PROFILES

Angel Olsen for the New York Times Magazine

In person, though, Olsen’s lingering reputation as a sad girl singing sad songs seems ill fitting. She’s direct, deliberate and carefully calibrated, with a sly sense of humor, full of coolly ironic asides and unexpected absurdism. “I don’t know if I would listen to my music if I weren’t the person who made it,” she told me. “I don’t know if it would be my vibe.” A few weeks after we met, she sent me a video of herself, curled up inside a large cardboard box, pulling the lid down over her elfin face and pouting: “People are always putting me in boxes!”

Yorgos Lanthimos for the New York Times Magazine

Ingmar Bergman might well have recognized the deep curiosity that drives these films: Like Bergman, Lanthimos is fascinated by the drive for control — in both its mundanities and extremes — and by the inscrutability of human behavior. But if Bergman’s work elevates these struggles to the realm of the metaphysical, Lanthimos’s approach is less lofty, ballasted by blood and grit. An ordinary toaster becomes a device for punishment; a woman is ferried to an ophthalmologist’s office in order to be blinded for her transgressions against the community.

Jenny Hval for VICE

Apocalypse, Girl borrows as much from pop music's playbooks as it does from minimalist, avant-garde electronica, with an intricate and choreographed sound that Hval says marks a different way of working and recording from her earlier albums. For this record, she spent more time than ever before in the studio tweaking vocals and backing tracks, working "with such detail, almost to the point of the detail which a writer has when they edit, with control over each word." Reproducing the full sonic texture of the album live seemed like a disappointing project until she realized that the very impossibility of the task offered her more room for spontaneity and play, "a much bigger palette to work from, an opening for including a lot of influences and thought, more spontaneous ideas."

Jeff Vandermeer for the New York Times Magazine

The fictionalized boar charge resembles its model in the way a person resembles their reflection in a fun-house mirror: the familiar features, distorted and rearranged, are more startling than ones chosen deliberately to shock. “I would say 90 percent of ‘The Southern Reach’ is actually mimetic fiction interrupted by weird stuff.” VanderMeer told me as we walked the same stretch of trail on a calm, hazy afternoon in March devoid of boars. For his fans, both longtime genre readers and newer ones who found his work through the best-selling “Annihilation” and its film adaptation, this statement may seem counterintuitive. His body of work — over a dozen novels and novellas, four volumes of short stories and two books of nonfiction, as well as 20 or so anthologies he co-edited (many assembled in collaboration with his wife, the influential sci-fi and fantasy editor Ann VanderMeer) — is best known for its dramatic departure both from mimetic realism as a literary technique (he might narrate from the perspective of a murderous bioengineered duck or a love-struck madman) and from more commonsensical, everyday reality.

Rebecca Hall in the New York Times Magazine

Like some long-limbed people, Hall has a tendency to fold herself up on the furniture in a disarming way, tucking her feet beneath her on the wicker sofa as she held a cup of green tea that I never saw her drink from. The researchers on “Finding Your Roots,” she told me, traced her mother’s side of the family tree as far back as her great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. She learned that her great-grandfather, whose name was John William Ewing, was born into slavery but found government work post-abolition in Washington, and even gave the toast for Frederick Douglass at a banquet in his honor. Her great-grandmother was a free woman of color, descended from one of only 5,000 Black men who fought on the side of the rebels during the Revolutionary War. But against the background of so much lineage lost and recovered was the discovery of the exact point at which the narrative had broken. “The revelation,” she said, “was that it was just my grandfather who passed — just that one act that erased a huge amount of history, including some stuff that’s really extraordinary.” She spoke carefully, pausing often. “The irony is his father was a race man. His father was someone who wanted to uplift.”

Michelle Yeoh in the New York Times Magazine

As she has grown older, Yeoh has given up doing some of the stunts that she blithely attempted when she was still proving herself — and when she watches her early films, she thinks of all that could have gone wrong. “We knew that we could do it, and we did it,” she said. “I swear, sometimes I look at a movie and go: Oh, my God. What the hell was I thinking then?” At one point, I asked whether she still remembered how to fight with the ancient weapons she used in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and she got to her feet and began lunging, thrusting an imaginary weapon. The key when mastering a new one, she said, is to spend time before the scene carrying it around everywhere, moving it constantly, making it an extension of your body. Wielding the pizzeria advertising sign she used for one of Evelyn’s alternate lives as a sign-spinner, for example, was “a little bit like using a spear, except it’s wider.”