Jodie Comer, Paul Mescal Take Acting Gold at Olivier Awards

Jodie Comer poses for photographers upon arrival at the Olivier Awards in London, Sunday, April 2, 2023. (AP)
Jodie Comer poses for photographers upon arrival at the Olivier Awards in London, Sunday, April 2, 2023. (AP)
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Jodie Comer, Paul Mescal Take Acting Gold at Olivier Awards

Jodie Comer poses for photographers upon arrival at the Olivier Awards in London, Sunday, April 2, 2023. (AP)
Jodie Comer poses for photographers upon arrival at the Olivier Awards in London, Sunday, April 2, 2023. (AP)

Screen stars Paul Mescal and Jodie Comer scored prizes at London’s Olivier Awards on Sunday for their first-ever West End stage roles, while a stage adaptation of Japanese animated classic “My Neighbor Totoro” won six trophies.

Irish actor Mescal – an Academy Award acting nominee this year for “Aftersun” – was named best actor in a play for his turn as the brutish Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theatre. Anjana Vasan won the best supporting actress award for playing Stella in Tennessee Williams’ scorching drama, which was named best revival.

Mescal, 27, said his rapid success “doesn’t feel real.”

“But it’s kind of happening at such a rate that there is no time to stop and think, ‘This is a phenomenal feeling,’” he said.

Liverpool-born Comer, 30, won the best actress in a play award for the one-person show “Prima Facie,” which she is taking to Broadway later this month. Suzie Miller’s drama about a lawyer dealing with the aftermath of a sexual assault was also named best new play.

Comer, who shot to fame as star of TV spy series “Killing Eve,” gave a shoutout “to any kids who haven’t been to drama school, who can’t afford to go to drama school, who has been rejected from drama school -- don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t possible.”

“My Neighbor Totoro” was named best entertainment or comedy play at the Oliviers, the UK equivalent of Broadway’s Tony Awards. Phelim McDermott won best-director trophy for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s magical coming-of-age film. It also took prizes for sound, lighting, costumes and sets.

“Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” an urban elegy set to the music of singer-songwriter Richard Hawley, was named best new musical, while an edgy, pared-down take on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s corn-fed classic “Oklahoma!” won the prize for best musical revival.

Arthur Darvill won the best-actor in a musical prize for playing Curly in “Oklahoma!” Katie Brayben was named best actress in a musical for playing televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in the Almeida Theatre’s “Tammy Faye.”

Musical Supporting performance trophies went to Beverley Knight for hiphop suffragette story “Sylvia” and Zubin Varla for “Tammy Faye.” Will Keen was named best actor in a play for playing Vladimir Putin in “Patriots,” a play about the Russian leader’s relationship with oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Keen called his character a “living, breathing, internationally recognized villain.”

Veteran actor Derek Jacobi received a lifetime achievement award to celebrate his six-decade career.

Hannah Waddingham – a West End musical star before she found TV fame as the owner of a struggling soccer team on “Ted Lasso” -- hosted the ceremony at London’s Royal Albert Hall, which included performances from musical nominees including “The Band’s Visit,” “Sylvia,” “Tammy Faye,” “Oklahoma!” and “Sister Act.”

The prizes were founded in 1976 and named for the late actor-director Laurence Olivier. Winners are chosen by voting groups of stage professionals and theatergoers.



Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
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Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)

A Post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote “Eddington”: “Remember the phones.”

“Eddington” may be set during the pandemic, but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data center is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents — their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data center — are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other’s sense of reality.

“We’re living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is,” Aster says. “Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder.”

“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird.”

Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” — have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment.

“Eddington,” which A24 releases in theaters Friday, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the US. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal’s elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream.

At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, “Eddington” dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn’t imagine avoiding it. “To not be talking about it is insane,” he said.

“I’m desperate for work that’s wrestling with this moment because I don’t know where we are. I’ve never been here before,” says Aster. “I have projects that I’ve been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don’t know why I would make those right now.”

Predictably polarizing

“Eddington,” appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster’s film has had one of the most polarizing receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. “I don’t know what you think,” he told the crowd.

Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. “Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries,” wrote The New Yorker’s Justin Chang. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: “Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he’s saying something about America, the joke is on him.”

Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around “Eddington.”

“I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that’s pretty disingenuous,” he says. “In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives.”

For Aster, satirizing the left doesn’t mean he doesn’t share their beliefs. “If there’s no self-reflection,” he says, “how are we ever going to get out of this?”

Capturing ‘what was in the air’

Aster began writing “Eddington” in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn’t start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled “Eddington” as a Western with smartphones in place of guns — though there are definitely guns, too.

“The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I’ve been living with that level of dread ever since,” Aster says. “I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air.”

Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today’s corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like “Eddington,” though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million-budgeted “Beau Is Afraid” struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year’s speculative war drama, “Civil War.”

And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in “Beau Is Afraid,” and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that “it’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this.” For Phoenix, “Eddington” offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience.

“We were all terrified and we didn’t fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position,” Phoenix earlier told The AP. “And in some ways it’s so obvious: Well, that’s not going to be helpful.”

‘A time of total obscenity’

Since Aster made “Eddington” — it was shot in 2024 — the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film.

“I would have made the movie more obscene,” he says. “And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we’re living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I’ve seen.”

“Eddington” is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western.

But whatever you make of “Eddington,” you might grant it’s vitally important that we have more films like it — movies that don’t tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn’t sound finished with what he started.

“I’m feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I’m looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?” Aster says. “Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off, or fortressed off, a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to reengage with each other?”