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This year, we’re taking things to the next level, collaborating with GQ and eight visionary fashion labels from across the globe to create
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Henry Golding’s latest triumph? Perfecting that gaze into the middle distance. Jacket, $4,990, by Tom Ford. Turtleneck, $210, by Sunspel. Pants, $4,300 (for suit), by Gucci. Boots, $1,195, by Christian Louboutin. Watch, $195, by Seiko.
Consider this Men of the Year issue our love letter to you, 2018. Was this the best year on record? Maybe not. Was there plenty to love? Yes, indeed. We needed ten pages for our annual BEST STUFF (P.45) package. We saw the opening of New York’s HOT TEST NEW RESTAURANT (P.66)—a pizza joint!—from the duo shaking up the food industry. PHILADELPHIA (P.74) might have straight up won 2018. TROYE SIVAN (P.80) became a pop icon. BOOKS (P.90), which were supposed to be dead by now, had a great year. LAWSON CRADDOCK (P.72) finished the Tour de France after fracturing his shoulder blade on the first day. AUSTIN CLAY (P.98) took down Trump’s Hollywood star. ROBERT MUELLER’S (P.100) report might take down Trump altogether.
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PREPPY BEAR
COVERS On SERENA WILLIAMS Photograph by Kristin-Lee Moolman. Styled by Solange Franklin. Bodysuit by Alix at Net-a-Porter. Belt, vintage Chanel at Depuis 1924. Jewelry by David Webb. Hair by Vernon François at The Visionaries Agency. Makeup by Lora Arellano using Melt Cosmetics. Manicure by Sreynin Peng. Set design by Maxim Jezek for Walter Schupfer Management. Produced by Portfolio One. Special thanks to Signature Flight Support East at Van Nuys Airport and Wheels Up. On MICHAEL B. JORDAN Photograph by Awol Erizku. Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu. Coat, $3,495, sweater, $995, and pants, $695, by Ralph Lauren. Blazer, $1,280, by Dries Van Noten. Boots, $2,660, by Berluti. Hair by Jove Edmond. Grooming by Carola Gonzalez at Forward Artists. Set design by Lauren Nikrooz at The Magnet Agency. Wolf (Lupin) from All Creatures Great & Small of NY, Ltd.
This all-brown fall fit is, like, the 87th coolest thing Michael B. Jordan did in 2018. Coat, $1,495, coat (beneath), $995, pants, $348, and beanie, $248, by Boss. Shoes, $1,550, by Santoni. Socks, $21 (for three pairs), by Gold Toe. Watch, $21,000, by Piaget.
On JONAH HILL Photograph by Jason Nocito. Styled by Matthew Henson. Suit, $2,580, by Prada. Sweater, $840, by Prada at Mr Porter. Glasses, his own. Hair by Thom Priano for R + Co Haircare. Grooming by Kumi Craig using Dr. Barbara Sturm. Set design by Andrea Huelse for Art Dept. Produced by Donna Belej at Allswell Productions. On HENRY GOLDING Photograph by Pari Dukovic. Styled by Jim Moore. Coat, $5,000, by Dior Men. Shirt, $510, by Prada at Barneys New York. Grooming by Johnny Hernandez for Fierro Agency. Set design by Rob Strauss Studio. Produced by Michael Klein for Circadian Pictures.
her return to dominance and the U.S. Open final heard round the world. MICHAEL B. JORDAN (P.134) updates Allison P. Davis on the scale of his ambitions. Zach Baron re-discovers ETHAN HAWKE (P.132) and visits with JONAH HILL (P.148) to discuss a résumé that now includes “visionary director.” Leading man HENRY GOLDING (P.122) tells Michelle Lhooq what he wants to do next. Jessica Pressler reveals how RYAN MURPHY (P.118) saved television. Daniel Riley breaks down DAMIEN CHAZELLE’S (P.121) latest masterpiece.
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start a movement. Brennan Carley explains the TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET (P.133) phenomenon. Drew Magary hears from the people who knew ANTHONY BOURDAIN (P.142) best. Mark Anthony Green celebrates TRAVIS SCOTT (P.147) . Claire Foy and John David Washington headline a sparkling class of HOLLYWOOD BREAKOUTS (P.156) . An army of citizens gets membership to a new club: TRUMP’S TWITTER TARGETS (P.154) . Sean Flynn reports on the miraculous story of the boys trapped in the THAILAND CAVE (P.166) .
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Letter from the Editor
It has come to my attention that this is my last issue. ¶ It does not seem possible. ¶ When I try to make sense of it all, of the good times, of the mountains of excellent work I’ve been fortunate enough to publish, and the crazy expanse of time I have spent happily toiling at the Quarterly of Gentlemen, my brain, usually reliably insistent, gives up and turns to mush. ¶ I remember the first day I started at GQ , in 1862. You should have seen what men’s fashion shows were like back then. Just a bunch of guys in chaps walking around a horse barn! ¶ There were no printing presses as we know them. We were forced to write with quill pens about the most exciting fashion developments of the day. (“Verily, if the vestments currently on display at the Woolworths & Sundry are to be judged, this Scribe can vouchsafe that dandies everywhere will have a Most Flamboyant Winter ahead!”) 3 8
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obvious as it ever was. See, throughout my years here, there was always something that was going to come along and revolutionize everything— the iPad, Vine, Facebook Live, IGTV—but to my mind, nothing ever replaced, or will replace, what happens when smart and talented storytellers put their hearts and minds together to create work they’re excited about. That’s the only key to the past and future of media, and the only thing worth aspiring to. Thank you for reading.
JIM NELSON EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
But here’s a short list: Jim Moore, Fred “the Legend” Woodward, Andy Ward, Devin Friedman, Adam Rapoport, Sarah Ball, Will Welch, Madeline Weeks, Michael Hainey, Brendan Vaughan, Ilena Silverman, Chris Heath, Mike Paterniti, Lucy Kaylin, Andrew Corsello, Jason Gay, Victoria Graham, Joel Lovell, Jon Wilde, Devin Gordon, Ta≠y Brodesser-Akner, Laura Vitale, Ted Sta≠ord, Dan Riley, Jeanne Marie Laskas, Sean Flynn, Brett Martin, Alan Richman, Beth Altschull, Colin Groundwater, Stan Parish, Eric Sullivan, Benjy HansenBundy, Meredith Bryan, Kevin Sintumuang, Caroline Campion, Caroline Callahan, Dana Mathews, Mike Benoist, Peggy Sirota, Mark Seliger, Mark Kirby, Caity Weaver, Chris Cox, Geo≠ Gagnon, Luke Zaleski, Jim Gomez, Andy Comer, Amy Wallace, Dora Somosi, Krista Prestek, Mark Healy, Alex Pappademas, Lisa Cohen, Martin Schoeller, Nathaniel Goldberg, Adam Sachs, Mark Adams, Wil Hylton, George Saunders, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Chris Huvane, Catherine Gundersen, Sarah Schmidt, Ben Watts, Pari Dukovic, Mickey Rapkin, Mike Hofman, Sean Fennessey, Sarah Goldstein, Tom Alberty, Jim O’Brien, Dan Fierman, Glenn O’Brien, Carly Holden, Robert Draper, Jason Zengerle, Donovan Hohn, Raha Naddaf, Ken Gawrych, Rob Vargas, Roxanne Behr & about 187 other immortals.
ERIC RAY DAVIDSON
I’m Almost Done Here
Ah hell, I miss those days. In truth, I did start at GQ in the previous century. Annus 1997. I worked for six years under legendary turtlenecked editor-in-chief Art Cooper and learned a ton, about how to edit a publication with outsize ambitions, about the need to both entertain and inform readers, and how this could all be achieved with Brendan Fraser on the cover. If you were sentient during that era of media history, you will remember it as the period Right After Laddie Mags Broke Magazines and Right Before the Internet Broke the Internet. I will confess to not knowing 100 percent what I was doing when I became editor-in-chief in 2003. But I learned the most from my colleagues, the team of us scrappily producing a magazine and all its attendant platforms month in and month out, and being driven, above all, by a desire to connect with readers. A deadline is a powerful enforcer of creativity, and I will remember my time here as a string of punishing deadlines met (crushed, in fact) by a team of wildly creative editors, writers, photographers, journalists, and digital pros who worked their asses o≠ and were always up for trying to make something as great as it could possibly be. I owe everything to them. I do not have the words, or the space, to thank them su∞ciently, nor to list them, lest I o≠end anyone dear to me*, but I will simply say: Friends, I am forever in your debt. We hear a lot about the Future of Media, about the inconvenient truth of disruption and the promise of this or that way forward. Sometimes I think no one knows anything. And then I realize the answer is as
qww
This December GQ’s annual Men of the Year issue comes to life with exclusive events that include Hollywood’s ultimate showrunner Ryan Murphy, Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, and Jonah Hill (with the cast of Mid90s). Plus, a GQ shop featuring special-edition GQ merch.
DECEMBER 7 & 8 • LOS ANGELES JOIN US • GQLIVE.COM
OFFICIAL SPONSORS
Thanks to GQ’s most loyal reader, Kanye West, for all the love.
G Q H Q
”
“so lit ye @kanyewest
The Latest News from the Monthly, the Daily, and the All-the-Time-ly World of GQ
On Sale Now:
GQ LIVE
Gaga for Gosling Our November cover star, First Man actor Ryan Gosling, set hearts everywhere aflame (who can blame them?). Here are just some of the thirstiest replies.
On December 7 and 8, join JONAH HILL (with the cast of his new movie, Mid90s), VAMPIRE Meet…
Dana Mathews GQ’s entertainment director, Dana Mathews, is a woman who wears more hats than most. When she’s not busy booking covers and fashion shoots and videos, she’s off scouting the year’s best and brightest movies, TV shows, music, and more. So how does she do it? We asked her. You’re one of GQ’s busiest employees. When do you find time to sleep?
small-screen auteur RYAN MURPHY, and some soon-to-be-announced SPECIAL SURPRISE GUESTS for GQ LIVE, our inaugural summit in Los Angeles. Details, tickets, and pricing can be found at GQLIVE.com. See you in California!
I’m one of those people who has to get eight hours of sleep to be a normal functioning person. I count the hours obsessively. So...I will make up for it somewhere, somehow!
Yup. Where can I buy??? And Ryan take me to the moon with you. Actually take me anywhere! #Gq #RyanGosling—@elaine_7 7 7 7 My day thus far has been filled with telling my cats how pretty they are, reading and looking at Ryan Gosling’s pictures from GQ. All in all a very productive day.—@Lynnie_Tunis Ryan gosling is on GQ and all of suddenly I have GQ magazines in my mailbox?—@agentmon1 Yeah, they were gods AND superhumans - to do what they did. and yeah, that’s why Ryan Gosling was PERFECT for the role...—@ThisIsJeanMarie
Describe outgoing editor-in-chief Jim Nelson in a few words. Brilliant. Mentor.
Traveler. A kindred spirit of life. They make a movie about this GQ era. Who plays you, and who plays Jim? Mila
TuneIn
Kunis is my top pick for me, as she’d do great for all the crisis/funny scenes, and Jim’s doppelgänger, James Marsden, would play him. They are twins! When you write a book about your time at GQ, what is the title of the ninth chapter? “Phoenix Rising,” inspired
by Ryan Gosling’s La La Land line, which I quote often. How many celebrities do you have in your phone’s address book? It would be
distasteful and strange for me to divulge the actual number, but I have kept my phone messages from Harrison Ford and Larry David—because they’re too good to delete forever. Who’s a celebrity you’re dying to work with for GQ?
Harry Styles.
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THE LONG & “SHORT” OF IT Last month, GQ’s “A Short Man’s Guide to Higher Style” showed less-than-Thor-sized gents how to dress. The Internet had some thoughts and thanks. god bless @crissymilazzo for her lil ode to short kings in this piece @marianne_eloise
I don’t break 5'2"...I hate being short, but I know it’s a vastly different ballgame for less-than-lofty dudes. @bellwak
Alternatively, just wear literally whatever you want to wear that makes you feel good about yourself @andyonhere
If you haven’t heard GQ’s newest podcast, Mad Influence, yet, you’re missing career-spanning conversations between editor-in-chief Jim Nelson and the legends you love, including Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, First
Reformed star Ethan Hawke,
↑ Download at gq.com/about/mad -influence-podcast.
culinary icon and Momofuku founder David Chang, and many others. Keep listening—there’s more to come.
ILLUSTRATIONS, FROM TOP: LOUISE ZERGAENG POMEROY; SIMON ABRANOWICZ. PHOTOGRAPHS, TOP: MAT T MARTIN. BOT TOM, FROM LEF T: FRA ZER HARRISON/GE T T Y IMAGES; DIMITRIOS K AMBOURIS/GE T T Y IMAGES; RACHEL MURRAY/GE T T Y IMAGES.
WEEKEND’S EZRA KOENIG,
N E W YO R K ASPEN DENVER SAN FRANCISCO LO S A N G E L E S A E T H E R A P PA R E L .C O M
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PROP ST YLIST: ALEX BRANNIAN AT ART DEPARTMENT
VISIT OUR NYC MEN’S STORE AT 235 WEST 57TH STREET AND SHOP NORDSTROM.COM FROM LEFT: SHOE MAISON MARGIELA SHIRT AND TURTLENECK CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC BAG PRADA, SHOE GOLDEN GOOSE
MAY ALL YOUR GIFTING BE BRIGHT
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(Don’t) Stay Thirsty
Mood: Lighting
You can’t keep buying plastic water bottles. And your college Nalgene somehow still smells like that one time you mixed a margarita in it. The Hay Sowden Bottle, with its fuck-minimalism colors, is the proper vessel for the coffee-shop gig-economy worker of the future.
The w127 Winkel by Wästberg is made of a “biologically sourced” plastic that feels like metal. The light it casts is bright but not too clinical. And the crane neck holds any position you put it in. Now close the laptop and pull out that Moleskine you ambitiously bought last year.
$35–$39, hay.dk
$400, wastberg.com
Clout Goggles These Vuarnets have all the glare-blocking features of the Bond-ian glacier goggles the classic French brand is known for. But they’re a little better suited for more urbane movie-star adventures like, say, getting ambushed by paparazzi as you exit the Uber. They also work even if the only thing flashing in your face is the harmful blue light from your phone— 99 percent of which these shades block out. $300, us.vuarnet.com
The side shields pop off if you’re not keen on the goggle effect. But that little extra bit of glare protection is what really reduces eye strain.
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Moët & Chandon ® Champagne, © 2018 Imported by Moët Hennessy USA, Inc., New York, NY. Celebrate Responsibly – www.moet.com
LIFE’S MEMORABLE MOMENTS MUST BE MOËT & CHANDON
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Shag Is Back Wanting to lie down on your floor the second you get home isn’t usually a sign of things going well—unless you’ve recently bought this rug from L.A. design house Block Shop. It’s so thick and fluffy and handsome that reclining on it will become part of your nightly routine. Standing on it, your feet will celebrate shag’s aesthetic comeback. It feels that good underfoot. $700, blockshoptextiles.com
Ten years ago, Polaroid stopped making instant film. First, The Impossible Project started making the film; then it just bought the whole brand.
The Best Polaroid Camera Yet The OneStep+ i-Type is a classic instant when you want it to be, but also a modern camera equipped with self-timers, double exposures, and manually adjustable settings. It just depends on how staged you want your spontaneous party snapshots to be. $160, us.polaroid originals.com
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Moët & Chandon ® Champagne, © 2018 Imported by Moët Hennessy USA, Inc., New York, NY. Celebrate Responsibly – www.moet.com
LIFE’S MEMORABLE MOMENTS MUST BE MOËT & CHANDON
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The Throwback Car of the Future What’s sexier than 170 miles of all-electric range packaged in Swinging ’60s aah-OOH-ga curves? Very little. Jaguar will happily build you an E-type Zero by sourcing a vintage model or by converting one you own— either option costs about half a mil. No one said electro-sexy was cheap. Price available upon request, jaguar.com
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INTRODUCING DESCENTE Premium apparel that moves the way you move
Design that moves
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Yeti, which is famous for its forever-cold line of coolers, is expanding into other sturdily built products for buzzed enjoyment of the outdoors.
An Oil for Everything
Tailgate the Apocalypse
What does one do with Everyday Oil? Anything. Literally. Rub this stuff everywhere. Face, hands, hair, wherever. The concoction of coconut, olive, jojoba, castor, and argan oils (with palo santo, lavender, geranium, and sage) will make your skin and hair feel smooth and rejuvenated.
The release of Yeti’s first chair, this year, came with high expectations. So indestructible is the Hondo Base Camp Chair that when you throw it in the back of a pickup, it’s the pickup you’ll want to check for damage afterward. The cup holder, by absolute necessity, is included.
$22, everydayoil.com
$300, yeti.com
High Design A host of stylish brands are replacing the heady 420 gear of dorm rooms past. Magma makes the solid-resin rolling tray. Then there’s Mister Green, which stocks boutique smoking goods—like this sharp Japanese Tsubota Pearl lighter. And this Aesop oil burner covers up any lingering smells. $35 for lighter, green-mister.com $170 for oil burner, aesop.com $49 for tray, shoptetra.com
©2018 Timex Group USA, Inc. TIMEX and MARLIN are registered trademarks of Timex Group USA, Inc. in the US and other countries.
MARLIN
®
The gentlemen’s standard — then and now. This reissue of a 1960s timepiece pairs the purity of hand-wound mechanical movement with the timeless sophistication of a sleek design.
Available at timex.com and toddsnyder.com
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The Waviest Board The surf savants at Almond, out of sunny Costa Mesa, California, made a foam board, the R-Series, that’s gentle and forgiving. It’s the right size (five and a half feet) and shape (the company’s Secret Menu outline) for beginners and seasoned surfers alike. We’ll toss up a shaka to that. $389, almondsurfboards.com
Just the Right Amount of ’70s While turned off, this Tom Dixon pendant light— with its golden hue, mirrorish finish, and polygonal shape—hangs like a big-ass fancy earring from your ceiling. And when it’s turned on? Light bursts through the material, casting a kaleidoscopic series of reflections throughout the room. $950, tomdixon.net
Hang a couple of these together and the prisms of light dancing across the ceiling will make those childhood glow-in-the-dark stars look like, well, child’s play.
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Bring Your Favorite Hotel Home That aesthetic taking over the hospitality industry for the past decade? Blame it on Roman & Williams—a.k.a. the husbandand-wife design team of Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer. Their eye for vintage furniture—honed during their stint as Hollywood set designers—has informed the look and feel of the Ace, the Freehand, the Standard Highline, and a dozen other hotels and restaurants you’ve pined over on an influencer’s Instagram. Their first store opened in SoHo last December, and with it their most expansive collection yet of consumer-facing goods. The best item is their Reader chair and footstool, all supple leather and hard wooden intersections. $7,000, rwguild.com
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Earbuds That Stay In Despite Apple’s insistence to the contrary, not all ears do well with hard plastic lodged inside them. For people with—how to say this?—more delicate canals, Jabra makes a soft-tipped solution. Does it help that the sound is great, that they pair easily and quickly with your device, that they play for five continuous hours, and that they won’t fall out while you’re getting sweaty on the elliptical? Sure, you can check those boxes, too. $170, jabra.com
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Time to clear out the “spatulas and stuff” drawer in your kitchen and swap in an actual, intentional collection.
Meal Prep
Trippy Tiles
The Fundamentals from Material Kitchen has everything you need. A one-stop shop—for less than 200 bucks. When you have someone over for that first home-cooked dinner, it’s going to look like you’ve actually hosted before—at least in the kitchen.
Make one surface in your home righteously bold. Bring on the bright, geometric bathroom walls! Give us loud backsplash tiling! Popham Design’s tiles are hand-poured concrete, made in Morocco in patterns you’ll never see in a friend’s place.
$175, material kitchen.com
From $25 per square foot, pophamdesign.com
GO BIG THIS HOLIDAY SEASON. Introducing the limited-edition one-liter bottle of Patrón Silver, filled with the same ultra-premium tequila found in our traditional bottle, only 33% more. Featuring a vibrant design inspired by Mexico’s rich tradition and history of glass craftsmanship, it’s the perfect gift for anyone on your list.
THE FOURTH IN OUR SERIES OF ONE-LITER COLLECTIBLE HOLIDAY BOTTLES.
The perfect way to enjoy Patrón is responsibly. Handcrafted and imported exclusively from Mexico by The Patrón Spirits Company, Las Vegas, NV. 40% abv.
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Get Fleeced How do you improve upon the humble fleece vest that’s warmed the cores of untold mountaineers and urban explorers? If you’re 18 East designer Antonio Ciongoli, you add hand-painted kalamkari fabric details and design it with a large internal pocket so the whole fleece can fold down into a handy travel pillow. $195, 18east.co
Patagonia is known for its eco-conscious outerwear, but it just might be the world’s best bag company, too.
The Last Weekend Bag You’ll Ever Buy This insanely durable Patagonia duffel passed the test last summer on planes, trains, and automobiles nearly every weekend. Plus it looks approximately 1,000 percent cooler than everyone else’s carry-on. The shoulderstrap attachments mean you can actually hoof it up a mountain. $129, patagonia.com
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PROMOTION
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Try Calling This Pot Black Behold the Goldilocks of cookware: not too big or small, affordable but so well designed you’ll want to hang it up like a piece of kitchen art. This saucier is a workhorse that doubles as a serving vessel in a pinch. Great Jones, a brand-new direct-to-consumer line of pots and pans, has the perfect upgrade from the ramshackle collection currently languishing on your shelves. $85, greatjonesgoods.com
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The All-New Corolla Hatchback
Bıggest The
T h e F i x
Ch e f s of th e Ye ar
Thing in Restaurants Is...
on the island of Manhattan, the buzziest restaurant opening was not a big-money expense-account spot or a high-budget new-French joint or another farm-to-table temple from some guy who’s had his own dedicated season of television. It was a cozy and principled pizza place with penny-tile walls, natural wines, and a tiramisu so punchy and light it almost—almost—outshines the pies. The restaurant is Una Pizza Napoletana, and it’s the third from the BFF chef duo of Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra. It’s also a collaboration with a downtown legend, Anthony Mangieri, who opened the original Una Pizza Napoletana, in New Jersey, in 1996. Una Pizza sits on a crammed stretch of Orchard Street on New York’s Lower East Side, just a couple blocks from their first two IN THE YEAR 2018,
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SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.
Three More Tiny Empires We Love
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In Montreal, Paris, and New York, these chefs have made their neighborhoods far tastier places to visit
JOE BEEF
SEPTIME
VIA CAROTA & CO
Frédéric Morin and David McMillan’s restaurant group turned Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighborhood into one of the city’s best, making its name on fearless yet classic meat cookery. “I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but we have a very advanced dining public,” says McMillan. “I sell extensive
Chef Bertrand Grébaut has mastered the art of playing hard to get. His cultishly beloved Septime is one of Paris’s most elusive reservations, but if you strike out, you can go down the street to Septime’s wine bar, La Cave, for a glass of pét-nat before putting your name in at Clamato, his near perfect seafood restaurant.
Rita Sodi and Jody Williams have built a family of deeply personal restaurants in the West Village inspired by their backgrounds in French and Italian cooking. (Via Carota, one of New York’s most beloved restaurants, is modeled after Sodi’s house in Italy.) “Each restaurant has character,” Williams explains, “and it’s like a group of people.”
restaurants: Contra, a casual tastingmenu spot (more on that seeming paradox later), and Wildair, a neighborhood gem convincingly disguised as a cool wine bar. Within this stone’s throw on the LES, the pair have built the most exciting restaurant group in a city where culinary ambitions are often trounced by high rents and even higher competition. And in doing so, they’ve become the best example of what’s so great about eating out in America right now: that what’s working—what is winning—is a style of restauranting that favors the enjoyment of the diner over the ego of the chef and that serves Michelin-star-level food without Michelin-star-level pretense. Stone and von Hauske represent a new era of chef-restaurateurs who are creating tiny empires that express their own style of dining, where the casual and the quirky are valued over the tried and true—and having a few restaurants with highly specific personalities is far more e≠ective (and financially viable) than trying to create a single finedining monolith. These restaurants care more about listening to diners and having a good time than adhering to any pre-existing script of what a “nice” restaurant needs to feel like. Creating a restaurant group, it turns out, doesn’t have to mean taking over a city or replicating similar concepts in di≠erent neighborhoods; it’s about finding the unique vibes that local diners are into and sprinkling them into a concentrated few blocks, betting that in those o≠erings there’s something for everyone on any given night of the week.
natural-wine lists, and think that vibes are the main ingredient in their kitchens. These are, undoubtedly, cool restaurants. But this only proves the sly success of their cooking style, which is excellent but never showy, and generously lacking in fanciness. There’s an asceticism to Stone and von Hauske’s flavors: Things are pared down but never plain. They favor acid over fat. Their style is more an act of restraint than anything, giving their dishes the e≠ect of a duck in a pond— simple from the viewer’s perspective, industrious beneath the surface. There is no tableside pouring of broth at Contra, no tweezer-applied garnishes, and very few animal intestines. When you open three restaurants in New York, where margins are slim and diners are flighty, twisting the knobs to dial into those things that will work takes an enormously delicate touch. Expanding into second and third spaces meant growing up. “Opening next door really helped to open our
↓ Clockwise from left, the bright and airy interior of Una Pizza Napoletana; the pork milanese at Wildair; Contra’s escargot, potato, and sugar snap peas.
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eyes to see what doing something that is very inviting could do,” von Hauske says. “And also, just the maturity of being more welcoming, being more hospitable.” As their menus have gotten more “mature” as well, and as they’ve settled into the neighborhood, Stone and von Hauske have learned how to listen to their customers, and find a middle ground between the more outthere stu≠ they’d cook if they could and what their diners will actually eat. “You’re always going to have people that are like, ‘Oh, why don’t you guys ever do duck tongues?’ ” Stone says. “And it’s like, ‘Because I’ve got a guy who’s not even going to eat beef tenderloin.’ ” Being able to accept those adaptations and let go of their own very specific visions for their restaurants has been integral to their success in a city where regulars—whether or not they live here—can make or break you. (Their 2019 project—a restaurant slash wine shop in the old Essex Street Market, where diners can taste wine and then go buy the bottle at retail prices next door—will be the furthest extension yet of this philosophy.) “We’ve really come around to understanding what kind of people are going to come in,” Stone says. “Nobody wants to be the experimental place, because then people can go and have one meal and they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s not something I want to eat every day.’ We try to make food that people want to eat all the time.”
I T ’ S E A S Y T O L O O K at Contra, Wildair, and Una Pizza Napoletana, with their low-key decor and high-key
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Texan LAWSON CRADDOCK was ready for a breakout Tour de France—the notoriously grueling three-week race in July. But a first-day crash left him with a broken shoulder blade and a new goal: just finish the damn race
I ’ V E B E E N W A T C H I N G the Tour since I was 8, and I swear, every single year, in the feed zone, someone crashes and breaks something. So heading into the feed zone on that first day, I was quite nervous. I made sure I was in good position. And then I hit a water bottle, and it shot me o≠ the road. Most of the time, when you hit a bottle like that, it will explode. But if you hit it just perfectly, it can be catastrophic, which is what ended up happening. I hit a spectator and hit the ground after that. Something didn’t quite feel right, but it’s the Tour de France, Stage 1. There’s no intermissions, no time-outs. I got a new bike and was able to get on. When I grabbed the handlebars, I realized, “Something’s not quite right.” You know something’s possibly broken. But you also tell yourself, “You can continue. If you pull out now, you’re gonna regret it. Make it to the finish, get an X-ray, and then you can make a call.” It was a very, very long next 100 kilometers. I spent a lot of time at the doctor’s car. I had blood coming into my eye, so I needed to get that cleaned up. While the doctor’s doing that, I can’t pedal. So I had to hold on to the car with a broken shoulder as she’s pulling me along at 30 miles an hour and she’s rubbing my eye. That was not very comfortable. I crossed the finish line, which was a relief. Our team doctor was there. The first thing he said was, “You have doping control” [basically a random drug test]. Which was rough—I have use of only one arm, I got all this blood running down my face. But if you miss doping control, you’re handed a twoyear suspension. After that, we ran through the whole process: got stitches in my brow, then got an X-ray of the shoulder. The X-ray showed everything was still okay. Going through the ultrasound, we saw no fracture. And
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then he rolled over the spine of the left scapula, and you could see a fracture right through the middle of it. Your whole world comes crashing down. Generally, you have a broken bone, you’re on the next flight back home. So seeing that little black line was pretty crushing. We started talking: “The way it’s fractured, it’s secure.” It’s not like the scapula was in two pieces. You never want a broken bone, but it could have been a whole lot worse. As a professional athlete, you never want to quit. And if your doctor says, “There’s a chance you could continue,” it’s not a chance. You don’t stop. We got back to the hotel and met with our physical therapist. When I walked in, I couldn’t lift my left arm three inches. By the time we were done, I could almost lift it to shoulder height. We’re part of the MPCC [Movement for Credible (Drug-Free) Cycling]. You can’t take anything stronger than ibuprofen. So I didn’t sleep well that night. The night after the crash, I was like, “I can feel sorry for myself, or we can try and turn this into something better.” As soon as I got into the Tour, it was our plan to try to help out the Velodrome in Houston. And immediately after we set up the GoFundMe, we were blowing by the goals. I had to keep going. The first few days after the crash, the muscles in your shoulder and in your arm are tight. Every bump, every turn, every time you put on the brakes, there’s shooting pain. It was rough. I couldn’t get out of the saddle at all for four- or five-hour stages, 120-mile days on the bike. The cobblestones were definitely a big obstacle. Those are hard on the body when you’re healthy. You’re riding over the absolute worst terrain
that the organizers of the Tour de France can find. Honestly, I came into the Tour excited for the cobbles, and that turned into fear pretty quickly. It was a brutal day. We had made leaps and bounds in terms of rehab, but you’re still racing with a hair fracture in your shoulder blade. The last road stage was one of the hardest I’ve ever done, just with the mountains that we climbed. I was o≠ the back. But I was just telling myself, “What is fighting tooth and nail to make it over this mountain? What is that compared to what I’ve had to do for the last three weeks?” Finally, on Stage 20, you realize, “Okay. This is it. This is the final obstacle.” And then when I finally saw the one-kilometer banner, it was a pretty emotional moment. Crossing the finish line [in Paris], I saw my parents were there. My wife, my brother were there. They made the trip to Paris to be there for me. My brother squeezed a bit too hard. “Lanterne Rouge” comes from the olden days. Trains would put a red lantern on the last car to signal at each stop, “This is the last car.” That’s how the last place in the Tour de France got its name. In no race do you wanna be last. But a lot of times it tells a story of who had the hardest time getting from the start to the finish. And while I didn’t look for it coming into the race, I was last place, and I’m proud of it. — A S TO L D TO S A M S C H U B E
COR VOS
The
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Philly (Is) Special Suddenly, Philadelphia has become a model city, with a Super Bowl– winning (and Trump-defying) NFL team and a new radical political class. Oh, and Meek Mill is finally free. We asked some of our favorite locals why they’re celebrating 2018
is to be accustomed to losing. We have a history of losing. You learn about it in school. Every year we’d make the trek out to Valley Forge, 24 miles northwest of the city, where George Washington’s army sheltered in place after losing first downtown and then the neighborhood I grew up in, Germantown, in a series of terrible defeats. Winter hit in Valley Forge, and Washington lost thousands more men. We’d go into their freezing huts, which still stand, and imagine loss. Later we were the nation’s capital, until we weren’t. Our baseball team, the Phillies, has the distinction of having lost more games than any other professional sports franchise in the country. This magazine called us the “meanest fans in America.” One of our stadiums had jails and judges in it. Until recently, our one victorious athlete was Rocky Balboa, who is a fictional character. But then a weird thing happened: We started winning. I don’t just mean the Super Bowl, which, you may recall, the Eagles won on February 4, 2018, in a thrilling 41–33 victory over the New England Patriots, who came out onto the field to the song “Crazy Train” for some reason. We came out to Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares.” Even my parents were saying: “Free Meek Mill.” Then, in April, Meek Mill was freed. The first thing he did was take a helicopter to a Philadelphia 76ers game to see Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid play, because Simmons and Embiid are fucking amazing. Eagles players became activists, speaking out about the flawed criminal-justice system. Donald Trump disinvited the team from visiting the White House out of spite; our mayor, Jim Kenney, then called our president “a fragile egomaniac obsessed with crowd size.” Our recently elected district attorney, Larry Krasner, is the most progressive D.A. in the entire country. Our restaurants now regularly grace Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants list. Will Smith joined Instagram and immediately became incredible at it. You don’t have to sell your plasma or your soul to a≠ord an apartment in the city. It just feels…di≠erent in Philadelphia these days. Downright victorious, even.— Z A C H B A R O N TO BE FROM PHILADELPHIA
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Safety for the Philadelphia Eagles
What was your first impression of Philadelphia when you got there? MALCOL M JENKINS: I was coming from New Orleans, so I was surprised that the food was as good as it was, that Philly had so many good restaurants. GQ:
What was it like during your run to the Super Bowl last year? It was crazy—especially the more wins we had. It was a fun energy. But also, nobody wanted to get overly excited. Philly’s had some disappointing things happen to their teams. So they were a little nervous, right to the end. Like, “Is this going to be another one of those years, where we get hit by a jinx?” [Quarterback] Carson Wentz gets hurt at the end of the year: “Aw, here it is—it’s a curse!” But luckily as players we didn’t really buy into that. How did you feel about being disinvited to the White House by President Trump? It didn’t bother me. I wasn’t going to go, anyway. I think it was a little disappointing for the guys who wanted to go. Their entire lives they’ve dreamed of winning the Super Bowl and going to the White House, partaking in that tradition. But that was a decision that came from the team. They were only going to send like a couple delegates, and I guess the White House didn’t want that. But it didn’t stop our celebration. We kept it moving and enjoyed our off-season.— Z . B .
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRIS SZ AGOL A /AP PHOTO. ILLUSTRATION: SIMON ABRANOWICZ.
Malcolm Jenkins
says, “What happened on that tackle? How’d you miss that?”
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Meek Mill Rapper and favorite son
Philly. There was a lot of chaos jungle-style environment, being a kid and just making it through. In
Larry Krasner
said I pointed a gun at him. And now I’m out on bail and still under When I was in jail, the Eagles adopted my song “Dreams and
a teenage grease monkey. “One of the things I figured out back in 1978 was that when you tune a car, it gets better gas mileage, it gets quieter, it accelerates more quickly. There are just some kinds of systems, if you can get them to run better, they run better in many different ways.” Now, as Philadelphia’s district attorney, Krasner is taking his wrench to the criminal-justice system. In just a year on the job, he’s instituted a sweeping set of reforms—reducing sentences, getting rid of cash bail for a host of nonviolent crimes, and not even prosecuting some offenses, like marijuana possession, at all. The result? Philadelphia’s jail population has decreased by more than 20 percent—and crime is down, too. In the process, Philly has become a model of what a progressive, humane, and effective big-city law-enforcement operation looks like. Krasner is an avowed liberal who spent 30 years as a criminal defense attorney and who isn’t afraid to express his disdain for law-and-order types—“a notorious racist, a guy who, frankly, in my view, gets misty when he thinks about lynching,” he said of Attorney General Jeff Sessions— and his election last year was a watershed. “Philadelphia is fertile ground right now for criminal-justice
LARRY KRASNER WAS
the wrong direction for so long,”
and to some extent of the district attorney’s office and of the police bad history is exactly why it has a good future.”—J A S O N Z E N G E R L E
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It was a good feeling, just knowing I had support. I was in my cell watching the Super Bowl, and I saw the Eagles coming out to my of my life, so just to see that was crazy for me. It wasn’t really about the words and the lyrics; it was just about the excitement it brought the players and the energy it brought the players. I saw a YouTube clip of everyone saying, “Free Meek Mill.” There was cops, police officers, saying it. All the fans that rallied on Broad Street after the Eagles won were saying it. So, you know, it was a big thing. And then I got out.
now. I think the new D.A. they elected has integrity. It’s good that we have somebody in office who’s not just looking for convictions. We got a great mayor, we got a great governor of Pennsylvania. We got Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, the rest of the Sixers— they’re connected to the community. Despite all the adversity we’ve been through, it feels like our time right now.— A S TO L D TO Z A C H B A R O N
“I want to be in Philly for the rest of my life.” Cristina Martínez Chef and co-owner, South Philly Barbacoa
GQ: What do you like best about Philadelphia? CRISTINA MARTÍNEZ:
People are very attentive to our work here. The restaurant is busy at 5 a.m. My restaurant has had
Latino community but all the restaurants in the city. Were you surprised that barbacoa could become so popular here? Barbacoa is a food to bring families together. It’s also an affordable option for the community—I have the nourishment of hundreds of families in my hands. I feel a commitment to make sure everything is perfect when we are prepping for the day. What do you like to do in the city when you aren’t working? I like to visit Amis, the Italian restaurant where I met my husband. It’s motivation for me. And I like to visit the studio of an artist called Isaiah Zagar, who has transformed the city with his murals.
How do chefs fight for the rights of undocumented immigrants? We are organizing 12 dinners with 12 different restaurants, bringing together cooks, chefs, and supporters with the lawyers and activists to listen to the needs of fellow restaurant workers that are undocumented like myself. We are working in the darkness. Do you feel more pressure to keep silent now that Trump is president? We are here. We work hard. Sometimes I feel that when a person speaks the truth, it makes people uncomfortable; sometimes they come after you. But someone has to do it. So here I am. I’m not scared. —CAMIL A PÉREZ
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CHARLES FOX/ THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER/AP PHOTO; LISA LAKE/GET TY IMAGES; GILBERT CARRASQUILLO/GET TY IMAGES; JEFF FUSCO
District attorney
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With his ecstatic 2018 album, Bloom, and a standout role in Boy Erased, the Internet star turned pop artist emerges as a gay icon for the Instagram age By MARIAN BULL
ST Y L I ST: K E L LY M C C A B E . P R O P ST Y L I ST: PA S C A L E L E M A I R E AT T H E A RT I ST A G E N C Y. G R O O M I N G : S U S A N H E Y DT AT T H E A RT I ST A G E N C Y.
Suit, $3,755, by Givenchy. Shirt (price upon request) by Dior.
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→ Jacket, $2,450, shirt, $450, pants, $850, and sneakers, $930, by Dior Men. Socks, $17 (for three pairs), by Gold Toe.
↓ Jacket, $2,450 (for suit), and turtleneck, $950, by Versace.
at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Troye Sivan knows exactly what we want. In a sheer emerald Valentino top, the 23-year-old singer slinks and stomps and wiggles his beautiful green bean of a body across the stage. He grooves his hips the way I imagine a more coordinated person dances in front of a mirror. Sivan knows we want to scream, and dance, and watch him fling his arms out and twirl around the stage that is his and his alone. He also knows we—we horny, endorphin-filled, glitter-covered masses—want to cry. A few songs into a set chock-full of-A grass-fed bops, Sivan brings up a young yarmulke-and-fleece-clad man named Judah. From the pocket of his fuzzy vest, Judah produces an FRONT AND CENTER
engagement ring, which he presents to his boyfriend (also yarmulkeand-fleece-clad). There’s a proposal! What looks like a yes! A kiss! The crowd erupts in hysterics, the sort of shared experience that only occurs when something pure and beautiful is observed by gleeful hordes. Sivan ushers them off the stage with a triumphant “Mazel tov!” and flings his green arms out, launching himself into his next song. This is a cause for celebration, after all. Sivan has been making good things happen for people all year: There was “Bloom,” his euphoric, dance-y single about getting fucked; and then his record of the same name (“a carefree-happy-gay-love album,” in his words). Tonight he’s transformed one of New York’s
biggest concert venues into a space of his own, where he can perform and invite queer couples onstage to get engaged if he wants to. All of this cements Sivan as the earnest, poreless, tireless pop star we need. But his most unexpected achievement comes this November, in Boy Erased, the Joel-Edgertonwritten-and-directed-and-actedin drama about gay-conversion therapy. In the movie, Sivan appears as a jarringly divine vision: He’s the gamine but weary boy Lucas Hedges’s main character meets at a camp horrifically named Love in Action, where newly outed young people are expected to list and renounce their “sins” (that’s hate-speak for gay stuff). Sivan’s character periodically guides
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→ Jacket, $1,800, turtleneck, $290, pants, $890, and boots, $1,350, by Calvin Klein 205W39NYC. Ring (on left hand) throughout, $1,100, by Ariel Gordon. Ring (on right hand) throughout, $665, by J. Hannah.
Hedges’s through the trauma of denying one’s identity. The role is important to Sivan, but it also took an emotional toll on him. During filming, “it started to feel really isolated from the rest of the world,” he tells me. “All day, every day, all we heard was this negative rhetoric about LGBTQ people.” Scripted homophobia still hurts the soul. “So it started to feel very real after a while.” Turns out the best way to recover from months of acting out conversion therapy is returning to your real world. “I remember feeling so relieved to go back to my life, which feels almost comically gay now: I got to make this super-gay album, and shoot these music videos, and live with my boyfriend in L.A., and get coffee in West Hollywood every morning.” Because even a queer spirit guide— one who comforts and celebrates the LGBTQ community with his songs, his shows, his performances—needs a break once in a while. Plus he’s hesitant to decide what he’s up to next: “I get a little freaked out when I imagine my career as a game of chess. What’s the next right move?” Sivan just wants to feel inspired, challenged. “I have this theory: The only way to stay relevant is if you stay true. If you’re making something you genuinely love all the time,” he says, “hopefully, surely, somebody out there is gonna love it, too.” Marian Bull is GQ’s food and travel editor.
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← Jacket, $1,440, shirt, $250, pants, $520, and tie, $125, by Paul Smith. Watch, $3,450, by Cartier.
ABOUT THESE CLOTHES Not every pop star leaned into the scum-bro aesthetic— thin ’stache, face tats, hungoveron-the-way-to-Hillsong outfit— in 2018. Troye Sivan knows we should expect more of our celeb style heroes; whether onstage or out and about in L.A., he marches to his own beat in polished sportswear, daring high fashion, and suits cut as sharp as his cheekbones. Here he shows the many versions of attitudinal tailoring available this season, from glammed-out tuxedos to a double-breasted suit fit for a rock ’n’ roller—or a rising pop icon.
→ Jacket, $3,690, shirt, $1,850, pants, $1,290, and boots, $1,995, by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.
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These were our favorites of 2018— and their authors were cool enough to recommend their favorites, too B y K E V I N N G U Y E N
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This December GQ’s annual Men of the Year issue comes to life with exclusive events that include Hollywood’s ultimate showrunner Ryan Murphy, Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, and Jonah Hill (with the cast of Mid90s). Plus, a GQ shop featuring special-edition GQ merch.
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T h e
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Small Fry
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Lisa Brennan-Jobs
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS RECOMMENDS:
Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill
Growing up with an absent father—not easy! But what if your MIA dad is Steve Jobs? For years, the Apple cofounder denied his paternity of his first daughter. And in the exceptionally written Small Fry, penned by that very daughter, this was just one of the many abhorrent qualities about Jobs. But while the book is critical of him, it’s far from a takedown. This memoir is one of rejection, longing, and forgiveness.
“This story collection is insightful, sly, and made me guffaw.”
Playing Changes Nate Chinen
God Save Texas Lawrence Wright After tackling 9/11 and Scientology, journalist Lawrence Wright wrangles his toughest subject yet: home, the Lone Star State. With a balance of deep reporting and memoir, the New Yorker staff writer offers a personal history of Texas, a place both singular and the bellwether of American politics and morality. It’s a different approach, and one that Wright nails.
Does jazz need to be saved? Ryan Gosling in La La Land might think so, but that’s not the case for NPR’s foremost jazz expert, Nate Chinen. Over 12 colorfully written chapters, he argues that the genre is as vital as ever. In its breadth, the book embraces jazz’s diversity as evidence that it needs no saviors. Plus, Chinen ends the book with the 129 best albums of this century so you can hear for yourself.
NATE CHINEN RECOMMENDS:
Boom Town by Sam Anderson
“This is a book about Oklahoma City that wraps so much in its wry embrace: Manifest Destiny, the NBA, extreme weather, urban planning, the Flaming Lips.”
Bad Blood John Carreyrou Elizabeth Holmes was supposed to be the Steve Jobs of the medical world—but may have turned out to be the greatest fraud in recent history. Her company, Theranos, promoted a device that would revolutionize blood testing. Those machines seemingly ended up being lemons. But when life gives you lemons, you can apparently just lie out your ass about it to venture capitalists. Remarkably, Theranos became a $9 billion Silicon Valley darling before Holmes’s alleged misdeeds were ultimately exposed. This Pulitzer Prize– winning reporter shares every detail.
JOHN CARREYROU RECOMMENDS:
Red Card by Ken Bensinger
LAWRENCE WRIGHT RECOMMENDS:
Asymmetry
Ticker
Lisa Halliday
by Mimi Swartz
“I was enthralled by Swartz’s book on the race to build an artificial heart. In addition to being a tutorial on the bloody science of heart surgery, it read like a thriller.” 9 2
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This appears to be a New York novel with familiar beats: a young aspiring novelist has an affair with a thinly veiled Philip Roth type. But the book transforms into a subversive novel about power structures, and its hella divisive ending will leave you totally floored.
LISA HALLIDAY RECOMMENDS:
Deviation by Luce d’Eramo
“I’m a soccer fan (I grew up in France rooting for Les Bleus), and reading this deeply reported account of how U.S. prosecutors unraveled the web of corruption that gangrened the beautiful game was both fun and infuriating.”
“In this novelistic treatment of her life experiences with Fascists and Nazis, d’Eramo explores the unreliability of memory, the mutability of morality, the multiplicity of the self, and the miseries of war.”
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In July, a man named AUSTIN CLAY took a pickax to Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Here he talks about why he did it, the mysterious man who bailed him out of jail, and what the Secret Service did when they came to his house
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I C O N S I D E R M Y S E L F on the left. I’m definitely in opposition to the president. He’s so blatantly and openly corrupt, and such a slimeball. There’s a line that you’re crossing when you’re separating children from their parents. That fueled a lot of the fire. I bought a pickax at the Home Depot in Glendale. I concealed it in a guitar case, and I went down to the star. I put on some headphones; I was listening to Death Grips, which is some high-energy, ridiculous music. It gave me the energy I needed to tear through the star. I’d heard from a lot of people that a sledgehammer was the right tool for the job, but the pickax worked. Rocks were flying up in my face. I wanted to obliterate the thing, because I thought that would be a statement: We’re removing him from the ground, we’re removing him from Hollywood, we’re removing him from California, we’re removing him from the United States. When I was done, I turned myself in at the precinct in Beverly Hills. They put me in cu≠s and took me down to Hollywood. From Hollywood, they took me to downtown L.A. When they were frisking me, they found a little piece of rubble in my shirt pocket. The guy put it to the side, and he’s like, “One rock. Put it on the inventory list.” But I wish they hadn’t found that so I could have a little piece of the star, a little souvenir. My mom, who supports Trump, was just aghast. She told me I should have stayed in jail. But I got bailed out within 24 hours, by somebody who would like to remain anonymous. I did make it public that I spoke to Robert De Niro after my release. I don’t know how he got my number. I mean—it might have something to do with that anonymous bailout. Maybe.
I’m really not at liberty to say. [A spokesperson for De Niro denied that he had any association with Clay.—Ed.] Three days later, I got another call: “Don’t be alarmed, but we’re the Secret Service, and we’re coming to your house.” So I went outside, and I just see these two suits that are walking toward me. I walk over to meet them, and they’re like, “We’re the Secret Service,” and they flash their badges. But they kind of thought it was funny. I didn’t harm anyone; I didn’t commit a violent act. After we got to talking, one of them gave me a high five. The West Hollywood City Council had a meeting about removing Trump’s star. I got up and spoke, and it was really dramatic: “I see this country being destroyed. I see nuclear bombs. We gotta get this guy out of o∞ce!” I went over my two minutes, but I still had more to say. The people opposing me were yelling, “Over your time! Over your time!” So it became a fucking mess. Then they voted unanimously to remove it, but it was West Hollywood, not Hollywood, so the vote was just symbolic. The Walk of Fame is a whole boulevard of di≠erent people who have lived amazing lives. David Bowie. Marilyn Monroe. Taking Trump’s name out of there is very rich and symbolic. I’m sure his ego was torn up about it, considering it’s the second time that it’s happened. He’s like, “Damn it. Not again.” I want to be seen as somebody who saw things going horribly and had to take a stance, before things got even worse than they already were. I’ve participated in protests before— but my problem with peaceful protest is, what needs to happen for political change to arise? I think it takes a dynamic, explosive event.— A S T O L D TO J E S S E B A R RO N
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROBYN BECK/AFP/GET TY IMAGES; REED SAXON/AP PHOTO; JOHANNA SIRING/VG
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T h e F i x
Public Ser vant of the Year
The Master of Silence
B y M AT TAT H I A S S C H WA R T Z
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mesosphere of Washington, D.C., where the pale marble declines into the concrete prairie, you will find the newish and largish building where special counsel Robert Mueller is silently drilling down into Donald Trump’s White House. Try to imagine the shhh of a combination lock turning on a secure filing cabinet in that anonymous building, the ghostly whisper of papers shu±ing between manila folders, the steel roll-down gate ascending so Michael Flynn or Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen can emerge from the mouth of the underground parking garage, their souls now unburdened of incriminating secrets, having disclosed them in the windowless confessional of the special counsel’s conference room where, The Washington Post reports, Mueller, a “sphinx-like presence,” does not ask any questions himself, instead sitting in the back and letting his sta≠ work the cooperating SOMEWHERE IN THE
I L L U S T R A T I O N
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PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID BUTOW/REDUX
Donald Trump cries “witch hunt”; Fox News shouts “no collusion”; ROBERT MUELLER has no comment. We talked to the people who know him best to figure out how Mueller runs the most disciplined shop in Washington—and what it all means for Trump
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T h e F i x
Public Ser vant of the Year
witnesses over, like a card player who lets his confederates do the betting. The fuse on Mueller’s investigation has been quietly burning away for more than a year. Soon it will, as the dueling partisans tell it, either explode into another Civil War or fizzle away into nothing at all. In the meantime, we make do with whatever pieces of news slip out. From Mueller, we’ve seen sober legal filings implicating various members of Trump’s team. From Trump, we’ve been subjected to a series of increasingly anguished tweets. He has claimed that Mueller’s investigation is “illegal” and a “Witch Hunt.” Rather than punch back, Mueller has maintained his silence. Those who know him are not surprised. Robert Swan Mueller III, now 74 years old, has long been revered by elders of both political parties. He is a throwback to an earlier regime, when, the story goes, Ivy League patricians entered government for the sake of service, not self-enrichment. “He’s the perfect choice,” said Ken Starr, whose memoir, Contempt, looks back on his time investigating Bill Clinton. “I know him from observation to be a person of complete integrity.” “He is smart, dedicated, patriotic, and self-e≠acing,” said General James Clapper, the former intelligence chief. “There is no straighter arrow.” Mueller’s di≠erences with Trump are expressed in part by their respective styles: barrel cu≠s (Mueller) versus French cu≠s (Trump), Brooks versus Brioni, lace-ups versus loafers, button-down collars versus spread collars, muted foulard belt-length ties versus shiny red scotch-taped descenders. One man is aiming for quiet adherence to established norms. The other is trying to stun his prey. John Miller, who reported to Mueller as an assistant director at the FBI and is now a deputy commissioner of the NYPD, described Mueller’s wardrobe as being constructed “so that if you got out of bed at 5:18, knowing that you had to be at work at 6:18 in the morning, and you couldn’t turn on the light because you couldn’t wake anybody else up, it would never make any di≠erence.” It
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is a kind of sartorial “no comment,” constructed of blue and gray suits, white shirts, quiet ties. One day, Miller showed up for work at Robert Mueller’s FBI wearing a pink shirt, French cu≠s, and a gold watch. Mueller called him out in the morning meeting. “John, John, John,” he said. “What are you supposed to be?” “Sir, you told me that we dress like lawyers here.” “Yes. But not like drug lawyers.” One can only imagine Mueller’s thinking when he introduced into evidence receipts for more than $1 million in clothing purchased by Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager. Among his acquisitions were $1,500 shirts, $1,000 ties, and jackets made from the skins of ostriches and pythons. Some of Manafort’s finery was procured via funds transmitted overseas from a Cypriot shell corporation to the House of Bijan in Beverly Hills. We don’t know what Mueller thought about all that because he speaks to us only in court, through the mouths of his deputies and their legal filings. There are no press conferences, no raging tweets, no reply to the president’s whining. The quiet is also part of the uniform. Mueller’s silence evokes something that we would all like to believe about the American justice system. He embodies the Boy Scout ideal of the FBI: the absolute fairness of the lawful good, of power without partisanship. Somehow, despite abuses of the law in the agency’s recent past, this ideal has persisted. It survived the gross excesses of J. Edgar Hoover and the warping of the Constitution after 9/11, with the FBI rounding up Muslims and working hand in glove with the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance. Mueller went along with some of it, until he didn’t. Unlike their CIA counterparts, FBI agents refrained from torturing captives held at Guantánamo. In 2004, Mueller threatened to resign rather than continue the most intrusive forms of domestic surveillance. He did not close the gap between what the FBI is and what we want it to be, but the record shows that he tried. As our common narrative bifurcates like a serpent’s tongue, we cling to the hope that someone is keeping track, that objective truth still resides somewhere, in carbon-copy triplicate, locked in a filing cabinet upstairs. We may decide, in the end, that we do not want to know Robert Mueller; we may even take comfort in the fact that there may not be much of Robert Mueller to know. We need him to remain vague
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and silent so he can continue to serve as a vessel for our ridiculous hopes— that there is someone in government worth believing in, that the times we are experiencing now will somehow be brought to a reasonable end, and that the story of what happened will be something that we can all agree on. “Silence is a weapon,” said Ali Soufan, who worked with Mueller on counterterrorism at the FBI after 9/11. “The moment he opens his mouth and says anything about this investigation, it’s going to be interpreted politically, as part of the partisan circus. And so silence, by itself, is a statement. He understands the importance of the job that is on his shoulders.” It should come as no surprise that Mueller wears the clothes of a man with nothing to prove. His father, after all, was a DuPont executive. One of his mother’s grandfathers was the selfmade president and later chairman of the Lackawanna Railroad. Mueller, who still benefits from multiple family trusts, did what he could to give back. He volunteered to go to Vietnam and returned to the United States a decorated combat veteran. “Those of us who came back believed we had a responsibility to live a purposeful life, to live a life that does honor to the legacy of those who
G.O.P.
y R.M. Before Trump turned on him, Robert Mueller was almost universally praised, even by the president’s most faithful allies in Congress.
2001
gave theirs,” said John Kerry, who was Mueller’s classmate at St. Paul’s, an elite boarding school, and who also fought in Vietnam. The two boys bonded through sports, playing soccer, hockey, and lacrosse together at St. Paul’s. “People looked up to Bob,” Kerry told me. “He doesn’t brag or boast or showboat. He isn’t moved by headlines. He’s a Marine. He lives by a code.” Many of those who praised Mueller did not see themselves as part of the resistance. They sounded principled and impartial when they told me that they did not care whether Mueller sent Trump to the clink or completely exonerated him. Regardless of the outcome, they would have confidence in the resulting report, whether or not it was made public, so long as it was Mueller’s signature at the bottom. Their belief in Mueller is not a reflection of any belief in the president’s guilt so much as a belief in the Constitution, due process, and the enduring power of institutions. It represents the ideal of a government of laws, not men, an ideal so embattled now that it seems to hang on the good name of one man alone. Mueller survived a long hilltop firefight in an area known as Mutter’s Ridge, a battle that claimed IN VIETNAM,
2013
From far left: at Marine Officer Candidates School; at his confirmation hearing to become FBI director; at his FBI farewell ceremony.
the lives of 13 Marines. He has never told the story of what happened there; others have had to reconstruct it from the words of his comrades and from citations written up by the Marine Corps when he won the Bronze Star. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” one of the Marines under his command told Garrett M. Gra≠, the author of The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror. Four months later, Mueller was shot in the thigh during an ambush and received the Purple Heart. After his tour, he considered making a career in the Marines and served as an aide to a general. He found that he did not like the atmosphere away from the front lines, and his wife, Ann, was ambivalent about his making his career in the military. They moved to Charlottesville, and Mueller enrolled in law school at the University of Virginia. He passed the bar and became a rising star within the Department of Justice. His work on the investigation of Pan Am Flight 103 led to the conviction of a Libyan intelligence o∞cer. He assisted with the prosecution of Manuel Noriega and approved a deal in which Sammy “the Bull” Gravano would betray his superior, John Gotti, in exchange for a reduced sentence.
JOHN CORNYN
MARK MEADOWS
MITCH McCONNELL
PETER KING
DEVIN NUNES
LINDSEY GRAHAM
“Robert Mueller is perhaps the single most qualified individual to lead such an investigation, in my view, and he’s certainly independent.”
“He has credibility on both sides.”
“I have a lot of confidence in Bob Mueller. I think it was a good choice.”
“I think Bob Mueller’s as good as you’re going to find.”
“The right man was chosen for the job. Robert Mueller is a highly respected former FBI director who has tremendous integrity, and I’m confident he will lead a credible investigation."
“I do believe that Mr. Mueller will be fair; I don't believe this is a witch hunt.”
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In 1995, Mueller made an unusual career move and became a rank-andfile federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, working homicides. “That decision speaks volumes about his level of commitment,” said Mary McCord, the former head of the Justice Department’s national-security division. “If you manage for too long, you get a bit ivory tower. He can roll up his sleeves and do the ground-level work.” In 2001, George W. Bush appointed him to be the sixth director of the FBI. He took o∞ce one week before the September 11 attacks and led the bureau through the tumultuous aftermath. The White House was demanding answers about how the attackers slipped through and was frantic about preventing a second wave, one that never wound up materializing. In multiple hearings, Mueller vigorously defended the bureau from congressmen who wanted to break it up and re-distribute its responsibilities. Internally, he was a hard-charging reformer. He required agents to rotate between bureaus, shook up underperforming managers with an up-or-out policy, and opened 18 new overseas o∞ces. “I credit him for saving the FBI as we know it today,” said Sheri≠ William D. Gore, who led the bureau’s San Diego o∞ce during the early aughts. As a leader, Mueller tolerated the expression of dissenting views and would often reach down into the lower ranks to triangulate what he was hearing. But he had no patience for ignorance, lassitude, or evasion. Lauren C. Anderson, who was then the FBI’s Legal Attaché to the U.S. embassy in Paris, told me about a 2003 meeting she had with Mueller and several cabinet members of Tunisia in Tunis, the country’s capital. When the Tunisians seemed less than forthcoming about a group of suspected terrorists, Mueller abruptly stood up. “We’re done here,” he said. The U.S. ambassador followed. The Tunisians scrambled to hand out the gifts they’d brought to the meeting. “The message was clear,” Anderson told me. “You need to cooperate in full before we’ll give you any of our time.” Among his colleagues, Mueller was known for his diligence, his aloofness from politics, and, perhaps above all, his reserve. John Rizzo, the former CIA general counsel, recalls sitting with Mueller in the agency’s cafeteria after a briefing. At lunch, rather than bantering about careers and family, Mueller held himself apart from the group. “He was polite and a≠able,” Rizzo said. “But he did none of that.” Mueller has spoken about the Marine Corps as a second family, and it is possible that he internalized some of its rules against
T h e F i x
Public Ser vant of the Year
“fraternization,” the development of personal friendships within a chain of command. “He was not a social guy,” said Philip Mudd, who served under Mueller as deputy director of the bureau’s national-security branch. “I wouldn’t call him shy—I would call him private. Really private. When we would go to Iraq and Afghanistan, we wouldn’t sit around with him at night having beers and cigars and saying ‘Where did you grow up?’ and so on.” Mueller was approachable, polite, and likable, Mudd said, but “he wasn’t friends with any of us.” In one job interview, Mueller is said to have had the candidate stand at attention until he dismissed him. He imposed the same sort of discipline on himself. “People would talk about him coming into work at five in the morning,” said McCord. “Everyone who works with him has to adjust their schedule.” James Comey told Gra≠ something similar: “He drives at such speed that he can burn up people around him.” Some of Mueller’s former colleagues preferred his reticence to Comey’s showiness. Even before the controversial press conferences about the Clinton investigation during the run-up to the 2016 election, Comey eagerly sought out the spotlight, weighing in on matters as varied as encryption, the root causes of terrorism, how to be a good listener. Mueller, by contrast, mostly closed himself o≠ from public view. Two commencement speeches, spaced out over several years, recycle the same homiletic calls to adhere to the virtues of patience, service, and humility. “We must all find ways to contribute to something bigger than ourselves,” he told the graduating class of 2013 at William & Mary. “Most importantly, we must never, ever, sacrifice our integrity.” Mueller has never said much about his military service beyond remarking “pretty accurate” when watching a war movie while traveling on a plane with his sta≠, words that come thirdhand, through Gra≠ ’s reporting. “He won’t write a memoir,” Rizzo told me. (continued on page 177)
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DRAMATICALLY BE T TER.
JEANNE MARIE LASKAS
S E R E N A KRISTIN-LEE MOOLMAN
W O N ! SOLANGE FRANKLIN
After a remarkable year, the world’s most indomitable
athlete has a few things she’d like to share— about that wild evening at the U.S. Open, sure, but also about how she managed to triumph in the end by raising her voice
CHAMPION
S quietly and without fanfare, on the backyard patio of her Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, home, where I have been waiting with Chip, her tiny five-yearold Yorkie. She does not introduce herself, does not shake hands. She slides her fantastic, superhuman body onto the white couch without so much as a sigh. It’s oddly spectacular. A giant athlete materializing as if from fairy dust. “I’m struggling a little bit,” she says with a mumble, apologizing for being late. (She hardly is.) “It’s a baby. You’re never on time with a baby.” She’s groggy, pu≠y, says she didn’t get much sleep. She’s in a pink top from her new independent clothing line, Serena, and she’s wearing gray sweats, no shoes. Really, the only remarkable thing is her makeup, fresh and glistening, full-on contoured cheeks, shiny lips, woolly lashes, eyebrows enhanced with confidence and certitude; it would seem unnecessary for ten o’clock in the morning on a random Thursday with no one here except the nanny in the kitchen and a guy with a leaf blower over by the pool. I’m wondering why she felt the need to go all out on the makeup and it strikes me as dutiful. She said she would do this thing, so she’s going to do it. It’s part of the job. A professional athlete in the era of Kaepernick and King James is supposed to provide thoughts after the big game, help make sense of the whole thing, put it all in cultural context—and let’s face it, that last one was loaded. The 2018 U.S. Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, New York, all the world watching Serena Williams, the most enduring athlete of all time, perform, impossibly, in top form, still, at age 36, and just a year after having a baby, after battling life-threatening blood clots, after marrying a tech giant, Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit; she had no idea what Reddit was, he had never watched a tennis match), and then...what? What was happening to Serena? Freaking out at chair umpire Carlos Ramos after he gave her a “coaching” code violation, and, what? Well, she is, after all, losing. Defeated in the first set and trailing in the second— but she’s going o≠ on Ramos, and, what? She has smashed her racket on the ground, reducing it to a wobble of gut and wire, and now she’s taking him on: There are men out here that do a lot worse, but because I’m a SHE HAS APPEARED,
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woman, because I’m a woman, you’re going hard time.” I tell her I like Chip. He’s calm. She to take this away from me? She’s pacing, call- looks up at me, for the first time that morning Ramos a “liar” and a “thief ” for removing ing meeting my eyes. I notice that the glue the point, and so he docks her a whole game, on one of her eyelashes, the right one, isn’t and thus her opponent, 20-year-old Naomi quite holding the way it should; the lash is Osaka, wins her first Grand Slam, in a way no popping forward a bit. A glitch. A flaw in the one ever wants to win her first Grand Slam, plan of what it is to be Serena, allowing for the crowd booing the umpire, Naomi sob- a whole di≠erent Serena. All that might, all bing, apologizing for winning, Serena telling that emotion, exploding on the international the crowd to stop it, to let Naomi have her stage, all the symbolism and all the responsimoment, and then of course come the tweets, bility—but here now in retreat, unknowing, and the opinion pages, and a racist cartoon, a slipped eyelash. everybody shouting. The noise. The noise. The noise. Yes, yes, yes, discuss! It’s part of the job. And so although the lethargy is pal- “ I F E E L L I K E W E need to shift to that mindpable, the reluctance real, Serena Williams is set, you know, it’s not just me, it’s the way the here on her patio in full makeup and glorious country is,” she says, finally and fully reportlashes reporting for duty. ing for duty, one eyelash amiss, a professional “I love your shoes,” she says to me, looking athlete seeking symbolism. down. “They’re really stylish.” She would like to make one thing clear “Hey, baby,” she says to Chip. about Ramos hitting her with the coaching I tell her I’m sorry if I’m part of the prob- code violation. It wasn’t typical. Usually, if an umpire notices a player’s coach making lem. All the world tugging at her. “No, no, no,” she says. “God, no.” suspicious movements (in tennis, coaches are She strikes a remorseful tone when she not allowed to, well, coach during the match), attempts to explain why she went o≠ like that he’ll simply say something to the player and at Arthur Ashe Stadium, says bad stu≠ always that’s the end of it. “That was where a lot of people don’t understand. That’s where I happens to her at the Open. “I’ve had a lot of things happen to me at the was coming from. Like, usually you talk to U.S. Open,” she says. “I think about three or me, tell me that something’s happening, and four di≠erent things. Especially in the later I’ll tell my box, like, whatever you’re doing, rounds. I think a person can be a little bit don’t. First, I can’t see you—I’m clear on the more sensitive to anything in that moment. other side of the court. Second, don’t do it. You know, in psychosis it becomes a trig- We’re here to win or to lose with dignity, and ger moment. When you go through a really that’s how I’ve always done my career.” To be extreme ordeal not once, not twice, not three accused of cheating, and eventually docked times, it becomes a trigger moment.” a point for it, was an injustice. “That is not Too sensitive. A person making herself right,” she told the referee repeatedly. “And wrong for expressing outrage, using words you know it. And I know you can’t admit it, like “psychosis” and “trigger moment.” but you know it. That’s not right.” Serena? What happened to There are men An injustice. What do you do with that? If out here that do a lot worse, but because I’m a you’re a man, you fight and become a hero; woman, because I’m a woman, you’re going to if you’re a woman, you better shut up or else take this away from me? they’ll call you crazy. I ask her what it’s like to find herself at the “I don’t really remember how it went, to be honest,” she says with a wave of her hand center of a giant conversation, particularly and a tug on the headband keeping her pro- now, in this #MeToo moment, about power digious curls in order. “I’ve been purposely and gender, about what happens to a woman not thinking about it.” She says she’s deleted when she expresses anger. social-media apps from her “Especially a black woman,” phone. “I don’t watch TV at all. I she says. “You do research on how try to keep myself in a bubble as black women, you know, in the OPENING much as I can. I just don’t want workforce are, there’s literally PAGES to be involved in other people’s papers about it, how black women dress T BY opinions. Let them live how they are treated if they’re angry, as ALEXANDER opposed to white women, white want to feel.” WANG But—Serena? Serena Williams. men, black men. It is bottom of the shoes Power and glory and feminism and bottom of the totem pole.” JIMMY CHOO fight. I want that Serena. I want The meltdown at the Open hapjewelry normal Serena. Not exhausted pened just as people were gathDAVID WEBB ering in Washington to consider Serena. Not disgusted Serena. the nomination of Judge Brett Chip hops onto her lap. He’s OPPOSITE PAGE Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme half the size of her biceps. “He dress won’t even acknowledge the Court. These narratives inevitably CALVIN KLEIN baby,” she says. “He’s having a became linked. 205W39NYC
“Funny how a black female tennis player is held to a higher standard to keep her emotions in check than a Supreme Court nominee,” tweeted Alabama state-senator candidate Deborah Barros, referring to Kavanaugh’s tears and hissy fit upon being accused of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. He was praised by President Trump for being a fighter, and then he was awarded a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. “It’s not funny; it’s bullshit,” Serena’s husband, Alexis Ohanian, said in a followup tweet, and in a tweetstorm he railed on her behalf. “Kavanaugh’s a white man,” Serena says, when I ask her about anger and who’s allowed to express it. “I’m a black woman. His limit is higher. My limit is way lower. And that’s where we stand right now in this world. And it’s a fact. It is literally a fact. If you don’t believe anything I say, just look at those two examples.” I ask her what she does with that. How does she accept that and walk around with it? “You don’t accept it. You talk out about it like I have. You make it better for the next generation.” She talks about the continuum, about Rosa Parks, “or you look at people like Althea Gibson, who had to sleep in her car.” In 1956, Althea Gibson became the first AfricanAmerican to win a Grand Slam title, and the next year she won two more, despite the fact that hotels and country clubs still excluded blacks and so she was routinely banned from clubhouses. Also she was broke. There was no prize money for women in tennis, no professional tours. “That was awful,” Serena says. “But that was for her generation, and she bore the burden for someone like me. I have it way better than she does. And then I’m bearing the burden for the next generation, and they’re going to have it way, way better than I do.”
a tasteful mansion no more giant than your standard suburban McMansion, is newly furnished with big, plastic toddler gear, a colorful slide, climbing things, toys everywhere; the dining-room table is covered with stu≠, half-opened boxes, papers, a miscellaneous sorting place. Nothing about the house suggests world-famous, fantastically wealthy athlete; in fact, with the growl of the leaf blower and the static morning sunshine, the vibe here is just a regular Thursday in a rich person’s neighborhood where the dad is away on business (he is) and the mom is home thinking about playdates. “Do you want to move over to the sandbox?” Serena asks, and that’s what we do, following 1-year-old Olympia, who just woke up and is motoring around the patio with her SERENA’S HOUSE,
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big, square, stumpy legs, and everything now is baby talk—I’ve just never loved anyone like I loved this little baby, how’d I get so lucky to have this baby? “We do everything together,” she says excitedly. She tells me she has been with Olympia every day of her life so far: “I love everything about being a mom. The only thing I don’t love about being a mom is come 7:30, Olympia’s in bed and I get sad. I’m like, ‘Should I go to bed?’ Because then if I wake up, I get to see her again.” In the sandbox, Serena abruptly switches to French, as she often does with Olympia. She taught herself the language when she
“ TENNIS PLAYERS DIDN’ T LOOK LIKE ME. ESPECIALLY THE TOP PL AYERS OR ANYONE THAT EVER WON GRAND SLAMS. NOTHING LIKE ME.”
began setting up schools in Africa a decade ago, and she lived for a time in Paris, and of course her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, is French. Olympia hasn’t started speaking yet, but it’s bound to come out French! We marvel at Olympia’s new teeth and her pretty curls. “And, like, I’m keeping a lot of her clothes,” Serena says. “And then, when she gets a little older, we’re going to go over to the foster care and give them away.” Oh, they have big plans together! No plans, per se, for tennis. Not like it was for Serena, growing up with her famous sister, Venus, just a year older, when life was: tennis. This is worth noting. Tennis was never a choice. Tennis was predetermined by their father, Richard, who hatched a wholly preposterous plan when, after seeing a player on TV win $40,000 one day, he thought, Huh, good idea, and decided to grow some tennis champions all his own. He bought books and tapes to learn tennis, taught his wife Oracene, a gifted athlete, how to play, and together they coached the three girls from his first marriage. None of those took. So he perfected the plan with baby Venus and baby Serena. They were 3 and 4 when they first hit the courts, in Compton, California. Their father drew up a 78-page training regime, a blueprint to tennis glory, and he wove in lessons
about dealing with racism. He had to toughen them up against that stu≠, as he would later write in his autobiography, Black and White: The Way I See It. He bused in bullies, kids from the local schools. He paid them to shout vile, racist things at his girls as they practiced. “Every curse word in the English language, including ‘Nigger,’ ’’ he wrote.‘‘I paid them to do it and told them to ‘do their worst.’ ” And with that, Venus and Serena were turning into fine tennis players. Their father moved the family to a compound in South Florida when Serena was 10 and Venus was 11, where they could attend the tennis academy of Rick Macci, but a few years later he pulled them out and did all the coaching himself at home. The only thing more ludicrous than the plan was that it worked, spectacularly, and soon Venus and Serena were winning titles and trophies, and they became millionaires many times over, moving into separate wings of their own mansion together, here in this gated community in Palm Beach Gardens, just one street away from where we are now sitting. I make the point that maybe it’s not so hard for Serena to live in a bubble, as she has insisted she now wants to do, since she grew up in one. It must feel familiar, and safe, to be in a bubble. She looks at me, confused. What do I mean? An unusual childhood. I want to say, how did you end up so normal, having grown up like that? Why didn’t you ever veer o≠ the rails like Michael Jackson—or at least like Tonya Harding—did? I want to say, Wow, your dad? “So much tennis” is what I say. “I don’t feel like I was really in a bubble, to be honest,” she says. “I had friends. And you know, my dad wouldn’t let us be pro full-time until we finished high school.” It was a normal, happy childhood, she says. She does not appear to be faking it. And who is anyone else to say? Besides, it wasn’t just tennis. “Our dad said always put God first and then family and then tennis,” she says. They were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses. “And I remember being so young and not understanding, because I was like, ‘We want to do tennis first.’ He’s like, ‘No, God always comes first, followed by your family. And then after that it’s tennis.’ I thought that was interesting. I never forgot that. I kind of always lived by that. And I think that’s what made me and my sister such rounded people.” It certainly seems that the message stuck. The family remains a tight-knit unit. Serena is nothing but all defense when it comes to her family, showing not so much as a nod toward the notion that her dad is one odd dude. He still lives close by, is long divorced from her mom. Last November, he texted Serena one hour before her wedding to say he was not going to walk her down the aisle. He was sorry. He was not up to it. She understood.
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like, my boobs were bigger than Venus’s, and my body was thicker. I was curvier. I was like, ‘Why am I not Venus?’ And she was tired of me copying her. She was like, ‘Get your own identity, please!’ It was like a window into much bigger things that I would face in the future. I was di≠erent. I looked di≠erent. And I played di≠erent. And I hit di≠erent. And I ran di≠erent.” She credits her eldest half sister, Yetunde, who was once personal assistant to both Serena and Venus, as the one who helped her overcome her feelings of inadequacy. “I was really struggling, and she’s like, ‘You know, everyone is di≠erent. You’re not Venus, and you’re never going to be Venus. You’re never going to be as thin as her, and that’s okay. And you’re never going to be as tall as her, and that’s okay. Nothing is wrong with that. You have a beautiful body on your own. You have a beautiful face.’ And that’s when I first started being more comfortable with who I was.” Years later, in 2003, Yetunde was killed in a gang-related drive-by shooting in Compton, and when Serena says the loss hit her hard, was in fact devastating, this is part of what she means. “But it was good that she taught me that lesson, because in a way she was teaching me a lesson about life. In a way, it had nothing to do with Venus. It wasn’t about her at all. Tennis players in general didn’t look like me. Especially the top players or anyone that ever won Grand Slams. Nothing like me. So it was, Can I win looking like this? Can I perform looking like this? “And that was something that I realized that I could do. I just had to learn that it was okay to, you know, not be Venus.” She was 16 when the di≠erentiation happened. She remembers vividly because a year later she won her first Grand Slam title, at the 1999 U.S. Open, defeating world number one Martina Hingis. Then the more she allowed herself to become Serena, the more she won: 23 Grand Slams and four Olympic gold medals and more than $88 million in prize money over the course of her career. She embraced di≠erent, became its defender, spoke out for the disenfranchised, railed against pay gaps for women of color, against police violence, LGBTQ discrimination. Even the very fact of her race seemed like its own act of defiance in an ultra-white sport; she trotted out di≠erent as a fashion statement on the court. In 2002, a black Lycra mini catsuit at the U.S. Open; in 2004, denim and knee-high boots; in 2008, a white trench coat at Wimbledon. Let them criticize. Give them something to talk about. Be di≠erent. Of course, at all those U.S. Opens at Arthur Ashe Stadium, she also started accumulating the series of events that would eventually build up and trigger the spectacular blowup at Carlos Ramos.
In 2004: four egregiously questionable calls against Serena, including three in the decisive set. “The reason Hawk-Eye exists is because of me at the U.S. Open,” she tells me, referring to the video-replay system that is now in standard use at many tournaments. In 2009: a foot fault against Serena on a second serve (which, at a major, is sort of like calling a balk in the bottom of the ninth at the World Series). “I’ll fucking take the ball and shove it down your fucking throat,” Serena shouts at the line judge. In 2011: a hindrance call for shouting “Come on!” during her opponent’s backswing. “Are you the one that screwed me over the last time here?” Serena shouts to the umpire. “You’re ugly on the inside.” These things build up. So there she was: In May 2018 at the French Open, making her Grand Slam return after giving birth to Olympia, she wore a skintight catsuit. “I feel like a warrior in it, a warrior princess,” she said during a press conference. “I’ve always wanted to be a superhero.” But it wasn’t just about her. The look was a gift to moms everywhere, embracing femininity and all its glorious curves. “Catsuit anyone?”
“EVERYONE HAS TO WORK ON SOMETHING. I'M STILL LEARNING TO EMBRACE BEING, FOR L ACK OF A BET TER WORD, GREAT.”
she tweeted with a picture of herself. “For all the moms out there who had a tough recovery from pregnancy—here you go. If I can do it, so can you. Love you all!!” The French Tennis Federation was not impressed. O∞cials later responded by banning catsuits: “One must respect the game and the place.” So then, finally, two weeks later, the big emotional finale at the 2018 U.S. Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Here comes Serena, locked and loaded in a fuck-you tutu. A twotone one-sleeve leotard with twirl-worthy black tulle peeking out and fishnet tights, the ensemble a collaboration between designer Virgil Abloh and Nike. On Serena’s solid, square frame, it was fabulous, and righteous—the world’s greatest athlete in a tutu coming after some stupid skinny
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She did not complain. And hey, six months later her friend Meghan Markle’s dad did not walk her down the aisle. Oracene, Serena’s mom, just moved into the neighborhood, and Venus lives one street away in the mansion the two sisters used to share. “I moved out, like, three years ago. I was like, ‘Venus, I’m never going to have a serious relationship if we’re roommates forever.’ It was hard for me the first six months. I still stayed in our house. It was like, ‘This is my bed!’ But then, slowly, it got easier. Now she’s always over here. She doesn’t keep anything in her house, so she always comes over here and gets food. “It’s honestly pathetic, but we’re really close.” So close that for a long time when they were growing up, Serena couldn’t find where Venus left o≠ and Serena began. Just 15 months apart in age, both athletes, prodigies, in the exact same sport on the exact same court. “I was not myself. I was Venus. Just… Seren-us. I identified as Venus. I felt weird,
dress OFF-WHITE C/O VIRGIL ABLOH
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white-boy umpire who robbed Serena, who robbed Naomi of legitimate glory, who ruined everything.
it feels to accomplish so much in her life, all the progress for women in sports and fashion and business, all the trophies, all the millions of dollars. “It feels good,” she says. “I mean, I go out there, and I win, and it feels good.” She takes a sip from her glass of water, jiggles the ice. There is clearly more to this story. We have moved back to the couch because Olympia is busy inside at her high chair, experimenting with solid foods, dropping them overboard for Chip—tender o≠erings of friendship. “But I also, unfortunately, you know, I’m always thinking, Okay, so what’s next? What can I do? How can I improve? You know, What did I do wrong? It’s just a vicious cycle. It doesn’t matter if I win a Grand Slam, I’m I ASK SERENA HOW
always thinking about Okay, I won—now what’s next? It’s Oh, my God, do I gotta get on this phone call because I gotta make sure S brand is doing good, so..., or is it, you know, What is it?” She has said in the past that her ultimate goal is 25 Grand Slam victories, to surpass the record of Australia’s legendary Margaret Court, who holds 24 (Serena has 23), but she doesn’t talk that way today on the patio. “I think my goal is when I wake up and I say I absolutely don’t want to do this anymore, and that will be when I decide it’s enough.” She’ll start training again in a few weeks for next season. “It starts slow. It starts just, like, a mile running and then, like, 45 minutes on the court. Until then I’m up to, like, three miles a day. Or every other day, and two and a half hours on the court—twice a day.” So that’s, you know, tennis. She becomes animated when she starts talking about the fashion line, hiring execs, interviewing, all
the business stu≠ she’s learning: “I never thought I would have a start-up. And it’s been so much work, and it’s so chaotic, and I’ve never been more stressed out in my life. Just like, literally, meetings after meetings and call after call. But at the same time, it’s like I’m stressed out, but my hair isn’t falling out. Because I’m having fun. I’m doing everything, I’m doing the designing, I’m leading the calls, I’m doing the COO search. I’m doing, like, you know, o≠er letters! So I’m literally on the phone every night until, like, 10 p.m. “And I’m a full-time mom. I’m a very hands-on mom.” She’s a sandbox-and-teachyour-kid-to-be-bilingual mom. In an o≠hand way, she says she’s thinking of one day adopting a kid from foster care, too. So, sure: 25 Grand Slam victories, becoming the undisputed best tennis player of all time. That would be nice. But then what of 26? Where does it end? Motherhood and marriage and a new business and a certain philosophical distance seem to have widened her measure of success. “A good friend of mine, Sheryl Sandberg, we’re really close,” she says. (Serena famously became a rock for Sandberg, chief operating o∞cer of Facebook, when she was grieving the sudden death of her husband in 2015.) “When I won my last Grand Slam, she’s like, Serena. I think it was Wimbledon, whenever that was a couple years ago. She’s like, ‘You’ve got to celebrate this.’ I’m like, ‘I know,’ and she’s like, ‘No, you need to celebrate and enjoy this moment,’ and I’m like, ‘All right...’ “That is something that I need to personally work on.” She pushes her sleeve up, rubs her shoulder. It is wide and round, possibly as big as my head. Extra. Super. Like her, a woman with a body growing so big it felt shameful, and then she learned how to use it. “Everyone has to work on something,” she says. “I’m still learning to embrace being, for lack of a better word, great.” She sits with that one for a moment. Huh. What a weird thought. A person struggling to learn that it’s okay to be amazing. “I did buy myself a cake the other day,” she says. “I never have cake. I went to bed thinking I want a cake, and I want, like, a decorated cake.” She pulls out her phone, swipes, finds the picture, and shows it to me—a mini cake, single serving, white icing, abundant yellow flowers, flowing ribbons of purple sugar. “Maybe it was my celebration to myself?” She pinches the photo to make it bigger, leans in. “I felt really happy to have that cake and eat it.” jeanne marie laskas is a gq correspondent.
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Nobody is better at unearthing the richest stories of our recent past to create a fresh vision of how we live now than RYAN MURPHY. And with ‘POSE,’ his latest and boldest series yet, he’s showing why he’s the most audacious man in television today JESSICA PRESSLER
RUVEN AFANADOR
MADELINE WEEKS
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R he can be scary. “People think I’m, like, Satan,” he says as the waiter at the tiny Italian restaurant near his Manhattan apartment approaches with a bottle of Cabernet. Murphy looks up. “A good pour,” he directs as wine sloshes like blood—just the sort of portentous imagery you might expect on a Ryan Murphy show. Given that he is the mind behind some of television’s most indelibly horrific moments, on shows like his breakout Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story, it’s not surprising that people would find him a little unnerving. Plus he’s long been known in Hollywood as a kind of…I’m afraid to say it. “Enfant terrible?” he o≠ers, baring his teeth in a grin. Yes, that. Last winter, Murphy became even more intimidating, after landing a five-year, $300 million contract with Netflix—a deal that gives the showrunner unprecedented power in a rapidly changing television landscape. But his reign, he insists, will be a benevolent one. While he may have been a bit “ornery” in the past, power has changed him. “I’m a di≠erent, softer creature,” he says. He points to Pose, the 1980s-set FX series that debuted this summer, as an example. The show, which revolves around the denizens of New York’s competitive ballroom scene popularized by Madonna’s “Vogue,” originated with a pilot from a recent film grad named Steven Canals and was polished by a diverse and opinionated writers’ room that RYAN MURPHY KNOWS
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included trans activists Janet Mock and Our Lady J. “When I was in my 20s and 30s, I was all about control,” Murphy says. “Now I’m much more interested in hearing from di≠erent voices.” Proof of that is his Half Initiative, which aims to fill half the directing slots on his shows with women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community. “I started it two years ago because it was the right thing to do,” he says. “Then Trump got elected, and that made me more angry and more determined to push content that is sort of a middle finger to him.” Out of this came what he calls “angry art,” projects like The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, a narrative about the 1997 shooting of the designer that is really about homophobia, and American Horror Story: Apocalypse, which imagines a world after a certain pair of tiny hands get too close to the nuclear button. Then there’s Pose, which takes place in the literal shadow of Trump Tower. Although the show’s characters grapple with issues that feel distressingly timely— transphobia, racism—the series is no downer. Its characters manage to be both heartwarming and hilarious, spouting quintessential Murphian lines like: “What is that on your lips? Oh, it’s just your favorite lip gloss—sperm.” “It’s a family show,” says Murphy. “I wanted people to feel good. I wanted my child to be able to watch it.” Murphy credits fatherhood, more than anything else, with his softening. “It has changed what I am and am not interested in,” he says. “Now I’m much more interested in family. Pose is all about finding a family. Versace, I was interested in how tough that is, to have a family. Before I had kids, I think I would have told a much racier, violent, nihilistic version of Versace.” My expression must indicate that I’m flashing back to the part where Andrew Cunanan beats his friend to death with a baseball bat, and also the packing-tape torture scene,
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TRUMP’S ELECTION, MURPHY SAYS, “MADE ME MORE DETERMINED TO PUSH CONTENT THAT IS SORT OF A MIDDLE FINGER TO HIM.”
and the bit with the knife in the steak—because Murphy quickly backtracks. “I mean, he was a tough dude,” he says of Cunanan. “But I was always interested in—you know, he wasn’t born a monster.” Murphy likes to say the same of people in Hollywood, including himself. His own “inciting incident,” as they say, was being born in suburban Indiana, to parents who didn’t always react well to his love of Grace Kelly and glitter. When he got to Hollywood, he found the industry wasn’t much more accepting than Indiana. His first show, Popular, a satire of teen dramas, was plagued by network notes he later described as “relentlessly homophobic.” Murphy fought hard for his next show, Nip/Tuck, a plasticsurgery drama with progressive ideology underlying its graphic sex and surgery scenes. The series became one of the first big hits for the fledgling FX, one that gave Murphy enough currency to try something even edgier. Or so he thought. His Pretty/Handsome, starring Joseph Fiennes as a closeted trans gynecologist, was turned down by the network. “It changed me,” he says. “It made me braver and smarter, and everything has come from that.” When Pose landed on his desk, in the summer of 2016, Murphy saw a chance to revisit the ideas that had inspired Pretty/Handsome. The script had been circulating, but no one was willing to make it. “It was too queer, too trans, too black, too urban,” Canals says. Murphy was undeterred, and the pair got to work. “I will be honest: I was scared,” says Canals, who wondered how assertive to be. “Like, shit, how do you disagree with Ryan Murphy? But he likes not people who are di∞cult, but who stand up for what they believe in.” Murphy, the former enfant terrible, shrugs. “There comes a point where you can’t be a baby. You have to be the dad.” jessica pressler is a contributing editor at ‘New York’ magazine.
SPACEMAN
Damien Chazelle The impossibly young and preposterously talented director pulled off his grandest project yet—and made clear he’s just getting started ERIK TANNER MADELINE WEEKS
With his new film, First Man, Damien Chazelle reminded us that he’s gonna be in our lives for a while. At just 33, he’s directed four distinctly stylish movies that scale up in scope (Whiplash to La La Land to the moon, e.g.), all while foregrounding a craftsmanship he’s been honing since he was a little kid dreaming of living life as a director someday.— D A N I E L R I L E Y
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GQ: So now that you’re here,
is being a real-live director everything you imagined it would be? I thought that at a certain point if I was lucky enough to make a second film, then I wouldn’t be nervous anymore. When I was coming up and looking at directors who were more established than me, they always seemed so calm and like they had it figured out. And so I figured, “Oh, I can’t wait for the moment when I’m not nervous at all about a movie and I don’t care what anyone thinks and I just do my thing because I have total confidence.” And I think I’ve had to learn the hard lesson that that probably never happens. [laughs] Back in the day, I’d spend all that time reading biographies of directors, all that time watching films, and wishing that I could be making films of my own. And now I sort of miss the watching of films; it’s always just that balance you hope to find. And so: Yes, being a director did seem romantic to me. Movies were always the thing to aspire to. So the idea of getting to spend your life doing that, that just feels like the biggest gift.
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Henry the First Crazy Rich Asians wasn’t supposed to be the biggest rom-com of the past decade. HENRY GOLDING was never supposed to be an actor. So what expectation is he going to shatter next? MICHELLE LHOOQ
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go straight to the airport to catch a 17-hour flight back to Singapore, I don’t expect an answer for a while. But five minutes later, my phone buzzes: “Hahaha. You got the shack!” Earlier, Golding had told me that he and Jon Chu go to Shake Shack quite often. “The one near Sunset Boulevard knows us by name,” he’d said. It never occurred to him that he might be recognized not for his ShackBurger craving but because he is Henry Golding, the next leading man of Hollywood.
What’s changed for you since Crazy Rich Asians?
GQ:
H E N RY G O L D I N G : When I finished filming
Golding is clearly a natural—yet he can watch only a few minutes of his younger self before bashfully turning it o≠. (“Look at my arms!” Golding squawks. “Pointing and shit! So bad!”) Somehow the gambit worked—he got the job. Golding’s life blossomed into a peripatetic fantasy: a brief stint at ESPN, then three years trekking through the beaches, jungles, and streets of Asia and New Zealand as a travel host for BBC and Discovery Channel Asia. A decade later, 30-year-old Golding would, for a third time, drop everything to pursue another dream—the one that’s landed him on the cover of GQ for his Hollywood arrival in Crazy Rich Asians. He was discovered not by a casting director but by an accountant working in the film’s Malaysian production o∞ce. She mentioned Golding to director Jon M. Chu, who then Googled Golding, watched all his Instagram and YouTube videos, and got in touch through a mutual Facebook friend. Golding had never acted before, at least not professionally, and had to interrupt his honeymoon for an audition. You know how the rest goes: Crazy Rich Asians broke box-o∞ce records as the biggest rom-com in a decade, proof that people have been thirsting for Asian-American stories from a film industry bereft of them. Even if it is just one movie, Crazy Rich Asians is hopefully a harbinger of more representation in Hollywood (or, at the very least, Crazy Rich Asians 2). And as for Golding, he’s a handsome face you’ll be seeing more and more of. This fall he made out with Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick in A Simple Favor, and
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he wrapped Monsoon, an indie movie about a gay British-Vietnamese refugee returning his parents’ ashes home. Next year he stars in a Guy Ritchie gangster movie, To≠ Guys, and the holiday movie Last Christmas. But before shooting begins, Golding’s in L.A. for a couple of days, and he wants to relax, which means taking his camera to Venice Beach—“It’s like therapy,” he says—so I tag along. When we first link up, Golding is towering over the people lined up at his go-to lunch spot, his thick hair tousled into a Cary Grant slick-back. Although he at first seems a little sleepy-eyed and aloof (maybe it’s the jet lag), he instantly disarms the stern cashier with a boyish grin and an accent that’s upperclass British with hints of Singlish’s singsong staccato. He’s charming, unpretentious, and friendly with everyone—he even rolls down the window on the highway to greet a dog panting out of another car. Photography is an old passion of Golding’s, and he likes to be surreptitious as he snaps pics of his unsuspecting subjects. Dressed inconspicuously in a Madewell jean jacket, Golding is ironically trying to operate like a Le Carré–esque spy photographer when he’s becoming one of the world’s most visible actors. A man in sunglasses, splayed on the ground, lifts his head toward us. “He’s spotted us!” whispers Golding, darting away. Later, Golding will ask me if I’m an In-NOut Burger person or a Shake Shack person. I tell him I’m team In-N-Out, to which he protests, “But their fries are terrible.” When we part ways, I head to Shake Shack and text him a photo of my burger. Knowing that he has to
it, but before the movie was out, I went to a lot of these general Hollywood meetings. They’d have to look at the paper that had my face on it and a little bit of a bio. And they’re like, “Crazy Rich Asians. What the hell is that? Is this, like, a television show? Is it a web series?” I’d be like, “No, no. It’s a movie. I think it’s gonna be pretty big.” When the success of Crazy Rich hit, it’s like everybody knows exactly who you are, and the way that they speak to you is di≠erent. I’ve stayed the same throughout. It’s just people’s perception of you changes. So I’m struggling with the fame a bit.
How so? There have been really amazing instances where people have come up to me and it’s like, “That film meant so much to me. It really a≠ected how I think of Asians in cinema.” They’ve been really, really supportive about it. Then you just get the weird ones, who wanna run up to you when you’re having a conversation and eating your lunch. I’ll come find you after I’ve finished my meal, if you’re still around.
Do you think your previous life as a travelshow host helped with your acting? I do. For me there’s a realism to everything, and I don’t get too carried away by the glittery, glamorous side of Hollywood. Because I know what really matters in the world. I understand all of this is super fleeting. It could be the fact that I’m a flavor of the month.
So what do you need to learn next? The American accent, which I really fucking suck at.
Let me hear it. No, no…no chance. It’s terrible.
How are you going to teach yourself accents? I’ll research. I’m, like, an Internet fiend. I will research anything and everything that pops into my head. YouTube is my university. It’s (text continued on page 128)
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About These Clothes Not every Hollywood newcomer hits the scene looking as comfortable and fresh in a tux as Henry Golding does. Luckily for us, he’s dominating the screens and the red carpet in the most Technicolor menswear moment since the ’80s. Here he shows off the best way to dress like a star right now— not in a staid black-tie uniform but, rather, in this season’s richest suits and silkiest shirts.
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where I’ve pretty much grown up for the past ten years—I left school when I was like 16, 17. I learned in life from a very young age that I soaked in a lot more from people that I respected and could learn from rather than a textbook.
Do you think that being raised internationally taught you to inhabit a lot of different roles? You just get more of a perspective than a lot of people. Even later in life, when you live in cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. Everybody’s from all over the world, and that hasn’t been their only stop. You have the craziest conversations. Like, “Oh no, I’m gonna be in Hong Kong the next couple of days, and then I’m heading over to Azerbaijan or Dubai, and then I’ll be back. So maybe let’s do some lunch over here.” You get used to the idea that the world’s only as large as a flight.
So before Crazy Rich Asians, before you were traveling the world as a TV host, you were a hairdresser. Were you thinking at the time about acting, or was that on the back burner? As a teenager, I would watch MTV Asia when I went back to Sarawak, Malaysia, for summer holidays—that was the only thing on TV that was in English. And I was like,
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“I DON’ T KNOW IF I’D BE COMFORTABLE BEING BRAD PIT T FAMOUS. YOU CAN’ T WALK ANY WHERE. YOU CAN’ T LIVE A LIFE.”
life without having to rely on anyone but myself. I can manage it if I don’t make it in Hollywood. I’ve got nothing to lose. Which is the great thing. There’s no pressure. If I really enjoy it, which I thoroughly do right now, I’m gonna continue to work my hardest for it. It’s not as though I’m trying to appease anyone else but myself. A lot of people say, “I gotta win my awards.” I just wanna make great movies.
“Well, I could do that.” It wasn’t until five years later that I said, “That’s what I’m gonna do.” Then I just started making plans to leave for Kuala Lumpur. It was such a crazy, foolish, naive thing. I was 21. I was working in an amazing salon. I had my own clients. And I didn’t even think twice about it: buying a one-way ticket, packing a bag, and moving to Kuala Lumpur, where I did not know a single soul or person or how I was gonna get into the industry. I was like, “Ah, it’ll be fine. I’ll just do it.” I had my scissors with me, so I thought, If all else fails, I’ll just head over to maybe Australia and cut hair.
That’s an admirable mentality. I don’t know. There’s another side to me that’s like, “I don’t know if I’d be comfortable being Brad Pitt famous.” You can’t walk anywhere. You can’t live a life.
Don’t you feel like you’re heading in that direction, though? That freaks me out more than anything, the repercussions of success in this industry.
Is that guiding the kinds of roles that you choose?
Are you intimidated, being a humble hairstylist now thrown into Hollywood fame?
No. I think it’s more like a slow car crash. You can see what you’re gonna run into— you just keep going towards it. Well, it’s gonna happen. Either you speed up or you take the scenic route. Let’s take the scenic route.
No, not really. That’s the weird thing. It feels so normal and natural. I made it this far in
michelle lhooq is a writer based in L. A.
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TRUTH TELLER
Ronan
Spearheading reporting that catalyzed the #MeToo movement, he won a Pulitzer Prize this
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Farrow
MARK PETERSON
year and something more: a reputation as the most fearsome investigative journalist in America
Ronan Farrow hit rock bottom on a September day in 2017. He’d spent R the previous ten months reporting on sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and it seemed it had all led to nothing. He’d been all but fired by his bosses at NBC, who’d refused to run the story. He’d found out that a pair of New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, were working on the Weinstein story, too, and he was in danger of being scooped. Sitting in the back of a cab, Farrow phoned his partner and had a teary conversation. “I was just sort of wailing, ‘I swung too wide! I gambled too much! And now no one’s even going to know that any of this happened!’ ” he recalls. “I didn’t know whether I was ever going to have a job in journalism again.” Needless to say, Farrow is gainfully employed. A month after that taxicab call, The New Yorker published his Weinstein exposé, helping give birth to the #MeToo movement. And the scoops kept on coming. This year his reporting has helped lead to the downfalls of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and CBS CEO Les Moonves. Farrow’s ability to get people to share truths they may never have confided to anyone is a rare talent. “One of the important principles I enter those conversations with is transparency,” he explains. “I say, ‘I’m a reporter here, and I want to break this story, but also, separately, here’s what I see you being up against, and here’s how I think we can navigate it in a way that’s really journalistically fair but also respects you.’ ” As a result, Farrow has become more than just an award-winning investigative reporter. To some, he is an avenging angel, a real-life superhero. “[D]o we women have a bat signal for Ronan Farrow[?]” one admirer recently asked on Twitter. (“Basically yes,” Farrow tweeted back, and gave out his New Yorker e-mail address.) It’s a weight he tries to carry gracefully—and gratefully: “Anytime one of those sources feels that I’m a person that they can trust and come to if they have a significant story, and anytime someone knows that I will work carefully and meticulously to interrogate those claims but also create a space where they feel safe in coming forward with them, those are things I’m deeply grateful for. That’s what’s made this run of reporting possible.”—J A S O N Z E N G E R L E
MOBOLAJI DOWADU
Ethan Hawke
HALL OF FAMER
FANNY LATOUR-LAMBERT
After nailing the best performance of his career, in First Reformed, he’s officially graduated to Iconic Actor status
Ethan Hawke is as happy about the return of Ethan Hawke as you are. He hasn’t had a year like this one in a while: Blaze, a dreamy movie he directed about an obscure country musician, came out this summer; First Reformed, in which he plays a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, has been an Oscar favorite since it was released last spring. Hawke loves talking about these movies. “It’s a challenge doing promotion when you’re playing, like, Daredevil’s dad”—which he’s not, though Marvel, if you’re listening, that might actually be a good idea. “But instead,” he says, “we get to talk about Paul Schrader and Townes Van Zandt.” It’s been a pleasure watching Hawke arrive again, as an older, more mature, more fully formed artist. He says that a lot of what’s been happening lately is simply the result of letting go: “There’s a certain humility that comes along with hitting the middle point of your life and realizing that the earth would get along just fine if you never existed.” Luckily for us, things went the other way, and this fall Hawke could very well pick up his fifth Oscar nomination. If there’s any justice, he might even win. “I’ve always been wary of imbuing it with too much meaning, because failure really hurts, right?” Hawke says. But, yeah: “I would love to deserve to be nominated. If that could happen, it would be great.”— Z A C H B A R O N
E
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for production credits, see additional credits, page 177.
RYAN MCGINLEY
BOY WONDER
MEL OTTENBERG
Timothée We’ll always remember the year between Call Me by Your Name and Beautiful Boy as the year we got to know this guy
At the top of 2018, Timothée Chalamet was already a known quantity by gay men (his performance in Luca Guadagnino’s lush Call Me by Your Name immediately became queer canon) and all women (because, you know, that swoonworthy hair, for starters). But by the time awards season wrapped three short months later, he was a household name, a fashion darling, an Academy Award nominee, a GQ cover star, and Hollywood’s most in-demand young actor—and for good reason. He’s spent most of his time between then and now back at work, filming and lying (mostly) low, ensuring us plenty more Chalamet to come in 2019 and beyond. (He’ll appear in the Netflix period drama The King, playing Henry V; there’s a sure-to-be-lucrative reboot—Denis Villeneuve’s take on Dune; and of course there’s that Call Me by Your Name sequel that Guadagnino keeps teasing.) In October he re-emerged and handed us another emotional bludgeoning in Beautiful Boy. His addiction-addled Nic is at times sympathetic; at others, he’s an infuriating villain, his muscles spasming and face contorting as he tries to score his next fix, no matter the cost. It’s another Oscar-worthy performance—the sort that after just one short year of knowing Chalamet, we’ve come to expect.
A
—BRENNAN CARLEY
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for production credits, see additional credits, page 177.
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ALLISON P. DAVIS
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Is This Your King?
I OPENING PAGES
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Michael B. Jordan tells me, describing his movie-star aspirations: like Tom Cruise, like Leonardo DiCaprio, like Will Smith. We’d been talking about the kinds of opportunities given to the very biggest male stars at the very top of the upper echelons of Hollywood. I ask him, why Tom Cruise? “Great actor, movie star. Everywhere, hard worker,” Jordan replies. Why Will Smith? “Great actor. Extremely hard worker. Focused, business-savvy movie star that can open up all over the world. Those are things I want.” “Why Leo? The Pussy Posse?” I ask. “Pussy Posse? Woooooooow,” he drawls. “That’s…your words not mine, man,” Jordan says, putting his hands up, professing zero awareness of DiCaprio’s once lascivious circle of ’90s-era pals. “I didn’t even know that existed. Cool name,” he says with a laugh, revealing a dimple as deep and dangerous “I WANT TO BE WORLDWIDE,”
as a sinkhole in Florida pavement. “Leo,” he continues. “Patient. Makes great choices. Has an air This winter there’s of elusiveness.” only one outerwear rule: Biger is Jordan wants to be better. There’s the sort of star who is never been a finer unimpeachable, and selection of coats he’s found himself, at with oversize silhouettes or extrathis stage in his career, plush materials, suddenly in a place like this maximally where he can express cozy Coach hoodie. those lofty ambitions without anyone sugjacket $2,200 gesting he has delusions COACH of grandeur. turtleneck $355 He’s telling me all Z ZEGNA this in an empty tapas restaurant in an Atlanta hotel. He’s a little tightly wound, even though he’s dressed to relax—Adidas pool slides, socks, Nike joggers, and a gray Stadium Goods hoodie that wants to be loose but can’t. He’s got less than 12 hours to learn lines and get some decent sleep before a 5 a.m. call time on the set of Just Mercy, the new film he’s starring in alongside Brie Larson and Jamie Foxx. The biopic, centered on death-row lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s best-selling memoir, is one of the first projects Jordan’s new company, Outlier Society Productions, is putting out into the world. Hollywood, Jordan says, is getting better for creators of color, “because we’re starting to realize our worth more and what we bring to the table.” It was just over a year ago that he was here in Atlanta, filming Black Panther—the film that completed his journey from wiry child star to soap-opera actor to full-on celluloid idol. If it was 2013’s Fruitvale Station that made everyone realize damn, that kid can act, and Creed, two years later, that made everyone realize, damn, that kid’s a star, it was Black Panther that catapulted him to new heights. We take it for granted now that the Wakanda salute is as recognizable as a peace sign, but Hollywood executives were never sure Black Panther would do what it has. That’s because the industry had never seen anything like it before: a Marvel movie with a predominantly black cast, a story rooted in Afro-centric mythology, a film with a full-blown Kendrick Lamar album for a soundtrack. And Jordan was di≠erent, too, cast to play against type as Killmonger, a hotheaded Malcolm X–like antihero who had his hair in strategically emulatable twists. When its director, Ryan Coogler, who had previously teamed up with Jordan on Fruitvale Station and Creed, was given a budget of $200 million, he was also given the burden of proof: Show us what a “black film” can do. Black Panther became a cultural revolution. Wakanda is now
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part of the lexicon; children throw Black Panther–themed birthday parties and clutch action figures. More important to the suits, it was a financial win. The movie made $1.3 billion and is the only Marvel project earning genuine Oscar whispers. Jordan quickly rap-rap-raps on the wood table when I mention it. “Let’s not jinx it,” he says.
filming the fourth season of Friday Night Lights, creator Peter Berg pulled him aside. “You’re going to get tired of waiting for the phone to ring and being told what to do and being on set and listening to a director all the time,” Jordan remembers Berg telling him, encouraging him to take control. “You got to write your own stories. You got to create your own properties. You gotta create your own I.P., and then you can dictate how things go.” Berg’s advice stuck with him, says Jordan, who knew he wanted to dictate the course of his career from the very beginning. When he was 11, Jordan was told by a receptionist in THE his doctor’s o∞ce that ULTIMATE he should model. And SHEARLING with the support of his These days parents—his father, everyone has a Michael, a former cool-guy leather Marine; and his mother, jacket. Skirt the masses and save Donna, an artist and a up for Hermès’s social worker—he did. buttery shearling From there, he spent parka instead. chunks of his childhood in the car, driving with coat $17,000 his parents to acting HERMÈS auditions. pants $575 By 14, Jordan had BOGLIOLI landed on The Wire, shoes $1,550 playing Wallace, a babySANTONI faced drug dealer with socks $17 (for three pairs) cornrows and a heart GOLD TOE so good that David watch $21,000 Simon, the show’s crePIAGET ator, knew killing him o≠ would be the most emotional gut punch the series could deliver in its first season. “Everybody liked me too much,” Jordan recalls with a cocky smile. Nobody expected the death, and everyone was destroyed, Jordan remembers: the cast, the crew, the audience. Devastating, yes, but actually a fairly good indication of how he’s become a film star. He was so likable, he had to get a bullet in the chest. And in the roles he took next—Vince Howard on Friday Night Lights; Alex, a love interest with a
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heartbreaking backstory, on Parenthood; Oscar Grant, an innocent Oakland man gunned down in an act of police brutality, in Fruitvale Station; even a blind patient with a mysterious illness on a single episode of House—Jordan showed a talent for worming his way into hearts and building a little nest there so that viewers couldn’t bear to watch him die or su≠er the tiniest bit. That remains a superpower of his, he suggests, “just making people feel.”
When he was 19, Jordan moved to Los Angeles. Eventually, the whole family did, too. Very early on, he resolved that he wouldn’t just accept the stereotypical roles on o≠er to young black actors. Before he got Fruitvale, it was a struggle: He was frequently o≠ered auditions for parts that felt at best like variations on Wallace and at worst like stereotypical “thug” roles. When there were good parts, he disliked auditioning and seeing kids—his friends—all
FALCON (DAREDE VIL) FROM ALL C R E AT U R E S G R E AT & S M A L L O F N Y, LT D .
WHEN JORDAN WAS
going up for the same roles. He hated the feeling that the rule of one—there can be only one successful P.O.C. at a time in a whitedominated industry—was at play. “You feel like you’re pitted against each other, in hindsight. I was like, ‘Damn! Everybody should be able to, like, work and grow and eat together. We’re not. Well, then, I guess there’s not enough roles.’ ” Even then, the solution seemed obvious to Jordan: “I guess the only logical thing to do is to create more roles.”
H O L LY WO O D I S GET TING BET TER FOR C R E ATO RS O F C O LO R, “ B ECAU S E W E ’ R E S TA RT I N G TO R E A L I Z E O U R WO RT H M O R E .”
These days, Jordan is in the DiCaprioian position to make choices about roles— specifically the ability to turn things down. He and his agent, Phillip Sun, say they now take a color-blind approach to choosing Jordan’s projects, which may sound like a naive post-racial platitude, but they’ve been using it to underwrite a smart business plan for Michael, Inc. “Obviously, there are certain roles in film and television that are specifically (text continued on page 172)
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Anthony Bourdain in the kitchen of Les Halles, March 2000.
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TRIBUTE
Cu rio us
The
Last
Man
The enormous life of ANTHONY BOURDAIN, according to those who knew him best
DREW MAGARY
MARTIN SCHOELLER
C
is searching for a word that he cannot quite find. We’re sitting together in a small café in Grand Central Terminal, drinking table wine and talking about his late older brother, Anthony. Chris has a habit of looking away as he’s talking to you, one of many physical traits he shares with Tony. And right now he is thinking, with Bourdainian intensity, for a way to sum up his brother succinctly, and for a very specific reason. ¶ “The death certificate that was printed in France,” he tells me, “listed as his profession ‘chef.’ And I tried for months to figure out, what is the appropriate way to describe what Tony has been doing for the last seven or eight years? There’s no description for it.” ¶ It’s true. There is no easy description for Tony Bourdain, or for the utterly unique role he managed to carve out for himself in this world. He was a chef. And an author. A very popular TV host—the cheerfully dickish center of the food-media universe. He was an explorer who removed degrees of separation from the world’s sociological arithmetic, a man who was always, in his words, hungry for more. ¶ He’s gone now. And while everyone I talked to for this story is still coming to grips with the enormity of that loss, one can also sense a fierce determination among them that Bourdain’s work cannot end with him. That’s why Chris is racking his brain, trying to boil it all down to a simple vocation, a template that others might be able to follow to live richer, fuller lives. ¶ This is Tony, according to those who knew him best. CHRIS
BOURDAIN
the lunch and the dinner service, and I walked in, and he was sitting at the bar. He had his chef whites on, unbuttoned, and he was having a drink. He stood up, and my first thought was “He’s very tall. We’re going to be looking up his nose a lot with our cameras.” We watched [him] in the kitchen, clearly in control. He just talked about what traveling the world would be like for him. He had gone to France as a kid, he had gone to Japan once, and that was it. Chris and I got married in December 2000, and a week after we got married, we left for this five-week foray with Anthony Bourdain. We joke all these years later that we got married and then, a week later, we all got married. For the first episodes of ‘A Cook’s Tour,’ a TV show with an accompanying book of the same name, Bourdain and his future ZPZ team traveled to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Tenaglia: Japan was a fucking
Philippe Lajaunie (owner, Les Halles, where Bourdain had been executive chef): The first time I met him, he was in the kitchen and cooking. It was a cramped kitchen that had been designed back in the ’70s, so it was kind of out of proportion. And he was very quiet. Almost timid. He had just worked a few years for an Italian restaurant, and at the beginning all of his specials were very Italian. So that was rattling my cage a little bit—it was a French restaurant! Jeremiah Tower (chef): I went
by the restaurant, Les Halles, because I’d read [his memoir] Kitchen Confidential when it came out, and I was absolutely wowed by the book. And he asked me what I thought of Les Halles, and I said, “Well, it’s a fairly terrible restaurant.” And he loved that I said it. Chris Bourdain (brother): I loved Les Halles. I miss it. Had he ever showed interest in cooking [when we were kids]? No, no, no, no, no, not at all.
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Zero, zero, zero. I know he didn’t like [college], and I know he didn’t care. Our parents did not have a lot of money, and I definitely remember, we went to some restaurant in Putnam County, New York, on Route 22, where our parents had a massive, huge fucking argument with Tony: Why are we paying for Vassar? You’re fucking up there. Which he was. The upshot of that was he did not go back to Vassar. After that, he ended up working out of Provincetown, Massachusetts, down at the restaurant there. Miles Borzilleri (Vassar class
of 1979): I was on campus for a couple years when he was around. The thing that I remember is Tony used to have two samurai swords. They were holstered around his waist, and he would just go through the day like that. That was part of his little persona. Jeff Formosa (musician, childhood friend): He was big with nunchucks for a while. I
don’t know that he was good at striking, but he made them fly around his body, and he didn’t hit himself too often. He was a joker, too. He’d run into the next room and turn on a blender or a noisy appliance, and he would start screaming like his hand was caught in it.
disaster. Chris Collins (co-founder, ZPZ):
The mistakes were very clear. He did not engage with us. He would not acknowledge our presence and that we were there working together. Tenaglia: I think he was
After the success of ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ Bourdain was approached by freelance TV producers Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins, who would go on to form Zero Point Zero Productions, the studio behind ‘A Cook’s Tour,’ ‘No Reservations,’ and ‘Parts Unknown.’ Lydia Tenaglia (co-founder, ZPZ
Productions): Chris [Collins] and I were doing a lot of medical shows, like Trauma in the ER. I read Kitchen Confidential, and I said, “Hey, I’m a producer. Can I talk with you?” And [Tony] was like, “Yeah, sure, whatever.” We made an appointment to meet at the restaurant. It was in between
thinking, “Great! I just got a free ride to all these countries.” We would go back to the hotel and say, “We are so screwed.” Collins: We shot in Japan for probably nine days. And Tony said, “Listen, I gotta fly back to New York. I always cook dinner for my wife’s family, Christmas dinner.” [Bourdain and his first wife, former high school sweetheart Nancy Putkoski, divorced in 2005.] I’m like, “You gotta fly home?” Tenaglia: Part of us thought
that he may never come back. [He did.] Then we flew to Vietnam. Suddenly he looked around and he had this instant cultural touchstone. His idea of
“I JUST THINK IT’S LONELIER WITHOUT HIM IN THE WORLD.” — PA U L A F R O E L I C H
Vietnam, Japan, and Hong Kong all emanated out of literary and film references. And of course he was a voracious reader, one of those just preternaturally gifted people that could absorb what he had read and retain it. He wanted to connect what he had read with the actual experience of that in a very romantic way. Collins: He started drinking it
in, and something inherently changed in that guy. There was something...the smell, the colors…something twisted in his head the right way. It really sounds crazy, but it was “Okay, we’ve got something.”
migrate to CNN as ‘Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.’ Collins: [Travel Channel] gave
us an order of three episodes. Paris was our first shoot. Tony and I are standing outside the restaurant we’re going to shoot, and at that point I could see he was smoking like three cigarettes simultaneously, so something was amiss. We took a little walk together, and it was just this welling up of this anxiety and insecurity. “Why are we doing this? What are we doing? What have I done?” And I’m like, “Tony, let me tell you what we’ve done. We’ve just agreed on a contract to deliver
Tenaglia: He felt it, too. He
came alive, because those frames of reference were starting to pop. His sudden inclination was to turn and share that with us. You could sense this excitement, like, “Holy crap, I’m actually on the ground in a location that I have studied, that I know, that I have references to.” You know, Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness, Graham Greene, the Vietnam War. He was percolating with an excitement that was very genuine. Collins: It was like a light switch coming on.
OPENING PAGES AND THIS PAGE: AUGUST
Tenaglia: [Before that] he was
the guy with the camera around his neck. No, seriously. He went everywhere with his frigging camera, and we’d have to pull it o≠ his neck. He was a tourist! After the initial success of ‘A Cook’s Tour,’ Food Network demanded more domestic episodes and more beauty shots of barbecue. Bourdain balked. He and ZPZ went to the Travel Channel a year later and rebooted the show as ‘Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations’; the show would eventually
Bourdain with the staff of Les Halles.
three episodes. So you better walk this o≠ and get your ass in the restaurant, and we’re gonna go to work.” People’s idea of Tony is formed after 20 years of watching him on television, and there’s a sense of like “This guy is the un-muscled James Bond.” In fact, he was actually a shy man. Gabrielle Hamilton (owner
and chef, Prune): He was an awkward dude. When he’s on, you know, he can perform. And perfectly. But I think he has social anxiety. I know he does. Tony’s famously like, “Just don’t leave my side. We’re about to walk into this room, and there’s gonna be 450 people in it. And they’re all gonna say hi to me, and can you not be far?” Eric Ripert (chef, Le Bernardin; Tony’s close friend and frequent
on-air guest): On camera in Peru, we went to see a shaman. The shaman was explaining what he was going to do, and I was the translator. And I said, “The shaman is gonna put some alcohol in his mouth, and he’s gonna purify you by spitting on you.” And Tony said, “I don’t want to be wet—I don’t want anything to do with that.” So I translated to the shaman by saying, “Oh, he loves the idea. He’s excited about it!” And then Tony went in front of the shaman, and he completely covered Tony with the alcohol. When we went to Sichuan, I knew very well that I was going to su≠er with the spices, and he knew, too. He asked me before I went, “Are you okay
Clockwise from top left: filming Parts Unknown in Vietnam; as a guest in Oman; with chef Eric Ripert in France; with comedian W. Kamau Bell in Kenya.
Morgan Fallon (director and D.P., ZPZ Productions): Honestly, a lot of times I was so hungry after a scene, I’d just go over and start picking at what was left. And Tony, very lovingly, would refer to us as seagulls. Josh Homme (frontman,
Queens of the Stone Age; composed the theme song for ‘Parts Unknown’): He was such a
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beautiful contagion. He presented such a fascinating doorway to so many other things that aren’t within your narrow doorway of what you do. When it was time to write the song for his show, he sent over [Joey Ramone] doing “What a Wonderful World.” And I said to him, “Are you sure you want me to do this?” And he just said, “It is a wonderful world. Isn’t it?” Michael Ruhlman (author):
There was this woman who was a foodie, but she was a student and she was poor. And she used to go by his restaurant every day. She’d just stand out there, looking in and smelling the smells and thinking about it. One day Tony came out and said, “Hey, I see you here all the time.” She said, “Yeah, I can’t a≠ord to eat here.” He said, “Come in. I’m gonna feed you.” And so he fed her a steak and a proper béarnaise sauce while she sat amongst the crowd. Between ‘No Reservations’ and ‘Parts Unknown,’ Bourdain and the ZPZ team ended up producing 242 episodes. He
traveled nearly 275 days out of every year, never stopping, because the mission of the show had grown too important to him and to everyone else involved in making it. Tom Colicchio (chef, TV host): Anthony took food TV and turned it into something serious. It was about bringing people together around food and trying to get Americans to see someone living in a Middle Eastern country, [that] they weren’t terrorists. They were people who live there and had very similar issues to issues we have here, and he was able to do that through food. Collins: If anything can be said about Tony, he was an unbelievable guest. Ripert: He never complained
about anything. That was something that struck me about Tony. You could be hours in a car, or you could be in freezing weather, or you could be in a room with very unpleasant people, and Tony would not complain, ever.
Matt Goulding (co-founder,
Roads & Kingdoms): You could never beat Anthony Bourdain to a meeting. It was impossible. And if you were late to a meeting, you probably wouldn’t get a second one. The guy showed up 15, 20 minutes early to everything in his life. I remember the last time that I saw him was out in L.A., and we were going into Netflix with a show that we were developing with him. We said, “You know what? Let’s try to get there 20 minutes early. We’ve got to beat Bourdain.” And so we show up there 22 minutes early into the lobby. Sure enough, there’s Tony sitting there with his legs crossed, with his newspaper out and his cup of co≠ee. And he’s like, “Enough, guys, you’re never going to beat me.” Nathan Thornburgh
(co-founder, Roads & Kingdoms): He traveled incredibly well and e∞ciently. We just had to make sure he had a lot of Marlboro Reds. (continued on page 174)
CABLE NEWS NETWORK. A TIME WARNER COMPANY (4)
with that?” And I said, “Yes, I’m gonna be a good sport.” Now, I didn’t know to which degree I was going to su≠er, but it was unbearable. It was so bad that one night I said, “Tony, I can’t anymore.… Take me to Hooters.” Next to the hotel was a Hooters. He was like, “You’re kidding me.” I said, “No, I’m not. I’m not. My stomach is burned, I can’t.” And he said, “Okay, let’s go to Hooters.” And he took all the production, invited everyone. So all the cameramen, everybody, we all went to Hooters in Chengdu in the middle of China. I needed a break. I ordered a burger with a weird name. I needed bread.
MAESTRO
shirt $325
With Astroworld, his moody ode to his hometown of Houston, Travis gave us our favorite album of the year
EMPORIO ARMANI
jewelry, his own for production credits, see additional credits, page 177.
PAOLA KUDACKI MADELINE WEEKS
H Here are a few of the predictions we made in 2018: Trump would be impeached, LeBron would go to the Rockets, and Travis Scott would make one of the best albums of the year. (Team GQ! Shooting 33 percent from the field!) In a summer when almost every hip-hop heavyweight dropped a project, Travis raged supreme with Astroworld. We knew he could turn out the Houstonian bangers that make his concerts so rowdy and fun, but this was the first time he relied on more than just vibe. Astroworld is full of peaks and valleys, momentum shifts, and insanely intricate production. The cover, shot by David LaChapelle, looks like a skeevy carnival mid–acid trip. And the features are a perfect cocktail of the hardto-find (Frank Ocean), the impossible-to-get
(Stevie Wonder), and antidotes to his abrasiveness (The Weeknd). The result is Travis’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The most impressive feat, though, is that
every song is rageable. Meaning: The contact sport that is Travis’s live show just got that much better— and even a bit more dangerous.— M A R K ANTHONY GREEN
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RE-INVENTION
Jonah’s Arc
With his directorial debut, the coming-of-age skater flick Mid90s, JONAH HILL proves that he’s as sharp a filmmaker as he is an actor, even after he raised the stakes with his performance in Maniac. What trick is he going to land next?
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JASON NOCITO
J the New York o∞ces of his film distributor, A24, as he almost always is these days. There is a conference room that the executives here at the company would probably like to use, but can’t, because Jonah Hill is in there all the time, talking about the movie he directed, Mid90s. The conference room has a Mid90s poster on the wall. It’s as silent and hushed as a shrine. Here he can just talk, and talk, and talk, about Mid90s—he’s been doing it all fall, with no dip in stamina or energy. Every conversation is like the first conversation he’s ever had about it. There’s no way of overstating the breadth of his enthusiasm, his terror, his pride, his manic energy around this film. “It’s my best friend,” he says about Mid90s. He’s dressed all in black, like he might go direct another movie right now. Golden hair, golden beard, attentive stare. “It’s literally my best friend. Like, anytime I was sad, angry, happy, lonely, I’d go in my room and I’d just write, spend time with this, cater to it, build it. And then now it goes o≠ into the world and someone can…beat it and punish it or hug it. This kind of thing is vulnerable in a way I’ve never experienced before.” The film, which took four years and 20 drafts and a whole lot of his soul to finish, contains basically everything Hill has ever loved: skating, rap music, ’90s independent cinema, Los Angeles. It’s about a young kid named Stevie, played by a young kid named Sunny Suljic, who lives in a fraught and abusive home and is ultimately adopted by a crew of older skateboarders, who introduce him to drugs and girls and the freedom that comes from bashing yourself into concrete from greater and greater heights. It’s the best fictional film about skateboarding since Kids, and it has the Harmony Korine cameo to prove it. Hill takes the awesome nihilism of that film and turns it inside out, to make something intimate and a little sad about selflove and acceptance. As an actor, Hill first became known for his particular skill in playing a type of character—whether in 2007’s Superbad, the comedy that made him famous, or 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the drama that garnered him his second of two Oscar nominations— who used aggression to camouflage hurt: JONAH HILL IS IN
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He was an open wound, but with serrated edges. He often felt, and acted, that way in real life, too. “I think he’s always been vulnerable,” Emma Stone, who has known Hill since they co-starred in Superbad, says. “And he’s always been incredibly sensitive.” But as a 34-year-old director, Hill is a mood seeker, a nurturer. The film is harsh in the way its protagonists—mostly untrained actors, from which Hill extracts measured, naturalistic performances—talk to one another, as skaters in the ’90s did, but Hill is primarily in search of transcendence: This is what the light looks like at the end of a Los Angeles day. This is what it feels like to make a friend. This is what it’s like to be known. Making the film changed something deep inside him, Hill says. It made him…happy. Happier, anyway. It’s not that he’s giving up on being an actor—just this year he starred in Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, as a recovering addict with a penchant for gold watches, flowing robes, and deep empathy, and in Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix series, Maniac, in an on-screen reunion with Stone. But making a film of his own allowed him to see himself di≠erently somehow: as not just an actor but as a peer to the directors he used to act for, like Martin Scorsese, or the Coen brothers. Hill’s not comparing himself to these guys; he’s just thrilled he gets to talk shop with them now. He’s been texting with Paul Thomas Anderson about Mid90s—Hill’s assistant recently framed the exchange and gave it to him as a gift. “It has my really sweaty, neurotic texts,” Hill says, and then Anderson’s response. Hill almost fell over when the first message came in. Okay, the truth is: He did fall over. Maybe 15 minutes after he tells me this story, he’s standing in the A24 lobby when the elevator doors open and a fearsome-looking man in khaki shorts and sunglasses staggers out. “Oh shit,” Hill says. It’s Paul Schrader: the guy who wrote Taxi Driver, who just this year made a late-stage masterpiece with First Reformed, which is also distributed by A24. “Oh shit,” Hill says again. He goes silent for the first time in hours. Schrader tells the receptionist, in his thundering trash-compactor voice, that he’s here for an appointment and then sits and glowers into the middle distance.
“ S K AT I N G B R O K E ME OUT OF A R AC I A L A N D S O C I O ECONOMIC BUBBLE. I T R E A L LY O P E N E D M Y WO R L D U P.”
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jacket $160 CARHARTT WIP
t-shirt $350 THE ROW
pants $300 TRÈS BIEN AT MR PORTER
his own glasses (throughout) FRIEDRICH’S OPTIK
his own watch PATEK PHILIPPE
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jacket $2,950 shirt $850 pants $1,050 THE ROW
his own boots (throughout) DRIES VAN NOTEN
Hill’s looking at me, but he’s really looking over my shoulder. Paul Schrader, in the flesh. Here for the same reason Hill is. Member of the same club. Hill’s grinning nearly uncontrollably. He keeps trying to resume whatever conversation we were having and then discovering Schrader all over again, right there. “Fuck,” Hill says. “Can we even talk right now?” Eventually he works up the nerve to make eye contact. And then: a little nervous wave. Schrader, impassive, nods back. Hill smiles even wider.
Jonah Hill: middle child, growing up in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, by the Fox lot and a public golf course, son of a guy who was an accountant for Guns N’ Roses and a costumedesigner mother. He was an inside creature: “A Simpsons kid. A movie kid.” Someone who became funny early out of ambition, and as a way of hiding. “I think humor when I was young was a good way to avoid intimacy,” Hill says. His parents were supportive of their TV-obsessed child. “But they wanted me to get outside and be a kid, too.” Skating did that for Hill. Like Stevie, the protagonist of Mid90s, Hill started going to his local skate shop around 12 or 13. Skating turned out to be a way of getting out of his own head. “I was like, ‘I’m smoking cigarettes. I’m watching people drinking 40s, people fighting, people are laughing, there’re no adults around, and we’re literally at a courthouse where trials are going on and we’re running away from the cops.’ Like, What? I was just playing with Pogs six months ago. And now I’m running away from cops.” Skating also “broke me out of a racial and socio-economic bubble that I may never have gotten out of. It really opened my world up.” PICTURE A YOUNG
The cast of Mid90s (clockwise from far left): Na-Kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Ryder McLaughlin, Sunny Suljic, and Gio Galicia.
know, you’re in those movies, and you’re like, ‘This is what would make it di≠erent than every other movie you put out.’ “And then you realize: ‘Oh, I’m in the wrong system.’ ”
“Everything is everything.” He has an aversion to the kind of narrative most actors develop about themselves over the years—the usual recitation of triumphs, followed by setbacks, followed by the triumphant overcoming of those setbacks, etc. Instead, Hill seems drawn to the middle of things, the mushy place where experiences were neither good nor bad. Recently, Hill published a zine, called Inner Children. The first sentence of it reads, “I got famous in my late teens and then spent most of my young adult life listening to people say that I was fat and gross and unattractive.” Does he regret becoming famous? No: It brought him here, to Gus Van Sant and Maniac and Mid90s. Does he wish he had made a di≠erent first impression to the world? Sure. The experience, ultimately, was what it was. Everything is everything. He will admit now that he used to dread encounters like this one, sitting across from a journalist. “I always felt like this little kid who was being attacked,” he says. “If you’re funny at all, people are allowed to just rip on you. And it makes you feel like shit. You feel like you’re being bullied, like you were when you were 9, but you’re at work at an interview and anyone’s allowed to say whatever they want to you and you react. I reacted horribly.” Most actors learn to lie their way through these encounters. But Hill never did. “My mom always makes fun of me,” he says. “She’s like, ‘You’re the worst actor in real life.’ Like, I got caught in every lie. I got caught in every mistake I made. And I’m like, now, ‘Dude, just don’t listen to what they’re saying or don’t let it hurt you.’ But it hurt me. And I’m a sensitive person, and I thought I was being cool by being honest or something, you know?” It took a car crash of an encounter with a Rolling Stone interviewer who asked him what kind of farter he was (“I’m not answering that dumb question! I’m not that kind of person! Being in a funny movie doesn’t make me have to answer dumb questions!”) and a screening of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash to finally goad him first into re-evaluating why he was reacting the way he was reacting and then, ultimately, into stepping out of the system that made him famous. “It was all right around the same time,” Hill remembers, “where it’s like: ‘Okay, am I gonna be, like, 50 and this guy is gonna ask me about farts?’ And then at the same time, Spike Jonze and my sister and I saw Whiplash, and we walk out and we all love the movie, and Spike’s like, ‘How old is that guy?’ And he’s younger than me. That night I went home and
But movies were always the thing he wanted to do. He went to school with Dustin Ho≠man’s kids, and Ho≠man ultimately introduced him to the director David O. Russell, who cast Hill in a small part in I s Huckabees. Later, recordings would emerge from that set of Russell screaming at his lead actress, Lily Tomlin. Jonah Hill was right there. His first time ever on a movie set: “I was like, ‘This is what Hollywood is like?’ ” But Huckabees got him a small part in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He was supposed to have only a couple of lines in that film, but it rained, and that messed up the shooting schedule enough to give him a half-day on set—su∞cient time to start improvising new lines in front of Judd Apatow, who was so impressed that he cast Hill as the lead in Superbad. He was 22 years old, acting in “the Citizen Kane of the kind of movie you like when you’re 22.” This was probably the last time Hill’s life was normal. He remembers the billboard with his face on it that went up above the apartment he was living in at the time: “No one knows who you are, and then the next day people are staring at you or coming up to you. And I mean overnight. It wasn’t gradual for me at all.” Comedy was Hill’s way into Hollywood, but even early on, he sought out dramatic roles, too: The Duplass brothers cast him
“IF THERE’S GONNA BE WEIRDOS WITH CA M E R A S O U T S I D E MY HOUSE, I’M G O N N A AT L E A S T TA K E S O M E C O N T R O L BY H AV I N G F U N .” 1 5 2
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in 2010’s mumblecore romance Cyrus, as Marisa Tomei’s malevolent large adult son. It was a sinister and yet still comic performance that Hill then showed to director Bennett Miller, who ultimately put him in 2011’s Moneyball. That role, as the soft-spoken baseball-analytics adviser to a shaggy Brad Pitt, got Hill his first Oscar nomination. He spent the next few years showing up at auditions alongside the same three guys: “There were four of us. Shia LaBeouf would get the o≠er, Jesse Eisenberg would get it if he turned it down, and then me and Paul Dano would fight for the scraps. We were always the weirdos, essentially. They were the more palatable, digestible options.” At 25 he executive-produced a movie at Sony called The Sitter: He picked the script, chose the director, selected himself as the lead actor. This was a young man’s power move that he looks back at now with amusement and some embarrassment, as if it had happened to someone else entirely. “The Sitter is the one that everyone clowns me for. Like ‘The Rock as the tooth fairy’ kind of movie. Like a fake bad movie. Like ‘Jonah Hill’s a crazy babysitter!’ But I get it, dude. I tried.” Hill hired David Gordon Green to direct and attempted to get Brooklyn indie duo Ratatat to score the film. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote, “I don’t blame Green for working in the genre. But I blame him for making a bad movie that isn’t funny.” In retrospect, this experience would be one of the first clues that maybe Hill’s path lay elsewhere, outside of being a studio star. Hill realized that trying to improve the soundtrack of a mainstream comedy wasn’t going to make the work fulfilling, for him or anyone else. “That was a big swing,” he says. “Me, at 25, being the producer of a big Fox movie, and going to Tom Rothman, who was running Fox, and him being like, ‘Who the fuck is Ratatat?’ I’m like, ‘You don’t get it!’ You
THESE PAGES, LEF T PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF TOBIN YELL AND/A24. ILLUSTRATIONS BY SIMON ABRANOWICZ.
HILL LIKES TO SAY:
About These Clothes Jonah’s as much a fashion enthusiast as any of us at GQ. So when he traded in his Palace hoodies and Grateful Dead tie-dye tees for the polished uniform of a newly minted auteur, what was he going to do, dial back his drip? Here he rocks a subtle suit from an emerging force of luxury men’s fashion (The Row) and
a clean chore coat from streetwear’s favorite heritage brand (Carhartt), proving that there’s never been a better time to embrace minimalist style. (The Chelsea boots—which Hill can be seen wearing all over the Internet with the infamous Phoenix Suns jersey ’fit of 2018—are his own.)
started writing the fucking movie. Because I was like, ‘Why am I being an asshole? Why am I being defensive? What about me personally is making that happen and where am I at in regards to where I want to be at?’ And no one does that for you. Both the personal work and the creative or professional work, it’s like, put your money where your mouth is and stop talking about it and do it.” So he decided to move to New York and go and do it.
O V E R T H E P A S T few years, Hill has become an improbable style icon, and lately he has adopted a new uniform: black sweater, black
jacket $7,995 BRUNELLO CUCINELLI
t-shirt $350 sweatpants $2,990 THE ROW
pants, black boots. “I’ve kind of started to wear the same thing every day, and I realized I really like it,” he says. We’re at what might be his favorite restaurant in the world, Shuko, a sushi place in the East Village. It took Hill some time to even realize that the way he dressed had become an object of fascination, he says: something that people noticed and celebrated on the Internet. He began wearing Palace and tie-dye and skate brands owned by his friends mixed in with designer stu≠; he looked both well-dressed and relatable, like he was on his way to the same o∞ce or bar that you were. But because he was Jonah Hill, a whole culture sprang up around his outfits. For instance: “Did you see the jersey tucked into the dress pants?” Hill asks. I did. After Hill moved to New York, photographers began staking out his apartment, and his gym, and a new genre of photo emerged: Hill, iced co≠ee or cigarette in hand, on the streets of SoHo, wearing the increasingly elevated streetwear silhouettes he favored until he switched to his current uniform. In September, one of these photos went viral: Hill, a big grin on his face, wearing dark dress pants, a colorful belt, and a game-ready Phoenix Suns jersey. (As one talented Twitter user described it: “when you have a business meeting at 6 pm but a 48-point loss at 7.”) One question about Hill’s phase as a streetstyle icon—one question about Hill, in general—is whether or not he is in on the joke. For a while, no one could really tell. But at least when it comes to the jersey tucked into dress pants: Yes, Jonah Hill is in on the joke. “That was a really funny one, because it went viral. It had people fighting over whether it was sick or not. People will come up to me and they’ll say, like, ‘Dude, jersey in the dress pants. So sick.’ ” The story, for the record, is this: Hill was with his sister one day, at his apartment, photographers waiting. “It was really hot, and I knew they were outside,” Hill says. “I just saw this Suns jersey, but I left a meeting and I was wearing dress pants and dress shoes, so to me that was funny. I did think it was sick, but it’s one of those things where you don’t know where the joke is—where the joke meets the actual choice. Because we saw photographers and I was like, ‘Watch this, I’m gonna (continued on page 176)
Roger Goodell
“I was just upset he didn’t use my handle, because I would have gotten more followers. That was literally it. I could give two shits that he did it.”
Sam Nunberg
Michael Cohen
Sports
N.F.L.
TREASON?
Entertainment
Bruce & Nellie Ohr
F.B.I. Andrew McCabe
Law Enforcement
Michelle Wolf Peter Strzok & Lisa Page
Samantha Bee
Robert Mueller
Jay-Z
Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!
Stormy Daniels
The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will “flip.” They use....
The New York Times
Justice John Paul Stevens
Periodicals The Washington Post
Judges and Lawyers The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Jake Tapper Journalists
Brian Ross ABC
Morning Joe
Lester Holt
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Bob Woodward
Jim Acosta
Media Bloomberg
MSNBC CNN Networks
Oscars
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Slippery James Comey, the worst FBI Director in history, was not fired because of the phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems)!
Pennsylvania Supreme Court
Avenatti
The Wall Street Journal
“Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd
Full Frontal
Shows
James Comey
The Boston Globe
Carl Bernstein
Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent! SNL
The New Yorker
Don Lemon
Maggie Haberman
Tony Podesta
Jeff Sessions
Robert De Niro Bob Iger
Alec Baldwin
Imran Awan
The 2016 Election
D.O.J.
Charles Koch
Jimmy Fallon
D.N.C.
Terry McAuliffe
Moguls
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“Allies”
Sally Yates
Andy Lack
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Jamie Dimon
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Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Unknown Leakers
Culture Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!
Does the so-called “Senior Administration Official” really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!
Intelligence
Omarosa Manigault Newman
The Mercer Family recently dumped the leaker known as Sloppy Steve Bannon. Smart!
Jeff Zucker
James Clapper
John Brennan
Confidants
Philadelphia Eagles
LeBron James
Philip Mudd
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Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY. Problem is, we don’t have Stars anymore - except your President (just kidding, of course)!
Journalists with Books to Move
Michael Wolff
President’s Twitter Targets @realDonaldTrump went after a lot of people in 2018. We wanted to show you (almost) all of them on two pages JAY WILLIS
HarleyDavidson
The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!
The Red Hen
Google Amazon Nike
and her lawyers
Companies Twitter
Civilians OPEC
The E.U.
Pfizer
Bill de Blasio
Local Restaurants NAFTA Deals
Online Retailers
D.C. Council
Rachel Crooks
Just like the NFL, whose ratings have gone WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!
Andrew Cuomo
Jerry Brown Eric Schneiderman W.T.O. NATO
City Officials
Yulín Cruz
Rahm Emanuel
We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!
Perceived Enemies
Honduras Iran
John Kerry
Mexico
State Officials
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
Politicians
South Africa
The very unpopular Governor of Ohio (and failed presidential candidate) @JohnKasich hurt Troy Balderson’s recent win by tamping down enthusiasm for an otherwise great candidate. Even Kasich’s Lt. Governor lost Gov. race because of his unpopularity. Credit to Troy on the BIG WIN!
John Kasich
Bashar al-Assad
Germany
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
Pakistan Countries Turkey
Emmanuel Macron
Foreign and Domestic Heads of State
China Supreme Leaders
Legislators Elizabeth Warren
Phil Bredesen
Chuck Schumer
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George W. Bush
Debbie Stabenow
Kim Jong-un Bob Casey
Barack Obama
Bill Nelson
Collin Peterson
Don Blankenship
Nancy Pelosi
“Big Trump Hater” Joe Crowley
Tammy Baldwin
SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.
Danny O’Connor
Justin Trudeau
Claire McCaskill 2018 Candidates
Amy McGrath
“Instead of tweeting about me, the people of the 12th District need the president to improve their health care and rebuild our infrastructure like he promised he would do. Thousands of supporters stepped up to join our campaign that day.”
Conor Lamb #LambTheSham
Current Tim Kaine
Vladimir Putin (barely)
Joe Biden
North Korea
Beto O’Rourke
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Canada
Russia
Andrew Gillum
Hassan Rouhani
Former Politicians
Jeff Flake
Jon Tester
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
“Liddle’ Adam Schiff, the leakin’ monster of no control”
“Crazy” Maxine Waters “Drunken” Mark Warner Dick Durbin
Richard Blumenthal
Mark Sanford
M O T Y
Fair Trade is now to be called Fool Trade if it is not Reciprocal. According to a Canada release, they make almost 100 Billion Dollars in Trade with U.S. (guess they were bragging and got caught!). Minimum is 17B. Tax Dairy from us at 270%. Then Justin acts hurt when called out!
“If you had told me a few years ago that a president of the United States would take to calling me names on Twitter, I would have asked what you were smoking. The way I see it, if Trump is bashing me on Twitter, I must be doing something right, so I wear it as a badge of honor.”
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Claire Foy AGE:
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As a reluctant but dutiful Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown; as Janet Armstrong, the wife of a man who would rather go to the moon than talk about his feelings, in First Man; as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander (from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), out for vengeance in The Girl in the Spider’s Web. BRE AKOU T RO L E S :
WA S SHE A SPACE NERD
“We didn’t have a space program in the U.K., so it’s not like growing up I thought ‘I should be an astronaut’ or anything like that.”
A S A KID?
WHAT DREW HER TO PL AYING L ISBETH SAL ANDER? Embodying a badass who doesn’t fit into any boxes. “They’ll say she’s androgynous, she’s not feminine, she’s just trying to look like a man, she’s not clever, and then it turns out she’s a genius. She doesn’t identify herself with any group of people. She doesn’t judge people at all, which I find so refreshing.” WHAT ’S ONE THING SHE WAN TS TO D O WIT H HE R CAR E E R ? Maybe a musical? “I’d love to do some singing and dancing, though no one else would want to hear that or see that.”
—J AYA S A X E N A
OPENING PAGES
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John David Washington AGE:
34
WA SHINGTON? SOUNDS FAMIL IAR: It is! He’s the son of Denzel and Pauletta Washington. WHERE YOU’ VE SEEN HIM BEFORE: In all four seasons of Ballers, as Ricky Jerret, a firebrand NFL wide receiver. BRE AKOU T ROL E S: As Ron Stallworth, a real-life detective who infiltrated the KKK over the phone in the ’70s, in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman; as Officer Dennis Williams in Monsters and Men; as Lieutenant Kelley in The Old Man & the Gun. THAT ’S A LOT OF C OPS:
“I’m realizing how thankless a job it is.” THE HARDE S T THING ABOU T PL AYING ONE
“The perspective of the African-American police officer, of the minority police officer— we don’t really hear a lot from them. We don’t get to hear their side or at least get to know what they’re feeling. If they even feel what we feel.”
TODAY:
AND WHY IT WA S A L IT TL E MORE FUN TO PL AY ONE FROM
“I had to rid myself of all hip-hop for three months. It was ’60s and ’70s music, from Led Zeppelin to Hendrix to Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, the Beatles. My playlist is crazy. It’s so dope.”
THE ’70 S :
WH AT IT ’ S L IK E TO NAIL A SP IK E L EE J O INT:
Lucky and humbling. “There will be years where I might not be able to work with people that feel this way about the art. But I will take these experiences and put them in the bank and recall them when I need them. Which will be quite often.” BU T HE’S EXPECTING coat $4,235
MORE KIL L ER YE ARS,
GIVENCHY
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“My grandma says, ‘If you pray for rain, you’ve got to prepare for the mud.’ ”
TOM FORD
—J O S H U A R I V E R A
RIGHT ?
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The Scions of Succession As the junior members of the mediaconglomerate-owning Roy family on HBO’s razor-sharp satire of the one percent, Succession.
BRE AKOU T ROL E S:
HOW ’D THE SE GUYS PREPARE TO PL AY BIL L IONAIRE HEIRS? To play kung fu enthusiast and presumptive CEO Kendall Roy, Jeremy Strong went deep on James B. Stewart’s DisneyWar—and on Bruce Lee quotes. Aussie Sarah Snook, who plays Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, listened to Planet Money to familiarize herself with wealth in America. But to inhabit Cousin Greg, possibly the most awkward television character of this young century, Nicholas Braun did his own “research” off the set: “In the airport, on my way to shoot the pilot, I just found myself in kiosks and the massage parlor, talking to people for too long.” WERE THERE CONCERNS THAT THE SHOW WOUL D BE UNRE AL IS TIC ? “We did a read-through of the pilot on Election Night,” says Macfadyen, who plays Shiv’s half-aggro, half-simpering husband, Tom Wambsgans. “We all went to this gathering at [executive producer] Adam McKay’s house after the read-through to watch the states come in. The party was, like…[makes sputtering noise]. But you think, Anything that you put in the show, that’s fine now, because anything goes.”
‘Well, at least we’re making the right show.’ ” I S I T F U N TO P L AY A R I C H A S S H O L E? Kieran Culkin’s wisecracking sibling, Roman Roy, might be a sociopath, doesn’t know how to sit on chairs, and gets all the rudest insults. It’s fun for Culkin, if troubling: “I’m having the best time playing this guy. I still don’t really know why, and I don’t want to know.” IS IT FUN TO PL AY A
Braun: “I was like, ‘Am I ruining scenes by being as weird as I am?’ But I guess that’s what Greg is in this world: the guy who doesn’t say the right thing, almost ever.”
TOTAL WEIRD O?
FANS IN HIGH PL ACE S:
“I brought Nick [Braun] out to the Hamptons,” Strong recalls. “We ended up at a party with the Clintons and Paul McCartney,” who enjoyed Braun’s off-center Cousin Greg vibes. WHAT ’S NEX T: Season two starts shooting early next year. Everyone’s on board, including Strong: “I’m ready for whatever ninth circle of hell they’re gonna send me to.”— S A M S C H U B E
WHAT ’D M C K AY THINK?
FROM LEF T ON MAT THEW
Snook recounts: “There’s a silence, and he’s like,
MACFADYEN
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MATTHEW MACFADYEN 44
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ON KIERAN CULKIN
jacket $2,890 shirt $990 pants $1,190 tie $195 SAINT L AURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO
boots $1,050 SANTONI ON JEREMY STRONG
suit (price upon request) shirt $760 LOUIS VUIT TON
bow tie $135 L ANVIN
shoes $1,490 TOM FORD
watch $17,800 ROLEX ON NICHOL AS BRAUN
jacket $3,395 shirt $565 pants $750 ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA
bow tie $180 GUCCI
KIERAN CULKIN 36
JEREMY STRONG 39
NICHOLAS BRAUN 30
shoes $895 CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
Hiro Murai AGE:
35
H OW YO U K N OW H I M :
As the Emmy-nominated director behind Atlanta and countless music videos, including Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” ON THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND HIS MUSIC VIDEOS: “I don’t like fast cuts. I’d rather shoot something that dances to the music.” WHAT D O NAL D GLOV E R SAYS ABOU T HIM: “Hiro has something that you really can’t pay for, which is just respect for art, for craft.” W H AT ‘AT L A N TA’ I S
Being an outsider, Murai says. And “that weird feeling in your chest when you have to confront things— especially latent, passive racism, which we deal with a lot on the show. The feeling that doesn’t hit you until a day or two later.” R E A L LY A B O U T:
HIS R E SP ONSE TO T H OS E WHO FIND S OM E O F HIS WOR K U NSE T T L I N G :
“I mean, this sounds dramatic, but that’s kind of how I feel most of the time.” HIS E ARLY INFLUENCE S:
Looney Tunes and The Simpsons, which is how he learned English after moving from Tokyo to L.A. when he was 9. In high school, he got into the “dry, deadpan existential comedies” of filmmaker Takeshi Kitano: “At least I think they were comedies.” WHAT ’S NEX T: A rumored film/music-video/short/ who-knows project called Guava Island, starring Donald Glover and Rihanna, shot in Cuba. A SKED IF HE’D EXPL AIN:
“Sure, sure.” [silence] ANY PL ANS TO DIRECT
shirt $596 GIORGIO ARMANI
A FE ATURE? “I just want to do things on my own terms as much as possible. When people tell me, ‘This is your opportunity to do this,’ my impulse is to be like, ‘Well, hold on, though.’ ”
pants $475
—AMY WALL ACE
ROLEX
EMPORIO ARMANI
bow tie $195 GIORGIO ARMANI
suspenders $88 TRAFALGAR AT BARNEYS NEW YORK
watch $17,800
Michelle Wolf AGE:
33
HOW YOU KNOW HER:
The writers’ room of Seth Meyers, then the relaunched Daily Show under Trevor Noah, before stepping into the spotlight herself with the vicious HBO stand-up special Nice Lady. BU T WHAT YOU RE AL LY KNOW HER FROM:
Setting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ablaze with a set that righteously lampooned the Trump administration. (It was controversial only among people who somehow don’t think Trump is a racist.) WHERE YOU SHOUL D KNOW HER FROM BU T PROBABLY D ON’ T:
The brilliant-but-nowcanceled The Break with Michelle Wolf, a Netflix late-night show canned after its ten-episode run. WHEN SHE KNEW ‘ THE BRE AK’ WA S GOING TO BE CANCEL ED: “Literally after the first episode, when I was seeing how it was being distributed to me on Netflix. I was like, ‘No one’s gonna find this. There’s no way this is ever gonna catch on.’ ” THE CL IP YOU NEED TO YOU TUBE IMMEDIATELY:
The segment aptly titled “Segment Time,” where she skewers her contemporaries (John Oliver, Sam Bee) and old bosses (Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers). “That’s when we really tapped in to be like, ‘We’re not gonna do what [Netflix] wants us to do. We’re gonna do the show that we want, and we’re gonna make it silly and fun.’ ” SO WHAT ’S L IFE L IKE P OS T–‘ THE BRE AK’?
Touring relentlessly to perfect material for the next special, which sounds like a glorious extension of Nice Lady: “I have jokes about health care, birth, a bunch of women’s issues.”
dress BRANDON MA XWELL
shoes CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
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WHAT SHE’S NOT D OING
LOUIS VUIT TON
ANYMORE:
“A single Trump joke.”
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—KEVIN NGUYEN
CARTIER
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Winston Duke AGE:
32
HOW YOU KNOW
Showcasing incredible charisma and physicality as M’Baku in Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War.
HIM:
ON THE SECRECY SURROUNDING HIS ‘BL ACK PANTHER’ AUDIT IO N: “I was told by my agent that I was going in for an ‘untitled Marvel project.’ I had no idea what I was auditioning for.” THEN HE SCREENTE S TED WITH CHADWICK BOSEMAN:
“I walked in there and I saw his face, and I’m
like, ‘Oh, damn. It’s real.’ They wanted us to wrestle around a little bit, and my pants split. And I was just like, ‘You know what, man? Go with it. Champions adjust.’ ” SO HE HAD TO GET SUPERHERO BUFF:
“I was on a really strict diet. Every 35 to 45 minutes, I’d have a meal. Usually, like, a sweet potato and some chicken. It was like a Swiss watch.”
Us, Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated follow-up to Get Out.
jacket $3,680 turtleneck $1,890 TOM FORD
WHAT HE CAN watch $19,400
ACTUAL LY SAY ABOU T
ROLEX
Not much. “I think it’ll be a wonderful conversation piece for 2019. Peeleian—that’s gonna become a word in the film lexicon very soon. You’re gonna say, ‘Aw, man, this feels very Jordan Peeleian.’ ”
‘US’:
+ foy’s hair by ben skervin at the wall group. grooming (for braun, culkin, duke, murai, and strong) by david cox for kevin.murphy. grooming (for macfadyen) and hair (for snook and wolf) by thomas dunkin for oribe. grooming (for washington) by joanna simkin. foy’s makeup by tyron machhausen for chanel. snook’s makeup by yacine diallo for laura mercier. wolf’s makeup by michelle kearns. manicures by chi natsume. set design by colin donahue for owl and the elephant. produced by kelly jacobson for ge projects.
— S C OT T M E S L O W
ON FANS GRILLING HIM FOR NEW MARVEL INTEL: He doesn’t mind; he just can’t help them. “I get it on the street: ‘When they making the next Black Panther? Is that even happening?’ I can’t say.” WHAT ’S NEX T ? Starring opposite Lupita Nyong’o and Elisabeth Moss in
+ Full stories on all the Breakouts GQ.COM
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Miracle at Tham Luang
The story of the THAI CAVE RESCUE—in which a team of young soccer players and their coach survived for 18 days before being extracted by divers—got even more unbelievable the closer we looked
SEAN FLYNN
Thai rescue workers gather near the boys’ bikes at the entrance to the cave on the second full day of the recovery effort.
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S the miracle, when the boys were cocooned in a sterile hospital and the divers had flown home and almost all of the journalists had dispersed, people came to the cave again. There were villagers from the flatlands beneath the Doi Nang Non, the mountains that rise between Thailand and Myanmar, and there were volunteers, hundreds of them in their lemon yellow shirts and sky blue caps, who had been there for most of the 18 days the miracle had required. There were monks, too, at a makeshift dais on the footpath to the cave, and there were dignitaries— local authorities, the families of the boys who’d been blessed by the miracle—in rows of chairs under a long tent. The people, many of them, brought o≠erings. Below the mouth of the cave and in front of the big sign that announces the place as Tham Luang–Khun Nam Nang Non Forest Park, in a clearing cut into the dirt at the side of the road, they planted small white pennants and sticks of incense and candles the color of goldenrod. On a table near the monks, they left fish and fruit and the severed heads of pigs. These were gifts to the spirit of the cave. For almost three weeks, Tham Luang had held within her a dozen young soccer players and their coach, who were trapped by flooding rains without food or water or any possible way to remove themselves. For most of that time, it also was assumed, if rarely spoken aloud, that some of those boys—perhaps all of those boys—could die. The miracle was that they did not.
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And so the people came early in the morning, trudging up the park road from the police checkpoint, and they continued coming until the afternoon, and they stayed until nightfall. The dignitaries sat silently in their chairs, and the monks chanted, monotone and rhythmic, and the volunteers filled in the empty areas where the journalists and the food stalls and the electrical feeds had been days before, all of them facing the monks on the dais. They stood for hours, only occasionally kneeling, as if a field of enormous yellow flowers with pale blue centers had risen from the mud and the gravel, all of them together in the green of the forest and the steamy heat of July, under a sky
heavy with clouds but leaking only a light and misty rain. They were making merit, and they were thanking the spirit of the cave for the miracle she had allowed and atoning for the indignities inflicted upon her—the miles of hose and rope and cable run along the limestone, the endless boot prints in the mud, the lights and the noise and the chaos— in creating that miracle. The boys and their coach had been deep inside the cave, beyond miles of chambers and sumps and boulder chokes. It is not unthinkable (though it is horrifying to dwell upon the thought) that they would not have been found until November, after the monsoons had passed and the water
had receded and all of them were dead. Even after they were found, rescuing them was by no means certain. To extract exhausted and weakened boys through a black labyrinth of mud and swirling water was technically daring, physically improbable, and logistically overwhelming. Yet dozens of people with specialized, almost esoteric skills traveled from around the world to do so, to try to save 13 strangers of no particular import other than being fellow humans. Those dozens were supported by many hundreds more, the volunteers in yellow and blue, the colors of the King and Queen Mother, who cooked and cleaned and kept order; and by holy men who
Family members (top left), Thai forest rangers (top right), and Thai Navy SEALs (bottom right) worked toward a safe recovery of the Wild Boars, joining volunteers (bottom left) from all over the world.
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COACH EK TAUGHT THE BOYS TO BREATHE SLOWLY, TO CLEAR THEIR MINDS, TO REMOVE THEMSELVES MENTALLY AND EMOTIONALLY FROM A MUDDY SLOPE. chanted and meditated and communed with the spirit of the cave. And millions upon millions watched, fed live updates by many hundreds of journalists staked out at the foot of the Doi Nang Non. Until finally, 18 days after going in, they were out, all of them, 12 boys and one coach. The rescuers succeeded, or the cave relented, or maybe both happened at once. No one can say for certain, and perhaps it doesn’t matter: It was a miracle either way. Six days later, after most of the foreigners had gone home and the garbage was being hauled away and the tents were being broken down, it was possible to imagine this place returning to what it always had been, a quiet
clearing next to a quiet cave. But it still quivered with a sense of the extraordinary, and so it was proper to make merit in such a place.
as the Moo Pa, a name that translates literally as “Forest Pigs” but also, more reasonably, as “Wild Boars,” and they practiced on a rough field across the road from a little church and a small sundries shop. There were at least 13 players at practice that night, the youngest 11 years old, the oldest nearly 17, one turning 16 that very day, which was Saturday, June 23. Practice was run by their assistant coach, Ekapol Chanthawong. Coach Ek is an orphan who trained to be
THE TEAM WAS KNOWN
a Buddhist monk and even then, as a grown man of 25, lived as a caretaker of sorts at Wat Phra That Doi Wao, a temple at the top of a steep mountain that, if you tottered over the side of the road, would dump you into Myanmar. The summer sky was still thick with golden light when practice ended. It was early and the boys had a little time before they had to be home. Twelve of them and Coach Ek decided to ride their bicycles to Tham Luang. Though some of the boys, maybe most of them, knew their parents might not approve, this was not a reckless adventure. The cave was neither far nor isolated—coming south from the scrappy border town of Mae Sai, you turn right just before the Toyota dealership and follow the road through a cornfield and a grove of fruit trees—and part of it had been properly tamed for tourists. It is, in fact, an o∞cial state park that includes several other caves worn into the Doi Nang Non. There is a sizable parking lot a hundred meters past the entrance and proper toilets and a ranger station from which park personnel during the dry season give tours of the first kilometer or so of the cave. On the footpath from the parking lot, as a matter of cultural habit, there is a shrine to Jao Mae Nang Non, the spirit of the cave. She is represented by what appears to be a recycled mannequin in a pink dress, but in the traditional lore, she was the princess of an ancient kingdom who fell in love with a stable boy. Like
most ancient stories of royalty and commoners, this one ended badly: Her father’s soldiers killed the stable boy, and, in her grief, the princess stabbed herself to death in the cave. The stream that runs through the cave is believed to be her blood, and the mountain is said to have taken her shape; the full name of the place, by one translation, is “cave of the lady who lies waiting,” and the mountain, from the right perspective, does indeed resemble a woman in repose. It is a majestic cavern, at least at the opening, a high and wide pocket eroded through the limestone. There is a well-worn path from the mouth, poured with cement in parts, and beyond that, Tham Luang narrows before opening again into a series of chambers. Even two kilometers in, when the cave constricts to a mud-floored passage, it’s still wide enough and high enough for a grown man to comfortably walk. The Wild Boars had no di∞culty getting fairly far in, crawling through a couple of choke points to the open spaces. And they expected no di∞culty getting back out. The heavy monsoon rains weren’t expected for another a week, and the year before, the cave hadn’t begun to flood until the middle of July. The team brought no food or serious spelunking gear because they were there on a lark, a brief field trip. They planned to stay for perhaps an hour, then retreat, and pedal home to their parents. But, as it can do in northern Thailand in the middle of summer, it started to rain. The Wild Boars wouldn’t have known that at first, with a couple thousand feet of rock above them and their being more than a mile from the open forest. But water fell on the mountains and gathered into streams that disappeared into sinks, rushing down through the (continued on next page)
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limestone into the voids below. The water rose suddenly and quickly, a great volume forced into a tight course. A low area behind the boys and their coach flooded, filled a narrow spot in the tunnel the same way water settles in the trap of a sink. Coach Ek tried to swim out, to see if there was a reasonable chance for the boys to follow, but was forced to turn back. More water came, and the Wild Boars retreated farther, scrambling up—the interior of the cave is not level, but rather rises and falls as it burrows into the mountain—to a chamber with a sandy patch called Pattaya Beach, then down again and up again, eventually reaching an even higher spot beyond. They settled on a mud slope above muddy water. And then they waited, first for minutes. The water did not recede. And so they waited for hours, because there was nothing else to do.
and parents began to worry. They made phone calls and sent text messages—to the head coach, to other parents—until, according to the The Washington Post, the coach reached one boy who didn’t go to Tham Luang after practice. The coach went to the cave and parents went to the cave, and they found bicycles at the mouth and impassable water inside. The Wild Boars obviously were trapped in the cave, but no one knew where exactly or, more to the point, how to get them out. But then the first little miracle transpired, which could probably be dismissed as coincidence if it weren’t for everything else that happened. An hour south, near the city of Chiang Rai, lived a man who knew the innards of Tham Luang better than anyone else on the planet. His name is Vernon Unsworth, a 63-year-old British hobbyist who’d learned to spelunk long ago in the Yorkshire dales and who now lives part of the year in Thailand. That cave, he would later tell reporters, had been “my second home” for more than half a decade: He had gone farther and deeper than anyone before him and had taken extensive measurements and notes; his explorations, in fact, are the basis for some of the section on Tham Luang in The Caves of Thailand, Vol. 2, a book by Martin Ellis published the previous year. As it happened, Unsworth had his gear ready to explore the cave the very next day, June 24, just to have a look around and check the water levels. One of the local authorities who knew Unsworth’s work called him, and Unsworth hustled up to the cave in the middle of the night. Because of his expertise, he understood two things immediately, both of B OY S D I D N ’ T C O M E H O M E ,
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critical importance. The first was where to look for the Wild Boars, a crucial decision considering that the cave is enormous and time was precious. About two kilometers from the mouth of Tham Luang, there is a junction. To the right is a “passage [that] soon becomes a crawl, which is flat out in places and often remains flooded in the dry season,” according to Ellis’s book. Instinct and necessity, then, would have sent the Boars left, toward Pattaya Beach. The second important thing Unsworth understood was that divers would be required, and that ordinary divers weren’t su∞ciently skilled. (Even Thai SEALs couldn’t get far at first.) Cave diving—swimming through tight tunnels full of sharp rocks and strong currents in near total darkness—is extraordinarily specialized and wildly dangerous, so much so that it isn’t even included in most naval dive training; the risk simply isn’t worth the benefit. But Unsworth, being a spelunker himself, knew of divers who were qualified, and he gave the authorities three names: Rick Stanton, John Volanthen, and Robert Harper, all of whom work with the volunteer British Cave Rescue Council. Unsworth told the Thais to contact the three through the British embassy. They were at the cave by 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday. T H E R A I N M O S T LY H E L D o≠ on Sunday, but then fell hard on Monday and Tuesday, too—water pouring from the sky and into the streams and down through the sinks. Deep in Tham Luang, the Moo Pa had no food, and the water below them was muddy, undrinkable, so Coach Ek pointed to the stalactites growing from the ceiling, relatively pure water dripping o≠ them. And the boys decided to dig, using rocks to scrape at the walls. It was futile to think they could tunnel their way out, but even in futility there could be hope. More important than the presence of hope, though, was the absence of panic, and the conservation of energy. Coach Ek had been a practicing monk for ten years, during which, like most monks, he’d learned how to meditate. There is a di≠erence, of course, between devout and dedicated religious mediation and staving o≠ terror in the damp dark of a cave, but the idea is the same. Coach Ek taught the boys to breathe slowly and purposefully, to clear their minds, to remove themselves mentally and emotionally from a muddy slope. Done properly—and the boys would later say their coach was an excellent teacher—the heart rate slows and metabolism downshifts and panic quells. That probably was more e≠ective than digging. Outside it was still raining, great torrents at times, a slow drizzle at others, and always a threat of more, even when the clouds broke over the Doi Nang Non. But rescuers and volunteers continued to arrive, hundreds of them—Thai military and civil authorities, Americans and Australians, expat divers from the resort islands in the south—and they knew they had to get at least some of the water out of the cave. Far above, streams were diverted to slow the flood going in, and massive pumps sucked out millions of liters,
steered a deluge into rice paddies brilliant green with maturing plants. “It was like two cups pouring into one,” said Setthavut Panyakham, the head of the village of Ban Nong O. The rice farmers there knew the flood was coming, knew it would drown their crop, knew they couldn’t re-plant until next year. But they did not protest; of 19 farmers, only four even asked for the compensation that the government o≠ered.
They sniffed. Thirteen people confined in a small space with limited airflow will, as a matter of biological certainty, create a stink. Volanthen smelled people. “It’s about giving,” Panyakham said. Making merit, he says, is also about not asking for money for doing the right thing. Instead of fretting about their destroyed livelihoods, the villagers in Ban Nong O brought food to the cave and washed clothes for the rescuers and directed tra∞c to keep all the volunteers and more than a thousand journalists from tripping over each other and gridlocking the roads. He beamed when he said this. “The people,” he said, “were able to show their spirit.”
forays into the cave, fighting hard currents, laying ropes to mark the way. They all turned left at the junction, as Unsworth had suggested, moving deeper into the cave with each expedition. On July 2, the ninth full day of the operation, Stanton and Volanthen made it all the way to Pattaya Beach, the sandy rise more than two kilometers in. They surfaced. No Wild Boars. They still had some rope left to lay, so they continued on, through a sump—a low spot that fills with water—that required them to swim through a narrow tunnel beneath low-hanging rock before they surfaced again. They sni≠ed. Thirteen people confined in a small space with limited airflow will, as a matter of biological certainty, create a stink. Volanthen smelled people. From the slope, the boys saw muted light through the murk of the water that brightened when it broke the surface. Adul, 14 years old and one of the couple who spoke English, edged to the water. “How many of you?” Volanthen asked. “Thirteen,” Adul answered. “Thirteen? Brilliant.” The boys and their coach wanted to leave. “No, not today,” Volanthen said. “There’s two of us. You have to dive. We’re coming. Many people are coming. We are the first. Many people come.” And many people did come. The next day Thai SEALs ferried food and water and blankets to the Wild Boars, and three of them, along with a military medic, stayed with the team. DIVERS BEGAN MAKING
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But the Wild boars still had to be brought out, and no one was quite sure how that would happen. Or even if it could happen.
the Wild Boars never left the park. They were secure in their own area, separate from the legion of journalists who filled the parking lot, and they napped on cots and in plastic chairs while they kept vigil. On occasion, monks would come to pray with them, including, at least twice, a forest monk by the name of Kruba Boonchum Yannasangwalo. He is 53 years old, revered in parts of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, and somewhat of a celebrity, as far as monks go: A souvenir stand at the temple where Coach Ek lives sells bracelets purportedly woven by him. (It also sells consecrated Phra Ruang Lamphun amulets, which are said to protect the holder from harm, and one of which Coach Ek wore around his neck. They have since become a very popular item.) Kruba Boonchum came to the cave after a woman he did not know, and who did not know him, claimed to have had a dream about the cave. In it, the woman wrote on Facebook four days after the Wild Boars went missing, the spirit of the cave visited her and said she would not release the boys until Kruba Boonchum came to pray. So he came on Friday, June 29, and mediated and prayed. “Don’t worry,” he announced. “The boys are safe. They will come out in a few days.” He prayed and meditated the next day, too, after which he said, “The SEAL divers are not far from the boys.” T H E FA M I L I E S O F
There were many theories about which boy would go first—the youngest, the weakest, the strongest—but in the end it came down to a boy who volunteered. Which was true, except it was Brits and not SEALs. And that could all just be a coincidence, a gentle monk dispensing hope. Or it could be, as some people believe, that Kruba Boonchum, in another life long ago, had been a stable boy who was killed because he loved a princess, and that princess, in her grief, had stabbed herself and bled to death in what is now a cave called Tham Luang. It is possible, because anything is possible when miracles are involved, that the spirit of the cave, the princess whose blood runs through it, was waiting for him to return.
T H E R E W E R E , in the beginning, three main thoughts about how to extricate the Wild Boars. One was deceptively simple: Wait until the monsoons passed and the waters drained to the point where they could walk out, which probably would have been November or maybe even December. But the logistics—the deceptive part—made that option almost certainly fatal. Even if no trained personnel stayed with them, the boys and Coach Ek would need to be fed: Thirteen boys eating
three times a day for, generously, 40 days is more than 1,500 meals, all of which would need to be ferried in by divers flirting with death themselves each time they went under. This was not an academic concern. On July 6, after the boys had been found and a rescue plan was being drafted, a retired Thai SEAL named Saman Gunan was positioning spare oxygen tanks inside the cave, backups for divers making their way to the boys and back, a grueling exercise that took, depending on the skill of the diver and the conditions in the cave, anywhere from five to twenty-three hours round-trip. Gunan was 37 years old, married, a triathlete in excellent physical condition, and a highly trained diver. He was also a volunteer. “Loaded all my stu≠ onto the plane. I’m ready to fly to Chiang Rai,” he said a few days earlier in a selfie video obtained by the Associated Press. “See you at Tham Luang in Chiang Rai. May good luck be on our side to bring the boys back home.” Gunan, diving with a partner, had deposited the spare tanks in the cave. His own ran out before he could surface. SEALs got him out, but he never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at a hospital. And even if meals had been successfully delivered, what about air? There’s only so much of it in a chamber plugged with water, and it was rapidly running out: When Gunan died, the oxygen concentration was beginning to border on dangerous levels. A second possibility was to dig them out. Drilling through a couple thousand feet of rock, which would require extensive construction of infrastructure to even begin, would take too long. So rangers and guides and volunteers crawled over the mountain, looking for natural shafts. Climbers from Koh Libong Island, where for generations men have scaled sheer cli≠s hunting for edible nests made of solidified bird spit—an expensive delicacy—roped up the faces of the mountain, searching for hidden openings. They found none. That left the third option: swimming them out. It had the advantage of being quicker, but also the disadvantage of, well, swimming them out. None of the boys nor Coach Ek knew how to dive. Even if they could learn the basics, cave diving isn’t the same as a practice run in a resort swimming pool. A weakened child submerged in disorienting darkness and breathing unnaturally through a regulator is more likely than not to panic. Yet through long stretches of the cave, he wouldn’t be able to simply surface and regain his composure—he would be in a flooded tunnel, entombed in rock. Perhaps one boy might make it through. Maybe half of them, or even most. But pull that o≠ 13 times in a row, even with experts guiding them? No one wanted to say it publicly, but that plan could kill a few kids. But the rain was still coming, and time wasn’t slowing. The Wild Boars had to come out the way they came in. If panic was the main concern—and it was—that had to be neutralized. First, the rescuers brought full-face respirators to the cave. Rather than sticking a regulator in each boy’s mouth, they would give them masks that
covered everything from their chins to their foreheads. Those would allow them to breathe normally while divers—assisted by about a dozen others posted along the route—guided them toward the mouth of Tham Luang. Second, they would be unconscious. Sedated, if you prefer the technical term, but so heavily that the di≠erence is immaterial. An Australian cave diver and anesthesiologist named Richard Harris, who arrived at the cave on July 6, had consulted colleagues and specialists on how to dose the boys. “I’ve never done it in the back of a cave on malnourished, skinny, dehydrated Thai kids before,” he would say at a press conference later. “So that, for me, was the most frightening part of the week.” (Frightening enough, in fact, that the Thai government granted him diplomatic immunity before the kids were sedated.)
It is no comfort to Gunan’s family, but that the cave took only one of those multitudes who trespassed upon her was in its own way a miracle. That those multitudes even came was a miracle. On July 7, authorities pushed the press farther back from the cave. Harris hiked and swam to the Wild Boars and evaluated each of them. The rescue—or the rescue attempt—was imminent. The next morning, a team of divers, including Harris, Stanton, and Volanthen, made their way to the muddy bank where the Wild Boars were stranded. There were many theories about which boy would go first—the youngest, the weakest, the strongest—but in the end it came down to a boy who volunteered. He was strapped into an improvised harness, with which he could be tethered to a diver, then bundled into a buoyancy jacket to keep him neutral in the water. Too heavy, and he’d have to be held above the rocks on the bottom; too light, and he would bump against the rocks above, dislodge his mask, and drown. And then he was sedated. It was a fastacting medicine that put him in a near slumber, but it was also a short-acting drug. It would wear o≠ after 45 minutes, give or take, so the divers were given a crash course in re-administering it mid-journey. They slipped beneath the water, the boy essentially a package, still and quiet. There was a handle on a his jacket that the diver could hold on to while keeping him clear of sharp rocks, steering him through the tightest tunnels. In dry spots, or at least spots not completely flooded, the other rescuers passed him from one to the next, like a bucket brigade, and in one long, muddy, rocky stretch, they strapped the boy onto a stretcher, clipped it to a line anchored in place by volunteer rock climbers, and maneuvered him above the muck. In the late afternoon, more than four hours after he’d left the ledge, the first Wild Boar was delivered to the mouth of the cave, alive
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and relatively healthy. He was packed into an ambulance, driven to a helicopter, and then flown to a hospital in Chiang Rai to be weaned back to a proper diet and monitored for respiratory infection, which would not be unheard of after 16 days in a damp cave. The next boy came about 45 minutes after the first, then the third and fourth in similar intervals. And that was all that could be done that day: Air tanks had to be restocked, divers had to rest. But rescue e≠orts continued deep in the cave, workers shoveling mud from the passageways that weren’t flooded, clearing and smoothing the path. On July 9, four more boys were pulled and pushed and floated and carried from the cave. The rescuers were practiced now, the cave well prepared: It took less and less time to get a Wild Boar through four kilometers of floodwater and rock and muck, a little quicker each trip. The next day, the final day, the remaining five came out. Coach Ek was the last to leave the mud slope. And then the water started rising again, quickly. One of the big pumps that had been draining the cave failed, almost as if on cue: The boys had been freed, and it was time to leave this place in peace.
the miracle, the Wild Boars were released from the hospital. They’d been admitted in remarkably good shape, all things considered, but kept in isolation as a precaution. The boys had become national symbols and as such were treated with a kind of collective protectionism, as if the country itself had adopted them as its wards. Indeed, they left the hospital under the strict E I G H T D AY S A F T E R
protection of the Thai government, which asked the swarming horde of journalists not to pester them or their families. Instead, the Thai authorities staged a press conference after the boys and their coach were released from the hospital. It was held in a municipal building in Chiang Rai, where a meeting room had been outfitted with rows of folding chairs and a riser for the Wild Boars and, between those two, a miniature soccer pitch. The boys arrived, ran a short gauntlet of photographers, then dribbled a bit on the little pitch before they lined up on the riser. One of Thailand’s best-known television journalists interviewed them all, restricting himself to questions that had been pre-screened by psychologists who feared traumatizing the Wild Boars. He gently extracted their story, from how they were initially trapped and how they passed the time to what they want to do now that they can go home. Eating real food, primarily. Kentucky Fried Chicken, surprisingly. They said the things everyone knew they would say. At first, they were afraid their parents would be angry with them for being so late. Then they were just afraid. They were thirsty and hungry, so very, very hungry, when they were in the cave, and they were grateful now that they were out, grateful to the rescuers, grateful to the world. They mourned Saman Gunan, whose portrait they all had signed and in whose honor almost all of them would be ordained, briefly, as Buddhist monks. They wanted to grow up to be professional soccer players. Or Thai SEALs, like the ones who’d been with them in the darkness, the ones who were now and would forever be family. Mostly, they wanted to go home.
the miracle, Saman Gunan was at the cave—his memory, at least, but quite possibly his spirit, too. He was represented by a large portrait set near the table with the pigs’ heads and fruit, flanked by urns of pink and white flowers and sheltered by a large parasol. He was wearing a red beret in the portrait, and he had a slightly cockeyed grin, the right side of his mouth pulled back, smile lines furrowed in his cheek. He looked, in that rendering, less like a SEAL than an extraordinarily gentle man. He was grieved, of course, but the people had come to honor him, too, in the way of martyrs and heroes. In him, in his face and the emotion it conveyed, was a reflection of all the others, the divers and spelunkers, the people who pumped water and diverted streams, the villagers who cooked food and washed clothes, the multitudes who, collectively, saved 13 people for no other reason than they needed saving. It is no comfort to Gunan’s family, but that the cave took only one of those multitudes who trespassed upon her was in its own way a miracle. That those multitudes even came was a miracle. And that 12 boys can hope still to grow up to be soccer players and SEALs is a miracle. That it was delivered by people of uncommon skill and exceptional courage and raw physical strength makes it no less of a miracle. And so the people came to make merit, to give thanks and to atone, and they stayed there all day, in the shadow of the Doi Nang Nong and the damp of a coming rain, together in gratitude for a miracle and in faith that such things are still possible.
vehicle for a white actor. Coming up, he’s got a remake of The Thomas Crown A≠air, in which he’ll play the titular character previously portrayed by Pierce Brosnan and Steve McQueen. Jordan is doing more than expanding Hollywood’s perceptions; he’s created a new template. “I remember when it used to be like, ‘He’s the next Will Smith,’ ” Jordan says. “Now I’m the example of the next—they’re looking for the next me.”
point is simple: A star ought to cultivate a sense of inaccessibility. “I didn’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, there’s Mike again.’ I want it to be like, ‘Oh shit—Mike’s here.’ ” Leave them wanting more (which they always do) became his line of defense. Often when he opened up, or tweeted, or was photographed in a club, it became grist for interpretation—and for a stretch there, seemingly everything he did was misinterpreted, he suggests. It doesn’t matter whom he’s actually dating; the world has its own ideas. He can be friendly with his Black Panther co-star Lupita Nyong’o and tweet at her, and if the tweets seem suggestive, the two must be dating. It happened last February, when he tweeted, “Bring them chocolate cakes back. You ready for round 2? #youknowyouwantthis.” The flirtation turned out to be part of an MTV game show called SafeWord, not an indecent proposal, as fans had hoped and were determined to make true. (In our defense, those tweets were basically erotica.) He’s found it di∞cult to navigate the expectations—for what he says, for whom he dates— that his fans place on him. Which is why a question about his relationship status drives Jordan inside his sweatshirt.
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sean flynn is a gq correspondent.
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much of Operation Worldwide look easy. But there are certain elements of fame that remain a struggle. He doesn’t have a multistep plan for being good at celebrity. He finds it tricky, especially in the post–Black Panther glow. For a long time, Jordan’s best method for staying above criticism was to just be remote, he says. A tactic borrowed from the insight of another actor he emulates, Denzel Washington. “One of his famous quotes is, like, ‘Why would I pay to see you on the weekend if I can see you every day during the week?’ ” Jordan is paraphrasing Washington, who was actually paraphrasing Sidney Poitier, but the J O R DA N M A K ES
African-American, usually period pieces,” Sun tells me. “But why, if he were just an actor, why would he be limited to only those roles? He was like, ‘Why should other people be held back like that? Why shouldn’t stories from di≠erent points of view be told more frequently? What is holding people back from doing that?’ And at the end of the day, we all know in Hollywood: It’s star power. If you have the star that wants to lead the way in that way, they’re going to do it.” Jordan took roles that were originally written as white, like the Human Torch in Fantastic Four. Creed put him at the heart of a franchise that had previously been a star
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“I don’t even know how you’re going to write this. I’m so nervous even talking like this,” he says through a layer of cotton. These days, Jordan insists he’s single. “My career is awesome. It is going great. There’s other places in my life that I’m fucking lacking at. I’m very mature and advanced in a lot of
“How do you go anywhere normal, chill, just getting to know somebody?” Jordan asks, trying to describe the scrutiny he deals with. “That part of dating is tough.” areas of life. Dating may not be one of ’em. My personal life is not. I don’t really know what dating is.” He pauses, cuts himself o≠. He tries a di≠erent approach. “But it’s like, I could meet you, right now, boom, right here. Me and you sitting here chilling, whatever. Meal, whatever. Somebody could be over there, see this. And all of a sudden, you’re my girl now.” I wouldn’t mind this, I say. My personal stock would rise. “Let it rise, girl, let it rise,” he says generously, then is instantly serious again. “So then they’re going to talk about you, they’re going to find out who you are. They’re gonna find out what your Instagram is, they’re going to find us in that. And all the fan club and everybody else is going to find out who you are, and now you and I are forever associated with one another. So now, how do you go anywhere normal, chill, just getting to know somebody that you just met, that you may not—may or may not—hit it o≠ at all? That part of dating is tough.” Jordan quickly adds, “Now, I’m not saying options aren’t there. I’m not saying that. But as far as, like, the nuance of dating, it’s just not the same. I’m just going to keep trying to work on myself and build this empire.” The constant romantic speculation frustrates him. As does the impression among some of his black fans that he spends an inordinate amount of time with white women. He’s always a bit surprised when he seems to disappoint his core group of fans. “Like, damn,” he says. “Of all the places that I’m getting this, it’s coming from here?” One example: This past summer, Jordan went on vacation. He was bouncing around Europe. He went to Italy. He got on a boat with childhood friend Sterling Brim, the co-host of MTV’s Ridiculousness, and a bunch of women. A bunch of white women. A picture popped up online; headlines called it a “Milky Mayo-y Boat Tour,” a “Beckies Only Boat Party.” For fans who felt that Jordan represented black culture, it seemed like a betrayal. “Michael wouldn’t say this,” Brim tells me over the phone. “I will. He was getting on the boat, but that was my girlfriend. I have a white girlfriend,” vaguely suggesting that all the white women on the boat in Italy were friends with his girlfriend.
Either way, the response over the summer upset Jordan, and as we talk about it now, it upsets him again: “Did you know whose boat it was? No. Was it a yacht? Nah. If you knew what a yacht was, you’d know that wasn’t a yacht. It’s a boat. It’s a boat. Have you ever been to Italy before? Do you know how that works? Sometimes you get on a boat, you go and meet people you’ve never met before, enjoy some stu≠. It’s vacation, it’s life. Then it just turned into this whole other thing that it wasn’t. It just wasn’t that. I felt like I needed to say something in that moment.” He went on Instagram Live to o≠er an explanation and really committed to an extended women-as-types-of-milk metaphor: “I like milk. I like chocolate milk. I love chocolate milk. I like almond milk, strawberry milk. You know the Cinnamon Toast Crunch? You know what I’m saying, the milk after that? I like that, too. That’s pretty good.” It didn’t help. He sighs, sits up, slides his hands into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt. “In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have. As I was doing it, all my boys, everyone, were just like, ‘Mike, put the phone down.’ But I was like, ‘Nah, I need to get this o≠ my chest.’ I just felt like it was unfair, I guess. I just felt emotional at the time.” He’s learning to practice some restraint now. Earlier this fall, a quote he’d given Vanity Fair was poorly received. “We don’t have any mythology, black mythology, or folklore,” he told the magazine. “Is this your king?” asked several tweets, turning Killmonger’s most famous line back on him. Jordan read those tweets. Instead of responding, he just stayed quiet. “I meant we don’t have black mythologies and folklore that’s on the big screen and small screen, period,” he tells me, emphasizing the
“I want to make this thing so my family ain’t gotta worry about nothing. I want intergenerational wealth. I’m going to have fun writing my will.” part of the quote that was missing when it went viral. “And I want to help bring those to the masses, the same stories, bedtime stories, that I was being told of Anansi the Spider and the story of Hannibal and Mansa Musa and all these historical figures!” Why does it bother him so much? Why does he even read the comments? He shrugs. “I’m human. I’ve got people, friends or whatever, in my life that always want to give me the news and the scoop,” he says. Recently he announced a purposeful course correction regarding his carefully curated inaccessibility. He’s changing strategies. “I wanna start to connect with you guys on a more personal level so challenging myself to give MORE of me,” he wrote in a caption on Instagram, promising us the gift of himself, raw and unfiltered.
“I’ve been inspired by Will and what he’s done with his social media as of late,” Jordan says, referring to Smith’s recent and explosive commitment to taking part in dance challenges and embarrassing his kids across social media—to the delight of millions upon millions of rapt fans. “Before that, you didn’t know that much about him. That’s why we’re looking at his posts like it’s the best thing since, like, Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, because we haven’t seen this side of him, ever. He’s earned that reveal.” He admits he’s still trying to figure out his personal formula for fame: “How much to give, how much not to give. What’s o≠-limits, what’s cool to share, what’s not.”
Jordan has been notching, he’s left one item conspicuously undone since he moved to Hollywood. He never got a place of his own. So, a few weeks after we meet, he’ll finally be moving out of the home he shares with his parents, into a not-yet-selected bachelor pad that will have a pool, he promises. For the foreseeable future, he’ll have little time to enjoy it, though. The promotional tour for Creed II looms large on his calendar. It’s a movie he’s proud of and a project he’s worked hard for. Reprising his role as Adonis “Donnie” Johnson, Jordan endured a grueling training schedule to get his body to new levels of objectification-bait for the film. “I wanted to be bigger than I was in the first Creed. More shredded than I was in Black Panther. I just wanted to see evolution,” he explains. “When I look at Creed now, I’m like, ‘I look like a kid.’ I look like a 20-yearold punk.” I admit to Jordan that I had to hide my eyes in a pillow during all of the fight scenes during Creed, I was so concerned about his face. “You didn’t watch the fights? That’s the best part!” he exclaims, pushing back his hood. He loved playing Adonis, the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, and loved being back in the ring for the sequel and having fists fly at him. “If you’ve never hit someone in the face,” he jokes, “you should do that one time, just to get it out your system.” He punched four people in the face during the making of Creed II. Beyond the ring, Adonis is dealing with a lot. The film questions relationships. Parenthood. Compromise. What does young love look like nowadays? What do you sacrifice in building a legacy? When it comes to his own legacy—a word that’s on Jordan’s mind a lot these days—he seems far less concerned with the sacrifices and way more excited about the upside of what he’s building. “I want to make this thing so my family ain’t gotta worry about nothing,” Jordan says of his empire. “My mom and dad, my brother and sister, my nieces, my future nieces and nephews, my future kids—everybody is going to be good. I want intergenerational wealth. I’m going to have fun writing my will. Oh, my God. It’s going to be so much fun.” F O R A L L T H E M I L ESTO N ES
allison p. davis is a senior writer at The Cut.
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Peter Meehan (co-founder, ‘Lucky Peach’ ): Tony was an excuse to smoke. Ripert: We were at the French Laundry. The dinner was exceptional, but one of my favorite moments was when they gave Tony a crème brûlée that was infused with Marlboro cigarettes. And I have to say, it was delicious. Fallon: There was never a show that he was like, “We can just coast through this one. It’s not an important show. It’s not.” It always meant something. Goulding: He was a hotel hound. I don’t know if you remember, but for the longest time his Instagram stories would only be about his hotel rooms. Thornburgh: That guy, he did appreciate a fine thread count. Collins: Tony was also sorta klutzy. Tenaglia: Very klutzy. Meehan: He had an AOL e-mail address. Paula Froelich (author, journalist): I’ll never forget laughing my ass o≠ because he was obsessed with my dog, who’s a small dachshund. He’d always walk my dog, and he was so tall and the dog was so long and short, they would look like this movable L. In 2016, before the election, President Barack Obama joined Bourdain for an episode shot in Hanoi, Vietnam, a meet-up that was months in the making. Jake Tapper (chief Washington correspondent, CNN): The Obama White House reached out to me because Obama was going to Kenya, and somebody had the idea of Bourdain joining Obama and going someplace in Kenya with him. But Bourdain couldn’t do it. I don’t remember why, but he had something, and I just passed it on. To me, I thought that was funny because…what did he have better to do? Sandy Zweig (executive producer, ‘Parts Unknown’): I think that’s probably the only time I’ve seen Tony nervous. Meehan: I asked him about the Obama hang, because obviously you ask about that. And he said to Obama, “We’re both fathers. Can you tell me, is everything going to be okay?” And Obama said, “Yes, Tony. Everything is going to be okay.” And he was comforted by that.
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Goulding: We went out to El Bulli. Albert and Ferran Adrià, the brothers, hosted us for a big barbecue there on the beach. And Ferran turned to Tony and said, “How far can you keep going? Where else can you go? You can’t go to the moon!” And Tony goes, “Really? Why not? I’ll go to the moon and make an episode on the moon. I’ll go anywhere.”
made a meat loaf that was really horrific. And our daughter was like, “I thought he could cook!” She’s 14 now, and after Tony passed away and everyone was putting up their messages outside the restaurant, she went over there by herself, and she wrote a note. And on that note she wrote, “I really didn’t enjoy your meat loaf, but the pancakes you made were fantastic.”
Tower: We were going to CBS. We were walking down the block to go to the studio, and on the other side of the street were some 15 or 20 really loud, professional strikers. Tough guys from New Jersey, screaming and yelling. They saw Tony, and they turned around and went, “Hey, Tony, Tony, Tony!” And he went over and said, “Hey, guys, you know, I’m doing a show, could you just tone it down for about 15 minutes?” “Yeah, Tony, of course, anything for you.” Now, who in the world could get a bunch of New York picketers to shut up, other than Tony? They just turned into little, quiet mice instantly. For about an hour.
Doug Quint (co-owner, Big Gay Ice Cream; close family friend): You know, at his house especially, he just loved grilling giant slabs of meat. But the first time I ate with him, I was at his house, and he’d prepared pigs in a blanket. Hebrew National pigs in a blanket. That was dinner. From a box. They were horrible. And they were burned. It was pre-emptive. He was like, “I cooked food, but I hope you don’t expect much,” and then he threw those at us as a joke. He used to leave the gas stove on. I remember a sign painted over it that Ottavia put up to remind him to turn o≠ the oven or the stove. He would take something o≠ the burner and leave it on.
Jen Agg (chef, author): I got an advance copy of my book to him and didn’t expect much, but within a week he’d sent me a beautiful, cover-worthy quote, and I actually cried. I couldn’t quite believe he’d done it. I was very used to being dismissed/ignored/ vilified by the men who run my industry, so when he chose to do the opposite, I was very, very touched. Goulding: He [eventually just got] tired of eating. You could see it. Very rarely he said anything more than, “Mmm, that’s really good.” I said, “You don’t talk about food anymore.” And he was like, “What do you need me to tell you? You need me to tell you how the acidity plays o≠ of the richness of the cream sauce? And how the crunch helps refresh your palate? Bullshit. You don’t need me.” O≠ camera, Bourdain still greatly enjoyed cooking, hosting, and gently fucking with loved ones. Marcus Samuelsson (chef): He took me to this Russian bar [Siberia, a now defunct dive bar located inside a subway station]. This was, like, at two o’clock in the morning. I had my speech and demo the next day. He had his speech and demo the next day, too. He said, “Marcus, you need to get out, because you have to be sober tomorrow, and guess what: I don’t. I’m going to do my demo hungover and be fine.” I’m completely trashed, and he’s laughing. My demo was horrible. I was hungover, and I see Tony and he’s just laughing on the stage: “See, I told you.” Ripert: Oh, my God, [that bar] was disgusting. It was dirty. He loved the music, and the music was, in my opinion, horrible. In 2007, Bourdain married Ottavia Busia. Together they had a daughter, Ariane, now 11 years old. The couple separated in 2016 but never formally divorced. Collins: A few years ago he was doing a cookbook, and they were testing recipes up at his apartment. So we went up there, and he
José Andrés (chef, author): The last two, three years, he was cooking more and more— almost like he was coming back to cooking. He was enjoying cooking again. Daniel Boulud (restaurateur and chef, Daniel ): He was taking pride in doing simple things, even if it was a steak frites. Tony was quite European in a way, in his thinking of cooking. Even French, I would say.
“That’s the thing about friendship with Tony,” says Gabrielle Hamilton. “Tony lavishes you with love and friendship and generosity and kindness, and then he disappears in the night and you don’t get to reciprocate.” Ripert: When he was renting a house, he was a real chef. You will go to the kitchen, his mise en place was incredible, like something that you see only in fine-dining restaurants. He was so precise with all the ingredients in the di≠erent containers that were perfectly placed on the table. He never cooked anything bad for me. Quint: He’s the kind of host like Ina [Garten] or Martha [Stewart], who has Tupperware ready to go at the end of a meal. He made sure there were extras and that you went home with stu≠. Homme: He liked all the bits that were well beyond what I liked. They make tripe out in the desert in these giant cauldrons, for all the guys who pick grapes and citrus. He was like, “Tripe!” I was like, “I can’t believe you’re excited about tripe.” He’s like, dad-joking, “It takes guts to love tripe.”
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Quint: It was at a rental house out in the Hamptons, and it was the first time I’d ever spent a night with him or anything like that. Their daughter [Ariane] at that time was probably 5. She came and tapped on Ottavia’s arm and whispered to her, and Ottavia said, “Oh, she’s going to do her song.” And I said, “What does that mean?” And Tony said, “Don’t ask. Just watch.” Ottavia took her phone and cued up “Call Me Maybe,” and Ariane came out from behind the wall and lip-synched and acted the whole thing out. Picking up a phone and fake calling into a phone, and it was just the most fuckin’ adorable thing I’d ever seen. I remember looking over at Tony, and he just stared at her with this look on his face like, just he was seeing perfection and couldn’t believe it had come out of him, you know? It’s exactly what you want to see in a parent’s eyes when they look at their kid. I sometimes didn’t like Tony, but I always loved Tony, and there was a lot to love when I saw that look come out at her. Homme: I was saying to him, “I want my daughter to do martial arts and learn to play piano.” And he said, “I don’t care what she does, as long as she loves it.” I thought that was beautiful, because that is the right attitude for parenting. Not to push—to help someone be who they already are and to help someone search hard enough to find who they could be. Hamilton: That’s the thing about friendship with Tony. Tony lavishes you with love and friendship and generosity and kindness, and then he disappears in the night and you don’t get to reciprocate. Friends also recognized that life wasn’t always easy for Bourdain, and that he had his own demons and struggled with the burden of his fame. Thornburgh: He wasn’t out there kicking his heels all the time and saying, “I’m rich and famous.” I think he felt the darkness of it, too. Andrew Zimmern (TV host): We’re shooting promos, standing around, both drinking co≠ees, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the cameras to get set up. And he looks at me, and he says, “Television is such a vile mistress.” Then we heard, from 200 yards away, “Action,” and we started to walk, and I was paralyzed, like, “What the fuck does he mean by this?” Andrés: I think Tony always saw himself as a man always on the edge of the good or the bad. It’s like a knife. It’s a very small edge, a very thin edge, but you have to be careful because you can cut yourself and you’ll never know what side of the knife’s blade you’re going to end up on. Tenaglia: Chris and I had dinner with him three weeks before he died. We had a really great meal together. I remember he had a big piece of steak, a big fat slice of cheesecake at the end of it. I’m just very, very thankful that we had that moment with him. Because three weeks later, to the day, he was gone.
On June 8, 2018, Eric Ripert discovered Bourdain dead by suicide in the bathroom of a French hotel. Ripert declined to discuss Bourdain’s final days for this story. Actor and director Asia Argento, with whom Bourdain was involved at the time of his death, politely declined to participate altogether. The wounds remain fresh and deep, but those closest to Bourdain appear to have absorbed an awful lot from him about how life ought to be lived. Quint: I heard my phone going o≠ in the middle of the night, and it was a text from Ottavia saying, “He’s killed himself, and I wanted you to know before the news came out.” I [drove] to O’Hare and went to their house. The whole morning, I was sitting head down, making sure I didn’t look at the TV. It’s just so fuckin’ lousy. It feels like you’re speeding into a black hole.
“People have said to me, ‘Well, you probably don’t wanna talk about that.’ I feel exactly the opposite,” Morgan Fallon says. “I want to talk about Tony. I want to make sure people know that that was the real deal, man.” Tenaglia: I don’t think it was a shock that one day we would get a call. It was like, “Okay. Maybe we should prepare ourselves that one day Tony’s either gotten into a plane crash, or flipped on an ATV, had a heart attack.” Collins: Not expecting, but you acknowledge that it could happen. Tenaglia: But we didn’t expect that call. It’s like someone’s just hit with you with a giant fucking frying pan. Meehan: It was hard to understand because he was really good at being a person. Helen Rosner (food correspondent, ‘The New Yorker’): He was the center of so many eco-systems. Lajaunie: I was on a trip in the north of Vietnam, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I stopped in this little village, exactly the kind of place where Tony and I would have stopped on the way. I heard my phone ding, with news, and I learned from the A.P. or Reuters that he had just killed himself. It could not have been a better place, and it could not have been a worse place. It was exactly the place we would have been together. And so it was eerie. Quint: That day, Ariane said to me something like, “Is this something that people outside of New York are gonna know about?” And we were like, “Yeah. All around the world, people are sad about this.” Telling her that made me realize, Jesus, God, this is world news. He changed lives around the world. Froelich: I just think it’s lonelier without him in the world.
Bourdain: I have in my possession the notes that people put up on Les Halles. I have them at the house. There was one woman who drove up from fucking Tennessee. Some dude took the back of an envelope to find some blank white space to write on, and he stuck it onto the glass at Les Halles with a Band-Aid. He wrote this personal, heartfelt little thing and then stuck it on with a fucking Band-Aid. Fred Morin (co-owner, Joe Beef ): I decided to put the bottle down. About 73 days. Fallon: I’ve stopped drinking as a part of this whole thing, too. Lajaunie: I’m moving to Vietnam. I think it’s time for me to do it. Goulding: The one common thing you hear from everyone is “Why does this hurt so much? I didn’t know the guy.” Yes, you did know the guy. You shared 100 meals with him, if not more. He shared 1,000 meals with the world. He did that year after year, episode after episode. So to not be able to do that anymore, I think is a big hit for all of us. From President Obama down to your friggin’ mailman, everyone feels that loss. Boulud: When Tony passed away, I suddenly watched a lot on CNN to see all these retrospectives on him, because I needed to feel connected. But I haven’t looked at the episode we did in Lyon since Tony passed. I want to do that in a moment where I can relax and enjoy and watch it maybe with my family in France. That would be nice. Hamilton: I have a very, very, very, very tender, fond moment of saying goodbye to Tony in L.A. I had to leave, and he was napping on his couch in his trailer, sleeping with his arms across his chest. No blanket. Shoes on. And me going in and just touching him on the arm and saying, “I’m leaving, thank you,” and going back to the airport. Just a brief kiss-on-thecheek kind of goodbye. Fallon: People have said to me, “Well, you probably don’t wanna talk about that.” I feel exactly the opposite. I want to talk about Tony. I want to make sure that people understand and know that that was the real deal, man. Thornburgh: My wife’s father’s family is from Japan, so we went and did a month in Japan a few years back. We were at the last soba shop in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, a place you walk over wood planks over a pond to get to. It just felt like the edge of the earth. My kid, who must’ve been like 7 at the time or something, he taps me on the shoulder, and he’s like, “Dad, it’s your friend.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” I turn around and, of course, because it’s this planet we all share, there’s a picture of fucking Tony shaking hands with the soba master in that noodle shop. You cannot go find something that he hadn’t done or where he hasn’t gripped and grinned. The end of the earth. “Daddy...there’s your friend.” drew magary is a gq correspondent.
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fuck with these guys. They’re gonna take my picture.’ ” And they did. At an earlier phase of Hill’s life, he might have experienced this as an existential crisis, being staked out by paparazzi, his every outfit and appearance dissected by jokers on the Internet with a lot of free time and advanced Photoshop skills. But now he’s finding a way to just go with it, to make it his. “If there’s gonna be weirdos with cameras outside my house, I’m gonna at least take some control by having fun with it,” Hill says. He’s been working on accepting what he cannot change.“My life is abnormal, and it’s been abnormal for a long time, but I always tried to pretend it was super normal. And there is a lot of normalcy to it. But outside of the front door, it’s weird and it’s abnormal and it’s great and it’s everything.” Like he said, everything is everything. Right around when he says this, he leans over the recently sanded bar at Shuko to say hi to the chef, Jimmy. It takes only a moment for him to look down and realize what he’s done. He’s in sawdust up to his elbows. He’s coated in shaved wood. You can see on his face how stricken he is. His black uniform has gone tan. He goes to the men’s room to clean what he can. And then he returns, laughing, trying his best to shrug it o≠. He’s going to try to calm back down, he says. “I can get shaken up really easily. Like, once you put both full forearms in sawdust at the beginning…” They seat us in a little cave-like room in the basement. Hill breathes the stress out and smiles. “I’m so much better in a cozy environment than, like, a party environment,” he says. “Because even at 34, I still get social anxiety.” “He doesn’t like to have small talk, ever, at all,” Emma Stone tells me later. They’d be on the Maniac set between takes, “and he wanted to talk about the nature of relationships and the starting point of insecurities.” The waiter emerges with the first course: West Coast Dungeness crab with cucumber and chrysanthemum flowers. “I always eat flowers for lunch, dude,” Hill jokes. In Mid90s, Stevie is a kid with a rough home life: a single mother, played by Katherine Waterston, with a penchant for bad men; an elder brother (Lucas Hedges) whom he worships and who bullies him mercilessly. But when Stevie gets out into the world, skates, makes friends, one of the first things he finds out is that his life is no better or worse than anyone else’s. This epiphany was Hill’s as much as it was his character’s: “There’s a line in the movie, like, ‘If you look inside of anybody else’s closet, you wouldn’t trade your shit for their shit.’ A lot of the film is based on that scene. And I’m obsessed with that idea. And really
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it’s: You’re never gonna get rid of what you’re embarrassed of, any moment in your life, and you really have to, as corny as it is, find selfacceptance. Like, ‘This is who I am, and it’s great.’ And I really struggled in my 20s with, like, understanding who I was or everyone telling me I was something di≠erent than I was.” Stone says she recognized immediately the way that Mid90s was about Hill: “He clearly had just reflected so much on his childhood. And then he wrote it all down and cracked his heart open.” Hill commandeers the stereo and puts on Travis Scott—“This might be the album of the year”—which eventually leads to a conversation about the time Hill went to Wyoming to see a maga-hat-era Kanye West unveil his new album. Hill’s had to answer a lot of questions about this trip since. “My sister didn’t speak to me for a week. We got into a fight.” And she was probably right, he says. “Now I’m just like: I love him as an artist, but I don’t agree with the shit he’s talking about right now, and I want to understand. I think that the people that love him, like myself, it’s getting a little past the point of, like: Just tell us something. Help us love you, you know?”
“Thank God for the movie. The movie saved my life in a lot of di≠erent ways,” he says. He was reluctant to finish it, until he absolutely had to. “It was hard to say goodbye.” The waiter returns with more rafts of sushi, including something he describes as “young shrimp.” “Young Shrimp, that’s my hip-hop name,” Hill says. Suddenly he looks concerned. “I’ve never heard of young shrimp.” It means they’re, uh, new to the world. “Babies?” Babies. “Oh, man.” He eats around the shrimp, until it’s the last thing left, and then tentatively lifts it to his mouth, before immediately spitting it out into a napkin: “Too young! It’s too young!”
over 35 days last summer, using mostly unknown actors. He says it was surreal, watching his teenage cast hanging around the set, laughing and talking, like looking at himself circa Superbad: “It reminded me of sitting around with Michael Cera and Emma Stone and Martha MacIsaac and Chris Mintz-Plasse, and we’re all making fun of each other and roasting each other at lunch, because when you’re young, that’s what you do.” Now he was the adult at the table. After he finished production on Mid90s, Hill went straight into filming Maniac. At the end of the year, he returned to the editing room to complete the film. On December 22, 2017, Hill’s elder brother, the music manager Jordan Feldstein, died of what was later revealed to be a pulmonary thromboembolism—a blood H I L L S H OT ‘ M I D 9 0 S’
clot, essentially. An early version of Mid90s that I saw was dedicated to him. In the film, Stevie’s relationship with his elder brother is complicated: He worships him, and learns about the world from him. But he’s also the guy Stevie needs to get out from under in order to become his own man. I ask Hill how true to life that was for him and his brother. “I definitely learned about hip-hop from my brother. I would sneak into his room, and that’s how I learned about everything. I had better taste in film and music than I ever would have had, because he was six years older and had great taste. And we fought like brothers fight, but it’s not a biopic of our life together.” For the final version of the film, the one in theaters, Hill removed the dedication. “When I was showing it to people I know intimately, they understood. But when we started showing it to an audience, they’re like, ‘What?’ It’s asking a lot of an audience to understand the intimate details of my life. The film is for him, but I took out the straight dedication.” He’s silent for a while. “The timing was really fucked. So it was on my mind every day. Thank God for the movie. The movie saved my life in a lot of di≠erent ways.” He says he was reluctant to finish it, until he absolutely had to—he didn’t lock a cut until right before the Toronto Film Festival, this past fall. Letting go of the edit felt like letting go of more than just the movie. All the feelings had gotten mixed up together. “That’s why it was hard to say goodbye,” he says. “I do like to look for life lessons and all the parallels of this stu≠. Because it makes it something bigger. When you’re giving your time to it and you love it and you love films like I do, if you love writing—it’s like you give yourself to it, but I like to think you’re getting something more out of it, too. And even really shitty bad experiences, if your eyes are open, you’re getting something out of it. So I try and look at life that way, and it’s been helpful.” I imagine that’s easier said than done. “For sure. But also, practice makes perfect.” He stops. “Actually practice doesn’t make perfect. But practice makes better.” Hill likes to tell a story about something Spike Jonze told him, a week before he started shooting Mid90s. He and Jonze were having dinner, and Jonze said to him, I can tell you’re ready, because you’re open. He was ready to let the film become whatever it would be. “That made me happy,” Hill says now, “because the more I’m closed o≠, whether it’s in life or in film, the more I feel like I’m fighting against life, instead of just letting it happen.” Mid90s, he says, is about a lot of things, but one of them is this idea, of allowing yourself to feel, for better or for worse. To be the person you suspect yourself of being. To let it happen. There’s this speech given by one of the characters in the film, a skater played by Na-Kel Smith, about being ambitious. He’s an amateur who wants to go pro. He wants to be better than he currently is. He doesn’t want to apologize for wanting what he wants. “He’s saying, ‘Try hard,’ ” Hill says. “His message is that everyone thinks it’s corny to try hard. I think it’s cool to try hard. His message is: We’re all fucked up. Let’s just be here together. Let’s go skate.” zach baron is gq’s sta≠ writer.
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has participated in the past 50 years of American history, it may all be remembered as preparation for the terrifying responsibilities of his current job. In May 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Trump’s deputy attorney general, appointed Mueller to as special counsel. It would be Mueller’s job to pick up Comey’s most important ongoing investigation and provide Rosenstein with the definitive, o∞cial answer to the question that has been dogging the country and casting a shadow over the legitimacy of its elected leadership: What exactly was going on between Donald Trump and Russia in the months before the 2016 election? In his letter appointing Mueller, Rosenstein granted him a broad hunting license. In addition to the power to indict, subpoena, and haul witnesses before a grand jury, Mueller could probe beyond Russia into “related matters… that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” He could prosecute anyone who sought to thwart him through “perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.” Rosenstein’s letter authorizes Mueller to keep digging at Trump until he either finds the root ball at the center of the president’s tangled corruptions or satisfies himself that no such thing exists. It is hard to look at the document and not see Rosenstein trying to compensate for what happened eight days earlier, when he wrote a memo to support Trump’s decision to fire Comey. Rosenstein was reportedly embarrassed and angered by the perception that he had been used by the White House to get rid of Comey. At one point he is said to have talked about using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from o∞ce. (Rosenstein has denied this.) His choice of Mueller to be special counsel is an understandably frightening one for Trump, or for anyone. “I wouldn’t want him after me, let’s put it that way,” Sheri≠ Gore said. This is how authority is supposed to behave: You do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way, and you keep your mouth shut about it. It is clear that Mueller couldn’t care less—if he is even aware—about his presence in this Men of the Year issue, or about any other form of publicity, for that matter. “One of the ways he’s maintained respect is by doing his job and letting his work speak for itself ” Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. “When you’re taking on the task of investigating the possibility that the president of the United States colluded with a foreign country, the very nature of this investigation is historic. It makes Watergate look small.” A S E X T E N S I V E LY A S M U E L L E R
Rizzo said he doubts Mueller will even hold a press conference when his investigation is complete. But when his report to Rosenstein is done—and many sources have this on the immediate horizon, shortly after the midterm elections—the special counsel’s silence will likely be broken. The question then will be whether the legendary impartiality with which Mueller is believed to have conducted his investigation will float atop the deadly partisan whirlpool of the contemporary news cycle or plummet to the bottom. At that moment, Mueller will no longer be able to please everyone, and the more aggressive partisans may look for ways to tear him down. One can at least take comfort in the idea that Mueller is not worrying too much about these political matters, which are beyond his control and, at least in his view, temporary. “He said to me once, whatever we put out, make sure it’s the truth,” Miller said. “No spin, no coloring, no shading. Even if we were going to get beat up, we were a good agency. We did good work. And that bad story was one day in the newspapers.” The report, no matter what it says, will be thorough. Mueller’s team has interviewed dozens of members of Trump’s cabinet and senior sta≠, along with the author of the notorious pee-tape dossier. He has spent hours with Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn, whose cooperation was reportedly “extensive,” and turned around the loyalties of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. He has more than one million pages of documents provided by the Trump campaign. He has requested records from Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and subpoenaed one of Trump’s largest creditors, Deutsche Bank. “My gut feeling is that where the rubber will meet the road is the financial part of this,” Gore told me. “All
gq is a registered trademark of advance magazine publishers inc. copyright © 2018 condé nast. all rights reserved. printed in the u.s.a. VOLUME 88, NO. 11. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly (except for combined issues in December/January) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President & Chief Executive O∞cer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial O∞cer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue & Marketing O∞cer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing o∞ces. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717, call 800-289-9330, or e-mail subscriptions@gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that o≠er products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these o≠ers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330. GQ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ARTWORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ARTWORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY GQ IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.
these allegations about individuals in Russia and investments going back and forth—when prosecutors put that all together, it’s likely to be the final nail in the co∞n.” “The walls seem to be closing in on some of the key figures,” said Senator Warner. “I hope he concludes as soon as he can.” What should be apparent to anyone following the Russia investigation is that there is, in addition to everything known about Trump already, some X factor, something that is known to members of the intelligence community but has yet to be revealed to the public. John Brennan, the former CIA director, has referred to X repeatedly, tweeting about what might happen when “the full extent” of Trump’s wrongdoing “becomes known” and hinting at times that in 2016 he possessed information about contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, which he passed on to the FBI. As far as those on the outside can tell, X originated in intelligence gathered by Britain and perhaps some other foreign countries. It has passed from Brennan to Comey to Mueller. Senator Warner, who told me he knows “Mueller a bit but not well,” reportedly joked at a dinner in June that “if you think you’ve seen wild stu≠ so far, buckle up.” At the end of Mueller’s investigation, the fight will commence in Congress over the size and significance of X and whether to terminate this presidency early or allow it to hobble its way to the finish line. All Mueller can do is unearth the X and bring it to light. He can arm the country with facts for these coming battles. But he cannot fight them for us. mattathias schwartz’s last article for gq, “The Un-Quiet American,” appeared in the December 2017/January 2018 issue.
A DDI TI ONA L CREDI TS Page 71. Top, from left: Chanelle Sinclair; David McMillan; TravelCollection/Alamy; Sylvain Gaboury/ Getty Images. Bottom, clockwise from left: Alex Lau; courtesy of Wildair; courtesy of Contra. Page 105. Clockwise from top left: courtesy National Archives (Image No. 127-N-a557634); Mike Theiler/Getty Images; Jonathan Ernst/Reuters; Lou Rocco/Getty Images; Mark Wilson/Getty Images; Tom Williams/Getty Images; Al Drago/Getty Images; Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Page 116. From top: Chaz Niell/Icon Sportswire/ AP Photo; Greg Allen/Invision/AP Photo; Corinne Dubreuil/Abaca/Sipa/AP Photo Page 132. Hair by Thom Priano for R+Co Haircare. Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer. Prop styling by Andrea Huelse for Art Department. Produced by Donna Belej at Allswell Productions. Page 133. Fashion by Mel Ottenberg at Total World. Hair by Thom Priano for R+Co Haircare. Grooming by Kumi Craig using Tom Ford for Men Skincare & Grooming. Set design by Ian Salter at Frank Reps. Produced by Mary-Clancey Pace for Hen’s Tooth Productions. Page 147. Braids by Styles by Jamaican Barbie. Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon using La Mer. Produced by Rockman Productions. Pages 154–155. Mr. Magoo: Everett Collection. Beer can: Mamuka Gotsiridze/Alamy. All other photographs: Getty Images (37). Pages 166–167. Chaichan Chaimun/Shutterstock Pages 168–169. Clockwise from top left: Sakchai Lalit/ AP Photo; Rungroj Yongrit/Shutterstock; Royal Thai Navy Facebook page via AP Photo; Tyrone Siu/Reuters
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Backstory
The Full Nelson
Everything that happened during Jim Nelson’s legendary 15-year run as the editor-in-chief of GQ, by the numbers
National Magazine Award nominations:
National Magazine Award wins:
57
10
Pulitzers in the past 12 months:
Stories published by MacArthur “geniuses”:
1
5
Some of the TV shows and movies spawned from magazine articles:
Only the Brave
Editor’s letters recounting drunken
(Good movie!)
1 (that we know of)
Army of One (Starring Nicolas Cage!)
Former staffers who became editors-inchief:
4,228 Times Snoop Dogg referred to Jim as “THE Editor and
Some of the books
6
Last Chance U (Emmy nominee!)
Cortados consumed:
Times Obama threw up the TV shows: 1
magazine articles: Number of Dirty Sanchez stories: 1
Pulphead Lunches eaten in Condé Nast cafeteria: 1 (grudgingly)
Sullivan
Love and Other Ways of Dying
Dinners beginning after 11 p.m., when the restaurant was already closed: 112
—Michael Paterniti
The Stranger in the Woods —Michael Finkel
Total hours late for meetings:
Hidden America
1,823
—Jeanne Marie Laskas
Worst headline:
Into the Storm —Tristram Korten
first line of a story published:
“Orlando Bloom sits chewing banana and peanut butter on toast.”
Ounces of coke expensed for the personal consumption of members of the Jackass cast: 2
Kardashians on the cover:
4!
(if you count Kanye) Thwarted attempts by corporate to make us sell pomade: 17
Trips to Corsica: 47
How to Watch Grey’s Anatomy Like a Man
Second-worst headline:
Bossman of the Year: Donald Trump* *In 2004, for The Apprentice
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FROM TOP: COLUMBIA PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION; FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF JIM NELSON; JAMIE MCCARTHY/GE T T Y IMAGES; JOE SCARNICI/GE T T Y IMAGES; DIMITRIOS K AMBOURIS/ WIREIMAGE /GE T T Y IMAGES
Photographs of men jumping in the air while wearing suits:
PUT TWO & TWO
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