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Carrie Coon has had quite a year.

Not only is she going into the Emmys as a nominee for her work as Bertha Russell in “The Gilded Age” but she spent months in Thailand shooting the third season of Mike White’s HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.”

“I got back from Thailand a few weeks ago, and I went back to ‘The Gilded Age’ 48 hours after I landed,” Coon says on the latest episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “I wasn’t supposed to stay that long, but ‘The White Lotus’ ran over a little bit because of the weather. I didn’t have any time in between, and it was very jarring, to say the least, to go from wearing bathing suits to wearing a corset. It was a little extreme.

“And I was terrible. I was just terrible the first couple days,” she continues. “I said,...

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I first met Michael (that’s what he went by in college, so that’s what I still call him) White in an acting class during our freshman year at Wesleyan. There were two acting classes, and we were in the bad one — the B group, so to speak. Michael was already a little bit famous on campus, having done a scene that made a big splash in No Doze Theater, an all-night theater production that ran during finals. But what stuck out to me was that he wasn’t wearing socks — it was January in Connecticut. He still doesn’t really know how to dress for the winter.

We remained close friends for years before ever working together. When I was just starting out and would travel to Los Angeles for work, I would stay with him, frequently overstaying my welcome. I...

A series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope

Before his successful career took off, Mike White wrote and starred in the indie comic-thriller "Chuck & Buck."Mike White is an incredible talent. Currently on HBO, his miniseries The White Lotus has become a must-see weekly event. Between Enlightened, School of Rock, Beatriz at Dinner and impressive seasons on Survivor and The Amazing Race, White has been a great fixture of film and TV over the past couple decades. In honor of The White Lotus success, we thought we would travel back in time to one of his earliest performances and screenplays - Chuck and Buck.

The early digital film feels like a relic of another time, especially compared to White’s more polished HBO work as of late. The advent of digital allowed more filmmakers a chance to tell their stories as they were able to do it on the cheap.

Welcome back to the Supporting Actress Smackdown. Each month we pick an Oscar vintage to explore through the lens of actressing at the edges. This episode goes back to the turn of the millenium, when Almost Famous, Pollock, Billy Elliot, and Chocolat were new in theaters and the following actresses were having a moment...

The Nominees 2000 provided a bevy of possibilities in the supporting actress category but Oscar ignored the gifted comediennes (Parker Posey in Best in Show and  Elaine May in Smalltime Crooks), the foreign divas (Catherine Deneuve in Dancer in the Dark and Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger), indie darlings (Lupe Ontiveros in Chuck & Buck) and even women in Best Picture contenders. What they came up with instead was an almost eerily archetypical shortlist which included five different kinds of traditional Oscar-friendly roles: long-suffering wife, feisty grandmother, manic pixie dream girl, mama bear, and the tough mentor.

In real life, a “yes day” is a recently codified parenting technique where desperate moms and dads bait their kids towards good behavior by rewarding them with a 24-hour period in which the parents can’t say “no” to any of their kids’ requests. Candy for dinner? Sure. Wearing Peppa Pig cosplay to the park? If that’s what they want. Helping a local bear recover the stolen pop-up book he wants to give to his aunt for her birthday? As long as no one gets arrested that sounds just fine.

In Netflix’s “Yes Day,” (cast against type in the role of a fun-loving lawyer dad who twerks within the first 10 minutes ), a “yes day” is basically the Purge for kids. Of course it starts on an innocent note, with the youngest of Allison and Carlos Torres’ three kids forcing her parents to dress up as glitter-spackled superheroes for...

Writer-producer Dana Baratta, known for projects including Dawson’s Creek, Jessica Jones and Good Behavior and a close collaborator with producer Melissa Rosenberg, died on Sunday She was 59. Her family announced Baratta’s death after a years-long battle with ovarian cancer.

Born in a small town in Maine, Baratta kicked off her film and TV career with the 1994 movie Andre, the family drama directed by George Miller. Baratta wore a number of hats on the pic as an editor, co-producer and writer.

In 1998, she landed Dawson’s Creek, the first of many TV series for which she would write and produce. She wrote seven episodes for the WB series that launched the careers of James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams among others.

Her next TV series gig would be Providence, the Emmy-winning John Masius romance drama for NBC. She produced 13 episodes and even wrote one for the series.

Throughout the...

The trick to creating successful screen farce is to make sure audiences don’t see you sweat. So it’s not a good sign that the actors are spritzing up a storm in Like a Boss. But what actors! The comic tornado known as Tiffany Haddish seizes the role of Mia Carter, the creative wiz behind a Diy cosmetics company she runs with her numbers-minded best friend, Mel Paige, played by her up-for-anything costar Rose Byrne. The duo work their butts off for laughs that the putatively femcentric script by two first-time screenwriters,...

Hulu has released its list of all the new content coming May 1 as well as everything that will leave the streaming service at the end of the month.

Highlights include Hulu Originals like “Into The Dark: All That We Destroy,” the show’s eighth episode coming May 3. Hulu describes the show as “A geneticist who fears that her son may be becoming a serial killer creates a group of clones in an attempt to cure him of his psychopathic tendencies by allowing him to relive the murder of his first victim.”

George Clooney’s “Catch-22,” which is on the Joseph Heller novel of the same name arrives mid-month. Per Hulu: “‘Catch-22'” is the story of the incomparable, artful dodger, Yossarian, a Us Air Force bombardier in World War II who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him.” The show stars Kyle Chandler,...

Every critic’s worst movie is another’s best, but Variety critics Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman had to draw the line somewhere. Whether it was the year’s top film at the box office, or a right-wing documentary that’s even worse than the filmmaker’s previous outrages, it was a good year to hate-watch.

Peter Debruge’s Five Worst Movies:

“Avengers: Infinity War”

Spoiler alert: The power-mad crazeballs behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe are out of control. First they blew up an entire planet (at the end of “Thor: Ragnarok”) and laughed if off, and then came Thanos’ snap, which (I said “spoiler alert” already — get off my case!) killed off half of all life in the galaxy. When that happened, I wanted to scream, “You can’t do that!” and not because I care about these characters (most of whom are quasi-invincible imbeciles anyway — although I was...

Paramount has tapped Miguel Arteta to direct the upcoming Tiffany Haddish comedy “Limited Partners.”

The studio announced in May that it had pulled “Transformers 7” from its June 28, 2019, release date, and slotted Haddish’s comedy “Limited Partners” in its place. Paramount set up the project last fall with writers Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly. The story centers on two female friends who build a successful company, then find their relationship tested following a buyout offer.

Peter Principato, Itay Reiss, and Joel Zadak are producing through Artists First, the re-named Principato-Young. Haddish is an executive producer and helped develop the script.

Haddish broke out in last year’s “Girls Trip” and will star in two comedies this fall: Universal’s “Night School” with Kevin Hart on Sept. 28 and Paramount’s Tyler Perry comedy “Nobody’s Fool,” opening Nov. 2. She’s also joining Hart in the voice cast of Universal’s “Secret...

For the curious, “Duck Butter” is Nsfw. Or at least, it’s not the kind of film title you want to Google from your work computer. Like a naïf (or an old person), I wasn’t familiar with the phrase “Duck Butter,” but figured that I probably wasn’t about to watch a foodie documentary. As its title implies (if you’re cooler than I am), this comedy from Miguel Arteta is sexy and sexually frank in its depiction of a relationship in fast forward.

Search Party’s Alia Shawkat falls for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in this occasionally daring but ultimately exhausting 24-hour love story

Writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta have quietly become one of the most effective yet underrated double acts working in independent film. They’ve created a string of nuanced, darkly funny, usually female-centric films and even one TV show, starting in 2000 with uncomfortable stalker comedy Chuck & Buck. Since then they’ve given Jennifer Aniston her best role to date in The Good Girl, gifted us with the criminally short-lived Laura Dern HBO show Enlightened, and most recently delivered Beatriz at Dinner, one of the sharpest films to tackle the current fractured state of the Us.

Related: 'I'm not a quirky 17-year-old any more': what Arrested Development's Alia Shawkat did next...