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    Doctor Who Gave Matthew Perry Ketamine Will Plead Guilty, U.S. Says

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    Dr. Salvador Plasencia, an urgent care clinic operator in the Los Angeles area, could face up to 40 years in prison in connection with the actor’s 2023 death.A doctor who illegally supplied the “Friends” actor Matthew Perry with the drug ketamine in the weeks leading up to Mr. Perry’s death in 2023 — traveling to his home and a parking lot to inject him — has agreed to plead guilty, according to court documents.The doctor, Salvador Plasencia, could face up to 40 years in prison and a $2 million fine on four criminal counts of distributing of ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, under the agreement, which was filed on Monday in federal court in Los Angeles.Dr. Plasencia, 43, an urgent care clinic operator in Calabasas, Calif., will become the fourth person to plead guilty in connection to Mr. Perry’s death, which the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office determined was caused by the “acute effects” of ketamine. A court date has not been set.Mr. Perry, who publicly struggled with drinking and drug use for decades, was found floating face down in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home on Oct. 28, 2023. He was 54.An autopsy said that drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of an opioid, buprenorphine, had contributed to his death.Ketamine, which has psychedelic properties, has emerged as increasingly popular alternative therapy for anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues. It is also used recreationally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada on How “Shogun” Recreates History

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      Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada, two stars of the hit series “Shogun,” discuss history, acting and what they’d bring to the present from feudal Japan.This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.The 2024 television series “Shogun,” a historical drama set in feudal Japan, was a worldwide hit. The show and its actors won a record 18 Emmy Awards, as well as four Golden Globes. Critics and viewers praised it not only for its writing, acting and production, but also for its devotion to accurately portraying Japan and Japanese culture in the early 1600s.The historical drama, which has been renewed for a second season, is based on a novel of the same name by James Clavell, published in 1975 and adapted into a mini-series in 1980. The story focuses on the relationship between Lord Yoshii Toranaga, a warlord struggling to fend off his political rivals, and John Blackthorne, a marooned English navigator who becomes an adviser to Toranaga. The 2024 series gives a more prominent and complex role to Toda Mariko, Blackthorne’s interpreter.The characters’ historical counterparts are Tokugawa Ieyasu (Toranaga), the “shogun,” or military ruler who helped to unite Japan; William Adams (Blackthorne), the first Englishman ever to reach Japan; and Hosokawa Gracia (Mariko), a Japanese noblewoman and converted Catholic.The novel and two series show varying degrees of faithfulness to the events they’re based on. The newest “Shogun,” however, is built around its Japanese characters and culture in ways that the 1980 series was not, foregrounding those characters’ points of view and their presence as drivers of the plot. And the accuracy the show embraces in details as small as gestures and fabric colors makes it a striking recreation of some parts of historical Japanese culture.It does include changes — some modernized language, for example, or stylistic omissions — to make it understandable to modern viewers around the world. But its commitment to authenticity makes “Shogun” a compelling lens through which to examine television’s role in interpreting and portraying history, as well as how actors inherit and embody history and culture in their performances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger and Other Tony Winners Party After the Awards

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      On Sunday night, after all the Tonys had been handed out, the comedian Alex Edelman took the stage during the official after-party at the Museum of Modern Art.“One day more,” he sang, waving his arms, trying to recruit others to join him behind the microphone in a rousing one-man rendition of a song from the musical “Les Misérables.”“Another day, another destiny … ”Mr. Edelman, who received a special Tony Award last year for his one-man show “Just for Us,” slowly gathered his army of fellow performers: Betsy Wolfe, Jessica Vosk and Casey Likes. Soon, more than half a dozen stars were belting not just their own parts, but every part.A cabaret moment is a familiar scene for any theater party, even on a night celebrating an unusual Broadway season. It has been a banner year on the district’s 41 stages, thanks in large part to a flurry of shows with screen stars on the marquee: “Good Night, and Good Luck” (George Clooney), “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Sarah Snook, who won a Tony Award for playing 26 different characters), “Othello” (Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal) and “Glengarry Glen Ross” (Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Kieran Culkin), among others.Many actors were making their Broadway debut.“I’m so lucky to get to do it,” Sadie Sink, best known for her role as the tomboy Max in Netflix’s science fiction drama series “Stranger Things,” said at the MoMA party, celebrating her first nomination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cole Escola Wins the Tony for Best Actor in a Play

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      In “Oh, Mary!,” Escola plays a drunken, melodramatic Mary Todd Lincoln who yearns to return to cabaret.Cole Escola won the Tony for best actor in a play for their performance in the outlandish, ahistoric comedy “Oh, Mary!” This is Escola’s Broadway debut, and first Tony.Escola, who is nonbinary, plays a self-indulgent, scheming Mary Todd Lincoln, who aspires to become a chanteuse. As a result, her boredom — which includes pining to perform her “madcap medleys” of yesteryear — drives her to all kinds of antics. (With Cole prancing around in a hoop skirt, hilarity ensues.)The New York Times chief theater critic, Jesse Green, called “Oh, Mary!,” which Escola also wrote, “one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years.”Directed by Sam Pinkleton, the show opened at the Lyceum Theater last summer after a sold-out and twice-extended Off Broadway run. The play has also been extended multiple times since it transferred to Broadway. (It was the first show in the Lyceum’s 121-year history to gross more than $1 million in a single week.)Escola, known for their roles in Hulu’s “Difficult People,” TBS’s “Search Party” and sketches on YouTube, came up through New York’s cabaret and alt comedy scenes. The premise for “Oh, Mary!” began with an idea, which Escola sat on for more than 12 years: “What if Abraham Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd?”The Tony Awards, like the Oscars, use gendered categories for performers, and Escola agreed to be considered eligible for an award as an actor. Escola isn’t the first nonbinary actor to win a Tony Award.In 2023, J. Harrison Ghee became the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony for best leading actor in a musical, for “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell became the first out nonbinary performer to win for best featured actor in a musical for “Shucked.” More

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      Nicole Scherzinger Wins the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical

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      In “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger plays Norma Desmond, a former screen star who descends into madness.Nicole Scherzinger won the Tony Award for best actress in a musical for her performance in a revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” a high-tech, minimal-scenery staging from Jamie Lloyd about a washed-up silent film star, Norma Desmond, who haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion. This is Scherzinger’s first nomination and win.This latest run of “Sunset Boulevard” — based on the 1950 film by Billy Wilder — is dramatically scaled back compared to previous revivals of the Andrew Lloyd Webber show. Instead, the show relies on technology to modernize it for a new audience. It is the type of show that demands vocal and choreographic athleticism, something that Scherzinger — the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls — takes on with confidence.It first opened in London in 2023, winning Scherzinger praise and an Olivier. It then moved to Broadway last fall, and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, wrote that Scherzinger delivered an “exciting yet exceptionally weird and counterintuitive performance.”Speaking to The Times in 2023, Scherzinger described her turn as Norma as “grueling.”“But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that,” she said.Before joining the show and after the Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success — dropping two solo albums and working as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”She later performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” in the West End. More

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      Valerie Mahaffey, Actress in “Northern Exposure” and “Desperate Housewives,” Dies at 71

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      She had memorable roles on TV shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Northern Exposure,” and in the dark comedy film “French Exit.”Valerie Mahaffey, a character actress with a knack for playing eccentric women who sometimes revealed themselves to be sinister on television shows like “Desperate Housewives,” “Northern Exposure” and “Devious Maids,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 71.The cause was cancer, her husband, the actor Joseph Kell, said in a statement.Ms. Mahaffey had worked steadily over the past five decades, starting out on the NBC daytime soap opera, “The Doctors,” for which she received a Daytime Emmy nomination for best supporting actress in 1980. Most recently, she appeared in the movie “The 8th Day,” a crime thriller released in March. She was also known for her guest-starring roles on well-known TV series such as “Seinfeld” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”She won an Emmy for best supporting actress in 1992 for her work as Eve, a hypochondriac, on the 1990s CBS series “Northern Exposure,” a drama set in Alaska. She was best known for playing seemingly friendly women who become villainous characters in dramas such as “Desperate Housewives,” where she appeared in nine episodes.In her “Housewives” role as Alma Hodge, she was a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who faked her own death to get back at her husband, hoping he would be blamed for her disappearance.She most recently won acclaim for her work in the 2020 dark comedy, “French Exit,” which saw her nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her portrayal of Madame Reynard, a scene-stealing eccentric widow.In an interview in 2021 with the Gold Derby, Ms. Mahaffey discussed the role, saying: “I know how to be funny. I’ve done sitcoms. I know ba-dum-bum humor.”“Maybe it’s this point in my life,” she added, “I don’t want any artifice. And I wanted to play the truth of every moment.”She also said then that she often ended up playing characters who were “a little askew,” which she said was aligned with how people are in reality.Ms. Mahaffey was born on June 16, 1953, in Sumatra, Indonesia. Her mother, Jean, was Canadian, and her father, Lewis, was an American who worked in the oil business. Her family later moved to Nigeria before eventually settling in Austin, Texas, where she attended high school and went on to earn a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1975, from the University of Texas.The frequent moves made her family very close, she told The New York Times in a 1983 interview.“We had to leave friends behind all the time, and so we turned toward one another,” she said.In addition to her husband, Ms. Mahaffey is survived by their daughter, Alice Richards. More

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      Give Yourself a Break, Tom Cruise. Give Us All a Break.

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      The new Tom Cruise movie, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” is nearly as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make. Mr. Cruise famously does his own stunts, one of the movie’s biggest selling points. But it’s hard to suspend disbelief watching a picture when you’re thinking about how much Tiger Balm went into its making. Is it possible Mr. Cruise and audiences alike would be better off if he didn’t go quite so hard? You can admire his stamina at 62, but a movie shouldn’t make you feel like you’ve been cornered at a party by a guy who can’t stop telling you how freaking amped he is.“Final Reckoning” — even the full title is taxing — is a movie so big, it has by my count both three MacGuffins and three set pieces with nuclear bombs that need to be disarmed before their timers go off. (Dayenu, as Jews sing at Passover; a single such blessing, or cliché, would have been enough.) We get to see Mr. Cruise dangle off not one but two biplanes and sprint back and forth across the streets of London with arms pumping manfully when he could have taken an Uber. For several scenes in which the necessities of plot and beefcake delivery force him to strip down to his boxer briefs, we also get to marvel at his perfectly toned senior body, which would be the envy at any recreational facility, not just the pickleball courts at the Villages.All movie stars, from Mary Pickford to Margot Robbie, are brands, as familiar and comforting in their way as Coke or Irish Spring, and almost as consistent. But Mr. Cruise, an A-lister across five decades now, has transcended even that exalted status. He’s become a genre unto himself, his movies akin to pornography in the sense that they trade not in illusion but in physical, bodily reality. He doesn’t so much act as endure, his stardom adjacent to martyrdom.“It’s actually hard to breathe,” he recently explained to People magazine, discussing the finer points of hanging off a biplane wing. “You’re so tired. Your eyesight’s blurry. There were times that I didn’t have the energy to get from the wing back into the cockpit, and I would have to almost fall asleep and wait till I had the energy to crawl back because we couldn’t land if I was on the wing. We landed, and I was so cold I couldn’t walk.”Mr. Cruise’s willingness to climb aboard real jet fighters, and subject his handsome face to unflattering G-forces, helped “Top Gun: Maverick” gross $1.5 billion worldwide in 2022 and return audiences to theaters postpandemic. The actor was widely credited with saving “Hollywood’s ass,” to quote (reportedly) Steven Spielberg. But how many things — movies, the world, his public image following its couch-jumping, Brooke Shields-hectoring nadir in the mid-2000s — does he have to save now that he’s nearly eligible for Medicare?When he’s not sprinting or dangling, Mr. Cruise can be a terrific actor, gifted with both talent and charisma, which you can see on display in films as varied as “Born of the Fourth of July,” “A Few Good Men,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Magnolia” (all made in the 20th century). Appearing in teen movies at the start of his career, he stood out as a minor character even among the loaded cast of “The Outsiders.” In “Risky Business” his charm not only held the screen’s center but also transformed what could have been a sour, New Hollywood-style satire of the American way into a rollicking Reagan-era salute to entrepreneurship. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing thematically, but it made Mr. Cruise a star.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Greg Cannom, Who Made Brad Pitt Old and Marlon Wayans White, Dies at 73

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      He won five Oscars as a makeup artist on movies in which characters transformed, like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “White Chicks” and many more.Greg Cannom, an Oscar-winning movie makeup artist responsible for some of the most striking acts of movie magic in recent decades — including the transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney in “Vice,” the creation of a giant expressive green head for Jim Carrey in “The Mask,” and the reverse aging of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — died on May 3. He was 73.His death was announced by Rick Baker, a frequent collaborator and another of Hollywood’s most admired movie makeup artists, as well as by the IATSE Local 706 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild. Neither source provided further details.An online fund-raising drive for Mr. Cannom posted two years ago listed a series of health challenges, including severe shingles, a staph infection, sepsis and heart failure.Mr. Cannom won Oscars for best makeup for his work on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) and “Vice” (2018).In 2005, he won a “technical achievement” Oscar for the development of a modified silicone that could be used to apply fantastical changes to an actor’s face while retaining the appearance of skin and flesh.Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Mr. Cannom won an Oscar for his work on the film.Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Harry Potter’ HBO Series Casts Dumbledore, Hagrid and More Major Roles

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      John Lithgow will play the Hogwarts headmaster in the HBO show, with Paapa Essiedu filling the role of Severus Snape.Potterheads are one step closer to seeing a television series about the boy wizard come to life, two years after it was announced.HBO said on Monday that it had cast John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as Minerva McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape and Nick Frost as Rubeus Hagrid.Casting for major roles like Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley has not been announced, and the series — based on the best-selling books by J.K. Rowling — does not have an official title or air date.HBO also said that Luke Thallon and Paul Whitehouse were joining the cast as Quirinus Quirrell and Argus Filch.“We’re delighted to have such extraordinary talent onboard, and we can’t wait to see them bring these beloved characters to new life,” Francesca Gardiner, the showrunner of the series, and Mark Mylod, who will direct several episodes, said in a joint statement. (They are both also executive producers of the show.)Paapa Essiedu will play Severus Snape in the show.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockLithgow starred in the 1990s television series “3rd Rock From the Sun” and won Emmys for his roles in “Dexter” and “The Crown.” He has also won two Tony Awards and has an extensive movie career; he played one of the cardinals contending for the papacy in last year’s “Conclave.”He told ScreenRant in February that he had signed on to play Dumbledore, a role played in the original “Harry Potter” films by Richard Harris, who died in 2002, and Michael Gambon, who died in 2023. (Jude Law played a younger Dumbledore in “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” a spinoff film.)“It was not an easy decision because it’s going to define me for the last chapter of my life, I’m afraid,” Lithgow said then. “But I’m very excited. Some wonderful people are turning their attention back to ‘Harry Potter.’ That’s why it’s been such a hard decision. I’ll be about 87 years old at the wrap party, but I’ve said yes.”The new show will air on HBO and stream on Max. HBO said in 2023 that the series would be a “faithful adaptation” of the seven books published between 1997 and 2007. Eight hit films were released between 2001 and 2011. More