15 minute read
Forces of Spring
A newly minted heartthrob, a musical master, and a punkyeccentric embody the dynamism of the season, which saw Mert& Marcus on camera, directional menswear, and water-resistantgrunge. 3, 2, 1… The forces of Spring prepare for lift-off.
Hero Fiennes Tiffin
A smash-hit young-adult book series hits the big screens, launching a future leading man.
A semi-known actor being uploaded to insta-celebrity has only happened a handful of times in the history of fandom. It happened to Daniel Radcliffe and Robert Pattinson, Jamie Dornan and Ansel Elgort, and it’s all but guaranteed to happen to Hero Fiennes Tiffin this spring. The golden boy in-waiting plays the romantic lead in After, hitting theaters this April, a parental advisory–pushing YA adaptation being projected as Fifty Shades for the 1D generation.
The model-turned-actor’s combo of leading-man looks and Hollywood pedigree (thanks to filmmaker mom Martha Fiennes and actor uncles Ralph and Joseph) is surefire kindling to ignite a bona-fide star that will only be fueled by After’s rabid teen following and salacious subject matter. But at present, bundled up in a Soho studio, the 21-year-old Londoner is still best known as young Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Like most Hogwarts alum, he has his lucky totems. Dipping into his hoodie, he pulls out his new gold chain and pendant—a miniature chimney sweep he picked up at a local jeweler in Brixton.
“I used to wear only one chain that my sister gave me ages ago. I was never huge on jewelry. I just liked having my one chain,” he says in a disarming baritone that betrays his acting-royalty roots and posh Battersea postcode.
But wearing a beanie, a black What We Wear hoodie, and black Madewell skinny jeans, he’s anything but posh. The 6’2” Scorpio looks as though he might hop on a Harley and speed away—which he probably could if he had to: “My brother had [a Harley],” he says, referring to Titan Fiennes Tiffin, 23. “I bought a motorbike when I was 16,” he says. “When we were younger [Titan and I] would ride wherever we could get away with it.”
A Harley would be an ideal fit for the bad-boy image he portrays in After. The original e-book, uploaded as One Direction fan fiction by then-25-year-old author Anna Todd, would go on to be read one billion times on Wattpad— an online playground for Harlequin yarns. It soon landed Todd a six-figure publishing deal, a spot on the New York Times Best Seller List, and a lucrative option by Paramount. But to the uninitiated, the mega-cult of After often comes as a surprise, as it did for Fiennes Tiffin. “I had never heard of the book before,” he admits. “Hearing how many fans it has and the numbers that it did, I was shocked.”
With After stans increasingly turning their fandom toward Fiennes Tiffin, one question might be: does he himself feel sexy? “I don’t think you’re allowed to judge yourself on that! I think you should have it in your head that you are, but I don’t think you should say it on record,” he offers. “But I guess ‘sexy’ is a word that can mean different things. I feel like everyone should see themselves as ‘sexy’ in their head, but I don’t think you should ever say it out loud.” Needless to say, he doesn’t have to say it. He has plenty of wordsmiths ready to write their own fan fictions about Fiennes Tiffin online.
Hero wears jacket, top, shorts by Dior Men
Since the announcement of Fiennes Tiffin’s casting last July, After fans have flooded the web with photos and praise, like one tweet reading, “Ladies, we’re done drunk texting our exes, we only drunk DM hero fiennes tiffin now.” Some have gone so far as to dissect the few paparazzi shots of Fiennes Tiffin, zooming in to his biceps or his V-cut abs. What does he make of all the attention? “What the fans do, the effort they put in, is so great,” he says with diplomacy. “There are definitely elements of it that are overwhelming, and elements of it that are so cool, but you have to take it with a pinch of salt.”
It wasn’t the popularity of the book that appealed to Fiennes Tiffin so much as the complexity of his character, Hardin, whom the unsuspecting Tessa (Josephine Langford, sister of Katherine) encounters on her college campus. While he gleaned that Hardin walks the line between mysterious hunk and brutish jerk, he held off on reading the book, which is told entirely from Tessa’s perspective. Instead, to get into Hardin’s particular headspace, Fiennes Tiffin chatted daily, often for hours on end, with Todd, who was on set and coproduced the film.
He’d worked hard to nail a leading-man role; Fiennes Tiffin can list off the projects he’s been up for but failed to secure: there’s Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, The Hate U Give, and Stranger Things’s second season. “I remember watching [them] and thinking, was that the part I auditioned for? And [one character] would start saying the lines from the audition, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I remember!’” he says. “[But] sometimes after a while you think, I must be doing something wrong.”
Which is not to say he lacks confidence. “I’m definitely confident in myself,” he says. “I’m self-assured, but I wouldn’t think of myself as the most outgoing. I get my confidence through auditioning; even getting one audition builds you up as a person.” But there are at least a few projects in the offing for which no audition will be necessary: he’s already signed on for the planned sequels to After.
While Fiennes Tiffin says many fans have yet to approach him IRL, he knows that may soon change. Whether he’s ready for fame is another story. “I don’t know if you can be ready for that kind of stuff,” he says. As for the Fifty Shades comparisons, this master-in-training is unfazed. “Obviously [Fifty Shades] did really well,” he says. “So being compared to that isn’t a bad thing… [But] some scenes won’t be too fun to watch with the ’rents!”
Hero wears jacket, top, pants by DQSquared2, necklace by Chrome Hearts, bracelet by David Yurman
By Trey Taylor
Mark Ronson
After conquering Hollywood, the power producer’s next act is his most triumphant to date.
Mark wears jacket by Louis Vuitton
It’s 10 degrees in New York—so bone-chilling outside that it’s even bone-chilling inside—and Mark Ronson is sitting in Studio C of the Electric Lady Studios in the West Village, putting the finishing touches on his fifth album, Late Night Feelings, his tall, lithe frame slumped in a chair and wrapped up in a heavy shearling. Frost be damned, he hunches over a mixing board and pulls up a song, staring off into the distance while listening for elements to change or get rid of. He is a producer and songwriter, not a singer or rapper, and so this part of the process—finding an album’s exact sound—is Ronson’s mastery.
“I’d say the record was done, then think, is this bad? Am I just conning people?,” says Ronson, who, at 43, is angularly handsome with a wall of pompadoured hair. “But [you have to] be painstaking.” Late Night Feelings, in its aura of introspection, is something of a departure for Ronson. Though he has long been capable of creating deeply emotional work on other people’s albums—like Amy Winehouse’s 2006 masterpiece Back to Black, which he coproduced—he has generally stayed in party mode on his own projects, like 2015’s Uptown Special, which featured “Uptown Funk” with Bruno Mars, a winking and excitable funk throwback that has racked up 3.5 billion views on YouTube. Before hitting it big as a producer in his own right, he was known as a DJ, and has an instinct for keeping the mood elevated.
Mark wears jacket, shirt, and turtleneck by Prada
Late Night Feelings has all the hallmarks of Ronson’s oeuvre, including an A-team of talent to perform the songs, in this case Miley Cyrus, Camila Cabello, Lykke Li, and Angel Olsen to name a few. Since going from the DJ booth to the recording studio in the early 2000s, Ronson has refined a glittering sweet spot that he says is “somewhere in between dance and R&B and pop.” The new track with Cabello, for instance, is a sugary slice of ’80s synth. But the album also has a truly tender touch. Since his divorce from ex-wife, the model Joséphine de la Baume, in 2017, everything he’s felt like creating has had a softer underbelly. “I was going through it. I was overwhelmingly melancholy,” he says. “Because of songs like ‘Uptown Funk,’ I’m always like, no, I’m a DJ, no one wants to hear [feelings] from me. Then the minute that I actually let my emotions into the music, it was the only thing that resonated.”
Still, in keeping with his DJ’s intuition, he was as interested in reading the room as he was in analyzing his own psyche, and he wanted the “late night feelings” behind the album’s title to be less specific to his own life than emblematic of the stresses that keep most people awake at all hours. It’s an album that’s more empathic than strictly personal—a mirror as much as a diary, sung by a cast of characters who all bring their own experience to the mic. “You know that feeling when you are trying to get to sleep and then two, three AM rolls up, you start to see dawn cracking, and you’re like, how the fuck am I going to get through tomorrow?” he says. “It’s about anything that leaves you unable to sleep. Heartbreak, anxiety, lust, bills, disdain for the world, the state of America.”
Which isn’t to say Late Night Feelings is maudlin. Many of the songs are, as he has labeled them, “sad bangers,” the kind to sweat out your pain to. “It still has to dance and move and be a tiny bit shiny,” he says. ”I’m not completely abandoning my box in the DJ section of the record store.” Take “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” the album’s first single, a beautiful ode to forlorn 1970s country sung by Miley Cyrus and done with a glitzy and contemporary disco twist. “The longing is there, the heart is in the voice, but there’s still killer basslines and drums,” he says. “I need to know that I’ve reinforced [a song] with everything that’ll give it a chance. What’s the point in getting Miley Cyrus to deliver this amazing vocal if you’re not going to ensure that it’s gonna fuckin’ bang?”
He is finishing Late Night Feelings all while gearing up for the Academy Awards. His work on “Shallow,” performed by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper for A Star is Born is favored to win Best Original Song after snagging the Golden Globe (at press time, the Oscars had yet to air). He first worked with Gaga on her 2016 album Joanne, and those sessions turned into him writing on “Shallow,” but he’s known her—and that she’s the real deal—for about a decade. “[When we met], she was just starting to blow up, and I was like, ‘Do you want to come out with me and my friends in London?’ We ended up at a loft apartment in East London,” he remembers. “She instantly went to a piano. There’s 30 people [there], nobody knows who she is, she’s wearing this skin-colored latex outfit, playing some chords, and [we have] a jam session. I think five o’clock came around, and she was still there.”
He is characteristically pragmatic about his Oscar nod. “I was in Terminal 5 about to take a JetBlue flight at eight in the morning when I found out I was nominated,” he says. “It’s an incredible accolade, but you still have to board a plane. Just get on with life, just keep doing the things that got you there to begin with.” Which is exactly what he’s up to here in this studio on this freezing cold Monday in January. “I think that continuing to care about the quality of the music, and working with incredibly talented people, is a good formula. I know I’m a 43-year-old dude making pop music. I’m aware my shelf life should maybe be over,” he says. “You have to prove yourself.” And with that, he queues up another track.
Mark wears jacket, shirt and pants by Jacquemus and shoes by Giuseppe Zanotti
By Alex Frank
Charlie Heaton
The pro drummer-turned-streaming sensation brings a “stranger” sensibility to sci-fi blockbusters. Here, Heaton talks to director and pal Miles Joris-Peyrafitte.
The first time I saw Charlie Heaton was in a pile of audition tapes. He had a thick British accent and, if memory serves, a black eye. I was 22 and casting my first film, As You Are, and while I was initially wary of casting a Brit to play a part written to be me or one of my Albany friends, his take on the character of Mark assuaged my suspicions.
If there was one thing As You Are succeeded in, it was the cast; the three leads (Charlie, Owen Campbell, and Amandla Stenberg) clicked immediately. We’d all met each other at a time in our lives when, like the characters, we needed each other. We were devastated when Charlie had to miss the wrap party (it overlapped with his first day on Stranger Things) but when he left there was no doubt that the friendships we had made were real and lasting.
My most recent encounter with Charlie was at the Ace Hotel in New York, as he was preparing for the premiere of Stranger Things’ third season in July, and his upcoming role in The New Mutants.
Charlie wears shirt, tank, and pants by Givenchy. Bracelet (right) by David Yurman, (left) Heaton's own. Boots by Clergerie.
MILES JORIS-PEYRAFITTE When did I see you last?
CHARLIE HEATON We were shooting Season 3; it must’ve been when I played drums for Faye Webster in September.
MJP That was the first time I got to see you play—right back where we started, too. Do you remember the first time we hung out, at Baby’s All Right [in Brooklyn]?
CH Yeah, how could I forget? You took me to see that really cool band. I wasn’t impressed [laughs].
MJP I remember looking at your face, like, oh I lost him. Found this great kid and he fuckin’ hates this. Do you have your own drum kit in Atlanta?
CH No, but I bought myself some music stuff last year—a guitar and keyboard. Because when you’re acting, you’re not in control of anything you do or say, so I still want to do music. Not to release an album—I’m literally coming home, emoting a bit, crying into the microphone... So sad! But it’s been nice. [Music] has always been a part of what I do.
MJP You left for Atlanta to shoot Season 1 the day we wrapped As You Are. No one knew what the show was going to be.
CH You wanted to hate it.
MJP I wanted to so badly. I was furious at the show. They wouldn’t let me shave your head. And then I watched the whole season [in a] day and I just couldn’t believe it. I loved it so much. How has the show affected you as a person?
CH It feels like a long time [has passed] since the first season. The characters have been on a journey, and all of us [as actors] have been on a journey. Sometimes I’ll get extremely nostalgic for the first season; there was innocence in not knowing what it would become... The trajectory of the last three years happened so quick; you don’t have time to think. And when you get a grip of things, you think, yeah I can be in control of my own destiny.
MJP [That reminds me] of seeing you get out of the car for the As You Are premiere in San Sebastian. In my head, this is literally when Charlie realizes that he’s famous, but he also has food poisoning... But you insisted on [being there]. It seems like you’ve always just gone and done the work. What was going through your head, [when] all of a sudden there were people giving a shit about you?
Charlie wears sweater by Gucci, pants by Stella McCartney. Makeup by Mariko Arai and hair by Tomo Jidai.
CH At first I thought they were screaming “Dalí,” but then I realized they were saying “Charlie.” I was really sick [but] you have that duty. It was new to me, so I [had to keep going].
MJP It’s kind of a drummer thing—your head is down, you’re keeping the beat, doing the work... Do you feel like your fanbase, which is a lot of young people, all on social media and who have opinions, puts a new responsibility on you?
CH Everything is really instant in the world we live in now. Nothing is tangible, it’s all quickfire. Social media can feel quite toxic. It can connect us but I worry it’s pulling us more apart.
MJP We’ve almost lost the ability to have a conversation. You’re not allowed to be wrong or make mistakes.
CH No, you’re not. You post something and it’s instantly judged. So, yeah. It feels like a dark world.
MJP When you’re on set, whether it’s Stranger Things or New Mutants, who to look to for guidance?
CH It is the director’s vision, but as an actor I find it hard to walk away from any scene and be like, that was fucking great! Did you see me do that? You always walk away with self-doubt. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to please myself. The scene [in As You Are] when Mark and Jack kiss, we worked on that for quite a while, struggling in between takes, hands in hair... [Something] didn’t feel right. But it ended up being one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
MJP None of us knew if we had it... I also remember the first time I asked you to do a series. You were so mad.
CH I was more hurt than mad. It was my second day on set. It was like, “Great, Owen.” And then, “Okay, Charlie do that again. Say that line again.” I was like, I can’t act. I’m fucking it up.
MJP And it was just because we had so little time... Does it make it easier having [girlfriend and co-star] Natalia [Dyer] there [on Stranger Things]? Does having someone there that you trust, not just work-wise, but that’s also like, “You’re my person,” make the process easier?
CH Yeah, because there are times when you do get stressed. So to go home with someone you work with, and say, “I think they hate me...” They’ll say, “No they don’t.” You can break the walls down with your partner. Because we work in the same industry and have had similar trajectories, we’ve gone through it together. Sharing that does bring you closer. They understand something that maybe no one else would. You go into high pressure situations together but you can share those insecurities or whatever they are. The great, happy times, too... Really fucking sweet!
By Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
