Glenn Close is not going to be ignored this time around, as the eight-time Oscar nominee will finally receive recognition from the academy this fall. |
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, working up a healthy World Cup fever even if it’s just an excuse to head to Lucky Baldwin’s for a pint or two and watch Cristiano Ronaldo one last time. |
But let’s circle back to American football and my digital cover story with “Beef” stars Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton, who watched a Super Bowl together, though they were cheering for different teams. |
That Super Bowl in question was Super Bowl LIX, pitting the Philadelphia Eagles against the Kansas City Chiefs. Melton hosted a watch party, and since he considers Kansas home and played football for Kansas State University, you might think he’d be rooting for the Chiefs. |
Nope. |
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“When I was living in Germany, I fell in love with Donovan McNabb,” Melton, an army brat, tells me, name-checking the longtime Eagles quarterback. |
Spaeny, it turns out, was the only Chiefs fan at the party. To enter Melton’s home, she had to step on a doormat that was fitted with a red-and-white Chiefs jersey. (“It got real dirty,” Melton says with pride.) |
Melton and Spaeny enjoy a relaxed and playful give-and-take, borne from the months they spent preparing to play Austin and Ashley, a Gen-Z couple working at a Montecito country club, dreaming and scheming toward upward mobility in “Beef.” |
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(Erik Carter / For The Times) |
The most memorable episode they shared found the couple in an overcrowded, ninth-circle-of-hell emergency room with Ashley, uninsured, experiencing severe ovarian torsion. Her concerns are dismissed and she begs for someone to save her. |
“Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-common experience,” Spaeny says. “I probably have a conversation once a month with female friends who go to the doctor’s office and are gaslit by the system, just being made to feel like what they’re experiencing isn’t really happening or they’re making it up. It’s scary.” |
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Still, being “Beef,” the episode has its share of mordant humor, like the scene where a nurse asks Ashley to rate her pain, zero being pain-free and 10 being excruciating. |
“Oh, I thought it was like Letterboxd,” Ashley replies, referring to the movie review social platform. “Two-and-a-half stars out of five is average.” |
“My whole life I’ve been a six or seven,” Melton says, noting his own personal pain scale. “I’ll have a cold and I’ll be like, ‘Six or seven.’” |
“That sounds like you,” Spaeny says. |
“I can get pretty dramatic,” Melton says. “It’s really like the end of the world when I’m sick.” |
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Spaeny deleted her Letterboxd account because she gets anxious about anything online containing reviews. |
“It takes two buttons to click on a movie that I’ve been in and see what people say about me,” Spaeny says. “So I forgot my password and left it that way.” |
Melton is an enthusiastic adopter and says he has twice shared his four favorite films, a feature where actors, usually on the red carpet, list a quartet of beloved movies. (Here’s one at the “May December” premiere where Melton enthuses over “The Matrix,” “In the Mood for Love,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Persona.”) |
“I saw them at another event and they were like, ‘Charles, so good to see you.’ And I was like, ‘Do you want my four favorite films?’ And they said, ‘No, you’ve already done it enough,’” Melton laughs. “What can I say? I love movies!” |
