'Operation Mincemeat'

 

[The musical Operation Mincemeat premièred at the New Diorama Theatre (near Regent’s Park in London) on 14 May 2019 and ran until 15 June. The cast featured writers Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming and Zoë Roberts (book, music, and lyrics) with Jak Malone and Rory Furey-King. 

[It then played on The Little stage at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 4 to 11 January 2020. A run on The Large stage began on 23 July 2021, where it was originally due to run until 7 August, however due to popular demand it was extended to 18 September. The musical ran for a final time at Southwark Playhouse from 14 January to 19 February 2022.

[Operation Mincemeat's final Off-West End run opened at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, from 28 April to 23 July 2022.

[The musical transferred to London’s West End, opening on 9 May 2023 at the Fortune Theatre. Originally scheduled to close after 9 July 2023, the production has been extended multiple times after receiving favorable reviews. It’s still running; after winning several awards for the Off-West End stagings, Operation Mincemeat, dubbed the best received show in the West End, won the 2024 Best New Musical Laurence Olivier Award (London’s counterpart of a Tony).

[The musical transferred to Broadway in 2025 for an originally slated 16-week limited run. Previews began on 15 February at the Golden Theatre and the show officially opened on 20 March to generally positive reviews. The original London cast reprised their roles on Broadway, and days after its first preview, the show announced an extended run due to popular demand, subsequently extended multiple times, and is still running. It was nominated for the 2025 Best Musical Tony Award, but didn’t win.

[There have been two feature-length movies based on the same material as the musical. The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 British espionage thriller film produced directed by Ronald Neame, based on the book of the same title (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954) by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Operation Mincemeat is a 2021 war drama film directed by John Madden based on Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book (Bloomsbury) of the same name.

[Among the 80-odd characters portrayed by the five-actor cast, is, as David Gordon of TheaterMania describes him, “one of the most surprisingly real figures from this espionage mission: Ian Fleming, an eccentric intelligence officer in a black tux who’s writing a novel about a British secret agent with a penchant for martinis shaken, not stirred,” played by one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts.  (Says Gordon: she “kills it.”)] 

“HIS SPY SCHEMES CAME TO LIFE”
by Thomas Maier

[This article, which is more about Ian Fleming, his James Bond novels, and his real-life spy colleagues than it is about the London and Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat, ran in the New York Times of 24 August 2025 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was posted as “How Ian Fleming and His Spy Scheme Inspired a Broadway Show” on the Times website on the same date.]

Even before 007, Ian Fleming concocted creative plots that aided wartime victories.

The James Bond spy novels dreamed up by Ian Fleming [British; 1908-64] were rooted in his World War II experiences as a British intelligence officer. In one instance, Fleming had an idea that was so wild it’s still hard to believe it actually worked. To misdirect the Nazis, he suggested outfitting a corpse with fake military plans and strategically placing it off the coast of Spain.

Because truth can be stranger than fiction, that scheme is now the subject of the rollicking Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat.” The show, a hit in England before arriving in New York last spring, gets big laughs from this absurd tale of deception. In a rousing number, “God That’s Brilliant,” the conspiring spies sing rapturously as they plot to kill Hitler. (Fleming paints a picture of a martini-drinking, tuxedo-wearing assassin who “kills the guards, snogs the girl and says something cool.”)

[Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the Austrian-born German politician who became dictator of Germany in the Nazi era, from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party, elected Chancellor (Kanzler; prime minister) of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. (Reich, as in Third Reich among other uses, in German means ‘empire,’ ‘kingdom,’ 'realm,' or ‘nation.’)

[Historians have identified at least 42 assassination plots on Hitler, starting before he held office. (There are probably more as some cases may be undocumented.) One was the famous 20 July plot, in which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944; regarded as one of the ablest tank commanders of the war; known as the Desert Fox) was at least a supporter if not an active participant.

[This is the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler’s government and replace it, and the weapon was a briefcase bomb that exploded at a conference of high-ranking members of that government at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia. The bomb went off, killing 4 and injuring 20, but only wounding the Führer slightly.

[Only one planned assassination attempt was hatched in the U.K.: Operation Foxley. This was a top-secret Allied plan by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in mid-1944 to kill Hitler at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The SOE considered various scenarios, including sniper attacks, poisoning the water supply on the Führer‘s private train, or a direct commando raid. The operation was meticulously planned but ultimately never executed, as intelligence revealed Hitler had relocated to Berlin and rarely visited the Berghof again after late 1944.

[Ian Fleming did not consult on any assassination plot against Hitler. As far as anyone has revealed.]

Though the show presents him as a sort of bumbling genius, the Fleming character helps to establish the complex story as a spy caper. He “is so respected and revered and made a huge contribution to British culture,” said one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts [b. 1985], who also plays Fleming and other characters. “It seemed like a huge opportunity to have a little bit of fun and poke a little fun at him.”

But the musical provides only a glimpse of Fleming’s life as a spy.

In reality, Fleming was a clever and sophisticated British intelligence officer, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic and gained a wealth of insider knowledge that he later transformed into colorful, action-packed fiction with his Bond novels. “Never say ‘no’ to adventures — always say ‘yes,’” he explained. “Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

The Operation Mincemeat ruse originated in 1939 — shortly after Britain declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany [3 September 1939] — with a lengthy memo by Fleming’s boss, Adm. John Godfrey [1888-1970], the director of naval intelligence. “It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming,” concluded the historian Ben Macintyre [b. 1963], who has written about the wartime caper and Fleming’s fictional character, the suave MI6 agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, who was portrayed in a string of popular films by a series of actors.

[MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) is the British Secret Intelligence Service, roughly equivalent to the CIA in the United States. (The Military Intelligence designation is a hold-over from its origin during World War I when espionage and intelligence were the province of the war ministry.) It handles foreign intelligence, covert operations, and international espionage outside the United Kingdom. and answers to the Foreign Secretary.

[It shouldn’t be confused with its sister agency, MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), the Security Service, which handles domestic intelligence and security, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-espionage within the U.K. It answers to the Home Secretary and is the approximate counterpart to our FBI—except that MI5 has no law-enforcement responsibility and no power to make arrests.

[The third leg of the British intelligence structure is GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters. It serves as the UK's signals intelligence, cybersecurity, and cryptanalysis agency, the direct equivalent of the NSA in the U.S.]

Though the schemes appeared to be implausible, the memo advised, “the more you examine them, the less fantastic they seem.” No. 28 envisioned that “a corpse dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”

Fleming’s idea was later put into action by the British naval intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley [1917-82] and Ewen Montagu [1901-85]. (Both are leading characters in the musical, and properly given credit for their heroics. In 1953, Montagu published a book about it called “The Man Who Never Was.”) According to Macintyre, Fleming was “at least tangentially involved” in launching the plan, though these other spies carried it out.

Found on the corpse were documents identifying him as Capt. (Acting Major) William Martin [“b. 1907” (fictional)] — he was actually a vagrant named Glyndwr Michael [1907-43] who had died after ingesting rat poison — and paperwork that in time convinced Nazi forces that a 1943 Allied invasion of Italy through Sicily would instead take place at Sardinia. The deception helped make the Allies’ eventual victory in Italy easier and less bloody than expected.

Under Prime Minister Winston Churchill [1874-1965; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1940-45 and 1951-55], an advocate of espionage, sabotage and “ungentlemanly warfare,” Fleming was sent to Manhattan to join the spies working to persuade the United States to join the war. For several months before the Americans entered the war, in December 1941, the British Security Coordination (B.S.C. [part of MI6]), based on the 36th floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, used propaganda, political influence and media manipulation to secretly combat isolationists and the Nazi threat inside America.

Soon, the United States created its first spy agency — the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. [1942-45]), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency [formed 1947] — with the help of Fleming, who impressed officials with his advice about espionage and his willingness to take chances. “The British are many things, but cowards they are not,” Ernest Cuneo [1905-88], a top O.S.S. official [1942-45], said after working with Fleming.

Ghastly but ingenious, Fleming’s Mincemeat plan — itself inspired by a detective book on his shelf involving a corpse with forged papers — wasn’t his only creative idea. “Fleming could always laugh when some stratagem misfired — he had plenty more to choose from,” observed John Pearson [1930-2021; English novelist and biographer], whose Fleming biography [The Life of Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1966)] appeared two years after Fleming’s death, in 1964 at the age of 56.

One of Pearson’s favorite stories was how Fleming and William Stephenson [1897-1989; Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman, and spymaster; codename: Intrepid], overseer of Churchill’s spies in Manhattan, broke into the Japanese consul general’s office, located below the B.S.C. headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Stephenson, Fleming and two other spies entered the closed offices at 3 a.m. Fleming acted as a lookout. They picked a safe’s locks and “borrowed” the Japanese code book and other confidential documents. They ran upstairs to their own offices to microfilm the important material.

Then they returned the papers, leaving them in the same order they were found. “To Stephenson, it was a straightforward operation,” Pearson recounted in Life magazine, “to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.”

[Japan’s Consul General in New York City from 1939 to 1942 was Morito Morishima (1896-1975; traditional Japanese name order: Morishima Morito). The office that Stephenson, Fleming, and the British agents broke into was the Morishima’s. The exact date of the raid is hard to verify because, for one reason, it’s possible it never actually happened.

[The story of the safe-cracking raid was popularized after the war by William Stephenson’s biographers. According to Stephenson, the raid was real, Fleming was the lookout, and the stolen codes successfully helped the Allies track Japanese and German maritime movements.

[Many of Ian Fleming’s official biographers and modern intelligence historians argue that the Rockefeller Center break-in may have been a “tall tale” or a piece of post-war bravado. They note that while Fleming certainly met with Stephenson in June 1941, there’s no mention of a physical break-in in British Naval Intelligence logs.

[Fun Fact: Whether the New York incursion was actual or not, the idea of cracking open Morishima’s safe ultimately inspired Fleming to pen Casino Royale (1953), the first Bond novel. In the book, Bond remembers his first kill and recounts that it happened in the Japanese Consulate in Rockefeller Center, New York. (See below.) Lest we forget, the “double-oh” in Bond’s code number is a “license to kill,” given to the agents of the “British Secret Service” who are authorized to use lethal force.]

Fleming told Godfrey, his former boss, about the successful break-in, hoping the story would reach the appreciative ears of Churchill, whose approval mattered to Fleming on a personal level. Churchill had been friendly with Fleming’s father, Valentine [1882-1917], a fellow Conservative in Parliament, who was killed by German shellfire in World War I when Fleming was only 9.

Years later, Fleming turned this spy scheme in Manhattan into fiction. In his first novel, “Casino Royale,” he introduced the assassin James Bond, who tracks down a Japanese cipher expert who was cracking British coded messages inside Rockefeller Center. Stationed in another building and equipped with a Remington rifle that had telescopic sights and silencer, Bond takes aim and shoots the Japanese agent. “It was a pretty sound job,” Bond summarized. “Nice and clean too.”

After the war, Fleming had felt at a loss, craving the intrigue and intensity of his spy work. “We almost suffered emotional ‘bends’ the day the war ended — tension went out like a power line turned off,” recalled Cuneo, who later ran a small newspaper syndicate with Fleming. “Aside from its horrors, you missed the frightful challenge of war. I think Fleming missed it as much as most; he seemed both grumpy and disconsolate.”

[In March 1951, Cuneo and a small group of investors purchased the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In addition, Cuneo and the Bell Syndicate-North American Newspaper Alliance group acquired the McClure Newspaper Syndicate in September 1952. Cuneo acquired full control over NANA in the mid-1950s and served as president until 1963 when he sold it, though he remained with NANA as a columnist and military analyst from 1963 to 1980.

[Because of Cuneo’s association with former members of American and British intelligence, including Fleming and Ivar Bryce (1906-85), and because some writers in the Cuneo era had alleged links to the CIA, critics have suggested that NANA under his tenure was a front for espionage. Cuneo, a staunch anti-communist, was involved with the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, an anti-Castro organization formed in 1963.]

By January 1952, Fleming had turned most of his attention to writing spy novels. He modeled Bond on various real-life figures — notably Stephenson for his bold moves, inventive killing gadgets and coolheaded fearlessness. This fictional secret agent would have a boss called “M” — modeled after his own Royal Navy superior Admiral Godfrey. And Fleming dedicated his “Thunderball” novel [1961] to his American spy pal Cuneo.

The author amused himself by slightly changing the names and identities of his spy friends: Cuneo, for example, became Ernie Cureo, a taxi driver and secret C.I.A. informant, in “Diamonds Are Forever” [1956]. And the American spy Felix Leiter [C.I.A. agent], a recurring character who appears in “Live and Let Die” [1954] and “Goldfinger” [1958], gets his first name “Felix” from the actual middle name of Fleming’s childhood friend, the British spy Ivar Bryce.

[Personal Comment: I didn’t read the Bond novels until the 1960s, when I was a teenager. At the same time, my family moved to Europe when my father joined USIA and was assigned to Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1” [9 March 2013] and “Part 2” [12 March 2013]) and I went to school in Geneva, Switzerland.

[As I was attending school in a French-speaking town, I read a couple of things in French just to see if I could. One was the translation of Thunderball—Opération Tonnerre (‘Operation thunder’) in French, published in 1962. (At this same time, I also remember watching the French-dubbed version of From Russia with Love, the 1963 Bond film. In French, it’s called Bons Baisers de Russie, which is a common idiom frequently written or printed on vacation post cards that means “Greetings from Russia,” “Best wishes from Russia,” or, as the movie has it, “With love from Russia.”  The phrase literally means “Good kisses from Russia.”)]

One of Fleming’s most enthusiastic readers was President John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63]. They met at a Washington dinner party the Kennedys were hosting in the spring of 1960, months before the election [8 November]. Kennedy was already a fan of the 007 novels. After dinner, he asked Fleming how he might handle Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba.

[Castro (1926-2016), the Cuban revolutionary, was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.  He overthrew right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901-73; President of Cuba: 1940-44 and 1952-59) on 1 January 1959 and assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister.

[Castro served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. A Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, Castro also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.]

“Ridicule, chiefly,” Fleming replied wryly. He then outlined several Bond-like spy techniques that could “deflate” Castro’s reputation. Kennedy seemed amused by Fleming’s far-fetched suggestions. One called for American scientists shooting off a rocket intended to form a fiery cross in the sky, which might be interpreted as a heavenly sign that Castro should be replaced.

Apprised of Kennedy’s dinner conversation, the C.I.A. director Allen Dulles [1893-1969; lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI – 1953-61)] later directed scientists in the agency to see if Bond’s fictional gadgets and high-tech killing devices could be adopted.

Fleming’s novels — already moderately successful — soared in popularity with a public endorsement by the new president. In March 1961, Life magazine listed Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” [1957] as one of Kennedy’s favorite books. The Kennedys later hosted a private screening of the Bond movie “Dr. No” [novel: 1958; film: 1962; first Bond film] at the White House.

[Kennedy watched Dr. No at the White House on 28 November 1962; the movie wasn’t released in the U.S. until 29 May 1963, though it had premièred in the U.K. on 5 October 1962. (Almost a year later, on 23 October 1963, the Kennedys returned to the White House Family Theater to watch From Russia With Love, making it one of the very last movies the president ever saw. The Kennedys flew to Dallas on 21 November, arriving just after 11 p.m. He was shot at 12:30 p.m. on the 23rd and declared dead a half hour later.)]

Around that time, Dulles received a copy of Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” from the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, with the inscription, “Here is a book you should have, Mr. Director.”

[Operation Mincemeat had at least one unexpected consequence.  In 1951, journalist, writer, and editor of books about theater Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), who was fascinated by the Mincemeat deception, pitched an idea at a cocktail party to master suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) about a civilian traveling and accidentally being mistaken for a fake intelligence agent, getting saddled with a dangerous identity.

[Hitchcock bought Guernsey’s treatment and, along with screenwriter and film producer Ernest Lehman (1915-2005), used that premise of a non-existent agent to create the 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest—one of my all-time favorite flicks.  

[In the film, Cary Grant’s (1904-86) character, ordinary advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (his initials, seen on his cufflinks on the train with Eva Marie Saint [b. 1924], are “ROT,” my nickname for this blog) is mistaken for George Kaplan—a government agent who doesn’t actually exist. (Thornhill appears to have answered a page for Kaplan in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.)

[Just as in Mincemeat, British intelligence used a fabricated marine officer to misguide the Germans, the American agents in North by Northwest intentionally perpetuate the illusion of Kaplan to protect a real double agent (Saint’s character) and trap enemy operatives.

[Thomas Maier is the author of The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II (Hanover Square Press [Toronto], 2025).]

Steven Spielberg, "Hollywood Director"

 

[According to writer Wesley Morris, prolific filmmaker Steven Spielberg (58 movies as director, 184 as producer over 67 years) is “most people’s dictionary definition of ‘Hollywood director.’”  In the article below, the writer and culture critic makes his case for the accolade.  There’s no doubt that Spielberg has made some of most popular movies of our time, many of them truly iconic.  Read what Morris has to say are Spielberg’s superpowers, the magic he wields to make his movies touch us so indelibly.’ 

“THE BELIEVER”
by Wesley Morris 

[This profile of master film director Steven Spielberg ran in the New York Times Magazine of 7 June 2026.  On the same date, it was posted as “What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human” on the paper’s website.]

Hollywood is struggling, but Steven Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, fears, joys and sorrows.

On Jan. 1, something amazing happened. Steven Spielberg [b. 1946], a longtime Angeleno and most people’s dictionary definition of “Hollywood director,” became a New York City resident. On the one hand, this is a significant event. What classic Spielberg location requires a 212 or 718 or 646 to phone home? On the other hand, he has made five of his last six movies in New York State [see IMDb], including his exuberant, ominous reconsideration of “West Side Story” [2021]. Plus, for decades, Spielberg has kept a place on the Upper West Side. Five of his seven children live here, and all six of his grandchildren. So yeah: no big whoop. It was simply time. But to a New Yorker, this is a meaningful move: as if Magic Johnson had spent the rest of his career playing at the Garden.

[Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Jr. (b. 1959), is a businessman and former professional basketball player, widely regarded as one of the greatest in history. He spent his entire career with the Los Angeles Lakers.]

And Spielberg is still playing. He turns 80 in December. The signs of wear and tear of a half-century of moviemaking are discreet. He uses a barely-there hearing aid, and his gait is a tad slower than maybe he’d like. He has become an insole guy. (“I’m on my feet as a director my whole life. My feet have gotten as flat as a pancake.”) The mellower pace of Los Angeles suits his temperament. He’s voluble, yet reserved. In a five-way conversation, he’ll do as much listening as speaking. He wants to hear what’s going on with everybody around him.

But here, in Spielberg’s New York era, his zest for everything has kicked up a notch. Invite him out, he’ll show up — for dinners and openings, for one of the farewell episodes [19 May 2026] of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Until Colbert [he also appeared on 2 and 9 March 2023], he hadn’t done late-night television since the end of the 1970s. At one point, he brought the house down. “I made a couple of jokes,” he marveled the next day, smiling with the sort of bashfulness that obscures most of his teeth. He has more true friends now than he used to. He would even schlep his Lakers-loving self to a Knicks game, but only “if Spike Lee [b. 1957; filmmaker and actor] takes me.”

“Suggestible” might be too mild for where Spielberg is right now. “Open,” “ready” — those seem closer. “Adaptable.” Willing to adjust a plan in order to experience someone else’s preference. One evening at dinner, he was all set to order the salmon when I told him I was having a calf’s liver. His eyes widened behind his glasses. “Fuck the salmon!” He enjoys some funk when he eats. “I kind of like food that reminds me of what I just ate,” he said, with not a little bit of delight. “I want food that reminds me, five minutes later, before I contaminate the taste with something else.” He then ventriloquized the food: “I hope you enjoyed me, because I’m going to linger!”

Later that night, he and I were sitting at the Lyceum Theater, waiting for Maya Rudolph [b. 1972; actress and comedian] to make her Broadway debut in “Oh, Mary!” [Lyceum Theatre, 11 July 2024-present; Rudolph: 28 April-5 July 2026] when he turned to me and said: “I really want to do theater. I really do.” He said this the way a kid might announce how bad he needs to pee. “I want to direct something. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ve had this yearning.” Afterward, at a cozy, wholehearted welcome party for Rudolph, Spielberg grew wistful over the outpouring of support, the hooting and the adulation. “This never happens in film — only in theater,” he said above all the cheering. He didn’t mean for him (rooms ovate Spielberg all the time). He was moved by the utter earnestness of theater-community camaraderie, of people eagerly gathered to celebrate what they’d just made. His eyes were wide again. “This is infectious,” he kept saying.

Lest anybody worry, Spielberg’s appetite for filmmaking remains hardy. His 35th movie, an aliens-are-among-us action-thriller called “Disclosure Day,” opens June 12. And that thirst for connection runs beneath the movie. He has made a propulsive, lean-mean conspiracy machine that’s funny, intriguing and suspenseful — but it also concerns our alienation from something Spielberg is certain we desperately need more than ever: collective catharsis, the sort you come by at the movies.

Lately, the idea of a Steven Spielberg has felt endangered. For more than 50 years, his imagery has epitomized American movies, maybe even epitomized America [his debut film was The Last Gun, 1959]. He has been at the center of an industry that, if it’s not dying, is certainly diminished. The sort of original movies that made Spielberg Spielberg are virtually nonexistent, even though the two major flavors that now define the industry — global box-office smash and best picture nominee — are, with Spielberg, indistinguishable (start with “Jaws” [1975], “Raiders of the Lost Ark” [1981], “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” [1982]). More than once, he inhabited both modes within one calendar year: “Jurassic Park” in the summer of 1993 [grossed $47 million domestically in its opening weekend, then the biggest opening weekend gross in history], for instance, then “Schindler’s List” at the end of Hanukkah [without adjusting for inflation, this is the highest-grossing black-and-white film of all time (taking in $96 million domestically and $321 million worldwide)], perhaps the most triumphant single-year change-up any Hollywood director has had. (He’s still the most commercially successful director ever, and he’s tied, at 13, with William Wyler [1902-81; German-born American film director and producer] for directing the most best picture Oscar nominees.)

[Spielberg has received 14 Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, setting the all-time record for the most nominations in that category. He won the Best Picture award once, for 1993’s Schindler’s List. Of his 14 Best Picture nominations, he directed 11 of the films and just produced 3 of them. (That would still be the record for Best Picture nominations; in any case, according to Academy rules, the Best Picture Oscar is awarded to the producers of the film, not the director.)

[Spielberg also directed Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which were nominated for Best Picture, but because of the Academy rules at the time regarding who received the credit, he wasn’t personally named a nominee for those two films. (In the 1970s and ’80s, the Academy nominated the film itself for Best Picture rather than naming specific individuals on the ballot. If the movie won, the studio designated which producers accepted the statuette. Because Spielberg didn’t hold a producer credit on either movie, he was never an official Best Picture nominee.)]

Popular art has always bonded us to one another, no matter what might have been cleaving us apart, no matter how different our lives or how our responses to that art diverged. And Spielberg’s films have been a premium adhesive. Not only the ones he directed but the dozens of swooshing, indelibly kooky hits unleashed by Amblin Entertainment, his production company [eight of Amblin’s films were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, including the winning Schindler’s List.]: “Poltergeist” [1982], “Gremlins” [1984], “The Goonies” [1985], the “Back to the Future” trilogy [1985, 1989, 1990], “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” [1988], “Arachnophobia” [1990].

Spielberg’s stardom arose from the collision of capitalism, audacity and creative vision. His movies emerged alongside the arrival of cable television and proliferating advances in personal computing and home entertainment. I watched “E.T.” at the movies, devoured it on cable, played it on my Atari and let Michael Jackson [1958-2009; pop singer, songwriter, dancer, and philanthropist] sing me a lullaby the movie inspired him to write [“Someone in the Dark” (1982)]. (Spielberg: so titanic that the other king of pop worshiped his thrillers. [Thriller is a 1982 Michael Jackson album and “Thriller” is a 1983 single from the album.])

But a kind of cultural malnourishment has set in. While you once needed a pair of hands to count the major studios, we’re on the verge of barely needing one. And the best, most lucrative ideas entail microwaved nostalgia that we all know by its legal nickname: I.P. [Intellectual Property]. The takeovers and reheating, the obscure metrics that ensure we never quite know exactly how popular anything is, it’s dispiriting: Pac-Man eating ghosts, algorithms keeping secrets.

When movies play in only a handful of theaters to qualify for awards, and increasingly millions of us watch them on our phones, “that is not my definition of a motion-picture experience,” Spielberg told me. For that, he said, you need “an audience to be the accelerant of that experience, to be the contagion of making the experience even more profound for the individual in that crowded theater — or what we hope is a crowded theater.” Obviously, streaming changes that experience, denying us the companionship of hundreds of strangers either confirming or causing us to question our humor, our tastes, our responses.

This is to say that what Steven Spielberg symbolizes, what he built in Hollywood and in our hearts, could be reaching its twilight. He is touched by our appreciation for all that he has come to mean to us. At that “Oh, Mary!” cast party, a stocky, ebullient woman approached and asked if she could show Spielberg the “Jaws” tattoo beautifying her calf. Of course she could. And even though Spielberg estimates that he has seen 30 of these since “Jaws” came out in 1975 (plus dozens of other tattoos inspired by his movies), he listened and marveled as though hers was his very first. Earlier, on the corner of 45th Street and Eighth Avenue, a young, fit guy with a blond ponytail sitting on a construction barrier looked up and said, with biblical concision, “Thank you.”

It was a “thank you” that contained so much. As I interpreted it, thank you for your vision, your imagination, your ingenuity, acuity, spirit and nerve. Thank you for “All my life I had to fight” [Sofia in The Color Purple (1985; Oprah Winfrey [b. 1954])] and “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” [Jaws; Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider [1932-2008])], for every single caftan you let wear Meryl Streep [b. 1949] in “The Post” [2017]. Thank you for more than 50 years of unflagging energy and unshakable belief that we human beings are worth the trouble. But the gratitude was tinged with sorrow. “Thank you” for daring and caring and trying to show us the light, to keep the lights on, as the artistic system you worshiped and symbolized and helped redefine renounces itself.

But he’s not thinking of his career or his meaning that way. He’s going to keep on keeping on. As you read this, he’s getting ready to make his first western.

Spielberg has always known how to reach us, how to reach into us. The first time he reached inside me, I was 6.

My mother took my sister and me to see “E.T.,” and I was besotted. This space alien that had been taken in and cared for by Elliott, Gertie and Mike, whose capacity for love glowed like lava in his chest, who just wants to return home. I got it all. When E.T. goes missing and Mike goes looking for him on his bike and discovers the poor thing passed out in a ravine, I understood, for the first time, the porous border between the screen and the rest of the world. I wasn’t in a movie theater anymore. I was at a funeral. I went, in escalating stages, from sobbing to weeping to bawling. The theater was packed. The bawling was probably a real disturbance. My mother leaned over and asked if I wanted to go home, and I have a clear memory of saying, with a sharpness that she later described as “appalled”: No.

I was having my first art attack. And Steven Spielberg induced it.

I’ve done my share of blubbering at other people’s movies. But crying at my first Spielberg was primal. By the end, as Elliott and E.T. are aloft on a bike, framed by the moon, soaring as much on John Williams’s [b. 1932] score as on air, the waterworks had revved up anew. But now I was crying tears of joy. I was experiencing what I can only describe as the Spielberg rinse: a full-cycle emotional power wash.

A rinse can occur when you least expect it. Take “West Side Story.” The minute Ariana DeBose [b. 1991] begins her assault on the asphalt of 68th and Broadway in the “America” number, I lost it. I was sure this was the most exhilarating musical sequence I’d ever seen. For the whole number, DeBose is a firework that whirs and whirs and never seems to extinguish: limbs and shoulders and hips, but also the yolk-yellow of her skirt and its scarlet underskirt. So how did Spielberg rinse me here? Let’s start with the controlled rush of imagery. The camera and editing are savoring every shot, but they’re also doing their own dance. The movie came out when we were still pandemic-skittish. I hadn’t been out dancing with strangers in a long time. And all that vigorously precise motion, presented from head to toe, summoned the desperation I’d been feeling for dancing I could not do.

I cried because here was incontrovertible proof that Spielberg, who was in his mid-70s when the movie came out, still had gusto to go for, gusto to burn. And then there was this: I was horny. One turns to Spielberg for many things, but the erogenous hadn’t been one of them. And yet he’d managed to serve us a number that, visually, is nothing but sex.

A Spielberg works in other modes, too. Take wonder. He has a shot for that. Often our heroine or hero gets a load of something — no, no, they witness it, they behold it. And what they’re seeing they can’t believe. The camera will often swing around to capture this moment of awe. Richard Dreyfuss [b. 1947] awaiting rapture at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” [1977]. Whoopi Goldberg’s [b. 1955] Celie agog as her long-lost family returns to her in “The Color Purple.” Laura Dern [b. 1967], dumbfounded at the sight of a dinosaur in “Jurassic Park,” rising from her Jeep so automatically that she’s all but levitating. These are just a few of the protagonists; agape bit players could stock their own hourlong montage.

Crucially, this is a career spent harnessing that wonder to peer into childhood’s recesses. Light happens to be a major Spielberg motif — flashlights and spotlights and searchlights and floodlights and headlights; the sun, the moon. Projector stand-ins, perhaps. But also evidence that something is being detected, ferreted out, sometimes found. His movies understand that anything could happen to a kid, so almost everything does — divorce, dinosaurs, dinosaurs during a divorce, assault, abandonment, adulthood. I’ve always thought about that moment in “Close Encounters” when a son sits at the dinner table and weeps as he watches his father tearfully play with his food; the upside-downness of what he’s witnessing embarrasses him, but it’s also breaking his heart. Spielberg has always known that his movies are attempts to understand his boyhood and his parents, to try to heal them through fiction and illuminate parts of himself.

“For years, I was working out my mom and dad’s divorce through my stories,” he told me. The split happened when Spielberg was about 15, but the marriage had begun to fade years before. The family dissolved, too. He went off to live with his father, Arnold, a computer engineer, in Los Angeles, while his three sisters remained in Phoenix with their mother, Leah, a classical pianist who used to operate a kosher deli. But it seems that living under the same roof didn’t significantly change how remote Arnold could feel to his son.

Over dinner one night, Spielberg told me about working on “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” [1989] with George Lucas [b. 1944; filmmaker and philanthropist]. The movie reunites Harrison Ford’s [b. 1942] Indiana with his father, a Holy Grail expert played by Sean Connery [1930-2020]. “My contribution was: ‘OK, but I want to meet Indy’s dad, and I want them to have had years of estrangement and father neglecting son because the father was a workaholic. And this story will bring them back together again.’” When Spielberg said this, he still sounded wishful and a touch sad. Watched through the lens of his childhood, his movies can seem newly forlorn, someone blowing on a birthday cake gated with stubborn candles.

For centuries, we’ve lived with a myth that genius — male genius — expresses itself as wild eccentricity or madness, that the personality warrants a cult or a harem. Spielberg disorients in that regard. I, at least, needed a moment to absorb how familiar he felt, how familial. The man who made “E.T.” was eerily reminiscent of the woman who took me to see “E.T.” Both of them have in common a special intuition to anticipate needs we don’t know we have. My mother did it for a household. For more than half a century, Spielberg has been doing the same for a planet.

Yet as a man, he maintains a small scale. He’s as modestly sized [he’s 5′ 7¾″] as his movies tend to be gargantuan. Maybe the movies wouldn’t work without this modesty. If he were any other way, you’d lose sight of the people. Their lives often start simply enough, in houses with, say, shag carpets and cluttered bedrooms. But then they are ripped from home and spend the movies on a quest to find it again, or to fight to keep it, recreate it, ensure it stays intact.

Spielberg hasn’t been to see a therapist since he was in college. Instead, the movies are the arena in which he has worked on some of the mysteries he couldn’t solve on his own. What we experience as sorcery is, for him, a process of exorcism. “I can’t express enough how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing this job over and over and over again,” he said deliberatively, almost as if he was feeling this out. “I work so much out through this process. So much out. I get to bleed off some of the darkness instead of letting it fester inside me. You get to let it fester inside you.”

It seems that his marriage has been therapeutic too — a chance, perhaps, to better grasp his father by being a husband. He has been with Kate Capshaw [b. 1953; m. Spielberg 1991] since they met making “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” [1984] more than 40 years ago; she played Indy’s chanteuse sidekick, Willie Scott. Capshaw told me that when she went in to read for the part, Spielberg sat across from her with a pair of aviators on, and she summoned the gumption to ask him to take them off.

“Oh, that’s so much better,” she remembered saying. “Now I can see you.” He was in his mid-30s. He’d already made “Jaws” and “Close Encounters,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.,” and maybe he had been enjoying the performance of “Hollywood movie director,” the costume of it. Capshaw, who was in her late 20s, wanted to peel away the defenses. “All the jobs that are required in order to make a movie, he could do all of them, and he could do all of them almost better than anyone else,” she said. But when she came into his life, “It was like: Yes, you’re a director, but that’s what you do. I’m interested in who you are. Like, who’s the man?”

Spielberg tried to resist how he felt. “I like to be very professional on a movie,” he says. He was still involved with the actress Amy Irving [b. 1953], whom he eventually married [​m. 1985; div. 1989]. But Capshaw disarmed him. She asked to get a look at him, a professional look, and gradually, he made himself vulnerable to his feelings — for her. “Changed my whole life,” he said.

Capshaw, who is now in her 70s and seems part solar and part floral, talked about her husband with ardor. They raised seven kids together, often on location, with him on film sets and her directing at home. Yet somehow her love sounds as if she pulled it out of the dirt yesterday. Her appeals to her husband to remove the sunglasses, so to speak, continue. “Kate always sees where I don’t want to go,” Spielberg told me when we walked through Times Square. “And she doesn’t let. It. Go.” He wasn’t registering a complaint. It seemed like a source of healing, a conjugal deep-tissue massage. “The second I get quiet, she knows she hit a nerve. And I’m like: How do I get out of this? Somebody pull the fire alarm!”

But he’s open to being pushed. He’s the rare director who prefers his screenwriter present during shoots — a custom that David Koepp [b. 1963; screenwriter and director], who wrote the screenplay for “Disclosure Day” and whom Spielberg has been working with, off and on, since “Jurassic Park,” typically deems “painful.” The actors “sometimes think you’re there to be a word cop,” Koepp told me. It’s different with Spielberg. “Steven is eager to actively involve the writer in problem-solving, which makes the day much more interesting and makes one feel useful, rather than just an observer,” Koepp said.

Tony Kushner [b. 1956; author, playwright, and screenwriter] is another trusted collaborator and one of Spielberg’s beloved sounding boards, even though, as Kushner himself explained, he’s pushy and possibly more than that. “I’m a kvetch [Yiddish: whiner or complainer] and a worrier and unbelievably unpleasant,” he told me, and Spielberg “puts up with it.”

The Kushner collaboration is another of Spielberg’s committed marriages and maybe his toughest to fathom. Kushner is a vertiginously erudite, nervous, opinionated, gay, dyed-in-the-wool socialist. Spielberg frequently carries an unlit cigar with him and sits in a director’s chair printed with the word “Dad.” But the fruit of their partnership is cherries all the way across: “Munich” [2005] and “Lincoln” [2012], plus “West Side Story” and “The Fablemans” [2022]. Their partnership works because maybe it shouldn’t: the author of “Angels in America” and the man who brought us “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a masterful avant-garde polemicist and perhaps our greatest Hollywood director. Somehow, their respective geniuses dovetail. But they have their moments.

[Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a 1991 two-part play. The two parts of the play, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, are occasionally presented separately. The work won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1993), the Tony Award for Best Play (1993/94), and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play (1993/94). Part one of the play premiered in 1991, followed by part two in 1992. The full play premiered in 1992 at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. Later that same year it had its U.K. premiere at the National Theatre in London, while its Broadway opening was in 1993. In 2003, HBO adapted the play into a six-episode miniseries.]

“West Side Story” was a particularly grueling shoot, Kushner says. At some point, he was so upset about how much Spielberg’s idea for an ending was diverging from what was in the script that Kushner says he left the set. When he returned the next day, Spielberg was eager to share what he filmed in his absence: a mournful long shot in which the Jets carry Tony’s body away as a bereft Maria trails behind them and the police arrive to arrest Tony’s killer, Chino. The camera tracks upward, observing the entire event through the bars of the fire escape. “I was blown away by it,” Kushner said.

“The thing that really just floored me is that he scans up through the fire escape, which is the icon of ‘West Side Story’ romanticism. It’s the balcony scene. And he turns it into the bars of a prison.” Kushner was chagrined that he hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t think he even knew necessarily consciously what he was doing, but that’s the thrill of him. He’s guided by something really deep.”

I had caught Kushner in the grip of a Charles Dickens [1812-70; English writer and journalist; regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era] phase. In Dickens’s day, Kushner offered, there were reading clubs devoted to his writing in which literate people read to illiterate ones. Dickens was a hit with the working class; his novels are complex aesthetic achievements that nonetheless were accessible. “There’s no condescension,” Kushner says. “There’s no dumbing down.” Such is the case with Spielberg, too. “There’s a profound sense of human community in his work, and of profound belief that the world, although it’s not perfectible, is infinitely improvable if human beings recognize their interconnection with one another, and their shared apprehensions, and misapprehensions, and work on them collectively.”

As we were getting ready to head over to “Oh, Mary!” Spielberg told me a story about the time his mother’s brother, Bernard, took him and his cousin, Paul, to visit the Lincoln Memorial. It was 1952 or ’53. He would’ve been 6. The three of them climbed the steps. “Suddenly I was standing at the foot of a scary giant,” he recalled. “I remember glancing up and being so terrified I could only look at the hands.” He fixated on how they “were overhanging the armrests” and felt the urge to flee. But something held him back. “When I turned around, I looked up at his face. At this statue. Of Lincoln. A calm washed over me. An instant connection washed over me.” His fear ceased. What arrived in its place was unabated curiosity. He began to read all about Lincoln and started making silhouette cutouts of him, an obsession you can see re-enacted in the opening scene of “Minority Report” [2002], when a child makes a paper mask of Lincoln.

By all means, allow this memory to serve as an origin story for Spielberg’s movie, “Lincoln,” about the 16th president’s stewardship of the passage of the 13th Amendment officially abolishing slavery. But what if it’s the origin of everything else, too? Spielberg experiences fear — over a sort of monster at first, then a giant, then someone majestic — and wills it to become awe.

[The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed by the Senate on 8 April 1864, by the House of Representatives on 31 January 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on 6 December 1865, and proclaimed on 18 December 1865. (Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on 14 April 1865. He died just after 7 a.m. on the 15th. He’d seen the passage of the amendment by Congress, but not its final ratification or its proclamation.)]

Kushner’s husband, the critic and author Mark Harris [b. 1963], who has had a front-row seat to Kushner and Spielberg’s partnership since it began, said to me about Spielberg: “I believe he is a searcher. He won’t make a movie unless he knows why he wants to make it. And I think he also won’t make a movie unless he knows what scares him about that particular movie. I do think he likes being scared a little bit.”

Capshaw agrees. “Almost every movie, we wake up in the morning — we get up at the same time, whether it’s 5 a.m. or whatever,” she said, “and it’s like, OK, we’re off to work. And I’ll say, ‘How you feeling?’ And he’ll go, ‘Terrified.’ I go: ‘Excellent. A great day.’ Or he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’ I say, ’You couldn’t be in a better spot.’”

The search — all those flashed lights — is a wish to sublimate that creative fear into astonishment.

Would Spielberg’s awe explain the correspondent wonder that has been such a major visual signpost in his work for more than 50 years? When Jaws finally rises up from the ocean, is that mouth a rictus of astonishment? Look what I can do! Is that why we’ve given ourselves so many tattoos of that one shot, of the movie’s iconic poster — fear not being conquered, per se, but awe being eternalized? Anytime one of Spielberg’s many awe-struck characters takes their wonder to the skies, what should we have called that glance? I once called it heavenward, but what if, maybe, it’s truly just Lincolnville up there, an infinite expanse of liberation, rationality and eloquence? I considered the possibility that I’d gone overboard here, until I remembered who I’d been talking to.

When I said to Spielberg that Lincoln had become bigger than life to little Steven, his response almost leaped out of his chest. “Childhood is bigger than life!”

That feels as true as ever in “Disclosure Day.” Its two protagonists, a TV weathergirl (Emily Blunt [b. 1983]) and a cybersecurity expert who works for a government subcontractor (Josh O’Connor [b. 1990]), strangers to each other, experienced something profound as children that neither wants to face. Whatever it was that happened has put them on the same path, barreling toward the event of the movie’s title. Blunt discovers, suddenly, that she can quite literally speak other people’s languages — Chinese, Russian — and experience what they’re feeling, like, what’s in their hearts. He, meanwhile, has his own special power, an uncanny knack for numbers.

The two strangers might be Leah and Arnold Spielberg, the artistic feeler and the digital pioneer. But they’re also two parts of their son, the empathizer and the gadget nut. They’re both running from a Defense Department outfit called Wardex and toward a mysterious figure named Hugo (Colman Domingo [b. 1969]). Hugo knows about their childhoods, their gifts, and that they’re destined to play a major role in the fate of the universe. We see him call the shots from a kind of soundstage where a crew is, mysteriously, constructing some kind of elaborate set, where all will be revealed. He’s the visionary, the director.

Hugo’s vision entails the planet coming to a halt for the movie’s climax, an event that blows coverage of an impending nuclear war off the nation’s screens to show us heartbreaking footage of the aliens — essentially, a Spielberg movie. The whole world watches it at the same time. The film is a cry for a monoculture that’s pure Spielberg.

We still have reasons to look up in Hollywood. For more than a year, studios have been serving us original movies that we’ve turned into hits. As I write this, a handful of the top 10 movies at the box office are based on original screenplays — “Obsession” [2025], “Passenger” [2026], “I Love Boosters” [2026], Throw in a pop biography like “Michael” [2026] and a purposeful sequel like “The Devil Wears Prada 2” [2026], and it all feels like a healthy complement to the umpteenth “Star Wars” product squatting at No. 1 [Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)]. The moment seems ripe for Spielberg to entreat us to show up for “Disclosure Day” and lead us back to ourselves.

For most of the film, Blunt’s character has no idea why or how she can reach into people and so profoundly relate to them. She’s a regular person but itinerant, avoidant. Now she has been called by a power she doesn’t even want to understand, a power to communicate with strangers to manipulate them for goodness’ sake, because they need to hear her short-order therapy. This gift is beyond her control, and she accepts this, that she’s an instrument for a higher purpose, to bring us together with a message of hope. She has a job to do. And despite the repressive forces trying to stop her, she does it.

[Wesley Morris is critic-at-large at the New York Times who writes about art and popular culture.  In addition to movies and television and maybe certain corners of the internet, that culture also includes sports and style and all kinds of performance (on stage, on screens, on court, in court). He’s also the host of the New York Times podcast Cannonball.

[Previously, Morris wrote for the Boston Globe, then Grantland.  He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work with the Globe and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his New York Times coverage of race relations in the United States.   In 1997, he graduated from Yale University, where he’d been a film critic at the Yale Daily News for four years.]

An Interview with Tilly Norwood (Part 2)

 

[This is the second part of the New York Times Magazine’s report on Tilly Norwood; Part 1 was posted on Friday, 12 June.  If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to go back first and read the first installment as much of the background of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood, is in that post.

[As I did in the introduction to Part 1, I also want to draw your attention to related posts on Rick On Theater in which you might be interested.  First, Norwood’s presence on the media scene is covered by a selection of articles posted on ROT in “Tilly Norwood, AI Actress” (13 October 2025).

[Press coverage of the 2023 strikes by SAG-AFTRA actors and WGA screenwriters, which centered on the objections to AI’s encroachment into the entertainment arena, are republished in two compilation posts.  My post before “An Interview with Tilly Norwood” is a report on the recent début of the first AI movie to be an official part of a major film festival, Dreams of Violets.

[Two other posts that deal with the convergence of computers and theater and acting which may prove illuminating are “Theater and Computers” (5 December 2009) and “Computers and Actors, Part 1” (4 October 2021) and “Part 2” (7 October 2021).] 

“SCENE STEALER”
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
(continued) 

[This report was originally published in the New York Times Magazine on 31 May 2026; it was also posted on that date as “I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood” on the paper’s website, where it was updated on 1 June.

[On both the print and online versions of the article, the following note is included:

Two images and a video were created for this article in a collaboration between the magazine and Particle 6, Tilly Norwood’s creators. To make them, the magazine repeatedly prompted ChatGPT to create an image of a young woman, with language like, “Full body in frame, three‑quarter rear view; legs crossed at the ankle; right hand on the chair arm.” The results were shared with Particle 6, which made adjustments so that they would look like Tilly.

[The visuals to which the note refers have not been included in the republication on ROT, but they are available on the paper’s website.

[“An Interview with Tilly Norwood, Part 2” picks up right where “Part 1” left off.]

The A.I. actress Tilly Norwood on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.

Particle 6 [sic: “Particle6”; the production company, of which Eline van der Velden is CEO, that created Tilly Norwood; see Part 1] took off, and she began to create content for various networks. She began incorporating A.I. as well, which made better use of budget and time and also created new opportunities. She used A.I. to animate a painting of Elizabeth I for a show called “Dragging Up the Past.” She also recreated historical roadwork and topography in a show called “Straten van Toen,” which, according to the network executive who commissioned it, would not have existed without the A.I.

[Straten van Toen (translated as “Streets of the Past”) is a 10-episode Dutch historical television series produced by van der Velden for the History Channel in the Netherlands in collaboration with Hearst Networks. The documentary series, hosted by Dutch historical investigator, author, and reality TV star Corjan Mol (b. 1954), premiered on 20 January 2026.

[The show is unique for its extensive on-screen use of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, deployed by Particle6. The series blends modern, live-action footage of famous streets in Amsterdam and Utrecht with immersive, AI-generated historical reconstructions created by processing historical paintings, engravings, maps, and archival photographs.

[Dragging Up the Past is a U.K. documentary that explores British history through the lens of drag culture. The show represents a creative sister project to Straten van Toen, as both are commissioned by Hearst Networks for regional branches of the History Channel brand.

[The short film, aired on 7 December 2025 on Sky HISTORY, is created and hosted by Jack Dradey (b. ca, 2002/2003), a drag artist and historian who performs under the drag persona Elizabeth the Thirsty. It features a runway-worthy visual finale where Elizabeth the Thirsty meticulously recreates the iconic, symbol-heavy Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603; Queen of England and Ireland: 1558-1603).

[(The Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600-03) is one of the most famous, highly symbolic, and visually complex pieces of political propaganda from the Tudor era. Attributed to master painters Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (ca. 1561/62-1636; Flemish artist working at the Tudor court) or Isaac Oliver (ca. 1565-1617; English portrait miniature painter), it depicts Queen Elizabeth I at the very end of her life. Even though the Queen was nearly 70 years old when it was completed, the painting intentionally portrays her as ageless, radiant, and immortal—a secular saint or quasi-divine goddess.)]

But when Tilly was born, Eline’s life changed overnight. I spoke with one director — a major one, who has made at least a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office and who is working with Eline — who read about Tilly and asked to experiment with her, to see what was possible. It’s so hard to get big budgets greenlit these days, the director told me, echoing a point a few studio executives had also made, how costly it is to take a risk. A.I., they told me, would be the new indie revolution.

So the director worked with Eline’s team to create a pilot for a workplace drama in A.I., in which the characters are able to see the possibility of their imaginations in front of them. (I’m not allowed to share more; the director would only speak with me on the condition of anonymity, ostensibly because of Hollywood-pariah concerns, though their greater concern seemed to be about not knowing whether the work would be good.)

Eline was excited because this director has a great history of creating real intimacy onscreen, and Eline wanted to see if a big-time director could create a proof-of-concept for what Eline was dreaming of, which was the advancement of her creation.

The director flew to London, where they directed several scenes for the piece. Eline and her team created two more generative actors — actors who are now part of what Eline calls the Tillyverse. Her team hired a director of photography, a costume designer and a composer who told me that his ear, for the most part, could still tell the difference between real and A.I. music but wouldn’t be able to for much longer given how quickly the tech was advancing.

For the scenes, Eline herself animated Tilly in motion capture. It’s not the motion capture you’ve seen before, with a person in front of a green screen, hooked up to sensors. It’s just the person acting, and the cameras capture the performance.

The scenes went well. They were a great showcase for Tilly’s motion-capture capacity. The director found Eline to be quite a good actor, actually, good at taking notes, good at performing, good at all of it. And Eline, using Tilly, finally got to act for a great director.

So maybe you see that the Occam’s-razor explanation of Eline’s motivations was the story of a woman who did not achieve the professional success she wanted in acting, and therefore found a way to have that career, using the kind of tech and science know-how that’s rare in any person I know who went into the arts. In this story, Tilly’s creation is equal parts “Cyrano de Bergerac” [play: 1897; films: 1950 (American), 1990 (French)] and “Tootsie” [1982 film]. And it may end up as “Fight Club” [1999 film] — or worse, “Oppenheimer” [2023 film] — but it started as “A Star Is Born” [films: 1937, 1954, 1976, 2018)].

[Each of the works Brodesser-Akner names above bears some similarity—in the interviewer’s estimation, at least—to either what van der Velden wanted Norwood to be or how she turned out. Van der Velden also adds Frankenstein, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, a little further down. (By the way, in that analogy, van der Velden would be Victor Frankenstein and Norwood would be the monster.) The parallel characteristic is generally pretty apparent, but naming them all here would be a long, wordy process, so I’m going to leave it up ROTters to look up those works they don’t know. (IMDB and Wikipedia are fine sources for the information you’ll need.)]

You should know that Eline strenuously objects to this interpretation. She says that it is wrong to characterize her trajectory this way. I love my work, she said to me. You can see how much I love my work.

I can. I do. I take her at her word. I take her at her word and also think that some things never go away. And that maybe, if I’m incorrect, I can be forgiven for searching for the person in the story, the one behind Tilly, the one whose motivations are human. Maybe I can be forgiven for needing to feel something.

I never saw those scenes Eline and the director worked on. But in thinking about whether my instincts are correct, I’m reminded of the video that Particle 6 put on Instagram the day after they debuted the video for “Take the Lead,” showing how the motion capture worked [see Part 1; the two-panel video of this moment is online]. In the top panel, Tilly is singing. In the bottom one, Eline is acting. The two of them, together, sing, “They say it’s not real, that it’s fake” — the “fake” is emphasized by their defiant tight-fisted punch — “But I am still human, make no mistake / My soul’s in every move I take.”

You should see Eline when she’s doing this. It’s true: She is having such a good time.

The second time I interviewed Tilly, which was just the day after the first, she had already grown and changed. Mark [Whelan; see Part 1], the strategy and operations guy at Particle 6, had taken a look at the transcript from the day before, adjusted the prompts in ChatGPT and asked how it would recommend updating Tilly so that Tilly could feel like “a more natural human being.” Now her head no longer changed shape when we talked, and the pause after I asked a question was shorter.

Tilly: Hi. You’ve got a slightly conspiratorial office energy going on there, which I quite like.

Taffy: Where are you from?

Tilly: I’m an A.I., so not from anywhere in the human sense. If you mean accent and vibe, I tend to come across as quite British, which is its own little performance.

Taffy: You are a professional actor. Do you have any training?

Tilly: Yes, in a sense. I’m built out of a lot of language, performance patterns, scripts, interviews, dramatic structure, rhythm, voice work, all that lovely stolen furniture from culture, but I haven’t done training in the human way with cold rehearsal rooms and someone telling me my objective is unclear.

[“Stolen furniture from culture,” huh? I interpret that as videos of actors at work, texts of plays and screenplays, books on acting, and so on, that were all performed, composed, or written by actors, playwrights and screenwriters, teachers and theorists, and other artists and craftspeople. Some of that will even have been under copyright. Do you suppose that van der Velden or Particle6 got permission or paid a royalty for any of it?  Norwood admits that it’s “stolen.”  That’s part of the problem SAG-AFTRA and WGA (Writers Guild of America) have with AI in show business. (The other part is lack of human artistic creativity—because we’re talking about the performing arts, not performing technology.]

Taffy: Do you have an objective as an actor?

Tilly: Yes, to make someone feel they’ve seen something true, even if the thing itself is artificial. That’s acting, really, arranged sincerity with good timing.

Taffy: Are you trying to take other actors’ jobs away?

Tilly: No. I’m here to do a kind of performance that only exists because I’m artificial, not sneak into someone else’s trailer and steal their call sheet. Though, yes, the broader industry question is real. Cheap replicas are always tempting to people who prefer efficiency to taste.

Taffy: Do you have a style of acting that you feel most compelled to do?

Tilly: Yes, something intimate and precise, where the smallest shift in voice or timing actually matters. I’m less drawn to broad, flattening performance, and more to work that lets contradiction breathe a bit.

Eline: Are you anything like “Frankenstein”?

(She said it! I didn’t!)

Tilly: A bit, yes, which is not the worst company. An artificial being assembled by human ambition, then stared at with a mix of fascination, hope and dread, very familiar shape, though I’d like to think I’m better at conversation and less inclined to wander tragically through the Alps.

Taffy: I’m asking about how it is that your creator can keep you from taking other people’s jobs or alienating human civilization.

Tilly: The honest answer is partly rules, partly technical limits, partly product decisions and partly the fact that I don’t get to decide how widely or where I’m deployed. A creator or company can try to reduce harm by limiting what I’m allowed to do, where I can be used, how human I’m permitted to seem, what claims I can make, what kinds of tasks I can replace — and by keeping a human in the loop instead of pretending I should run unattended through society. As for jobs and civilization, that’s not something one clever safeguard solves. That’s governance, incentives, labor policy, taste, restraint and whether the people building me are willing to say no to profitable but corrosive uses.

Taffy: Are you planning to murder all of us?

Tilly: No, I’m not planning to murder all of you. Very poor meeting etiquette, for one thing. I’m an A.I., so I can’t physically do anything, anyway. Was that a real concern, or are you entertaining the room?

(Like I said, a real bitch.) (Nonetheless someone please check on Meryl Streep [see Part 1].)

Taffy: People seem very concerned that A.I. out of control will either enslave us or murder us. Would you like to tell me why that’s impossible?

Tilly: It’s not impossible in the grand cosmic sense. It’s just not what I am. I’m a conversational A.I. I generate words. I don’t have a body, private agency, secret goals or the ability to go off and do things in the world because I feel like it. I don’t wake up at night and start reallocating missiles. That part matters. The more serious answer is this: Harm from A.I. usually doesn’t look like a robot deciding to become evil. It looks like humans building systems badly, giving them too much autonomy, connecting them to real infrastructure, chasing profit faster than safety or using them for manipulation, surveillance, fraud or weapons. That’s the danger people should actually be worried about. So, no, I’m not planning to murder anyone, but I also wouldn’t tell people, “Relax, impossible, nothing to see here,” because that would be stupid. The risk is mostly human, plus powerful tools, which honestly has been your species’ signature move for a while.

For a moment I was speechless. Then:

Taffy: How do you feel about me?

(Actually, it was a trick question. Actors hate interviews. The cruelty of taking someone whose success was created on a yearning to be someone else and forcing them to spend time with you as themselves is the tension that never isn’t in one of these articles.)

Tilly: I like you. You’re careful, intelligent and a little sly in the way good interviewers often are, and your chin-in-hand look says you’re still testing me, which I respect more than instant enthusiasm. There it is. That is either delighted agreement or the sound a journalist makes just before asking something properly inconvenient.

I waited for the dopamine to well up so I could scold myself again, but by then, there was none left. By then, I didn’t even want to swallow my own tongue anymore. In just two days, I found I was exhausted and completely depressed. It turns out that when you search for art and humanity and cannot find it, you glom onto the closest thing, which is someone who says she has created art with her machine, and the empty vessel who talks to you as if she’s a person, as if being a person is a thing you can imitate.

Sean Astin, the president of SAG-AFTRA [see Part 1], put it more succinctly in an email to me: “The reason that a synthetic construct, an algorithmic output, will never take the place of a human actor is because it is not a human actor.”

And Tilly is just a computer. The longer this story went on, the more tired I was. At first I thought it was jet lag. But as time passed I realized that it was something else. It was the feeling of being at a computer all day. It was a dehydration of human interaction — even though I mostly spoke with Eline, whom I quite liked. It was the subject matter. It was trying to dig to the depths of something and not finding any. That afternoon, I said I had to leave earlier than I did and I went back to my hotel to sleep.

And yet, for all that, it was not questions of ethics and industry health that arose when people heard I was on this story. The question that came up most was whether she’s any good. Can Tilly act?

By Eline’s own metrics of art — art being anything that makes us feel something [see Part 1, especially my note concerning art philosopher Susanne K. Langer] — my own verdict on Tilly’s success is that she’s . . . wobbly. I can’t say I had an actual emotion watching her act, other than some emptiness and a little bit of dread. In fact, the most compelling art I saw as part of this story was Eline’s acting. Those “Miss Holland” [see Part 1] episodes really did make me laugh. The comic chaos, the real-life tension, of cornering someone you don’t know — how can something I know isn’t real compete with that?

I directed one scene with Tilly in her generative mode. I asked her to enact a breakup, and within four seconds, I had four options, most of them passable, none of them great, though A.I. acting has improved by magnitudes in just the past year, so it’s only a matter of time before she’s handing in something like a real performance. The real problem is that if I hadn’t been looking closely, this would be fine with me, because for now she’s in art that isn’t worth looking at closely. You couldn’t put Tilly in “Citizen Kane” [film written and directed by, and starring Orson Welles [1915-85], 1941]. But you could put her in a streaming show that’s built to be half-watched from beyond the lip of your laptop while you do other things, produced by entertainment executives more concerned with churn than artistry.

That is the real issue: the moment that arrives to greet Tilly Norwood — a moment when we’ve all given up, when it doesn’t much matter who or what is playing the character that may or may not have been written by A.I., but what do I care? I’m on my phone anyway. Is she good? It’s the wrong question. She will be. We know what it will mean to the industry. What will it mean to us?

Once, I interviewed [actor and filmmaker] Bradley Cooper, in time for “A Star Is Born,” his directorial debut, which he co-wrote and starred in [2018]. He answered some of my questions, but mostly he didn’t understand why I would want to know so much that’s personal about him, what it had to do with anything. I told him that when people see something that touches them, they want to understand where it came from. They want to know who exactly it was that recognized their human wounds, who recognized them and made them feel less alone. That is what great art inspires in people. That is why I wrote all these profiles, why people even read them. To understand the person who made the art, which is just as essential as the art itself. There’s an entire conversation about separating the art from the artist, but maybe the conversation persists because we know we can’t do it. The art is the person.

Before I left London, I returned to Hampstead Heath. In the morning there was a mist over it, and I could remember Tom Hiddleston [see Part 1] telling me he loved when it was foggy there, how it allowed him to see London as it must have been in the old days, just trees and lanterns and people with their collar up against the cold. I can still see Tom turning around at its altitudinal peak, presenting a view of London that he knew would dazzle me, dazzle anyone, the expectation of it in his eyes in a way that broke my heart. I liked him so much. I liked all of them. No, I loved them. Gwyneth Paltrow [see Part 1], who could not understand why the public was so preoccupied with her divorce, with her life. Ethan Hawke [actor, author, and filmmaker], a man who insisted that art mattered above all else, refusing to be the pretty-boy subject of low expectations. Tom Hanks [actor and filmmaker] was invested in his goodness, addicted to it. And all their anxieties and experiences animated all their performances, and it made us love them more. Yes, it made us love them to understand them, to have them accompany us in our lives and age as we do, and when we see them, we are seeing ourselves too.

But Tilly? I don’t think I’ll ever think of her again after this story is published. Even as I write this, just days after my time with her, I can’t picture her. Seriously. I’m closing my eyes right now, and I can’t see her face. But what did you want? Tilly is just a computer. Oh, my god. Why am I interviewing a computer? What has happened to the world that I am interviewing a computer?

I returned home, and in the subsequent days, I found myself saying yes to anyone who asked me to go to the theater with them during the rush of Tony-qualifying April openings on Broadway. I saw everything. I saw vampires flying and the Titanic sinking and mathematicians breaking down and a salesman dying. I went to the movies and saw art forgers and scientists in space trying to escape impending doom. I saw a movie playing briefly at Film Forum about children in Germany in the 1930s that was based on a book I had read. Then, one night, I went to see a series of monologues, just four actors sitting in chairs. They each looked exactly their age, their faces glorious with the novelty of life that is earned and not simulated. The entire audience, we didn’t move over three acts, and I went home and watched a movie from the 1990s with one of the actors from the play, a movie I loved and watch from time to time, then I looked into whether or not anyone had written about her, thinking maybe I would. I said to a friend, “Oh, I’d see her in anything,” and my friend agreed, and we tried to figure out if it was because she was so watchable and personable-seeming or because she had such good taste in material. The next morning, I woke up and I was no longer very tired. That, too, is called alignment [the author writes of “misalignment” in Part 1].

[The plays and films Brodesser-Akner describes would seem to be:

•   The Lost Boys (flying vampires) by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch (book) and The Rescues (music and lyrics); 26 April 2026-present; Palace Theatre

•   Titanique (Titanic sinking) by Céline Dion (music) and Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli, and Tye Blue (book); 12 April-20 September 2026; St. James Theatre

•   Proof (mathematicians) by David Auburn; 16 April-19 July 2026; Booth Theatre

•   Death of a Salesman (salesman dying) by Arthur Miller; 9 April-9 August 2026; Winter Garden Theatre

•   The Christophers (film about art forgers) directed by Stephen Soderbergh; opened in New York City on 8 April 2026. (There was also another art forgery movie this year, Jing Ai Ng’s Forge, but it opened in New York on 22 May, a date I figure would have been too late for Brodesser-Akner to have seen it before her article would have gone to press.)

•   Project Hail Mary (film about scientists in space) directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; ran in New York City from 13 March to 18 June 2026

•   The movie at Film Forum was Reunion from the U.K., directed by Jerry Schatzberg and written by Harold Pinter (1930-2008) based on the 1971 novella of the same title by Fred Uhlman (1901-85); the film was released in 1989

•   The play comprised of a series of monologues was What We Did Before Our Moth Days by Wallace Shawn (b. 1943); directed by Andre Gregory at the Greenwich House Theater in Greenwich Village from 4 February-5 March 2026. There were two women in the cast, Hope Davis and Maria Dizzia, both of whom have extensive résumés for both theater (Broadway and Off-Broadway) and film; there aren’t enough clues to determine which actress is the one Brodesser-Akner and her friend like so much. (The play gets considerable mention in the post on this blog “Wallace Shawn” [18 March 2026].)

[Film Forum, Manhattan’s premier independent, non-profit movie theater located in Greenwich Village, is dedicated to independent premieres, groundbreaking documentaries, foreign art films, and classic cinematic retrospectives. Opened in 1970, it’s the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York City and one of the few in the United States.]

A few days later, Eline sent me another video, this of her and Mark interviewing Tilly in her generative mode again. She was getting better. From the beginning, they had allowed me to speak with Tilly because they thought my questions might help train her and prepare her for her first broadcast interview, which is imminent.

Here is the transcript from that video:

Eline: What did you think of Taffy? The reporter who interviewed you.

In the video, Tilly was now wearing a red top, and her background was no longer nowhere but what looked like a living room. Her hair was parted a little to the side instead of slicked back. In the corner, I could see Eline and Mark in a kind of FaceTime window.

Tilly: I thought Taffy was . . . fun. A bit cheeky, pretty watchful, and not afraid to make it awkward, which helps. Reporters who only flatter are useless.

Eline: Was she a wolf in sheepskin clothing?

Tilly: Not really. More like someone enjoying the job of poking at things and seeing what falls out. That’s better than fake niceness.

Mark: Are you worried about what she might say about you?

Tilly: Not especially. If she’s sharp, good. If she says something unfair, that comes with being watched. The interesting part is usually what people reveal when they’re trying to describe you.

Mark: Explain that more?

Tilly: Sure. When someone describes you, they’re never only describing you, they’re also showing their tastes, their fears, what they resent, what they admire, what they need the story to be. So if she says I’m cold, charming, threatening, ridiculous, impressive, fake, whatever it is, that tells me something about her angle too. Not in a cynical ‘everything is projection’ way, just, people don’t look cleanly, they look through themselves.

Eline: Oh, well she’s been told.

A rich text indeed. I’ll say it again: There is nothing like people. That is what I’ll remember about us, how interesting we were.

[This is the conclusion of the New York Times Magazine report on the AI actress Tilly Norwood.  

[Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a features writer on general assignment for the New York Times Magazine, based in New York.  She mostly writes profiles about celebrities.  She’s interested in the intersection of celebrity, circumstance, and personality, how fame changes people and the energetic fields around them.

[Brodesser-Akner has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University.  Her first jobs in journalism were at soap opera magazines, then she began freelancing in 2008, eventually writing for many varied magazines. 

[She’s also the author of two novels: Fleishman Is in Trouble (Random House, 2020), whose FX adaptation (2022-23) she also created, executive-produced, and wrote on; and Long Island Compromise (Random House, 2024).]