The Art of Being Tara Subkoff
Lynn Hirschberg profiles actress, designer, director and “operator” Tara Subkoff, and the results are not pretty.
Philip Seymour Hoffman: 1967-2014
Here is Lynn Hirschberg’s 2008 New York Times Magazine profile of the actor, who was found dead Feb. 2 in Manhattan:
“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”
Strange Love
M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop
“I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”
The Self-Manufacture of Megan Fox
The Audacity of ‘Precious’
Although Lee Daniels will be 50 this year, he has the bouncy, mercurial energy of a child. The previous night, at the gala screening of his movie “Precious,” which he directed and helped produce, he greeted the audience by saying, “I’m a little homo, I’m a little Euro and I’m a little ghetto.” The crowd cheered.
Heeeere’s . . . Conan!!!
On a chilly Thursday night in late January, four weeks from his last show as host of “Late Night,” Conan O’Brien was strumming a guitar behind his beat-up desk in his cluttered office at Rockefeller Center, figuring out how to say goodbye. After 16 years and 2,725 shows, O’Brien would be moving, along with almost all his staff, to Universal City in California to take over “The Tonight Show.”