Sarah Jessica Parker had no idea that fans disliked a certain divisive And Just Like That character.

The actress behind Carrie Bradshaw says she was “shocked” to learn that some audiences detested Che Diaz, Sara Ramírez’s nonbinary stand-up comedian, who served as a new love interest for Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) on the Sex and the City follow-up series.

“A friend of mine brought it up to me, and it’s like: ‘What are you talking about?'” Parker recalled in a new interview with The Guardian. “And he said: ‘Yeah, there’s all this conversation.'”

Parker explained that she seldom takes note of backlash against her projects. “I’ve been an actor for 50 years, and I’ve almost never paid attention to peripheral chatter,” she said, adding that she had a good time on set with Ramírez. “I loved working with them.”

Ramírez ultimately left the show after season 2, in which their character and Miranda called it quits, with the actor sharing a statement distancing themself from Che before their departure.

“I am not the fictional characters I have played, nor am I responsible for the things that are written for them to say,” Ramírez wrote on Instagram. “I am a human being, an artist, an actor. And we are living in a world that has become increasingly hostile toward anyone who dares to free themselves from the gender binary, or disrupt the mainstream.”

Before their exit, Ramírez told Entertainment Weekly that they’re “actually nothing like” Che Diaz. “It was absolutely exhausting to bring this person to life,” the actor explained. “I had to stay in a bit of an extroverted mode in order to do that. So the efforts that it took to bring this character forth makes me feel really proud of what I’ve been able to deliver.”

Ramírez also noted that they were happy that Che inspired such extreme feelings in viewers. “I love that people have passionate opinions, that Che struck a nerve,” they said. “I think it’s really interesting to play a person who elicits such strong reactions and who can start much-needed conversations. If the storylines created major watercooler moments after each episode, then we did our job.”

Nixon acknowledged Ramírez’s departure in a different interview with EW last year. “I miss Sara,” the actress said. “I mean, Sara and I are in quite a lot of touch about Palestine and what’s happening. And so we talk quite a bit. And they came to my opening night of my play [The Seven Year Disappear], which was really lovely.”

However, the Gilded Age star noted that her onscreen relationship with Ramírez’s character didn’t have much left to offer the show. “I think for Miranda, Miranda and Che were really pretty done,” Nixon said. “I think that Miranda and Che had kind of run the gamut of what they were going to be to each other.”

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Nixon later told EW that she thinks And Just Like That works best when more of its central characters are free from long-term relationships. 

“I think our show is always at its most quintessential when as many of us as possible are single and dating and failing at it,” the actress said, adding that she was thrilled to bring guest star Rosie O’Donnell into the AJLT fold as a one-night stand for Miranda in season 3.

“Rosie and I have known each other for a long time,” she said. “I was like, ‘Shall I text her?’ And [showrunner Michael Patrick King] was like, ‘Sure!’ And she was wonderfully excited about the prospect, so we had a great time.”

Would you want to know how you’ll die?

It’s a question you might find yourself asking after watching The Life of Chuck (in theaters now). Based on the Steven King novella of the same name, the film ends with the titular character (played by Tom Hiddleston) walking away from an attic where he may have just seen an apparition of himself at the end of his life. 

The film tells the story of Charles Krantz, a dance-loving accountant who tragically dies from a brain tumor at 39. Chuck’s life unfolds for the audience through three acts, presented in reverse, with the final act telling the story of his childhood. 

In Act III, young Chuck (played by both Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay) is forbidden from going into his attic by his grandfather, Albie Krantz (Mark Hamill). We learn that in that attic, Albie has seen ghostly apparitions showing the deaths of himself and his loved ones, and he doesn’t want Chuck to be traumatized by similar visions.

But after Albie dies, teenage Chuck can no longer contain his curiosity. When he enters the room, he briefly sees an older version of himself in a hospital bed, hooked up to a monitor. Thanks to the reverse chronological storytelling, we know by this point in the film that young Chuck is indeed witnessing his own demise. But does Chuck let this phantom haunt him into adulthood?  

“Any premonition of death or the end of his life doesn’t scare him or suppress him,” Hiddleston tells Entertainment Weekly. “His choice in that moment is to live as fully as he can, which is the choice we all ought to make all the time. None of us know the day or the date that our lives will end. And if we think about it, we live with that uncertainty every day.” 

The reveal in Act III that Chuck has seen his final moment gives extra weight to earlier portions of the movie – specifically his spontaneous dance on the street in Act II. “Chuck is an accountant who on the inside is a dancer, and he contains multitudes, but he’s there to show us that we contain multitudes, to remember the infinite possibilities that we’re all born with,” Hiddleston says.

“You can try anything in life as long as you don’t hurt other people,” he continues. “Your life is yours to live and yours to explore, and yours to be curious about. And that curiosity is actually what sustains you.”

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Despite the movie’s supernatural ending, Hiddleston hopes audiences leave theaters on a hopeful note. “I think it inspires an instinct to live, [and] think, ‘Well, I have now. I have the present moment. I have the people I love.’ You start to be grateful for what you have and inspired to live as fully and as joyfully as you can, with the awareness that life also contains some of the hard stuff. It contains struggle and pain and loss and grief, but it also contains joy and connection and love and inspiration.” 

He adds, “If you can hold onto that, you’re living.”

There’s divine casting, and then there’s divine casting.

In the case of Bill Murray, who plays the Almighty himself in The Phoenician Scheme, it’s the latter. “I don’t know that we chose Bill to play God,” writer-director Wes Anderson tells Entertainment Weekly, pausing to gleefully add, “possibly God did.”

Jokes aside, Anderson says the casting was a match made in heaven. “What I will say is when Bill walked onto the set in his robes and his beard, he could barely move. And yet he seemed very comfortable, and he occupied his throne in a relaxed manner. It just didn’t seem that he was faking it. We knew very quickly he was going to be an informal God who is creating without making a show of it.”

The film follows Benicio del Toro’s wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, who appoints his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a nun, as sole heir to his estate. As Liesl, Korda, and his tutor, kooky bug lover Bjorn (Michael Cera), embark together on a new enterprise, they come up against several bonkers assassination attempts, presumably from Korda’s many enemies. Each time, Korda enters a sort of liminal space —a black and white heaven —where he experiences moments of personal growth and introspection. Here, he encounters Murray’s God… among other things.

“I think some of the most important changes in Benicio’s character Zsa-zsa are taking place during these sort of visions that he’s having as he repeatedly dies, or keeps getting assassinated,” Anderson explains.

To create this heaven — a first for an Anderson joint — he knew he wanted it all to be real. “We wanted it to all exist in front of the camera, to not use computer visual effects, to have it all be there,” he says, adding, “and so we made something kind of like a 360-degree stage, a set of clouds painted, sculpted, and we created a sort of Biblical troupe for these scenes.” (Other members credited in this troupe include F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Willem Dafoe.) 

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“I think it’s sort of the way biblical settings and characters were portrayed during the Renaissance, I think that’s really what we’ve done,” Anderson adds. “I mean, we’re so familiar with the Renaissance representation of stories from the Bible, and ours is the black and white version of that.”

The Phoenician Scheme, which was co-written with frequent Anderson collaborator Roman Coppola, also stars Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, and Hope Davis. The film is now playing in theaters.

This article contains spoilers for The Life of Chuck.

The Life of Chuck isn’t your average apocalypse movie. 

Like the Stephen King novella that inspired it, director Mike Flanagan’s latest film is told in three acts, presented in reverse chronological order. However, the big twist, which slowly unfolds throughout the movie, is that the first act — the one depicting the end of the world — is all in the title character Chuck’s (Tom Hiddleston) mind. 

With the help of young Chuck’s (Benjamin Pajak) English teacher, played by Kate Siegel, the conceit is explained by Act III. But there are plenty of Easter eggs along the way to help the audience understand what’s going on. 

“Having as many details in the first section of the movie that pay off later, and you understand where Chuck encountered these things and how he populated this universe in his head, that was a really fun thing,” Flanagan tells Entertainment Weekly. 

The first act centers on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Marty Anderson, a divorced schoolteacher who, despite a series of apocalyptic events unfolding around him, becomes strangely fixated on new billboards popping up around town, each thanking a man named Chuck for “39 great years.” After a sinkhole takes over the town’s busiest intersection, Marty and his ex, Karen Gillan’s nurse Felicia Gordon, can’t help but reconnect (she’s noticed the strange ads, too). When cell service, internet, and cable all go out, Marty walks to Felicia’s house, where they sit together to watch the stars blink out one by one. 

It turns out that the Chuck from the billboards is Charles Krantz, a local man who’s dying of a brain tumor at the heartbreaking age of 39. The universe containing Marty and Felicia is only in Chuck’s head — an amalgamation of people and experiences from throughout his life.

“We tried very hard to make it clear in retrospect that the first 40 minutes exist out of time, that all the technology people are using is from different eras and all kind of blended together,” Flanagan says. “Whether or not everyone is able to pick up those threads on the first viewing, we hoped it would encourage more viewings. There are a lot of little connections there that are fun to make.”

The second and third acts tell the story of Chuck’s life. Some of the connections are easy to spot: Marty and Felicia are chaperones at Chuck’s school dance in Act III, and Carl Lumbly’s Sam Yarbrough, who Marty encounters on his walk to Felicia’s, is the funeral director when Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill) dies.

But other Easter eggs are a little more difficult to spot: Actress Violet McGraw plays a young girl on roller skates who Marty encounters on his way to Felicia’s house in Act I. In Act II, Hiddleston’s adult Chuck briefly passes her after his impromptu street dance. Marty drives the same car as Chuck’s grandfather, and the boombox in Felicia’s nursing office that plays a commercial about Chuck is the same boombox that Samantha Sloyan’s Miss Rohrbacher uses to teach Chuck and his classmates dance in Act III. 

All three acts are also populated by the same background actors, adding a sense of familiarity to every face in the movie. “I loved that they would come back and be visible throughout,” Flanagan says of the small pool of background performers, “that there was a sense of echoing of the present in the past and that we could really hopefully trace the seeds of this imaginary world as he first encountered them.”

If you didn’t pick up on all the tiny connections between the three acts, don’t worry – some of the movie’s crew members didn’t either. 

“We erred on the side of trying to allow most of the specific revelations to exist in the back half of the movie, but to not flinch away from the moments that could have revealed it in the beginning,” Flanagan says. “And even then, I had a handful of crew members, and I’ve read even a handful of reviews out of TIFF that didn’t get it and that didn’t figure that out. And so that makes me feel like we kind of hopefully hit it right in the sweet spot, because my thing was it can’t be too obvious and it can’t be too obscure.” 

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If you do opt to see the movie again with the aim of Easter egg hunting, Flanagan hopes you stay in your seat until the Act III scene when Siegel “grabs the audience by the face and specifically explains what’s happening” with references to Walt Whitman’s famous “I contain multitudes.”

He jokes, “I just feel bad for anyone who’s in the bathroom or getting popcorn during that.”

This article contains spoilers for The Phoenician Scheme.

Will the real Agent Karlsen please stand up?

One of the biggest surprises in writer-director Wes Anderson’s newest film, The Phoenician Scheme, revolves around Michael Cera’s character, Bjorn. First introduced as a kooky Norwegian bug enthusiast, tutor, and sort of assistant to Benicio del Toro’s business tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda, Bjorn’s true identity is later revealed in a third-act twist — he’s really Agent Karlsen of the Covert North American Special Services. His mission is to infiltrate (but not sabotage, no, never sabotage!) Zsa-zsa’s operation. Like his alter ego, though, he really does have an affinity for insects and Zsa-zsa’s daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton).

“I guess that the turn to Agent Karlsen was sort of more or less informed by the front half of the character being Bjorn, because it just had to be a big contrast created,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “So creating Bjorn was the biggest job, and it’s weird because he is, I mean, the truth of the character is that he’s Agent Karlsen pretending to be this Professor Bjorn. But it actually feels more to me like Bjorn is the real guy.”

So much so that when Anderson would refer to Cera as Karlsen on set, he didn’t even respond.

“When we were shooting, Wes would often, if he’s back behind his monitor somewhere and he had to call out to us to readjust us or something in the frame, he would say, ‘Bjorn, go to the left a little.’ And I would always respond to that,” Cera says. “And then when I was doing scenes as Agent Karlsen, he would say, ‘Agent Karlsen, move over.’ And I wouldn’t hear him addressing me, and so he would be not able to get my attention, and then he would go, ‘Bjorn!’ Then I would hear him.”

Cera wasn’t even aware he was doing this until Anderson pointed it out to him later on.

“He went, ‘You only respond when I call you Bjorn,'” he recalls. “I didn’t even realize it, but I just got so used to that, I guess. So, that was funny.”

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Cera has a theory about why this was the case. The actor worked closely with his director to perfect the faux Norwegian accent, perfectly coiffed hair, and over-prescribed glasses that make up Bjorn, before figuring out those same elements for Karlsen. As a result, much of the latter was informed by the former.

“[Crafting Bjorn] felt like the bigger piece in a way. There was more to build there because there’s a whole voice — and Agent Karlsen has a voice too — but Bjorn had the accent, which just took a lot of preparation work, and creating the look for Bjorn was where our focus was,” Cera explains. “And then, I didn’t even get [to create Karlsen’s] hair. We had to do Bjorn’s hair first, even the days when I would just be Agent Karlsen, we’d kind of do the hair as Bjorn first and then change it.”

Now that the film, which also stars Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, and Scarlett Johansson, is out in the world, Cera is able to talk about all facets of his dual role.

“I think the movie is not that secretive, where it’s like, it’s not a precious secret, but I think the movie unfolds and reveals itself in really a fun way,” he says. “I think it’s a fun experience as a viewer, I hope.”