Michael Chernus on 'Devil in Disguise' and Honoring Victims' Stories

Considering the number of iconic women that have worked on Ryan Murphy projects, it’s shocking Glenn Close hasn’t. That’s changing with Hulu’s All’s Fair. “I was intimidated until I started to understand the tone. And once I understood the tone, then it became really fun,” Close told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. Close plays Dina, a powerful lawyer in an all-female firm that includes actors Kim Kardashian, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash and Naomi Watts, among others. “To bring all that energy...and all that experience together is bound to create something really unique.” It also created a special bond. “This group of women, they’ll be my friends for the rest of my life.” Part of what keeps Close working, beyond immense talent, is that she refuses to repeat herself—“I’m basically up for anything as long as it represents a new exploration.” She’ll next be seen in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, offered the same week as All’s Fair. “I got two Ryans in the same week. It was like, what?” Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, I have a serious and emotional conversation with actor Michael Chernus about his challenging new role as John Wayne Gacy in Peacock's Devil in Disguise. He shares how he mentally prepared to play the serial killer and why this limited series is different by focusing on the victims of these horrific crimes. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Padma Lakshmi’s new cookbook, Padma’s All American, is a natural extension of her Hulu series Taste the Nation. In fact, the documentary laid the groundwork for the book, says the former Top Chef host. “Once we had done the show, I had all these communities I had already embedded myself in,” she told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. Beyond recipes, the book carries an important message: Lakshmi “was trying to...really highlight the positive effects of having all these contributions from immigrants.” For Lakshmi, the recipes are ultimately a vehicle for connection. “I am hoping that the food will entice you, will almost be like a bait to get closer to your neighbors. Hopefully you’ll be curious enough to get to know the culture that the food came from and the people that are making this food.” Lakshmi returns to TV with the new CBS reality competition series America’s Culinary Cup, where elite chefs compete for a major prize. “It doesn’t look like any other TV set or studio I’ve ever seen.” Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I need to get obsessed by projects so I can be involved in. I want to be entirely disappearing in a project.” And that’s exactly what Marion Cotillard has done in joining season four of The Morning Show (Apple TV+). Cotillard plays Celine Dumont, the new board president of the fictional news network who hails from a French dynasty and has plans to shake things up. The Oscar-winning actress found her first TV series “very different from a movie,” but leaned into the “best advice” from co-star Billy Crudup. “He knew that I was freaking out. He said, ‘You know what they did on the first three seasons. You know how smart they are. Give your total trust and be a happy puppet. Let them direct you.’” Part of what interested Cotillard about the series is what it says about the state of journalism. “Journalism sometimes has to have strong opinions [in order] to dig into subjects, but also to open the door of very ugly things.” Joining a TV series fits with how Cotillard has led her career since winning the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. “I was solely following my choices. I never had any plan. I was so lucky that amazing directors offered me amazing journeys.” Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The most terrifying thing about nuclear weapons isn’t the warheads, but how quiet we as a society have become about them. The Cold War-era fear of total annihilation has morphed into a dangerous cultural amnesia that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow finds deafening. With her newest film, A House of Dynamite, she is determined to make the world listen again.  “I think the fact that the conversation has drifted off has a lot to do with the fact that nuclear weapons have sort of been normalized,” Bigelow tells Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. “And that in and of itself is a pretty terrifying idea. And the fact that we don’t look at it with the kind of global annihilation prospect that we should. I mean, we don’t tend to take it very seriously.” Pick up our cover story on Bigelow in the latest issue of Newsweek.  Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Even before Patricia Arquette signed on to play Maggie Murdaugh in Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, she was already “obsessed” with the infamous case of convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh. “I had been following it and watched documentaries and different shows about it,” she told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. “I was just really doing a deep dive looking at Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” One of the things that really fascinated Arquette about Maggie was her slow, tragic realization of her husband’s true nature. “I like that her awakening starts to happen but even until the last second she still never thinks he's capable of that.” In the end, it was “that danger of your own partner being capable of something so scary was so chilling to me and for her and for all these women.” The Academy Award and Emmy winning actress has been busy in recent years with various projects like Severance on Apple TV+, and her busy schedule is not something she takes for granted. "I'm just grateful honestly at this age that I'm still able to work and getting really good parts and being able to do some more character work, because when you're a young girl, you don't get parts like that, and you don't get chances like that." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How do you write a love story where the central characters can’t touch? Well, if anybody can, it’s Nicholas Sparks. “This is a difficult love story to pull off,” Sparks told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott about his new novel Remain, which he collaborated on with director M. Night Shyamalan, who is adapting the book into a feature film. “One of the reasons we're doing this, of course, is, hey, maybe some of my readers who don't see M. Night films will go see Remain. Maybe some of his fans who would never think of reading something that I write, maybe they will give that a shot.” And they should, because Remain is a haunting love story that is both tonally very much a Nicholas Sparks novel, but also wholly different. It also helps to visualize the actors playing the characters in the film adaptation. “If someone picks it up and they say, ‘Tate, I wonder what he looks like.’ Well, Google Jake Gyllenhaal, that'll help.” While the impact of Spark’s work is “something I very seldom think about,” he does like when he’ll hear a passing reference to one of his books in pop culture. “I'm the first to giggle when The Notebook comes up on Big Bang Theory or wherever it comes up. It's a lot of fun. It makes me smile.” Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

To play Alex Murdaugh, Jason Clarke wasn’t going to turn the man into a caricature, telling producers, “I’m not going to play a bad guy here,” Clarke told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. Instead, Clarke focused on the “tragedy of Roman proportions” in Hulu’s ‘Murdaugh: Death in the Family,’ based on the true story of a South Carolina man convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife and son. “We’re not here to sensationalize it or even to replay it. We’re there to open it up.” Clarke has two other big projects this year. The first is the Apple TV+ series ‘The Last Frontier,’ where he plays a U.S. Marshal in Alaska hunting fugitives who escaped a plane crash. “It’s a gut thing. Do I feel like doing eight months in the snow and the winter and the action? You know what? Yes.” Then there’s ‘A House of Dynamite,’ about which he says director Kathryn Bigelow has “stripped back a lot of the usual tools of cinema.” This diversity in roles is exactly why Clarke does what he does. “The times I’m grumpy, I’m frustrated, I’m hurting, I realized just how lucky I am and also what I’m capable of, and that if you find the right things, you can really disappear into them.” Subscribe to my newsletter: https://link.newsweek.com/join/for-the-culture Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, Tonatiuh joins Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott to discuss the powerful new film, Kiss of the Spider Woman. We explore the importance of Latin excellence on screen and why this story is so topical for queer and trans communities today. We also break down the incredible, star-making performance at the heart of the film by Tonatiuh and what it was like to work alongside powerhouses of talent like Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna and director Bill Condon.  Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.newsweek.com/newsletter/the-culture/ Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Keira Knightley is the first one to say her new film The Woman in Cabin 10 (Netflix) is “rather tense.” That said, “part of the joy of making something that's sort of so tense and twisted and strange is when you're working with really lovely people, you can also have a bit of a giggle,” Knightley told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott. Knightley plays Laura Blacklock, a journalist on an assignment on a super yacht with billionaires who don’t believe her when she stumbles on a gruesome secret. She says the film is “definitely playing with the idea of like, women are not believed,” but that gave her the opportunity to do something she’s never done before. “Love being the hero, as well. It was very exciting.” In fact, she joked about telling a fellow actor, “’I don't care that you can run that fast. You don't get to catch me because I'm the hero, OK?’” [laughs] Looking back at her career, while she doesn’t have the nostalgic relationship with her films that many fans have, she does look back on quite a few fondly, particularly Bend It Like Beckham. “There is still not another film about women's soccer. And it did have a place in that cultural landscape. And I think it did help to tell girls that it was okay to like soccer and play soccer.” Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.newsweek.com/newsletter/the-culture/ Follow me: https://linktr.ee/halanscott Subscribe to Newsweek’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/newsweek See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.