The Architect Behind New York’s Most Exciting New Building – How Anitta Made ‘Envolver’ and Took Over the World – How Maya Rudolph Became the Queen of Comedy

Dear Readers,

The Architect Behind New York’s Most Exciting New Building – How Anitta Made ‘Envolver’ and Took Over the World – How Maya Rudolph Became the Queen of Comedy

Today we do present to you three items to read, together with all the articles that appeared during the phase of non-publication

The first feature is on “The Architect Behind New York’s Most Exciting New Building” with breathtaking captions from around the world.

The second item introduces you to “How Anitta Made ‘Envolver’ and Took Over the World“ also garneered with many exciting captions.

The third fature tells you the story “How Maya Rudolph Became the Queen of Comedy” and there are also many captions as illustration.

These are all stories that appeared firstly in the Wall Street Magazine and the Editorial Team of TextileFuture is very happy to present the lucrative work.

We do wish for you that you read all the items, because these are well writtten and illustrated for your dedicating readings.

Have an excellent week ahead and don’t forget to return next Tuesday for the Textile-Future Newsletter. For your convenience you might also sign inn to receive the free of charge Newsletter in your personal inbox.

With best wishes

Your TextileFuture Editorial Team

Here is the start of the first item:

WSJ. INNOVATORS: The Architect Behind New York’s Most Exciting New Building

By Sarah Medford | Photography by Martien Mulder for WSJ. Magazine

The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York are some of its most popular attractions, a marriage of art and science transmuted into lifelike encounters with snarling jaguars, rapt penguins and blasé zebras standing rump-first to the glass. Even in the CGI age, their realism is startling.

The earliest dioramas owe a debt to Carl Akeley, a sculptor, taxidermist, inventor and big-game hunter who worked at the museum from about 1909 to 1926. Akeley pioneered a method of scooping plaster and papier-mâché over wire armatures to create lifelike creatures and their habitats. Playing around with a hose, a hill of dry concrete and some forced air, he also invented sprayable concrete, a material that could bond to metal-mesh walls and ceilings, enacting a supersized version of sculpting that would later revolutionize the swimming pool industry, among others.

This past spring, architect Jeanne Gang stood on the western edge of the natural history museum’s campus and watched as concrete spewed into the air through mechanized nozzles, clotting like wet snow around skeletons of wire and steel rebar to form the substance of her firm Studio Gang’s latest building. More like a landscape carved by wind and water than any kind of human creation, the six-story structure at West 79th Street and Columbus Avenue flows out of an opening between a clutch of existing buildings and announces itself to the world through a 65-foot-tall portal of glass, beckoning to be explored.

Related Video

The USD 431 million Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, as the building is called, opens on February 17, 2023. Besides much-needed exhibition space, it will provide classrooms, a library, glass-fronted collections storage for about four million specimens, a 360-degree theater, an Insectarium containing a walk-in beehive and a permanent home for the popular butterfly vivarium, all clustered around a skylit atrium on a recycled concrete foundation. As Akeley’s dioramas did over a century ago, Gang’s design is poised to shrink the distance between museumgoers and the natural world just a little bit more.

In 2013, when Studio Gang landed the commission in a closed competition, its vision for a building that would integrate architecture, nature, science and art—pillars of its own interdisciplinary practice—was already formulated. But the choice of Akeley’s construction method was coincidental, Gang says, and far from inevitable. For one thing, the modeling software for the metal framework was dodgy at first: “What was available [was] just turning it into blobs, and we wanted these creases,” Gang explains, studying a corkboard pinned with CAD drawings and landscape photographs in her Chicago office. “This crease”—her index finger traces a curve jutting out from a rocky headland in an image from the desert Southwest—“it’s the softness of the stone and water working on that.”

For the architect and her team, the process of honing an idea through repeated research and testing is as much a part of a design as the finished product. At one point with the Gilder Center, they used blocks of ice—fluid, subtractive—as a modelling tool.

“It’s always a balance of the material, the tool and the design,” says Gang of the firm’s iterative approach. “If you have a material but you don’t know how to exploit [it], you just end up replicating what another material could do.”

In her summer-weight cardigan and flat-soled Mary Janes, Gang, 58, roams easily between colleagues’ desks in her Wicker Park office, a 1930s low-rise with a studio-run art and architecture gallery at garden level and a biodiverse prairie meadow on the roof. But she can also be relentless, not only toward the details of her practice, but in her pursuit of new manifestations for architecture itself.

Today the 25-year-old Studio Gang is celebrated for its work in and around its hometown, from the St. Regis Chicago, rising 101 stories from an undulating tripartite base, to a pair of community boathouses that trace a connection between their sawtoothed rooflines and rowers’ surging, angular strokes to the Nature Boardwalk, threading its way through Lincoln Park Zoo. The creative muscle Chicago has seen will soon make itself felt in major buildings on three continents. In Brazil, Studio Gang is devising a new American Embassy that will integrate a restored garden by Roberto Burle Marx; in Paris, an academic building and a tower in the city’s financial district are both underway. Alongside the launch of the Gilder Centre, soon Studio Gang will see the reopening of the renovated and expanded Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, in Little Rock, and the debut of Q Residences, an Amsterdam community housing complex on a Piet Oudolf–designed plaza. The architect is driving the work of her highly collaborative team of more than 140, with offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Paris, toward a deeply felt remit: What more can architecture do?

For one thing, it can dance. “I love going to studios where there is creativity pouring out all over the space. It gives you an idea of where an idea starts,” says the Chicago-based artist Nick Cave, who collaborated with Gang on a performance piece called Here Hear Chicago in 2017. When he approached her, it was with a loose thought of exploring the interface between structure and the body, “creating an experience that can evolve,” Cave says. A team came together from both studios amid the cardboard models in Gang’s office, conjuring reflective “weeble-wobble forms,” as the artist calls them, that could bob among dancers wearing his multicolored Soundsuit sculptures and amplify the jubilant jam. “Until you’re actually working with something, you can’t see what the possibilities are,” says Cave, echoing the open-ended strategy of making and thinking that Gang employs.

Aqua Tower, the 82-story Chicago high-rise completed in 2010 that introduced Studio Gang to the world, shares a liquid mobility with the weeble-wobbles, shimmying in place amid a thicket of buildings overlooking Lake Michigan and Millennium Park. What elevates the mixed-use skyscraper almost to the level of sculpture are its silvery concrete floor slabs, which slice through the glass facade and extend to form a rippling matrix of balconies. The MacArthur Foundation, awarding Gang a fellowship in 2011, praised Aqua’s “unusual optical poetry.” In her firm’s recent monograph, she describes the high-rise as “a vertical landscape,” a place where she imagines neighborly conversations happening between one cloud-shaped outcrop and another.

Gang grew up about 70 miles from Chicago’s lakefront, in the town of Belvidere, Illinois. The third of four girls, she was outdoorsy—“I was always the kid making the tree house or the fort,” she says—and wanted to be a vet when she grew up. Her father, James Gang, was a civil engineer with a soft spot for bridges, and summer vacations were family road trips to see the landmarks of his profession. Equally impressive, Jeanne decided from the backseat, were the monumental landscapes of the American West. James Gang had served on a Navy ship in the South Pacific during World War II, his daughter says: “I think that sense of adventure was always with him. I got it too—got the bug.”

Her mother, Marjorie Gang, was a part-time librarian, a volunteer and “kind of a community organizer,” Gang says. “We know that word now.” Among her interests were public housing, child advocacy and the Girl Scouts; she taught Jeanne, her sisters and hundreds of other girls how to build a fire without matches, perform first aid and identify plants in the wild—especially poisonous ones, Gang says.

Drawn to art and engineering, Gang settled on architecture as a freshman at the University of Illinois. In her junior year, a scholarship to study abroad in Versailles, France, cracked open the discipline’s “capacity to be a record of culture…just really a reflection of who we are,” she recalls. Harvard’s Graduate School of Design seemed insular and careerist by comparison, at least until she encountered a gawky theorist there named Rem Koolhaas, who was serving as an adjunct professor. “With Rem it was more broadly like, What is happening in the world?” she remembers thinking of his inquisitive, penetrating stance. After graduation, she moved to Rotterdam and spent two years working at OMA, Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Something of the Dutch master’s steely nerve operates in Gang, too, and it influenced her decision, at 33, to set up a solo practice back in Chicago rather than continue to toe the line at a mega-firm, as many of her contemporaries were doing. “I just wanted to create my own way of working,” she says. “I was never going anywhere else.” Late-’90s Chicago presented plenty of street-corner design problems to solve, and Gang took on community centers and other projects where her growing interests in the social and environmental roles of architecture came into play. “The social response was really driven by my own family,” she says. “Kind of what my mom was doing all the time.”

Gang’s definition of “the social response” is broad and deep. It could encompass the firm’s current project in Memphis, where a six-mile sliver of Mississippi River coastline is being regenerated after failing a community in dire need of recreation space. Or it could mean the partnership Studio Gang struck with a Memphis community organization to form a youth design leadership program, giving teens a voice in what would get built while introducing them to what designers do. The architect calls this sort of work, drawing on design’s ability to build public awareness and awaken change, “actionable idealism,” and it’s a keystone of Studio Gang’s pragmatically minded process. In her view, architects are uniquely trained to reconcile vexing issues and competing interests. Why not use that training to edge us toward a more equitable, livable world?

“[Jeanne] sees the potential of bringing together issues and design to suggest improvement in society.”— Anna Deavere Smith

“[Jeanne] views architecture as a catalyst and an encounter,” says her friend Anna Deavere Smith, the actress, playwright and educator. “She sees the potential of bringing together issues and design to suggest improvement in society. She asks of others in her field: Will we mirror [society] by sorting ourselves into architects of the rich and architects of the poor?”

In Chicago, a city where the chasm between haves and have-nots runs deep and gun violence is among the highest in the nation, Gang has led by example, designing a service hub for neighborhood and foster-care families in Auburn Gresham and a Chinese-American community center, among others. In 2015, alarmed by the spiraling mistrust between Chicago’s citizens and its police force, Studio Gang met with residents of the city’s 10th District, one of its most economically challenged areas, to hear their views on policing and public safety. Not content with just presenting its findings at the Chicago Architecture Biennial that year, Studio Gang designed and helped build a basketball half-court outside the North Lawndale police station, encouraging safe play—and closer ties—as it began the work of reframing a centre of public service. It was an admittedly small gesture. Gang has called it a “proof of concept.” But it was also a start.

Deavere Smith found the project, and the history of policing it laid bare, riveting, she says. “Will architecture ever create trust between community members and law enforcement? Probably not,” she allows. “But this research and work represents a belief in the possibility of goodwill. We need evidence of goodwill in all kinds of spaces: schools, hospitals, political spaces.”

Given the range and complexity of the efforts underway in Gang’s office, it’s no surprise that she considers her colleagues her work family. Overseeing the Chicago office is Juliane Wolf, a specialist in sustainable building practices; the New York office is run by Weston Walker, who met Gang as a student at Yale when she was teaching there. (Gang is now a professor at Harvard.) And making sure the projects run on time and on budget is Mark Schendel, the firm’s managing principal and Gang’s husband. “The people who come here are the kinds of people who want to see things change and get better,” says Gang of her eclectic team. “And they’re also talented designers.”

She’s been a vocal advocate of pay equity at the firm, which is roughly equal in its gender breakdown, and she’s publicly challenged her professional peers to do the same. “Here’s some actionable idealism,” Gang says, framing the issue for optimal uptake. “It’s easy. It’s just math. And if you respect someone, you will pay them according to their value, right?”

“Jeanne is one of the leading architects in America and in the world, and the fact that she’s a woman and one of the few who can say that, bravo.”— Ellen Futter

Like many powerful women working in male-dominated fields, she rarely calls attention to her gender. In her hometown, though, a chorus of voices will tell you that the St. Regis Chicago is the tallest woman-designed tower on the globe, at 1,196 feet, as the Aqua Tower was before it. For Ellen Futter, the outgoing president of the American Museum of Natural History, it’s Gang herself who is doing the towering.

“Jeanne is one of the leading architects in America and in the world, and the fact that she’s a woman and one of the few who can say that, bravo,” Futter says. “And I’m happy to support it, enthusiastically.” Before arriving at the museum in 1993, Futter was president of the all-female Barnard College. “I haven’t forgotten,” she adds.

The Gilder Centre, displaying the kinetic grace that so many of Studio Gang’s buildings possess, is also a technical feat on the inside, linking 10 of the museum’s 23 contiguous buildings at 33 points, solving circulation problems that have plagued the institution, founded in 1869, as it grew from a turreted castle on West 77th Street into a four-block behemoth that sees nearly five million annual visitors. After landing Gilder, Studio Gang was tapped to design a new global terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, due in 2028.

For Gang, the way forward lies in thinking more expansively—not in terms of square footage, and not just about building, but about architecture itself. “The skill set is really about synthesis,” she says at the tail end of a discussion on Daniel Burnham, the architect whose 1909 master plan for Chicago, developed over three years, set the city on a century-long upward trajectory. Her goals are a little more immediate. “I just want to deploy that skill set towards some things that we can see happen in our lifetime,” Gang says. “And the urgent things we have to do.”

www.wsj.com

Here is the beginning of the second feature:

How Anitta Made ‘Envolver’ and Took Over the World

With this year’s release of her trilingual album, ‘Versions of Me,’ Brazilian singer Anitta broke into the U.S. market, translating her multicultural music across the globe.

By guest author Mails

| Photography by Gregory Harris for WSJ. Magazine | Styling by Edward Bowleg III

Oct. 25, 2022

“Envolver,” the global hit song with around half a billion Spotify streams, took its singer, Anitta, less than a day to write.

She had flown some friends, family and producers to Sanctuary Cap Cana, a five-star resort in the Dominican Republic, for a working vacation. Between lounging, swimming in some of the property’s six pools and filming a music video, the 29-year-old Brazilian recorded some new music in a makeshift studio set up in the hotel’s Terrace Tower Suite. Two of her guests were the Puerto Rican production duo Súbelo NEO, who are responsible for some of Latin rapper Bad Bunny’s biggest hits. They got to work with Anitta crafting a thumping reggaeton beat, and the lyrics flowed out of them. They knew they had an international superhit on their hands.

From there, it got complicated.

Anitta says Warner Music Latina, the label that has handled her Spanish-language releases since she signed with Warner Records in 2020, thought the record should be a duet with a male singer. “I was so sure that it was going to be big,” she says with a flip of her hand. “They were saying I couldn’t make it happen by myself.” Warner Music Latina declined to comment.

Related Video

Anitta went ahead solo. The song’s music video, which Anitta directed, currently has around 400 million views on YouTube, and the plank dance that she performs in the video spawned a TikTok trend. According to data provided by TikTok, “Envolver” was used in 6.7 million different TikToks, which generated 19.3 billion views collectively. In March 2022, Anitta became the first Brazilian act and first solo female Latin artist to reach the top slot on the Spotify Global Daily Chart, essentially making “Envolver” the most popular song in the world. In September, it received two Latin Grammy nominations, including a nod for one of the night’s biggest categories, Record of the Year.

Starting her career in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Anitta became a Brazilian superstar through a potent mix of moxie and undeniably catchy music. Now singing in five different languages, charting hits around the world, she’s collaborated with Madonna, Snoop Dogg and Missy Elliott and has over 63 million followers on Instagram.

As Elliott says, Anitta may have an outsize stage presence and distinct it-factor, but her secret sauce is her relatability. “Immediately you connect with her,” Elliott says. “She feels like the girl up the street, even though you know she’s a star.”

Like the single-monikered Cher and Madonna before her, Anitta is a diva whose fame doesn’t depend only on her talents. She draws attention with her opinions, sexuality and political views. She’s also a workhorse. Changing the sound of pop music in her native Brazil became possible only through a relentless performance schedule and a breakneck artistic output. A solid career in America is the capstone on her path to becoming a Latin superstar. “I only compete with myself,” she says.

In person, Anitta alternates between swagger and disarming humor. When we meet in Los Angeles in September, she’s just off a flight from her home in Miami and in off-duty superstar mode, wearing a black Balenciaga baseball hat and cozy sweats. She spends most of her year on planes, hopping between time zones and countries.

Born Larissa de Macedo Machado in the working-class neighborhood of Honório Gurgel, Anitta knew she wanted to be a singer from an early age. She grew up listening to Mariah Carey—“Always Be My Baby” was her favorite song—and Mexican singer Luis Miguel.

In 2010, a YouTube video she posted of herself singing into a can of deodorant caught people’s attention. In the video, she’s a 17-year-old ball of energy, smiling ear to ear, twirling around in a Technicolor dress and singing in Portuguese to a muffled background track. She started working with producers under her adopted stage name, Anitta, after a character from a classic Brazilian TV show called Presença de Anita who had many different personalities.

At just 19, she began performing at bailes, or parties, around Rio’s favelas, the birthplace and epicenter of funk carioca, a genre of dance music created by Black musicians in the ’80s, much the way hip-hop was born in the Bronx in New York. Bailes have been associated with street gangs, and at times, the Brazilian government has acted to restrict the parties, which has led to violent clashes with the police. Because of this, funk was not played on the radio or at nightclubs when Anitta was coming on the scene. She recalls watching her friends getting arrested and wondering if the police would try to arrest her next. She became a fixture of the party scene but would still make sure to sing with her grandfather at church on Sundays where he played the piano.

A breakout moment came in 2013 with “Show das Poderosas,” a song about female empowerment that took elements from funk and blended them with pop, making it radio-friendly. Over brash percussion in the song, Anitta asserts how powerful women are—it’s the same kind of feminist pop Beyoncé was releasing at the time. Anitta conceptualised a video for the song, which featured women with various body types and men in heels dancing behind her. It racked up a million views in a week, and local hawkers quickly started selling knockoffs of the cutoff shorts and studded bra top she wore in the video.

With that attention-grabbing track and her music’s unapologetic associations to funk, Anitta emerged as a fiery media personality. In a 2013 Brazilian talk-show appearance, when asked if she was sleeping with anyone, Anitta answered frankly: “It’s impossible not to get off with anyone.” The singer later came out as bisexual in a Netflix documentary. She also spoke publicly about her fondness for plastic surgery, a taboo topic in Brazil despite its popularity.

“Immediately you connect with her. She feels like the girl up the street, even though you know she’s a star.”— Missy Elliott

The cover of her latest album features six images of Anitta at various stages of her transformations from plastic surgery, which include a nose job, jaw-shaping procedures and breast augmentations. “It’s nothing to do with me not being happy with myself,” she says of the surgeries. “For me it’s like changing my hair.” She goes one step further: “Even if it’s not good or the way I expected, I still like the process. I like the adrenaline.”

Anitta’s first two albums sold well and spawned several hits. Her third album, 2015’s Bang!, became her most commercially successful project yet. On the album’s cover, she looks like a Roy Lichtenstein painting brought to life. Funk, in part due to Anitta’s popularity, was now becoming an accepted part of mainstream Brazilian culture. At the opening ceremonies of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, Anitta took the arena’s stage in a floor-length black gown to sing with seasoned Brazilian performers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. The opening ceremony broadcast drew a reported worldwide audience of 342 million people.

“Impossible? This word just makes me want to go for it,” Anitta says. Prada coat, price upon request, Prada.com.

In 2016, after winning Melhores do Ano, an annual singing prize in Brazil, for a third time, Anitta says, she didn’t like the road that lay ahead of her. She reasoned that if she stayed on the same path, she’d be a famous Brazilian singer until she was in her 40s or 50s. But as Anitta explains, she abhors routine. While Brazilian musicians like Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto enjoyed achievements on the world stage, pop crossover success for a Brazilian singer is rare.

Anitta recalls the scepticism of local industry folk about her global plans. “They said, ‘Well, you can try to go international, but that’s impossible. Nobody’s ever made it, the last person was Carmen Miranda,’ ” she says. “Impossible? This word just makes me want to go for it.”

During the week, she’d travel the globe, studying Spanish and English while trying to make it in markets totally unfamiliar with her. She remembers taking meetings at radio stations and with people who didn’t know or care who she was. On Thursday nights, she’d travel back to Brazil and hit the stage for three nights in a row. Performers in Brazil are expected to take the stage every weekend or else risk losing popularity. Eventually she stopped the weekend touring back home and settled in Miam

Anitta collaborated with Colombian musician Maluma on “Sí o No” in 2016. The hit duet marked her debut in Spanish (now her favorite language to perform in). “Paradinha,” a solo follow-up track, was even more popular. Anitta is part of a wave of female reggaeton superstars, including Karol G and Becky G, who have bucked the genre’s machismo focus.

She also has hits in France and Italy, singing “Mon Soleil” and “Un Altro Ballo” in their respective languages. She keeps a notebook for her language lessons and peppers her tutors with questions about local cultures to better understand her audiences.

A breakout moment came in 2013 with “Show das Poderosas,” a song about female empowerment that took elements from funk and blended them with pop, making it radio-friendly. Over brash percussion in the song, Anitta asserts how powerful women are—it’s the same kind of feminist pop Beyoncé was releasing at the time. Anitta conceptualized a video for the song, which featured women with various body types and men in heels dancing behind her. It racked up a million views in a week, and local hawkers quickly started selling knockoffs of the cutoff shorts and studded bra top she wore in the video.

“Immediately you connect with her. She feels like the girl up the street, even though you know she’s a star.”— Missy Elliott

“Even if it’s not good or the way I expected, I still like the process,” says Anitta of plastic surgery. “I like the adrenaline.” Gucci dress, $39,000, Gucci.com, Van Cleef & Arpels ring, USD 23,100, VanCleefArpels.com.

Colombian singer J Balvin, who calls Anitta his sister and has worked with her on many collaborations including 2017’s “Downtown,” acknowledges the responsibility that comes along with representing your country on the world stage. “There is a lot of pressure to say certain things or act in certain ways, not just for your country but for Latinos in general,” he says.

During her appearance at Coachella this year, the first for a female solo act from Brazil, she performed a career-spanning set list—including Version of Me’s “Girl From Rio,” an update of the bossa nova standard “The Girl From Ipanema” in English—in front of a backdrop that depicted Rio’s colorful favelas.

At this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, Anitta performed “Envolver” and then asked the crowd, “Did you think I wasn’t going to shake my ass tonight?” before doing an elaborate dance routine to a funk rhythm. The question was a callback to when she asked a Brazilian audience that same question years ago. “I just wanted them to know that I didn’t forget my roots,” she says of her Brazilian fans. Later in the night, she won the Best Latin category and became the first Brazilian to win a VMA for a solo project since the show’s inception in 1984.

At home her fame has been tested by her political beliefs. She initially withstood public pressure to speak out about the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, but she took classes with a friend, lawyer and commentator Gabriela Prioli, to get up to speed on her country’s political situation. She eventually brought these lessons to her Instagram audience and denounced President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right policies. Bolsonaro has in turn mocked her on Twitter, suggesting she was out of touch with everyday Brazilians after she shared that she had been discussing her concerns about climate change with Leonardo DiCaprio.

The response to the back-and-forth has been intense for the singer. “Half of the country wants to kill me, wants me to die, wants to punch me,” she says. “My family gets scared, I just tell them, Yeah, [if they] come kill me, [I] will haunt [them] forever as a ghost.”

“There is a lot of pressure to say certain things or act in certain ways, not just for your country but for Latinos in general.”— J Balvin

Her older brother Renan Machado, who has worked alongside her since her very first gigs, is the only person besides her business manager who knows how much money she actually has in the bank, she says. She’s afraid if she knew the amount, she’d start giving money away faster than she could earn it. Even though she’s bought six cars for friends and family, she only drives rentals. “How much does it cost for me to have a car and pay the taxes for the car just for it to be there doing nothing?” she says.

When in Brazil, Anitta tries to squeeze in trips to a temple where she practices Candomblé, a Brazilian religion with roots in several African religions. It was passed down to her from her father. She’ll wear a customary all-white outfit, sweep the temple’s floors and do the congregation’s dishes—she says it makes her feel like a normal person. Despite the faith’s popularity, Anitta is one of the few celebrities in Brazil to speak about Candomblé publicly, and when she posts on social media about it, it still makes news.

Followers of Candomblé believe that each person has a connection to a specific orixá, or spirit. Anitta says her orixá is Logun Ede, who spends half the year with his father and half the year with his mother, picking up dramatically different traits from each parent. Logun Ede exemplifies the duality that Anitta sees in herself: her sensitivity and her toughness. “After I understood this in my religion,” she says, “I understood myself.”

A breakout moment came in 2013 with “Show das Poderosas,” a song about female empowerment that took elements from funk and blended them with pop, making it radio-friendly. Over brash percussion in the song, Anitta asserts how powerful women are—it’s the same kind of feminist pop Beyoncé was releasing at the time. Anitta conceptualized a video for the song, which featured women with various body types and men in heels dancing behind her. It racked up a million views in a week, and local hawkers quickly started selling knockoffs of the cutoff shorts and studded bra top she wore in the video.

“Immediately you connect with her. She feels like the girl up the street, even though you know she’s a star.”— Missy Elliott

“There is a lot of pressure to say certain things or act in certain ways, not just for your country but for Latinos in general.”— J Balvin

A breakout moment came in 2013 with “Show das Poderosas,” a song about female empowerment that took elements from funk and blended them with pop, making it radio-friendly. Over brash percussion in the song, Anitta asserts how powerful women are—it’s the same kind of feminist pop Beyoncé was releasing at the time. Anitta conceptualized a video for the song, which featured women with various body types and men in heels dancing behind her. It racked up a million views in a week, and local hawkers quickly started selling knockoffs of the cutoff shorts and studded bra top she wore in the video.

“Immediately you connect with her. She feels like the girl up the street, even though you know she’s a star.”— Missy Elliott

Anitta recalls the skepticism of local industry folk about her global plans. “They said, ‘Well, you can try to go international, but that’s impossible. Nobody’s ever made it, the last person was Carmen Miranda,’ ” she says. “Impossible? This word just makes me want to go for it.”

“There is a lot of pressure to say certain things or act in certain ways, not just for your country but for Latinos in general.”— J Balvin

When asked if she’s going to sing and perform forever, Anitta jumps up in her seat and says, “Not forever. Hell, no.” She says she’ll keep making music for another five to six years, and then it’s time to end her singing career.

Instead, she’s planning to take up a new profession: acting. She’s eager to “bring the butterflies,” as she describes it. “It’s pointless for me to keep pushing myself to keep doing things that won’t fulfil new dreams. I’ve already done what was impossible,” she says. “What is bigger than No. 1?”

For now, she’s looking over scripts and planning a special 30th birthday trip for March. This past year, her astrologist told her to spend her 29th birthday in Thailand for good luck. Coincidence or not, Anitta’s two-day trip there, with one friend and a small bag, resulted in a No. 1 song on Spotify and a VMA award. She’s planning to take her astrologist’s advice again.

“I already texted her and asked what’s the place next year, ’cause I’m coming,” she says. “If she said Mars? I’m going to Mars. I’ll call Elon Mus

www.wsj.com

Here starts the third item:

How Maya Rudolph Became the Queen of Comedy

Audiences first fell in love with Rudolph—WSJ.’s 2022 Comedy Innovator—on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Two decades later, the writer, producer and Emmy-winning actor continues to bring her signature sense of humor to television, film and beyond.

By Clover Hope | Photography by Gioncarlo Valentine for WSJ. Magazine | Styling by Ronald Burton I

Oct. 28, 2022

Maya Rudolph doesn’t need to say anything to make us laugh. Audiences around the world want to watch her perform, and only the slightest twitch of her face begets giggles. She can impersonate an elusive chanteuse or an over-the-top Italian designer or make a phrase like “bubble bath” sound luxuriously burlesque. But years ago, when it came to public-facing parts of her job—interviews, talk shows, red carpets—she would find herself unable to be funny.

Related Video

“It would always feel like someone was stealing my soul,” says Rudolph, 50, sitting comfortably in a velvet armchair on a late September afternoon. “That’s where, over the years, I created a persona to protect myself.”

Rudolph is in the converted garage of her production company’s Los Angeles headquarters, wearing a black empire-waist maxi dress, her uniform of leisure. She remembers her first appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman in 2009. “I did not have a good time,” she reflects. “He said my name wrong, and I just sat there, like, I grew up my whole life in love with you. And now my heart is broken. And I’m sitting here embarrassed and humiliated. I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to come up with something funny to say. My public persona muscle wasn’t strong yet.” Over time, she adjusted. “I’ve definitely gotten much better. When I’m uncomfortable, I try to be funny.”

In June, she took on her latest television project, co-executive-producing and starring in the Apple TV+ series Loot as Molly Novak, a divorcée who discovers philanthropy after winning an USD 87 billion settlement from her cheating tech husband, played by Adam Scott. During an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Rudolph talked about filming scenes at the Bel Air megamansion The One, a 105,000-square-foot palace with 42 bathrooms and several pools, including one right off of a bedroom, which, as Rudolph told Meyers, is useful if “you wanna watch your lover swim.”

Rudolph has a natural curiosity and playfulness that makes her characters feel sincere. That impulse toward empathy has informed her work in comedies like Bridesmaids and as one of Saturday Night Live’s most-beloved cast members for seven seasons. She won her second Emmy last year for an affable guest portrayal as Vice President Kamala Harris. Now a Hollywood fixture, Rudolph has become choosier about roles and collaborators, many of whom are friends. In the macabre 2018 Amazon drama Forever, she played a suburban wife alongside SNL alumnus Fred Armisen. In Nick Kroll’s adolescent Netflix series Big Mouth, she voices the giddy Hormone Monstress, Connie. (Season 6 premiered in October.) In November, Rudolph stars opposite Amy Adams’s princess Giselle as the evil queen Malvina in the Enchanted sequel, Disenchanted.

The writer, producer and Emmy-winning actor discusses ‘Saturday Night Live,’ the funniest film of all time and how improv is her superpower.

Rudolph’s sense of mirth works well for a Disney villain. “People just love Maya, and you need to love this villain,” says Adams. “She’s able to bring so much joy and energy to the set but also stay extraordinarily grounded in the truth of any moment, even when playing these larger-than-life comedic beasts.”

The pandemic has made Rudolph, like many others, focus more on her physical and mental well-being. For her 50th birthday in June, she vacationed in Europe with her partner of over 20 years, director Paul Thomas Anderson, and their four kids. It was her first break in a while. The pursuit of balance is an existential cliché, and Rudolph has found it to be deceptive. “What is this fake thing we think exists about balance?” she says, steadying a Cobb salad she got for lunch on one palm. “I mean, meditation is helpful to me, but did I do it this morning? No.” She smiles. “And that’s OK.”

Lately she’s been having lucid revelations, like the fact that in years of performing physical roles on SNL, she never did warm-ups. “I’m like, Why didn’t I ever stretch before doing things like that? I could have really hurt myself!” she exclaims. “Little things add up, and when you turn 50, you start to think, Holy shit! I’ve been here for 50 years. Like, OK, I’m really examining my life right now. What needs to happen?”

“I’ve never personally been interested in scathing comedy,” says Rudolph. “It doesn’t sit right in my body.” The Row turtleneck, USD 1450, TheRow.com, Marc Jacobs scarf, price upon request, BergdorfGoodman.com.

A few years ago, Rudolph envisioned her ideal workspace as a happy place with a calming energy. She wanted peacefulness in her life and figured her office should be an actual home. “My dream was to have a kitchen and someone cooking in here all the time,” she says, rummaging for utensils in the back office. “That hasn’t happened yet. But isn’t that comforting?”

Rudolph formed Animal Pictures in 2018 with longtime friends: actor Natasha Lyonne (they met in Rudolph’s first year at SNL) and producer Danielle Renfrew Behrens (they’ve known each other since kindergarten). In June, the company inked a first-look deal with Apple TV+ and recently completed projects like Lyonne’s Peacock mystery series Poker Face, and Sirens, a documentary about a female hair-metal band. The Animal Pictures headquarters is a modest ranch house in Studio City, with an open-concept living room featuring a built-in bookcase filled with duplicate copies of biographies like Julia Blackburn’s With Billie.

As a rule, Rudolph loves the energy of working with friends, but the sketch-comedy cycle became exhausting. She started to prioritize rest. “Believe me, I am not a Pollyanna who’s like, I smile all day, every day. I get stressed out, I get pissed off, but I learned I could make a choice for myself, and it’s liberating,” she says of valuing downtime. “Maybe people who’ve worked as long as I have make other choices and have nicer cars. I don’t know, but it’s so important for me to [try to] have that balance.”

Earlier this year, Lyonne took over the company’s back office to edit for season 2 of her Netflix drama Russian Doll, which Animal Pictures co-produced. The back wall doubles as a whiteboard, still smeared with the grime of bygone notes. Rudolph mentions that the writers’ room for Loot met in the office recently to develop season 2. Although show creators Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard (who also created Forever) had Jeff Bezos’s divorce in mind when crafting Loot, Rudolph’s inspiration for her character, Molly, was looser. The commentary about wealth is cheeky, not searing.

“The show was never about raking any one person over the coals. I’ve never personally been interested in scathing comedy,” says Rudolph. “It doesn’t sit right in my body, and it doesn’t work for me, and I learned through experience that I’m funnier when I find something funny. When I’m not feeling that, it feels like a lie.” By the series’ end, Molly makes a grand, charitable gesture. Similarly, in September, Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, revealed that he’d donated the entire company, with future profits going to fight climate change. Rudolph says, “We were all texting each other, going, ‘Do you think he watched the show?!’

“I think there is something to human nature in that we want to empathize,” Rudolph says. “And that’s why we watch other human beings in stories. We want to connect somehow to ourselves.” Valentino cape, USD 6600, select Valentino boutiques, Lafayette 148 New York shirt, USD 698, and pants, USD 998, Lafayette148NY.com, Repossi ear cuff (right ear, top), USD 3850, SaksFifthAvenue.com.

Only a likable star could offset the opulence on Loot with levity. (During the divorce proceedings, Molly discovers she owns both an alpaca farm and an amusement park.) “The world of billionaires sounds like magic to me, and I’ve always loved an element of magic in anything I do,” says Rudolph. The show requires her to play an exaggerated version of herself at an intersection of fame and money that’s foreign to someone who doesn’t consider herself a celebrity. “I know I’m a working actor and people know who I am, but I don’t feel like a celebrity, because that word means something else today to me,” says Rudolph. “There are a lot of different types of celebrities these days and a lot of self-made celebrities where people are famous for being famous, and that isn’t what I do.”

On days when she’s not filming, you will “never, never” see her in full makeup. After we speak, she offers me an orange and packs my leftover salad into a spare paper bag like a lunch box, dropping in plastic cutlery. When Lyonne was preparing to host Saturday Night Live for the first time in May, she and Rudolph hopped on a FaceTime call. “She was walking around in the bathroom, and I’m pretty sure she was, like, topless,” says Lyonne, laughing at the memory. “She was like, ‘You need to tell little Natasha that big Natasha is here, and she’s going to take care of little Natasha and that you’ve got her, and you know how to show up for her now.’ ”

Lyonne attributes the easiness to a simple trait. “She essentially has self-respect, which I think so many of us are willing to dispose of too easily in the race to win at life,” says Lyonne. “Maya very much has that energy of, No, this is life. So we better get a good sofa that we can actually sit on and relax and watch movies, so we stay in an inspired, happy place where we want to continue to create rather than this harsh metal bench with the wind blowing and an overcoat pulled tight.”

Early in her career, Rudolph wondered the same thing others did: What is it about Maya Rudolph? “I remember saying to someone, ‘What am I to you? What’s my brand?’ Because I don’t know what it is,” she says. “Do I have a brand? Like, what is it?

The average TV viewer might not realize that Rudolph is the daughter of two artists: soul legend Minnie Riperton and producer-songwriter Richard Rudolph. The couple raised Maya and her older brother, Marc, in Los Angeles before Riperton died of breast cancer when Maya was 6 years old.

Naturally, Maya became a musical entertainer. She was also a style-obsessed Vogue magazine hoarder. Around eighth grade, she discovered thrift shops, and at 14, she worked at a store on Melrose, after saying she was 16 to get the job. For her high school senior project, Maya put on a fashion show and used a song by designer Jean Paul Gaultier (who briefly dabbled in dance music in the ’80s), and she once told her father she wanted to start an affordable clothing line. (She studied fashion one summer in Paris.)

She also studied photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and knew she wanted to act but didn’t want to be “a boring-ass person who grew up in L.A. and stayed in L.A.,” Rudolph says. “I wanted to feel more well-rounded, but I was probably a little scared to go far.”

As an actor, Rudolph leans toward being outrageous but jovial and always redeeming. “There’s nothing worse than watching a show and hating somebody. I mean, it exists,” she says. “You know, people love Succession. Like, ‘Oh, my God, they’re such assholes!’ It’s such an incredible show, but I think there is something to human nature in that we want to empathize. And that’s why we watch other human beings in stories. We want to connect somehow to ourselves.”

Lyonne also sees a rhythm in Rudolph’s approach. “I often think it’s because of a musicality that’s in her organically and walks hand-in-hand with the comedy,” says Lyonne. “Part of the skill of improvisation is that their minds are sort of wired for very big thoughts and also know how to have the joy of plucking it very quickly and distilling it to something that’s at its most absurdist.”

Rudolph doesn’t always understand why her comedy lands. All she knows is that she keeps creating until it feels right. “There isn’t always an answer. ‘Why did Bridesmaids click?’ has been the story ever since it came out,” Rudolph says with a shrug. “We were all so predisposed to making things we thought were funny but not necessarily having them resonate with other people in the way that that movie did. It proves there isn’t one way to do something, and you never know how people will respond. So the more you do the thing you do, the better you get at it.” So much of the process is out of her hands, and that’s OK, she says. “It’s never always up to you.”

Rudolph’s dad was adamant about her finding a job. Maya wanted a cool one. To pay rent, she worked as a wardrobe assistant for commercials and music videos tasked with finding, for example, “outfits for the type of people who would be on Three’s Company.” She once plucked costumes for kids cosplaying as rappers in a posthumous Notorious B.I.G. video.

After a stint as a keyboardist in the rock band the Rentals, Rudolph joined L.A. improv troupe The Groundlings. One of her teachers, actor Mindy Sterling, told her, “You sing. It’s part of you,” which inspired Rudolph to continue incorporating it into her act. For Disenchanted, she sings a challenging duet with co-star Adams. “I’m always hard on myself about singing. I put the bar way too high, and the song they wrote for us was much higher than I’m used to,” says Rudolph. “I was scared I wouldn’t be able to pull it off, so I worked really hard with our musical director. And when I sang it, it was such a personal accomplishment.”

“She’s able to bring so much joy and energy to the set but also stay extraordinarily grounded in the truth of any moment.” — Amy Adams

She uses her mother’s staggering five-octave vocal range as a measure. “I don’t know because I can’t ask her, but with her, it’s like, that was there from the beginning,” says Rudolph of her mom’s musicality. “What’s strange about my voice is I can sing like other people. I just don’t really know what my voice sounds like. I had to accept that I’m a bit more of an alto, and that’s OK. I can’t sing everything.”

At first, she took a passive approach to acting. “I thought being an actor was waiting to be hired by people, which is ironic for somebody like me, who looked like no one I saw on any screen at any point in my life,” says Rudolph, citing the actor she often mentions as a muse. “I like to say Lisa Bonet because I knew she was mixed [race]. I didn’t look like Lisa Bonet. But it was the closest I got. Because I hadn’t established who I was for myself, I didn’t know what my go-to thing was. I had to tell people who I was. They couldn’t figure me out. They weren’t thinking about me. No one’s thinking about you. Only you are thinking about you.”

Rudolph joined SNL when she was 27 and was stumbling toward finding her voice. She would sometimes write a piece she thought was funny, and it wouldn’t be chosen. “And then there were times I’d be handed something, and I would feel like, I don’t know how to do this,” she says. In time, she found her cadence and implemented it into her work. “I started to understand myself better, ” she says.

TextileFuture

by Virginia

How Anitta Made ‘Envolver’ and Took Over the World

With this year’s release of her trilingual album, ‘Versions of Me,’ Brazilian singer Anitta broke into the U.S. market, translating her multicultural music across the globe.

How Maya Rudolph Became the Queen of Comedy

Share this TextileFuture content with: