When you get to my age and you’ve been acting this long, you are in full control of your powers,” Emily Watson, 57, tells me over lunch at a swanky London hotel. In person, Watson exudes intellectual intensity and modish English reticence, though there’s a certain mischievous energy of the kind that defined her early performances. Her most recent roles have placed her in positions of great authority: In the upcoming film Small Things Like These (Watson won a Best Supporting Performance prize for it at the Berlin International Film Festival), she plays the Mother Superior of an Irish convent, quietly but powerfully threatening Cillian Murphy lest he release information about its abuse of women. She’ll also star in HBO’s Dune: Prophecy, a prequel series spun off the Denis Villeneuve films, playing Valya Harkonnen, leader of the sect of witchy nuns eventually known as the Bene Gesserit, which plots the future through subterfuge and arranged marriage.
The characters resonate with Watson’s own life. Watson’s family was part of the School of Economic Science, a cultish religious organization founded in England and influenced by Hindu traditions that proposed to teach meditation and philosophy and operated private schools for its members’ children. Those schools were, according to former pupils, hotbeds of cruelty and child abuse—an independent investigation in 2005 found evidence of criminal assault at the boys’ school in the 1970s and ’80s—as well as highly traditionalist values.
Denne historien er fra November 04-17, 2024-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Denne historien er fra November 04-17, 2024-utgaven av New York magazine.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MICROPLASTICS
They're in our blood, our livers, and our brains. They're in newborns and the elderly, urban and rural, rich and poor. What are all these plastics doing to our bodies?
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Six actors before opening night.
The Log Cabin No One Wanted
Jake Szymanski grew up in a Colorado log house. He thought he'd never want to live in one again.
When Westerners Go East
Like his characters, Mike White's series cannot seem to shed its core identity or biases.
All Bark, No Bite
Idina Menzel grieves in a tree.
Closers Only
Bob Odenkirk, Kieran Culkin, and Bill Burr battle for the top of the Glengarry Glen Ross leaderboard.
Noticing: Emilia Petrarca | Can I Boom Boom?
Falling for, and fretting over, the gilded and greedy new aesthetic.
TRUMP'S PURGE OF WASHINGTON FIVE WEEKS OF CHAOS, IN FOUR PARTS
ON JANUARY 30, Kash Patel, the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, went to Capitol Hill to attend to the formality of his Senate confirmation hearing.
Lululemon and Coconut Cake
Cafe Commerce offers easy uptown glamour, day or night.
Lisa Yuskavage Becomes the Protagonist
After 35 years of painting her signature girls, the artist has decided to turn to a new subject: herself.
