The Color of Money: Scorsese Knew All Along

There is a version of Martin Scorsese that never quite recovered from the 1980s. *Raging Bull* had been ignored at the box office, *The King of Comedy* was a commercial disaster, and Hollywood was doing what Hollywood does best — deciding that a director's vision was less valuable than his ability to fill seats. Then Paul Newman wrote him a letter. Not an email, not a call through an agent — a letter, the kind that requires you to mean what you say. The result was *The Color of Money*, 1986, and Newman's first Oscar after seven nominations. Forty years later, it reads less like a comeback story and more like proof that the best creative alliances begin with someone being honest about what they admire.

That story landed this week alongside the news that is apparently inescapable in the industry right now: HBO's Harry Potter series is consuming talent and money at a rate that suggests someone at Warner Bros. is terrified of getting it wrong. Nicholas Hoult is joining as Gilderoy Lockhart in the second season — a casting choice so perfect it almost makes you suspicious, because Hoult has built an entire career on playing men who are performing competence they don't possess, and Lockhart is the literary archetype of exactly that. The U.K.'s largest Harry Potter store is opening in London to coincide with the launch. Netflix executives are watching all of this very carefully.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Strong spent seven months speaking exclusively in a Polish accent for a role, wrote a personal letter to Mark Zuckerberg after being cast to play him in *Social Reckoning*, and then told GQ — now under new global editorial director Adam Baidawi — that Zuckerberg is "a reviled person." The letter still got sent. This is the most Jeremy Strong sentence that has ever existed, and somehow it tells you everything about why he is the most compelling actor of his generation: he does the thing anyway, then explains why it was complicated. The process is the performance and the performance is the process, and at some point you stop asking where one ends and the other begins.

*It Follows 2* is filming. Maika Monroe is back. David Robert Mitchell has finally surfaced with an update after a delay that began to feel less like scheduling and more like reluctance to return to something that worked so completely the first time. The original *It Follows* understood something about dread that most horror films miss entirely — that the scariest things move slowly, deliberately, and never stop.

The verdict this week belongs to Scorsese and Newman, though. Two men who had already proved everything, deciding to prove it again — and the letter that started it. The lesson, forty years on, is the same one it always was: sometimes the most important move is just telling someone you believe in what they're doing.