1. Benicio del Toro Opens Up to Scarlett Johansson About On-Set Isolation and Press-Tour Logorrhea
Over the past three decades, Wes Anderson has cultivated a highly eclectic and faithful stable of actors. When the director calls, a motley crew comes running—spanning ages, career phases, and box office favorabilities. It’s like summer camp, but for really successful adults. One recent addition to the menagerie is Academy Award winner Benicio del Toro, who first entered the fray in 2021’s The French Dispatch before returning to star The Phoenician Scheme as Zsa-zsa Korda—“international businessman, maverick in the fields of armaments and aviation, among the richest men in Europe.” After surviving his sixth airplane crash, the tycoon (written with del Toro in mind and inspired by Anderson’s own father-in-law) attempts to prime the sole heir to his vast fortune: one of his 10 offspring, who happens to be a nun. It’s Succession meets The Graduate at James Bond velocity…
2. Stellan Skarsgård and Robert Reich Tell Us How to Escape the Political Doom Loop
A frigid Scottish oil rig. A sun-drenched Greek isle, awash in a sea of turquoise. An antiques gallery in an alien megacity. Stellan Skarsgård has a gift for fitting in, no matter where he is. For the last six decades, the Swedish actor has brought a metric ton of gravitas to every role, whether in his taboo-breaking turns with Lars von Trier or levitating from a pit of black ooze in Dune. Despite his willingness to stare into the abyss, Skarsgård has a wry, paternal side. His latest film, Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix-nabbing Sentimental Value, puts his sensitivity on full display, and may just win the 74-year-old performer a long-awaited first Oscar nomination. Skarsgård, it turns out, also has a strong sense of civic duty. To the actor, film can be a form of resistance. “Art,” he says, “should be automatically radical.” So strong is Skarsgård’s commitment to this assertion that, for this Artists on Artists conversation, he asked to sit down with Robert Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor and recent high-profile opponent of the Trump administration…
Andrew Scott has spent the past decade leaving his tender yet eviscerating mark on everything from TV dramedies to heartbreaking indies. Following his star-making role as a maddeningly irresistible man of the cloth in Fleabag, Scott appeared opposite Paul Mescal in 2023’s eviscerating All of Us Strangers and 2024’s moody Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Ripley. All of this happened between the Laurence Olivier Award-winning actor’s turns on the stage—a feat which Josh O’Connor, who first witnessed Scott’s magnetism at the Royal Court in London while still a theater student, has always admired. The pair, who developed a close friendship over the years, share a penchant for independent films about the monsters in our minds that never fail to whip festival audiences into a frenzy. Last year, they departed from those roots to shoot the destined-to-be blockbuster Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. The project offered a brief comic respite for both actors…
4. R. Crumb and George DiCaprio Talk Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Astral Projection, and Acid Trips
Life as an underground comic book artist in the 1970s was as freewheeling as you imagine—just ask Robert Crumb and George DiCaprio. The two men, now in their 80s, had the kind of meet-cute that only old-world New York could conjure: DiCaprio offered his illegally inhabited loft to Crumb’s crew. The encounter was fortuitous. Crumb got DiCaprio the animation job that led him out West, where he ended up working as a comic book distributor and became the father of celebrated actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Meanwhile, Crumb emerged as one of the leading satirists of American culture. To revisit the bad trip that inspired Crumb’s new book, the creative scene that formed them, and the future of their art form, the two friends connected with cartoonist Sammy Harkham—a member of a younger generation shaped by their work—for a sprawling conversation…
The businesses of fashion and media are uneasy bedfellows. Yet the two industries have never been more closely intertwined than they are today—and the fate of fashion criticism hangs uneasily in the balance. Sea changes in media make for a daunting vista: Fast fashion’s behemoth environmental impact, a dearth of representation (gender or otherwise) among high-profile creative directors, and the proliferation of self-styled tastemakers have monopolized online discourse. Add to the mix a staggering concentration of power: Many of the oldest and best-respected legacy labels are nestled under the wing of titanic conglomerates, and many a publication is reliant on the partnership of those same companies to remain afloat. In 2025, neither industry can be said to boast a clean bill of health…
On Feb. 6, Annabelle Dexter-Jones sat down to pose for a portrait by the legendary Francesco Clemente—a birthday gift from her partner and the painter’s close friend, Daniel Humm. She didn’t know she’d walk out engaged. The year-long whirlwind that has consumed the Michelin-starred Swiss chef and British-American actor began at a wedding—their mutual friend Vito Schnabel’s—in the spring of 2024. They’ve been joined at the hip ever since. Many people treat wedding proposals as an art. Few actually involve art in them. But last year, Humm opened a cocktail bar in collaboration with Francesco Clemente just upstairs from Eleven Madison Park. (Dexter-Jones, meanwhile, has known the Italian painter since she was a teenager.) It’s no surprise, then, that when Humm asked Clemente to help him propose, the artist was overcome…
Some film industry bonds are forged under klieg lights and red carpets, but Margaret Qualley and Carrie Coon’s friendship predates Hollywood’s fanfare. Back then, Qualley was a bright-eyed newcomer, while Coon—already a stage luminary—was stepping gingerly into the film world. Fast-forward to now, and their winding career paths have crisscrossed in ways neither could’ve scripted: Coon juggling prestige TV turns in Fargo and The Gilded Age alongside off-Broadway tour de forces like Placebo and Mary Jane and indie slow-burns including His Three Daughters and The Nest; Qualley oscillating between off-kilter charm and serious roles with the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and Coralie Fargeat as though it’s second nature. In a candid interview with Qualley, Coon trades stories on everything from conquering the demands of live theater to Coon’s surviving The White Lotus as if in a fever dream—six months, twelve moves, two hospitalizations…
Olivier Assayas didn’t read the screenplay for Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, but he would have greenlit the project immediately. “This is the movie of someone who needs badly to make a movie,” he tells Stewart over Zoom one morning in November. Assayas, who directed the 35-year-old actor-turned-filmmaker in 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria and 2016’s Personal Shopper, knows a thing or two about a film made on one’s own terms at all costs. For Disorder, his own 1986 feature debut, he was offered the crew of the monumental French director Alain Resnais. Assayas turned the opportunity down, opting to continue working with his far less seasoned peers. “The foundational decision I made in filmmaking,” he continues, “was not to go the safe route.” With The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of championship swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, Stewart demonstrates the safe route is of no interest to her either…
9. Pals Ramy Youssef and Ayo Edebiri Have ‘Made It’—but They Still Sleep on Each Other’s Couches
Ayo Edebiri can’t pinpoint the exact moment she met Ramy Youssef. “I don’t remember the days before we knew each other,” she tells the CULT100 cover star. The pair of comedians both hit their strides in Christopher Storer-directed series—Youssef in 2019 on his show Ramy, where Storer tapped in on six early episodes, and Edebiri with Storer’s The Bear in 2022, where Youssef returned the favor by directing a second season episode. “So you admit to being a gossip?” Edebiri jabs when Youssef recalls that it was Storer who began bringing her name up in conversation around that time. “It was positive gossip,” he quips. All that chatter has amounted to a stacked slate of jobs for each…
10. Luc Tuymans and Yohji Yamamoto on Trauma, the Color Black, and Why They’ll Never Quit Smoking
Luc Tuymans first met Yohji Yamamoto on a visit to Japan with his wife, the Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha, in 1999. The Belgian painter had opened his debut exhibition with David Zwirner in New York a few years earlier. He was fascinated with the Japanese designer’s simultaneous precision and undone ease—qualities evident in his own politically oriented paintings. Who could have predicted that, more than 25 years later, the two men would still be friends, savoring simultaneous career milestones (at 82, Yamamoto’s business is generating more than $200 million a year; Tuymans, 67, opened a show of large-scale works, his 18th with Zwirner, in New York this November). Just days after Yamamoto debuted his Spring/Summer 2026 collection at an October Paris Fashion Week show Tuymans attended, the pair reunited at Yamamoto HQ for a cigarette and a chat about anger, black clothes, and cowboys with their frequent sparring partner, the writer Donatien Grau…
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