Claims against The Family Man Season 2 of being 'anti-Tamil' are a farce; Raj & DK's show is true pan-Indian television

There is an unseemly controversy, evidently political, which is erupting, over the portrayal of Eelam Tamils in the trailer of The Family Man Season 2. The show, as people would be aware, is pan-Indian television in the true sense since it uses South Indians who speak their own languages, alongside Hindi-speaking North-Indians.

Manoj Bajpayee played Srikanth Tiwari of NIA, and his Tamil wife Suchitra Iyer is played by South-Indian actress Priyamani. As an action show about terrorists, it tried to introduce an element of plausibility into an arena overcrowded with absurdity. Multilingual television is a step forward for culture in India since it is an admission of India’s cultural plurality in which the spoken language plays a key part. Season 1 of The Family Man brought in Malayalis played by Malayalis and Kashmiris played by Kashmiri actors. 

To give the reader an idea of earlier pan-Indian action cinema about terrorists, the last big saga was Saaho. If one were to describe what Saaho is about, one could say that it was about foreign criminal syndicate led by gangsters with Indian names and operating from a haven ‘Waaji’ that might be Wakanda from Black Panther. 

Saaho was touted as pan-Indian entertainment in which no attention is paid to where people in India come from, and the relationship between name, language, and region. What, for instance, are we to make of Narantak Roy (presumably Bengali) played by Jackie Shroff? Or Amritha Nair (presumably from Kerala) played by Shraddha Kapoor? Saaho himself is Siddanth Nandan Saaho (the alias of Ashok Chakravarthy), and if the name cannot be placed regionally, one may be sure that a numerologist was responsible for it rather than the scriptwriter. 

The issue is that given India’s diversity, homogeneous ‘pan-Indianness’ is at best an urban phenomenon among people who talk to each other in English.

Any film that claims to deal with ‘Indian’ issues should accommodate people from different regions and ethnicities speaking a variety of languages. Since this would be founded in India’s plurality, the issue of some region presented in bad light would not arise. People across India know the characteristics of people from the regions and their special qualities.

I still remember a journey in the Himalayas 40 years ago when a landslide blocked the road, and the PWD was struggling with it. I overheard a local telling another at this moment with distant admiration tinged with envy, “Agar koi Madarasi yahan hota toh bees minute mein kaam khatam ho jata.”

It is in this context that we must see the trailer of The Family Man Season 2. The film is an espionage thriller, and there is monotony in looking for terrorist threats only to the North-West. If there has to be a Season 2, an espionage series has to look elsewhere in another direction and looking southward towards Eelam Tamils, who have already had a history of terrorism, seems the most obvious choice. That the LTTE has been decimated in Sri Lanka is not of much consequence, and no one should seriously object to the ploy in fiction since the LTTE assassinated India’s former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. When the LTTE was active, the DMK was known to be sympathetic but all that should merely be water under the bridge. 

Unfortunately, for the producers of The Family Man, elections happened, and the DMK came to power after being in the political wilderness for a decade. MK Stalin is enjoying his first stint as chief minister without having had much to show in his political career. It would seem that the first act of a newly elected government is to change names of places, lash out against its predecessors’ decisions and reverse them if possible, and lodge protests to make its presence felt.  The previous AIADMK government had aligned itself with the centre – implying its lack of divergence with national issues - and the new government therefore demarcates itself. A thriller serial on terrorism on OTT is essentially ‘national,’ and protesting against regional representations in pan-national television, it could have been felt, would achieve that.  

The Tamil Nadu government has now requested the Centre to take immediate action either to stop or ban the release of Season 2, saying it depicted the Eelam Tamils in a “highly objectionable manner.” Claiming there were “condemnable, inappropriate, and malicious contents” in the show, IT Minister T Mano Thangaraj said the trailer released by Amazon Prime Video India on social media was aimed at discrediting and distorting the historical struggle of the Eelam Tamils in Sri Lanka. “I would like to state that the above serial has not only hurt the sentiments of Eelam Tamils but also the feelings of the people of Tamil Nadu in large scale, and if allowed to broadcast, it would be prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony in the state,” Thangaraj said in a letter to Information & Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar.

Does one seriously believe that ‘harmony will be disrupted’ by a television serial on OTT — unless the ruling party took it upon itself to foment political unrest? 

It should be noted here that Pakistan is not the only source of terrorism ever named in Indian films, and the ‘unnamed enemy’ was the earliest ploy. In Govind Nihalani’s film Drohkaal (1994), the terrorist group with its haunt in tribal India was headed by Commander Bhadra (Ashish Vidyarthi) without his ethnicity being elaborated upon. There have been films like Madras Café (2013) about the LTTE and the Sri Lankan civil war, and no public disturbances were noted. South-Indian filmmaker Santosh Sivan made a Tamil film The Terrorist (1998), naming Tamil terrorists, and the film even won the Best Tamil Film Award at the National Film Awards.

Although political parties in Tamil Nadu have feted leaders of separatist Eelam movements, there has never been open support for Eelam militants in Tamil Nadu. Ironically, the DMK fought the recent elections with the Congress as ally, and its leader Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by an Eelam Tamil. Some of those involved in that conspiracy are still in jail, and there has been no outcry for their release, which makes the present controversy seem artificial.   

The producers of The Family Man and the lead actor have pleaded with the Tamil Nadu government that they have the highest respect for Tamil Nadu, and one can see the catastrophe awaiting them if the serial is banned. They have vehemently protested that the serial is not ‘anti-Tamil,’ and there is no reason to disagree. Seeing the trailer itself, the very fact that the enemy named is Tamil-speaking is hardly a slur on Tamilians since there are large Tamil populations in other countries like Malaysia and Sri Lanka. 

It seems reasonable to say that the outcry against The Family Man Season 2 is political and should be ignored. If anything, it emphasises the plurality of India by using actors from all over India playing people from their respective regions. 

The Family Man Season 2 will release on Amazon Prime Video India on 4 June.

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योग पर आदित्य नाथ और रामदेव के विचारों को फिलॉस्फी के छात्रों को पढ़ाएगी मेरठ यूनिवर्सिटी

यूनिवर्सिटी के बोर्ड ऑफ स्टडीज ने नए पाठ्यक्रम को मंजूरी दे दी है। नए पाठ्यक्रम में योगी आदित्यनाथ की लिखी पुस्तक हठयोग की पढ़ाई कराई जाएगी। इस पुस्तक में योगी आदित्यनाथ ने हठ योग के स्वरूप व साधना के बारे में लिखा है।

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बीजेपी सांसद ने कहा- मोदी सरकार ने भी अर्थव्यवस्था का बेड़ा गर्क ही किया, मेरी बात से ज़्यादातर भारतीय अब सहमत हैं

स्वामी ने किसान बिल पर हो रहे आंदोलन को लेकर भी केंद्र सरकार को रास्ता बताया था। स्वामी ने पीएम नरेंद्र मोदी को खत लिखकर कहा था कि  कानूनों को देशभर में लागू नहीं किया जाए। जो राज्य कानून को लागू करना चाहते हैं उन्हें करने दिया जाए।

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हिंदुस्तान में आग नेहरू-गांधी परिवार ने ही लगाई थी- कांग्रेस के बयान पर बोले बॉलीवुड डायरेक्टर तो लोग करने लगे खिंचाई

मध्यप्रदेश कांग्रेस कमेटी की तरफ से एक ट्वीट आया था जिसमें उन्होंने लिखा- लंका में आग रावण ने नहीं लगाई थी, लेकिन लंका रावण के कारण ही जली थी...

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EPFO ने दी खाताधारकों को राहत, Covid-19 के इलाज के लिए भी एडवांस निकाल सकेंगे रकम

EPFO Members Second Dose of Coronavirus: इसके तहत तीन महीने के लिए मूल वेतन और महंगाई भत्ते (जो मूल वेतन के रूप में हो) की सीमा तक या ईपीएफ खाते में सदस्य की कुल राशि के 75 प्रतिशत तक, जो भी कम हो, धनराशि निकाली जा सकती है, जिसे वापस करने की जरूरत नहीं है।

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अपना बिजनेस बढ़ाने के लिए खेल कर रहे हैं? अमिश देवगन ने किया बाबा रामदेव से सवाल; देखें क्या मिला जवाब

अमिश देवगन ने बाबा रामदेव से लाइव डिबेट में कहा कि आप पर IMA और एलोपैथी के कई जानकार आरोप लगा रहे हैं कि बाबा रामदेव अपनी दवाइयों और बिजनेस को बेचने के लिए ये सारा खेल खेलरहे हैं...

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Deewar, Pakeezah art director Marutirao Kale passes away at 92 due to coronavirus complications

Veteran art director Marutirao Kale is no more. The 92-year-old artist recently passed away in Mumbai due to coronavirus-related complications. Kale was tested positive on 7 May, post which he was hospitalised. He breathed his last on 26 May, his daughter Meena Kapadia said.

Talking to Indian Express, Meena said, “My father had tested positive for Covid-19 on 7 May, we had admitted to Holy Family Hospital in Bandra, but he passed away on the night of 26 May”.

Kale had designed the sets for Subhash Ghai's hit film Saudagar which released in 1991. While talking to ABP News about his death, Ghai said, "Marutirao Kale was a very talented and veteran art director. It's so sad that he passed away like this".

Before getting into the field of art direction, Kale worked as a carpenter on sets of various Bollywood films including Mughal-e-Azam. The London Film Production Ltd then picked him as an assistant art director. Later, he also worked as an independent art director. Iman Dharam was his first film as an independent art director.

In a career spanning more than forty years, he worked as an art director for more than 100 Hindi films. As the Chief Art Director, he designed the sets for various successful films like Disco Dancer, Dance Dance, Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki, Commando, Saudagar, Ajooba among others.

Prior to this, he worked as an assistant art director for various films including Roti Kapda Aur Makaan, Razia Sultan, Deewar featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Meena Kumari's Pakeezah, Do Anjaane, Kabhie Kabhie, and Sunil Dutt-starrer Mera Saaya.

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Sanjay Dutt remembers mother Nargis on her 92nd birth anniversary: ‘There's nobody else like you’

Actor Sanjay Dutt on Tuesday paid tributes to his mother and legendary actor Nargis Dutt on her 92nd birth anniversary.

The actor shared a series of old family pictures on Instagram to mark the special day.

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Nargis, whose real name was Fatima Rashid, is regarded as one of the most celebrated actors of Indian cinema and has films such as Andaaz, Barsaat, Awaara, and Academy Award-nominated Mother India to her credit in a career spanning three decades.

She won the National Award for best actress for Raat Aur Din (1967).

She married her Mother India co-star Sunil Dutt in 1958. Together they had three children: Sanjay, politician Priya Dutt and Namrata Dutt.

Nargis died of pancreatic cancer on 3 May, 1981, three days before Sanjay Dutt's debut film Rocky hit the theatres.

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Salman Khan, Arbaaz on the Dabangg animated series, Chulbul Pandey's legacy, and plans for a fourth part

Dabangg is the latest Bollywood film franchise to branch into animation. After Rohit Shetty's Singham (Little Singham on Netflix India and Discovery Kids), Golmaal (Golmaal Jr on Nickelodeon Sonic), and Fukrey (Fukrey Boyzzz on Netflix India and Discovery Kids), Arbaaz Khan and Salman Khan's Dabangg franchise has also been adapted into an animation show for Disney+ Hotstar VIP.

As hand-painted animation makes gradual strides towards global recognition with critically acclaimed films like Gitanjali Rao's Bombay Rose, majority of the Indian animation industry continues to consolidate its domestic popularity, particularly among kids, by mining mythology for cartoon shows. After churning out cartoons from mythological characters like Hanuman and Bheem, animation studios have turned to Bollywood. Hindi film heroes are a mythology unto themselves.

Shetty, who is already expanding the Rohit Shetty Extended Universe a la Marvel with films like Simmba and Sooryavanshi, was the first mover from Bollywood to kids animation with Little Singham and Golmaal Jr. The perpetuity of these franchises help sustain the momentum for the kids animated shows as well. While the titular character of Singham (played by Ajay Devgn) continues to appear in Simmba, and next in Sooryavanshi, Golmaal already has four successful films as part of its franchise, along with a teaser of the fifth one in the song 'Aankh Marey' from Simmba.

Fukrey, which has two films in the franchise, was a challenge to adapt into an animated show because the makers had to make the language of the film more child-friendly. But Arbaaz and Salman, in an exclusive interview to Firstpost, claim Dabangg was a no-brainer when it came to adapting the franchise into an animated kids show. "Let's not forget, Chulbul Pandey won hearts. That character has a place in my heart. Now, seeing him having inspired a series, it's truly heartwarming. They have captured the essence entirely, and it's truly remarkable that the whole team brought this to life with so much love. It shows," says Salman.

"Chulbul as a character is one of a kind, and he is so entertaining that it would fit in any form of entertainment."

"Kids love characters who make a difference. Shin Chan, Doraemon, Moana — all these characters have struck a chord with children. With Chulbul being so loved across age groups, we thought, why not? He is so entertaining and so full of energy, it was hard not to picture an animated series that encapsulated his comical presence. Who doesn’t love a cop who can swing some classy moves?" says Arbaaz.

As a producer, however, Arbaaz does express concern about how far the Indian animation industry is from its optimum capacity. "I believe we are rapidly growing but are at the very early stages of exploring the field, and that as an industry, there is a high scope of a lot of good animation that can be produced in India. Definitely, with respect to content, we are trying to make animation more appealing to all age groups in the country with different storylines, relatable characters, and stronger narratives."

However, Salman insists that the animation industry is targeting kids more than adults right now. "I believe that the medium is very powerful, and already has a lot of our youth and children actively engaged in it. There are so many things to learn from it. I hope the Dabangg animated series inspires many more to come forward."

Dabangg has definitely been both a cash cow and a legacy for the Khans. But it has had its own share of controversies too. The latest instalment, directed by Prabhu Deva, released two years ago, was not received as warmly as the previous two parts. In the same year, Abhinav Kashyap, the director of the inaugural instalment, alleged that he was kicked out of the Dabangg franchise and his chances at venturing into other projects in the industry were jeopardised by the Khan brothers. Arbaaz, however, dismissed those claims.

"I believe that every director has their own vision when working with a project. Therefore, all directors cannot be compared on the same parameters. Regardless, I respect both directors for their work and what they have done is also remarkable, and I completely enjoyed watching all their projects," Arbaaz says, when asked about what made his directorial debut Dabangg 2 distinct from the other two parts. Admittedly in the past, Arbaaz claimed he could not divide his duties as a producer, director, and actor (he plays Chulbul's brother Makhi in the franchise) efficiently so decided to step away as the director in Dabangg 3.

His observation that all the three directors brought different sensibilities and perspective to their respective film in the franchise does hold true. But will there be a Dabangg 4? If so, who will be the director? Or for now, would the expansion of the Dabangg franchise remain limited to horizontal (animated show and other forms of entertainment), as opposed to vertical (more film instalments) ventures?

"I believe it is right to expand the universe not just in one, but in all directions. I believe that there should be adequate content available for kids as well as adults. Development horizontally also does not mean that vertical development has stopped. We never know what may cross our paths," Salman leaves it at that.

Dabangg animated series is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar VIP. It also airs episodically on Cartoon Network.

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Sajid Nadiadwala organises coronavirus vaccination drive for crew members of his upcoming films

Film producer Sajid Nadiadwala recently held a vaccination drive for over 500 employees and their families, his spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The crew members who got vaccinated are a part of the movies like Tiger Shroff-starrer Heropanti 2 with Tara Sutaria, Akshay Kumar’s Bachchan Pandey with Kriti Sanon, Salman Khan’s Kabhi Eid Kabhi Diwali featuring Pooja Hegde and Ahan Shetty’s launchpad, Tadap.

SAJID NADIADWALA GETS CREWS VACCINATED... #SajidNadiadwala gets the crew of his forthcoming movies vaccinated: employees and their families... Crews of #Heropanti2, #BachchanPandey, #Tadap and #KabhiEidKabhiDiwali... Second drive this week. pic.twitter.com/h4VecMORnf

— taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) June 1, 2021

According to the representative, Nadiadwala, owner of the Bollywood banner Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment, will be organising another vaccination drive in the coming days.

The producer came up with this decision as he wanted to ensure the safety of the teams who will be working on the different dimensions and places for these upcoming movies, writes Pinkvilla.

Talking about these movies, Tadap marks the Bollywood debut of Suniel Shetty's son Ahan which is in its post-production stage. Bachchan Pandey is currently in its last schedule and will go on floors once the COVID-19 restrictions in Mumbai are lifted. Heropanti 2 is also expected to go on floors after the vaccination drive. While Kabhi Eid Kabhi Diwali is still in its pre-production stage.

Meanwhile, on Monday, the Producers Guild of India (PGI), the association of Indian film, television and digital content producers, announced a vaccination drive for its members and associated production crews beginning from Tuesday.

The guild said the members will be vaccinated over the multi-day drive to be held at Mehboob Studios in suburban Bandra.

(With inputs from Press Trust of India)

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Kate Winslet weighs in on how she took on a 'wildly flawed, messy' character in Disney+ Hotstar Premium's Mare of Easttown

(With...)

Philly’s a tough town.

If there’s a quintessential story about the City of Brotherly Love, it’s this one: In 2015, when Canadian researchers developed a child-sized hitchhiking robot with a big smile and yellow wellies, the hitchbot made it across Europe and halfway down the East Coast, offering friendly small talk to anyone it encountered. Then it got to Philadelphia, where it was promptly torn limb from limb and left in an alley.

Residents have pelted Santa with snowballs and hurled batteries and beer at their own quarterback. They flip cars and set things on fire even when they win the Super Bowl and World Series.

The unloved cousin of Boston and New York is often overlooked by Hollywood. The accent is so tricky to replicate, most actors won’t go near it. (Even Rocky didn’t even have a proper Philly twang.)

So it’s funny, then, that it took a Brit with an elegant voice, creamy complexion and sunny outlook to parachute into the Philly burbs and totally nail the look, feel, sound and salty attitude of the denizens of Delaware County, or Delco, as it’s known.

Kate Winslet gets emotional talking about the end of her HBO limited series, Mare of Easttown, which scored its own Saturday Night Live skit and found a fan in the self-described Philly girl in the White House, Jill Biden. (“You don’t screw around with a Philly girl,” Joe Biden said of his wife last year, after she blocked an anti-dairy activist who bum-rushed him at a campaign stop.)

Winslet has said, in the past, that it’s hard for an actor to tell what will wow audiences while you’re shooting, that sometimes you think you’re doing great work and then it turns out to be “a limp biscuit.”

Mare Sheehan is anything but a limp biscuit. The police detective exists in a cloud of vape smoke, trysts, flannel, Rolling Rock and Jameson shots — “a very hot grandma,” as Guy Pearce’s character calls her, sparring with a mother (Jean Smart) who loves drinking Manhattans.

Winslet said that she has been bowled over by how audiences have fallen “in love with this wildly flawed, messy, broken, fragmented, difficult woman. I loved her marks and her scars and her faults and her flaws and the fact that she has no off switch, no stop button. She just knows ‘Go.’”

“Not only did I have to hide myself in the character completely, but I had to hide this story, carry the secret,” she said. “I kept it hidden since 2018 when I first read the scripts. My job was to take them on this horrendous journey and hope to God that they’d be prepared to come into the attic with me at the end. It has been agony, agony, agony. You can see I’m still like … ” She sounds as if she might cry — something she would never let Mare do — then pulls herself together and let's fly one of her frequent, merry F-bombs. “I can’t deal with it. It’s ridiculous.”

‘Bad Jeans’ and Cheesesteak

The show is a murder mystery with many motifs: grief, the opioid crisis, small-town life. Winslet, a mother of three, sees it from this perspective: “It’s about mothers protecting their children at all costs, and the lengths that a parent will go to in order to protect their children,” she said. About the finale’s twist ending, she adds, “Oh God, it’s just unbelievable, it’s heartbreaking.”

Underneath Mare’s facade, she said, “is a woman who is so entrenched in grief for her son that she has not processed, and as she shares it, as she talks about it with a therapist, she will crack. She doesn’t want affection. She doesn’t want to be loved. And she doesn’t want to be cared for because if she has to experience those things, it makes her feel vulnerable, and if she feels vulnerable, then she can’t be strong anymore, and she can’t carry on.”

Winslet is known for what one producer called an “insane work ethic.” She prepares elaborate backstories for her characters, and she said she prepped more for Mare than any other role in her life. (But she is not Daniel Day-Winslet; she is said to be fun once the shooting wraps for the day.)

She was Zooming in from her house on the south coast of England, curled up with bare feet, her blond mane looking much glossier than Mare’s. She’s wearing an old white Calypso T-shirt, a couple of gold necklaces and some black Sweaty Betty pants.

The actress often saves something from her sets, and she shifted her camera to show off the sign from the Easttown police station she has hung on a wall. She kept Mare’s jacket and badge, too.

She has been harking back to her breakout role as another strong, but more upper crust, Philly girl: Rose DeWitt Bukater. “It’s like Titanic again,” she said, chuckling. “I’m on the side of buses again! It’s like going back in time 24 years where I’m walking down the street and people are nudging and pointing and whispering again.” When the actress was on a bike ride in England recently, a woman ran up to stroke her arm and offer all her theories about whodunit.

Winslet said she knows people are saying, “Oh my God, how can she let herself look so unglamorous?” When Craig Zobel, the director, assured her he would cut “a bulgy bit of belly” in her sex scene with Guy Pearce, she told him, “Don’t you dare!” She also sent the show’s promo poster back twice because it was too retouched. “They were like ‘Kate, really, you can’t,’ and I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back.’”

She said she balked when she saw an early cut in which her ordinarily luminous skin looked too good. “We tried to light it to make it look not nice,” she said.

She continued: “Listen, I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman — I will be 46 in October — I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters. She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit.

“In episode one, she’s having sex on a couch. I said to my husband, ‘Am I OK with that? Is it all right that I’m playing a middle-aged woman who is a grandmother who does really make a habit of having one-night stands?’ He’s like, ‘Kate, it’s great. Let her do it.’”

In moments of doubt, she tortured herself and her assistant director, wondering about other actresses — “three real people were haunting my mind, I will not name them” — who might have done a better job.

The show’s costume designer did recon in Wawa, finding inspiration for Mare’s flannel, inexpensive T-shirts, Ocean City sweatshirts and “bad jeans,” as Winslet said.

“Whenever we’d find something unflattering,” Winslet recalled, “we’d be jumping up and down like, ‘Yes! We’re wearing this.’”

In one peak-Mare scene, she comes home and scarfs down a cheesesteak that her mother has gotten her, without taking off her jacket, still clutching her police files. “This is so clearly a woman who does not cook, doesn’t care about what she puts into her mouth, also probably forgets to eat, so that when she does eat, she’s so starving, she doesn’t even care what it is that she’s shoveling in,” she said.

Her father, Roger, also an actor, helped inform this bit. “My dad actually reminds me quite a lot of Mare, to be honest. He was slightly the inspiration,” she said. “He basically moves like Mare and eats like Mare. Well, he does eat with his mouth full. We do tell him all the time, ‘Dad!’ He’s going to be so mad I just said that.”

Visiting the Badlands

And yet, Winslet, a vegetarian, could only get into character so much. She sheepishly confessed to a Philly sacrilege: The show’s hoagies contained no meat and, most shockingly, no onions. “I felt really, really bad because I know onions are a very important part of a hoagie,” she said, “but because we had so many hours of filming scenes with all of this food, it basically wasn’t fair on the crew to have all this stinky onion food on our tiny set all day long.” (She said she was aware of the existence of scrapple but did not try it.)

Even with the counterfeit hoagies, locals are thrilled with Winslet’s metamorphosis. They even named a hoagie after Mare.

Shawn McCreesh, who works with me at The New York Times and grew up, like the first lady, in a nearby town very similar to Easttown, spotted someone he recognised from back home on the show. Patsy Meck, who plays the woman working the desk at the police station, said that Winslet was “genuinely who you would want her to be — she was so real.” Meck, whose three grandchildren were extras on the show, said that it was “amazing” to see Winslet “walk off set, sit down and talk to me in a deep British accent, then pop right back on set and start talking like the rest of us.”

Winslet said she had to change the way the muscles in her face moved — often in freezing weather — in order to emulate Philly’s Mid-Atlantic dialect, with its selectively elongated vowels and smushed consonants. “Look, when you’ve done Polish-Armenian and German,” she said, referring to her accents in “Steve Jobs” and her Oscar-winning turn as a Nazi in “The Reader,” “frankly, I thought, ‘Delaware County, oh, it’ll be fine. The vowel sounds a little bit different, but it’ll be fine.’ Honestly, it was just so hard.”

Still, mastering the sound wasn’t the hardest part. Stepping into the shoes of a mother raising a child with severe mental health issues, as Mare did, was. (Mare’s son, Kevin, had struggled with depression and addiction before taking his own life.). Winslet met with parents who had been through it all, and worked with a grief counsellor.

“There’s that moment,” she recalled, “when the therapist says to Mare, ‘Did he frighten you?’ and she just says, ‘Sometimes.’ A huge admission for Mare to even say out loud, ‘My son scared me.’ Of course, you see it in that flashback when Carrie and Kevin take Mare’s money for drugs in the bathroom.” She said the detective strives to fix everything else because she could not fix Kevin.

In order to truly understand the opioid epidemic, how its many tendrils can wrap around a place like Easttown, she went to what Philadelphians call “the badlands” — the North Philly neighbourhood of Kensington and its open-air drug markets. “We would go in an undercovery type of car and just drive around a lot,” she said.

What did the dark heart of America’s opioid crisis look like to a Brit? “I have to be honest,” she said, “I was really staggered that there aren’t more of those support networks in place to help with people. In this country, we do definitely have better support networks for people in crises like that, we absolutely do.”

‘Faces Are Beautiful’

Winslet has been known to warn young actors on a set not to confuse social media fame with the hard work of acting.

“I have certainly heard, twice, of certain actors being cast in roles because they have more followers,” she said. “I’ve actually heard people say, ‘She’s not who we wanted to cast, but she has more followers.’ I almost don’t know what to say. It’s so sad and so extraordinarily wrong. I think the danger is not just for young actors but younger people in general now. I think it makes you less present in your real life. Everyone is constantly taking photographs of their food and photographing themselves with filters.”

She leans her face close to the camera, and noted her lack of filters, with an expletive.

“What worries me is that faces are beautiful. Faces that change, that move, are beautiful faces, but we’ve stopped learning how to love those faces because we keep covering them up with filters now because of social media and anyone can photoshop themselves, and airbrush themselves, and so they do. In general, I would say I feel for this generation because I don’t see it stopping, I don’t see or feel it changing, and that just makes me sad because I hope that they aren’t missing out on being present in real life and not reaching for unattainable ideals.”

The actress is so famous for disrobing in movies that her IMDb profile says her trademark is her “voluptuous figure.” But she says nude scenes may be in her past.

“I think my days are getting a little bit numbered of doing nudity,” she said. “I’m just not that comfortable doing it anymore. It’s not even really an age thing, actually. There comes a point where people are going to go, ‘Oh, here she goes again.’” She jokes that it’s not fair to camera operators to have to work to get the best angles as her body changes.

Winslet has a daughter, Mia, 20, with her first husband, Jim Threapleton, a director whom she met on the set of “Hideous Kinky.” She has a son, Joe, 17, with Sam Mendes, her second husband. And she also has a son, Bear, 7, with her current husband, who has gone back to his original name, Edward Abel Smith, from his playful pseudonym, Ned Rocknroll.

Winslet grew up in Reading, west of London, in a modest house and worked slicing ham in a deli when she was young. “I came from a small community not dissimilar to Easttown in the sense that there were paper-thin walls,” she said. “You could hear the neighbours rowing through the wall. You could hear the verbal grenades that were being hurled at one another.”

She said her father had called to tell her he loved an episode of Mare, then added his usual caution: “But you know, babes, don’t rest on your laurels. You’re only as good as your last gig.””

Mare of Easttown streams on Disney+ Hotstar Premium. 

Maureen Dowd c.2021 The New York Times Company

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Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai actor Karan Mehra arrested after wife Nisha Rawal's complaint, granted bail

Television actor Karan Mehra, best known for playing the role of a doting father and an ideal husband in Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai, has been arrested by the Mumbai Police today, 1 June. He was arrested after his wife Nisha Rawal filed a complaint against him in Goregaon last night for allegedly beating her up.

The incident took place on Monday night following which the actor was taken into custody. He was released on bail from the police station in the early hours of Tuesday, the official said.

The Goregaon police received a call from their control room about the incident around 11 pm on Monday, he said.

The police went to the actor's house and brought him to the police station.

His wife Nisha Rawal, who is also a TV actor, lodged a police complaint against him after they had a fight, the official said.

A case was registered against Mehra under IPC sections 336 (endangering human life or personal safety others), 337 (causing hurt by an act which endangers human life), 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) and 506 (criminal intimidation), he said.

After the completion of legal formalities, the actor was released on bail from the police station, he said.

As per earlier reports, there were rumours that the couple is having trouble in their marriage. However, last month Mehra dismissed it in an interview with a news channel.

"I have no clue what led to these rumours all of a sudden. I saw this news today only and I have been getting calls from everywhere," Mehra had said. He further stated that his wife Nisha also got the news and she cleared it for others.

They both started their profession as models. Karan rose to fame after playing the lead role of Naitik Goenka, opposite Hina Khan, in top-rated Star Plus show Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai. He also works in the Punjabi film industry.

Nisha is also a TV actor who is best known for essaying the role of Soumya Diwan in the Main Lakshmi Tere Aangan Ki. She was also a part of Ekta Kapoor’s Kesar and was last seen in Shaadi Mubarak.

(With inputs from Press Trust of India)

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Solos is a time capsule of what we're experiencing during pandemic: Creator David Weil on his Amazon Prime Video sci-fi anthology

Solos creator David Weil says his Amazon Prime Video sci-fi series, which he wrote at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic last year, was born out of his desire to return to the feeling of how he first fell in love with stories as a child.

Starring A-list Hollywood stars such as Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Helen Mirren, Uzo Aduba, Anthony Mackie, Constance Wu, Dan Stevens and Nicole Beharie, the seven-episode series dropped on the streaming platform on 21 May.

Weil, best known for the Al Pacino-starrer Nazi hunting drama Hunters, said he wanted to transport the audience to a new location with "one singular story" with one actor to "feel the power and potency of what a single story can do".

"I wanted to create a series that returned me to the feeling of how I first fell in love with stories. And I first fell in love with stories around my grandmother''s kitchen table, listening to her experiences and her heroism during World War II.

"I fell in love with stories around the campfire as my older brothers would tell me ghost stories as we hiked up in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts," the writer told PTI in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles.

Weil makes his directorial debut with Solos with Sam Taylor-Johnson, Zach Braff and Tiffany Johnson also helming some of the episodes.

As a creator, Weil said he wanted the series to be a conversation for the audience to reflect on their own lives, hopes and dreams, and how they wish to change once the pandemic is over.

"I wrote this a year ago during the height of the pandemic. And as you see, it's really a story that yearns for connection. It's a story about affirming humanity and relationships. It's about parents and children, loved ones, and friends. It really is a time capsule, and will forever be of what we've all been experiencing and going through during this past year and a half."

The world of Solos is firmly rooted in sci-fi, which allowed Weil to give the audience some distance from the lived reality of the pandemic. Citing Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey as his favourite sci-fi movie, the director said he liked the film because the technology in the story is an extension of humanity.

"Technology can be incredibly benevolent, and I think it can be incredibly harmful. As we head into the future, I think we as human beings will forever struggle with that notion of how we keep the goodness in technology and our futurism.

"And how do we ward away some of the darkness, and the evil that can come with these advances. So I think it will be a perennial and forever struggle. I love science fiction that really contends with that and illuminates that," he added.

Asked about working with a stellar cast that includes the likes of Hathaway, Mirren and Mackie, Weil termed it a "wonderful symbiotic relationship with real push and pull".

"I feel like I write everything with Helen Mirren or Anthony Mackie in mind. I just love them so much and I've always wanted to work with all these eight brilliant actors.

"Anthony and Helen were both so proud of their work, it was such a thrill to have them and Anthony, in particular, felt like it''s some of the best work he''s done in such a long time. So, it was just a thrill for all the actors to see them receive their episodes with such warmth and excitement, that was a real gift," he said.

The writer-director said the second season of his show Hunters, also an Amazon series, will be full of "great twists and turns".

"Hunters season two is soon underway. We're all very excited. As always with Hunters, the only thing you can really expect is the unexpected so there''s going to be a lot of great twists and turns, and always leading with emotion in this great central story of this young man trying to honour his grandmother's legacy," he added.

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Akshay Kumar, Twinkle Khanna raise Rs 1 cr to provide hospitals with oxygen concentrators amid COVID-19 second wave

Twinkle Khanna and Akshay Kumar have raised Rs 1 crore to provide Indian hospitals with oxygen concentrators amid the second wave of the coronavirus.

Taking to social media on Monday, 31 May, Khanna thanked everyone for the support as the fundraiser has finally reached its target.

Here is her tweet

It’s thanks to all of you that we raised these funds and are able to send concentrators where they are needed. I will keep posting updates. A big shout out to all of you and @ANNADA_outreach for their tremendous support. #helpindiabreathe pic.twitter.com/eZSYmX5neR

— Twinkle Khanna (@mrsfunnybones) May 31, 2021

Previously the couple had donated 100 oxygen concentrators. Kumar had also donated Rs 1 crore to politician and former cricketer Gautam Gambhir’s foundation for coronavirus aid.

Last month, Kumar had tested positive for COVID-19 post following which he got hospitalised as a precautionary measure.

Along with Kumar, 45 crew members of Ram Setu also contracted the novel coronavirus post which the unit took a break from shooting. After around 8 days, he got discharged from the hospital and tested negative. 

On the professional front, Kumar has an interesting lineup of films including Rohit Shetty’s Sooryavanshi, BellBottom, Aanand L Rai helmed Atrangi Re, magnum opus Prithviraj, and Bachchan Pandey.

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Dhanush's Jagame Thandiram, M Night Shyamalan's Old, Sunil Grover's Sunflower: Trailers this week

This week, some of the most highly anticipated trailers were released - from Dhanush's Jagame Thandiram, to M Night Shyamalan's Old.

Check out the trailers released this week

Jagame Thandiram

Netflix has unveiled the first official trailer of Dhanush's Tamil film Jagame Thandhiram (Tricky World). Directed by Karthik Subbaraj, the film revolves around Suruli, a nomadic gangster who has to choose between good and evil in a war for what one can truly call home.

The film also stars James Cosmo, Aishwarya, Lekshmi, Kalaiyarasan, Joju George and others. The music of the film is composed by Santhosh Narayanan.

The film is produced by YNot Studios and Reliance Entertainment and will release on June 18 on Netflix.

Old

The official trailer of M Night Shyamalan's upcoming supernatural thriller Old is out. The film follows a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly … reducing their entire lives into a single day.

Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Eliza Scanlen, Thomasin McKenzie, Aaron Pierre, Alex Wolff, Vicky Krieps, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, Rufus Sewell, Embeth Davidtz and Emun Elliott and also produced by Shyamalan, the film will hit US theatres on 23 July.

Sunflower

The ZEE5 Original thriller series stars actor-comedian Sunil Grover in the lead. The cast also includes Ranvir Shorey, Girish Kulkarni, Shonali Nagrani, Sonal Jha and Ashish Vidyarthi. The story revolves around a murder mystery based in a middle-class housing society in Mumbai called Sunflower.

The show will premiere on 11 June.

The Tomorrow War

In this Chris Pratt-starrer sci-fi action drama, releasing on Amazon Prime Video on 2 July, the world is stunned when a group of time travellers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: Thirty years in the future mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species.

The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher and family man Dan Forester (Pratt). Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist and his estranged father in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.

Directed by Chris McKay, the Skydance Media's film also features Yvonne Strahovski, Betty Gilpin, Sam Richardson, Edwin Hodge, and Academy Award-winner J.K. Simmons.

Physical 

Rose Byrne's Apple TV+dark comedy series Physical follows Sheila Rubin (Byrne), a "quietly tortured, seemingly dutiful housewife supporting her smart but controversial husband’s bid for state assembly. But she’s also battling a complex set of personal demons relating to her self-image…. that is, until she finds release through the unlikeliest source: the world of aerobics. The series tracks her epic journey from a stifled, overlooked enabler to a powerful, confident economic force, as Sheila transforms into someone we take for granted today, the female lifestyle guru."

Also starring Rory Scovel, Dierdre Friel, Della Saba, Lou Taylor Pucci, Paul Sparks, and Ashley Liao, the show will make its global premiere on 18 June.

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