BlackBook Magazine

The young actor is getting typecast in period costume. But wethinks no one should protest too much. There's an Olivier here on the rise.

By Peter McQuaid

Eddie Redmayne, above, channels Mary Poppins at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

At the tender age of 25, Eddie Redmayne is becoming well acquainted with Elizabeth I. His first turn with the Virgin Queen was in 2005 in the television movie starring Helen Mirren. And this fall he took on the hapless role of a disgruntled Roman Catholic who attempts to assassinate the inimitable Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Later this spring, he plays William Stafford, foster father to a toddler-aged Elizabeth who is briefly left abandoned after the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn, in The Other Boleyn Girl.

And the mother of all new luxuries. Off with whose head?

TALLINN, ESTONIA
tallinn.ee/eng

A river view of Tallinn, Estonia, above.

Estonia is officially the most wired nation in the world, and with that comes all the free-market fervor old Soviets were always sniffing at. Its buzzing capital is split exactingly between its utterly charming, spit-polished medieval Old Town, with a stylish café or bohemian bar on virtually every corner, and its modern City Centre, with designer shopping and lots of sleek, occidental upscale nightlife. Chic hotels (Merchant House, The Telegraaf, the sublime Three Sisters) are swiftly proliferating. If it helps, imagine an entire city being Nolita. but with excellent Russian food and affable locals. —Ken Scrudato

The young actor is juggling genres, racking up accolades, and finding time to study. In the meantime, he'll be hiding in plain sight at a certain lodging.

By Peter McQuaid

Cross, left, the Chateau Marmont, Hollywood.

At 21 years young, Joseph Cross has managed to pull off that most difficult of career transitions: Tweenthrob to Serious Actor. There have been a few others as well: College Student to Working Stiff; Suburban Dude to Urbane Artist.

Actually, sitting in the ghostly-lit lobby of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, Cross is hilariously unassuming. “I love this place. I got introduced to it when Ryan Murphy interviewed me for Running With Scissors.” He gestures to one corner. “He interviewed me over there.” He gestures to another corner. “And that’s where he told me I got the part.” He laughs. “It still took me a while to realize that this hotel wasn’t a secret place that no one knew about.”

Break a plate for the going-going-gone '80s artist who, over the course of making three singularly visionary movies, has transformed himself into one of the great American Masters of independent cinema. And an amazing thing has come out of his ascension: modesty.

By Julian Sancton

Illustration by Fritz Drury, left.

Julian Schnabel burst onto Andy Warhol‘s New York in the 1970s with a splash of color, re-injecting life into an art world sterilized by minimalism and conceptual nonsense. As an artist, he could not be bound, be it by style, by medium, or by modesty. Nor, as a man of overflowing appetites, could he be bound by tight-fitting clothes. No surface (broken plates, mattresses, cowhide, wood, even other people’s paintings) was safe from his brush, or his fingers, or whatever he had at hand. But as success billowed his already healthy ego, his growing shadow soon eclipsed his work. In 1986, at the age of 35, Schnabel wrote an autobiography. In his estimation, the book implied, he had already lived a life worth telling. He had said everything he had to say. He had abandoned the struggle.

The electro king waves goodbye to his factory gig, recreates disco, and makes it with Kylie. Sound fishy?

By Nick Haramis

Click here to listen to Calvin Harris’s “Acceptable in the ‘80s!”

Harris, above, East London.

In order to pay the bills while making house music-literally, his bedroom moonlit as studio space—Scottish pop sensation Calvin Harris slaved away at a fish factory in Dumfries, where, by his own hands, salmon chips turned into oblong bits. “They were hot as fuck, and it wasn’t even your standard fishy smell,” he says, the odor in his mind now coming back to him in acrid waves. “Raw fish is so much worse.”

Men's lodgings, drunken sailors, and food lines have made way for luxury hotels, drunken hipsters, and fancy cafés. Our man in the hobo hat weighs the odds and ends.

By Peter Pavia

Sammy’s Bowery Follies, above, December 1944.

In Low Life, his now classic chronicle of the fabled, bedraggled Bowery, author Luc Sante describes the area on the east side of southern Manhattan as coming into its own, as it were, in Gilded Age New York.

The gaslit ether was haunted by hooligans and whores, home to arcades that ran fixed games, and rancid dives where the Mickey Finn, a knockout drink, took pride of place on the cocktail menu. The degeneration continued through the 20th century, and with the advent of rock cocaine, fresh miseries were born: the crackhead wino; for his grim pleasure, the crack hooker.

She's twice won the Best Actress Oscar playing androgynous, distinctly independent roles, showing just how versatile she is, since they're so far in so many ways from who she really is. But is America ready—with the romantic comedy P.S. I Love You—for its next cinematic sweetheart? The Boys Don't Cry star as the girl next door? Put up your dukes, boss, if you ain't.

By Ray Rogers

Click here for more exclusive photos from our shoot with Hilary Swank!

Given her taut, muscular physique, penchant for sports, and recent soul-searching journey to India following the breakdown of her eight-year marriage, I figured Hilary Swank might actually welcome an invigorating morning yoga session as a way to ease into the “celebrity profile interview.” Always such a hoot.

I propose we meet for a round of sun salutations while taking in the celestial orb rising on the beach in Malibu before settling down to the business at hand. There, I could witness firsthand her incredible strength and flexibility, and we could share a vulnerable moment of tranquility together, concluding with a few Ohms for world peace and inner balance.

I don’t know what herbal tea commercial I thought she was living in, but Hilary Swank had a different idea for her morning.

Photography by Warwick Saint
Styling by Elizabeth Sulcer

Four decades after an obscure author wrote the racy story of one Benjamin Braddock and everyone's favorite cougar, Mrs. Robinson, the novelist returns with a sequel. And the sex education continues.

By William Georgiades

Dustin Hoffman on The Graduate set, left, 1966.

In the beginning of Robert Altman’s The Player, Buck Henry is seen pitching a movie to an indifferent studio executive. “OK, here it is: The Graduate, Part 2! Ben and Elaine are married still, living in a big old spooky house in Northern California somewhere. Mrs. Robinson, her aging mother, lives with them. She’s had a stroke. And they’ve got a daughter in college—Julia Roberts, maybe. It’ll be dark and weird and funny—with a stroke.”

The 1967 film The Graduate established the careers of screenwriter Henry, director Mike Nichols, and star Dustin Hoffman, not to mention Simon and Garfunkel and the immortal line “Plastics.” The one person who didn’t fare so well was the author of the source material—Charles Webb.

He famously called our city's mascot the 'Statue of Bigotry.' But don't be fooled. Lou Reed is Manhattan. And we'll drink to that.

By Marianne Hagan

Reed, The Highline, New York City, above.

This photograph of Lou Reed standing against the New York City skyline—atop the abandoned, elevated railroad in the West Village known as The Highline—was taken on September 11th of this year. It marked the sixth anniversary of “that day.” Like so many other disembodied souls facing the unthinkable as it played out in nightmarish slow motion, Reed couldn’t reach his longtime love, Laurie Anderson, by phone. So he did the only thing he knew to do: howl from his rooftop, and write her a poem, “Laurie Sadly Listening.”

“Laurie if you’re sadly listening/ The birds are on fire/ The sky glistening/ While I atop my roof stand watching.”

These precocious man-children put their considerable skills together to provide a new—and top-secret—twist on Maurice Sendak's classic kids' book about a boy name Max who wants to be a forest creature. Don't call it a 'staggering adaptation.'

By Jonathan Kelly

Is it really in dreams that responsibilities actually begin? When young Max is sentenced to his room for acting like a wolf in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, an imaginary jungle ensconces him, his sophisticated fantasies grow primal, and a moment of childish catharsis is unleashed. Dreams breed alternate realities, we realize -the world around us isn’t nearly as lush compared to the one within our mind.

It is a realization that is echoed in Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze’s 1999 meditation on quotidian reality meets mise-en-Malkovich. And it is reverberated in author-cum-publisher-cum-voice of his generation Dave Eggers’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which broke down the fourth wall for good one year later. Neither Jonze nor Eggers were born when Sendak wrote Wild Things, but they are the ideal collaborative unit to project his timeless children’s book onto the big screen. The eponymous film, which the pair wrote and Jonze directed, finds theaters at least a year from now. But the expectations are about as high as the next Harry Potter.