Haha Now I’m reading all of his interview responses in Tobias’s fire sale voice!

I keep cracking up thinking about that “I want every scene to feel like I’m encountering a bear in the woods” line, but I get the impression he wasn’t trying to be funny. 

Agreed. I finally got around to watching The Americans recently—excellent show—but the vast difference between the British/American actors occasionally attempting Russian pronunciations only to badly mangle it and the supporting actors who could speak fluent Russian was like night and day. It’s a lovely language and…

Yeah I’ve read several of his books and enjoyed them all—he’s as adept as he is at writing as he is research—but I’d agree Jonestown was the best. His Bonnie and Clyde book is good too! In his last couple of books, he seems to be pulling away from crime, but I think he’s at his best when he’s looking at how true…

Brolin is an interesting choice--I can actually see that more so than Leo!

I understand completely! 

Yes The Raven is very good! That last part where the author starts describing his experiences at Jonestown in the first person is so haunting. Jeff Guinn’s got a really good book about Jonestown, too, though of course super disturbing.

Yes that tape is incredibly disturbing. The last part of the miniseries is drawn directly from that audiotape's transcript. If I’m not mistaken, it’s pretty much verbatim. 

YES! You could totally see why people followed him, as well as how they felt trapped into staying once they saw what a lunatic he was. Usually, when actors play infamous historical characters, they just lean into the crazy hard.

I would never have thought of Fraser for Jones, but I’d actually be way more interested in that movie! I’ve enjoyed Leo’s career for the most part—I was a 90s kid so had just assumed he’d lean on being a heartthrob and was pleasantly surprised he didn’t—but yes I agree that he’s not inherently menacing in the same way…

I don’t consider myself an unduly squeamish person, but I couldn’t sleep for days after watching Guyana Tragedy, largely due to his performance. Boothe played a lot of great villains over his career (got one of my favorites in my avatar!), but Jones was easily the most unsettling and haunting.

I don’t dislike Leo, but I have a hard time envisioning anyone else topping Powers Boothe’s performance as Jones in Guyana Tragedy.

That was also how it sounded to me when I first watched the trailer. Like Budget Boris and Natasha. 

Same at the library where I work. If they want to turn on their reading history, they have to do that themselves via their own online account, but we still don’t see it as staff members. And very few people turn on their reading histories. We actually changed systems last year, and as part of that process, we realized…

Still hilarious in 2021 too. Poor handsome Lev Gorn didn’t deserve that, and I love that the commentariat kept bringing it up.

Yeah I would tend to think most actors wouldn’t know what they were looking for, so having them check it as a matter of procedure isn’t necessarily a safety guarantee in the same way as having people who are supposed to know what they’re looking at do the safety check.

Yeah I read the novel in college and was sort of surprised by how overt it was for the time period. 

Why must it always be pandemonium?

I wondered the same thing. I don’t think Barsanti knows much about history, so he just assumed everyone else only knows about the two from the movie.

Yes! And it really sells that tragedy that is Withnail, underneath the outrageous humor. Until that point, I just saw Withnail as someone who lazily dabbles in acting, more to say he is an actor than out of any actual talent or devotion to the craft. But that scene showed he was so talented.