🎧 Julianne Nicholson Takes Us to 'Janet Planet'
The star of the A24 festival darling on how the movie captured '90s New England. Plus: Other summer movies with legit awards buzz
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It’s summer blockbuster season, and thanks to the box office performance of Inside Out 2 and Bad Boys: Ride or Die, we’re still allowed to believe in the concept of summer blockbusters. But summer is also the season for counterprogramming, and as June comes to a close there’s a raft of smaller, more challenging — and mostly excellent — new movies to grab your attention, too.Â
On this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast I’m joined by freelance critic and reporter Esther Zuckerman, who sees every movie and interviews everybody and has plenty to say about Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders and Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, all of which are playing in theaters now.
The episode also includes my conversation with the star of Janet Planet, Julianne Nicholson, who had met Baker through New York theater circles and joined her for a deeply nostalgic summertime shoot in western Massachusetts. The film is told from the perspective of 11-year-old Lacy, played by Zoe Ziegler, but her gaze is focused on her mother Janet, played by Nicholson. She told me what it took to build that onscreen mother-daughter relationship with Ziegler, which included the sheer effort of surviving a shoot in a house with no air conditioning.Â