Why Apple stays home

Fiona Apple is famously reclusive, said Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker. These days, the singer-songwriter rarely leaves her house in Venice Beach, Calif. (and not because of coronavirus). Her overnight fame in the 1990s took a massive toll, and she’s since dealt with obsessivecompulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety. Apple resents being thought of as “the patron saint of mental illness,” she says, “instead of someone who creates things.” She is still making music, after all. Her emergence in the 1990s seemed mythical: A classically trained pianist who began composing at 7, then at 16 heard a voice telling her to record songs, so she moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles, where her father lived, and made 78 demo tapes. A record deal followed, and her first album, Tidal, sold 2.7 million copies. Then Apple revealed she’d been raped as a child by a stranger outsider her apartment, and she came to be seen as a damaged prodigy. “I have a temper,” she says. “I have lots of rage inside. I have lots of sadness inside.” Better to stay home, she decided. Her new music reflects those feelings, but she won’t spare herself the pain of introspection. “I shake when I have to write about myself,” she says. “It’s scary to go there, but I go there.”

What Krasinski learned from Clooney

John Krasinski could have been a TV one-hit wonder, said Ed Potton in The Times (U.K.). He rose to fame playing the endearing everyman Jim on NBC’s The Office from 2005 to 2013. Yet instead of being typecast or trapped in a sitcom prison, Krasinski, 40, has blossomed into a filmmaker; 2018’s A Quiet Place, a horror movie he co-wrote and directed, grossed more than $340 million. He credits his breakout largely to advice from George Clooney, who made the difficult leap from acting in TV shows like ER to movies and producing. “George has been a mentor to me in every aspect, more as a person even than as someone involved in the business,” Krasinski says. He and his wife, actress Emily Blunt, got married in 2010 at Clooney’s house on Lake Como in Italy. The two men have been friends since Krasinski played a college football player in Leatherheads, a 2008 box-office flop that Clooney starred in and directed. During production, Clooney invited Krasinski to a screening where the filmmakers would iron out problems. Krasinski initially passed, to which Clooney said, “Are you telling me that for the rest of your career you’re just going to be an actor? You have to see how the sausage is made.” Krasinski learned his lesson. “It was an incredibly important moment in my life,” he says.