Table of contents for Hollywood 2022 in Vanity Fair

To mark the occasion of our 28th annual Hollywood Issue, we present the iconic Hollywood cover times eight: scenes real and imagined from the gravitational center of moviemaking, conjuring fantasies of stardom with a wink. Behind the camera for the second year in a row are conceptual artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari (for more on their amazing process, see page 46). The talent in front of their lens hardly needs introduction. Nicole Kidman ushers us inside the gates of Hollywood; Kristen Stewart lounges above the L.A. skyline; Idris Elba unites car culture and pool cool in one perfect frame…. Our cover stars are on top of their worlds. Every one of these actors is having a hell of a year, bridging art house films and epic franchises, studios and…

Shiny statuettes are the currency among performers this season, but the real action is on the bathroom shelves, thanks to a celebrity beauty spree. Telegenic hair gave rise to Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie; Pharrell Williams’s lineless skin brought us Humanrace. You can match your nails to Harry Styles (Pleasing), shimmer in Halsey’s About-Face glitter, and smell like Tyler, the Creator (his musky-rose French Waltz). This collection of new launches is a slick lot but responsible too—down to Rihanna’s eco-minded refillable lipsticks. Even better than an autograph.…

“THIS BOOK IS A STUDY OF PASSION,” writes Stephen Galloway in Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century, out from Grand Central. It’s true that there’s passion in spades—not to mention a cameo by Marilyn Monroe, glitzy dinners, and cinematic visits to the sets and stages of Antony and Cleopatra and Gone With the Wind. But Leigh and Olivier’s affair, marriage, and eventual divorce is a complicated saga, inflected by Leigh’s mental illness, which was widely dismissed and misunderstood. (“Nonsense,” Noël Coward told Olivier, when the actor raised concerns.) While past depictions render Leigh difficult and Olivier long-suffering, Galloway makes clear their symbiosis—Leigh “did her best to care for Larry” too, joining him as he filmed Henry V “to assist and advise and encourage and…

ON A CRISP December evening, Idris Elba rescued a group of men—from embarrassment. The night had taken a turn for the worse for the young chaps after they were denied entry to a hot London club. But Elba happened to be walking by the venue, where he and his friends are regulars, and chatted with the manager to get the group in, even offering to buy them a table. The incident went viral on TikTok. Elba laughs, thinking about it now. “This guy appealed to me because I was him,” he says over a Zoom call in early January. “I was definitely that guy being turned away just because I’m slightly bigger and I don’t fit the criteria of the club.” It’s hard to imagine anyone turning away Elba, whose…

ANDREW GARFIELD IS ready to talk—about the admirable work of his older brother, a pulmonary specialist in London; about the awe-inspiring experience of seeing New Yorkers take to the streets in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; about the pain of losing his mother, Lynn, to cancer in 2019; about feeling a compulsion to jump into the ocean at Fire Island while preparing to film Tick, Tick…Boom! The open water jolted him. “It was like I got the full download,” Garfield says. “It reminded me that sons and daughters have been losing their mothers since the dawn of time. And I had this very unique feeling of loss and grief. I’d just jumped into the club of losing the illusion that the person that gives you life is always going…

ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 18, 2021, LIBERTY UNIVERSITY’S FRESHMAN CLASS BEGAN ARRIVING on campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, for the start of Welcome Week. The kickoff to the fall semester had the exuberance of a pregame pep rally. An outdoor sound system blasted Gary Glitter’s glam rock anthem “Rock and Roll Part II.” Student greeters in navy Liberty T-shirts whooped and cheered when a new arrival’s car pulled up to the dorms. Buildings all over the Jeffersonian-style campus were festooned with banners that read: “Liberty University: 50 Years of Training Champions for Christ.” For 49 of those years, a member of the Falwell family had run Liberty, the country’s most influential evangelical university. But the day before orientation started, Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the late televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr.…

CREATING MUSIC IN 21st-century Hollywood, as a composer for an Emmy-winning cable series put it, “feels like an underground, a real pimp situation.” He talked about long hours, low pay, and working under a martinet “lead composer”—his boss—who delegated the actual work of writing and recording. “One time he had a meltdown because the director was coming to hear what he had come up with and he didn’t have anything to play him,” the composer went on, “because my computer had all the music on it and it was on the fritz!” He laughed—c’est la guerre. But the irritation and dismay were palpable. Another Hollywood composer summed up the widespread feeling among the men and women who do the day-to-day work of bending melody, harmony, and rhythm to match pictures…

THE WEBSITE GRAILED is the streetwear world’s go-to place to find rare, coveted items of clothing being resold by fashion aficionados, often at grand markups from the retail price. A 2017 Louis Vuitton backpack made in collaboration with Supreme will set you back $35,000. An Off-White x Burton x Vogue snowboard? It’s just over $18,000 as of press. Chrome Hearts own heart rings: Activate the platinum card. Lately, right alongside all the covetable totems of drop culture, a burgeoning swath of the resale site has been catering to a strange variant of hypebeast lust: promotional merch for films produced or distributed by A24, the boutique movie studio started by three Hollywood execs in 2012 that engendered the kind of cult appeal once reserved for skate brands and certain punk bands.…

WAUGHHHH!” NICOLE KIDMAN lets out a nasally wail, her face stretched into exaggerated, comic pain, her body covered in bandages, and her weight supported by Javier Bardem. She’s acting twice over, playing Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo to Bardem’s Desi Arnaz as Ricky, in Amazon Studios’ Being the Ricardos. The dram-com, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, could have been filled with more signature I Love Lucy pratfalls, but Sorkin was more interested in the real-life Ball, a promising dramatic actor who reinvented herself as a comedy star and business executive. Hence, the multidimensional Kidman. When “Cut” is called, it’s meta; Kidman snaps out of Ricardo and bolts upright as Ball, rattling off notes to the men. In another scene, Ball sits back in an armchair, her legs outstretched on…

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH doesn’t dodge tough questions—in fact, he raises some of the thorniest ones himself. Over a long outdoor breakfast at the Malibu Racquet Club, we’re preparing to discuss two of the most significant films of his career, Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Power of the Dog, both of which came out this past year. Cumberbatch considers their heft. “Am I working for the Goliath that’s killing the David?” he says. Technically, it’s two Goliaths—Marvel and Netflix, respectively—but these days the Davids can’t afford to be adversarial. Cumberbatch knows how difficult it is to get a movie made without a particular star power: “Unless you have a Marvel star, financing any film is very, very, very, very difficult—no matter how important the story, no matter how urgent the story,…

I’M JUST A regular, shmegular girl,” says Michaela Jaé Rodriguez. Her pedigree would beg to differ. In 2021, Rodriguez became the first trans woman to earn an Emmy nomination in a lead acting category for her work as Blanca on the groundbreaking FX series Pose. In 2022, she added another pivotal win: the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama series, making her the first transgender star to be so recognized by the HFPA. “Child, it changed my whole perspective of how I saw myself and how I saw myself as an actress,” Rodriguez says over Zoom a day after finding out she won the Globe. “I just felt so seen.” Behind the awards and accolades hails a woman from Brick City—Newark, New Jersey, for the uninitiated—who bursts with…

GALADRIEL’S WORLD IS A RAGING SEA. FAR FROM THE WISE, ethereal elven queen that Cate Blanchett brought to Peter Jackson’s acclaimed films, the Galadriel played by Morfydd Clark in Amazon’s upcoming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is thousands of years younger, as angry and brash as she is clever, and certain that evil is looming closer than anyone realizes. By episode two, her warnings set her adrift, literally and figuratively, until she’s struggling for survival on a raft in the storm-swept Sundering Seas alongside a mortal castaway named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), whom the show’s creators have invented. Galadriel is fighting for the future; Halbrand is running from the past. Their entwined destinies are just two of the stories woven together for a TV series that,…

SHE’D NEVER BEEN summoned by a costar like that before—but then she’d never worked with Jerry Lewis. Apparently, it was how he did things. Karen Sharpe had already held her own onscreen with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and won a Golden Globe for the airplane-disaster movie The High and the Mighty when she was cast in 1964’s The Disorderly Orderly. The role, the love interest to Lewis’s typically zany buffoon, hadn’t initially appealed to her. It was a comedy, and she preferred drama. It had also been made clear she wasn’t permitted to be funny opposite the film’s notoriously insecure leading man. But Sharpe had recently taken a year-and-a-half-long hiatus from Hollywood—she’d gone to San Antonio to settle her father’s estate after his death—and returned to a town that…

EVERYBODY IN L.A. seems to be placing bets on Horses, a new Sunset Boulevard restaurant committed to a deeper nostalgia than mere prepandemic festivity, harking back to the city’s golden age. Any given night, locals pack the bar and booths in the tavern, dubbed The Drinkery. Food industry folks converge under the skylight in the Sunshine Room, featuring bright yellow banquettes and a sight line to the open kitchen. And, if a recent drop-in by Will Ferrell is any indication, celebrities beeline to Kacper’s Room in the back, adorned with equestrian paintings by artist Kacper Abolik, whose portrait subjects have included A$AP Rocky and Madonna. Egged on by ashtrays, customers reclaiming their joie de vivre might even bum a cigarette out front; the host has been known to facilitate introductions.…

WHAT KIND OF MONSTER would choose white carpet for an outdoor event?1 The outdoors, no matter how fancy, is just not the natural habitat of carpet—white or otherwise. The issue plagued me so doggedly that I failed to notice I was in the middle of what could have easily been a genuine fever dream. When John Stamos introduced himself to me at the Netflix Emmy party in September 2018 and gushed glowingly about my stand-up comedy special Nanette, I could only watch his mouth move and hope he didn’t notice that my mind was elsewhere. The only thing I really wanted to talk about was under our feet: What do you reckon will happen to this carpet tomorrow? Will it have a life beyond this event, Sir Stamos? It was…

KRISTEN STEWART IS not going to play it cool. “Everyone wants to win an Oscar, you know?” she says. She’s looking at me through rose-colored glasses, glowing in the California sun. Her face is sharp and delicate, like a marquise-cut diamond, framed by blond strands near-black at the roots. Her dog, Cole, barks in the Zoom background, lounging somewhere in the spacious Palm Springs Airbnb where Stewart is on vacation. Stewart is in the midst of an awards campaign for Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s haunting portrait of three gasping days in the life of Princess Diana. The role has earned the actor—whose career began at 9 and exploded at 18—a new level of critical acclaim. “I’m totally touched,” she says, smiling and taking off her sunglasses. It’s actually less about a…

WINDING DOWN AFTER a long cover shoot, Penélope Cruz sits back like she’s got it all figured out. She’s returned to the hair-and-makeup chair to deglam, her In-N-Out cheeseburger sitting patiently on the nearby counter. Colleagues pop in to hug her and say their goodbyes. She’ll soon return home to Madrid, having spent the holidays here in Los Angeles with family. This is how Cruz prefers things. She doesn’t allow her life or persona to be dictated by her industry. “Only you can stop yourself from doing normal things,” she says. Cruz cried often, internalizing HER CHARACTER’S PAIN. “I pretended that I had things under control, but I WAS SCARED.” Cruz gives every ounce of herself to her craft and very little to the attention that surrounds it. Since signing…

THERE’S A CHARMING pugilist’s persistence to the way Simu Liu parries any question into an excuse to say something nice about his coworkers. He tells me Phillipa Soo, his costar in the upcoming rom-com One True Loves, has “one of the best voices I’ve ever heard.” Working with SNL writer Celeste Yim was “extremely rewarding”; Randall Park, he insists, is “an absolutely wonderful human being.” Even the four-legged background actors in the forthcoming Arthur the King get a rave review: Liu adopted one of the dogs on set, but he’s quick to add that “all the dogs we worked with had such an amazing demeanor.” It’s that stereotypical Canadian niceness but polished to a mirror shine per the accumulated media training of a Marvel Cinematic Universe member and newly designated…

MARY CARMACK-ALTWIES RACED across the desert, chasing some peace and quiet. She had won her campaign to become Santa Fe’s district attorney the year before, and her first 10 months in office were intense and all-consuming. In her previous life as a public defender and later working in private practice, she always internalized her cases. She felt that empathy made her a good attorney, but it was depleting. “I’ve spent basically my entire career working the worst of the worst cases. And so I feel it a lot,” she says. In October, her prosecution had successfully sent a man to prison for his role in the child abuse death of a 13-year-old boy. It was a gruesome, emotional case, and Carmack-Altwies needed to decompress. So she scheduled some vacation time,…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Eating ice cream in the cinema, watching the trailers, with the main film about to start. On what occasion do you lie? When Tottenham Hotspur lose a football match and I defend it as a wonderful opportunity to learn. Which living person do you most admire? Our local doctor. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My wife, and literature. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Vacillation. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Time wasting. What is your greatest extravagance? Red wine from Northern Italy. What is your motto? Be early, be cheerful, say thank you. What is your greatest fear? Ignorance. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Doubting Thomas. What is your…