Fincher Won: Olyphant Learned to Stop Counting

By Dua Mifsud

There is a specific kind of actor who walks onto a David Fincher set and immediately begins doing the mathematics. How many takes is too many? Who is this for? Is this control or is this craft? Timothy Olyphant, by his own admission, was doing the mathematics. He thought the relentless repetition on *Adventures of Cliff Booth* — the long-awaited *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* sequel — was an unnecessary power move. He said this out loud. He also said he couldn't wait to get on set. Both things are true and neither one cancels the other out, which is the most honest thing an actor has said about working with Fincher in years.

Here is what I think actually happened: Olyphant started counting takes and stopped understanding the film. That is always the moment you lose Fincher. The takes are not about perfection in the way people assume — they are about erosion. Fincher shoots until the performance has no more performance left in it, until what's on screen is something closer to behaviour than acting. Whether that's necessary is exactly the wrong question. The question is whether it works, and it almost always does.

Meanwhile, the Harry Potter universe is celebrating twenty-five years of *Sorcerer's Stone* with a theatrical re-release and new footage from the HBO series reboot — which is either a genuinely generous gift to a generation raised on Hogwarts or the most elegantly disguised marketing campaign Warner Bros. Discovery has run this decade. Probably both. I'll be in the cinema anyway. Some nostalgia is worth the transaction.

On the streaming charts, John Boyega's *Pacific Rim Uprising* is dominating Netflix competitor HBO Max, which is the kind of sentence that deserves a moment of reflection. Not because the film is bad — it isn't, it's a functional enough sequel to Guillermo del Toro's genuinely magnificent 2013 original — but because *Uprising* is the film that happens when you remove everything that made the first one worth watching and replace it with brightness and speed. Boyega is good. He's always good. The film around him is a different conversation.

Hugh Jackman's 2019 HBO crime drama *Bad Education* should have been an Oscar film. It wasn't, because premium cable apparently disqualified it from consideration at the time, which remains one of the more embarrassing administrative decisions the Academy has quietly pretended never happened.

The verdict: Fincher is always right. You just don't know it until the film is finished.