Actors In Film
| Christian Camargo Katie Holmes William Hurt Allison Janney Cherry Jones Russell Means Michael Nyqvist Jean Reno Juliet Rylance Mark Rylance Ben Whishaw |
The cast of Days and Nights: front row, from left, Cherry Jones, William Hurt, Mark Rylance, writer-director Christian Camargo (with script), Juliet Rylance (Camargo’s real-life wife and one of the film’s producers), and the late Russell Means; back row, Michael Nyqvist, Jean Reno, Allison Janney, Ben Whishaw, Katie Holmes, and producer Barbara Romer. Photographed on South Spectacle Pond, Litchfield County, Connecticut.
An ensemble cast of eccentrics has become a cinematic trope—thank you, Christopher Guest, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach. But in the new indie feature Days and Nights—the directorial debut of actor Christian Camargo (Dexter)—the star-studded troupe turns into a master class, and their performances serve not comedy but tragedy. The film, for which Camargo also wrote the script, offers an update of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. (That’s the playwright himself, in the inset at left, reading the play to the Moscow Art Theatre group in 1898.) Channeling that spirit for Vanity Fair is Camargo’s charmed ensemble, including Camargo himself, French treasure Jean Reno, a commanding Allison Janney, William Hurt in Oscar-caliber form, an emotionally smoldering Ben Whishaw, the incomparable Mark Rylance and his incandescent stepdaughter, Juliet, and, yes, Katie Holmes.
Days and Nights, appearing in theaters this month, depicts the interplay among members of a dysfunctional family and their extended circle over two pivotal weekends, three years apart. Filmed at an idyllic, if forbidding, lakeside retreat in rural Connecticut, the picture is set in the Reagan era, with a backdrop of guns and ammo, video art, endangered species, and a new, insidious disease run rampant. The cycle of life plays out as a dozen houseguests pierce the thin membranes between creativity, fraud, desire, and madness. Camargo’s film, with a haunting score by Claire van Kampen (wife of Mark Rylance) and one of the most delightfully cacophonous dinner-table scenes in memory, is that rare discovery that is usually beyond the means of the medium: a tragedy for a contemporary audience, brimming with sparkling dialogue, pathos, and, mercifully, humor
From Vanity Fair – Christian Camargo’s Days and Nights Channels Chekhov
Through a Topflight Cast
Anton Chekhov, center, and members of the Moscow Art Theatre, circa 1898
“Seagull” starring Juliet Stevenson. Also, Ben and Juliet worked together in
Martin Crimp’s new translation of The Seagull opens June 27, 2006 following previews that began June 17.The cast includes Juliet Stevenson, who plays actress Arkadina; and Ben Whishaw as her son Konstantin, who casually shoots the eponymous gull about which novelist Trigorin (Mark Blazeley) will one day write the story.
Stevenson has previously appeared at the National in Private Lives, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Hedda Gabler. In 1991 Stevenson also created the role of Paulina in Ariel Dorfman’s award-winning Death and the Maiden.
In 2004 Whishaw burst onto the London stage with an Olivier Award-nominated performance as Hamlet in Trevor Nunn’s Old Vic production. That year’s Best Actor Award was won by Richard Griffiths for The History Boys. He also appeared at The Menier Chocolate Factory in 2005 in Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur.
Ben Whishaw's Notebook 