\n<\/p>\n
S<\/span>ix weeks ago, Alex Winter was on stage at the first night of previews for Waiting for Godot \u2013 the latest Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett\u2019s absurdist masterpiece, in which Winter plays the puttering Vladimir to Keanu Reeves\u2019s equally aimless Estragon.<\/p>\n Winter is an old pro at live performance: he spent almost all of his middle and high school years on Broadway, eight shows a week. He and Reeves, his longtime friend and most righteous co-star of the Bill & Ted movies, had the idea for the revival three years ago and have been prepping ever since.<\/p>\n <\/span>Anthony Carrigan, Kaya Scodelario and Josh Gad in Adulthood.<\/span> Photograph: Albert Camicioli\/Signature Entertainment<\/p>\n And yet, on stage for the first time since he was a teenager, the 60-year-old actor had a moment of panic. \u201cI was like: \u2018Oh, holy shit! What if I\u2019m wrong?\u201d he says, perched on a velvet sofa in a lounge at the theatre, a few hours before he goes on again. \u201cAnd I\u2019m looking at Keanu, who\u2019s in a similar state of terror. And \u2013 well, it would have worried me if either of us were like, \u2018whatever.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The show, of course, went on. Winter and Reeves, the beloved time-travelling slackers of yore reunited as befuddled buddies in timeless purgatory, are now a third of the way through their 16-week run. Winter looks relaxed, sipping tea, in a blue scarf, at once garrulous and introspective. He\u2019s in favour of people feeling the precipitous fear of creative risk a little more. \u201cOne hundred percent. There should be a jumping-out-of-an-airplane [feeling] without, you know, jumping out of an airplane.\u201d<\/p>\n I know I can trust Keanu and he can trust me. There\u2019s no bullshit<\/p>\n Winter would know. As well as a return to Broadway, this season brings the release of Adulthood, his first film as director in over a decade. (He also appears in the black comedy as a weirdo stoner.) A child actor turned movie star turned director and producer and prolific tech documentarian, Winter\u2019s career has been fitful, searching and unconventional, full of sharp left turns and voracious curiosity. (On Godot, the New Yorker\u2019s Helen Shaw reported, accurately, that Winter\u2019s \u201cpalpable intelligence drives the show.\u201d) Returning to Broadway, where he made his debut at age 13, is a bit like closing a loop. \u201cI\u2019ve lived like three lifetimes since then. But now being backstage and doing my warm-ups, being in the wings and seeing the stagehands \u2013 it feels like I never left. It\u2019s like a complete time-bend.\u201d<\/p>\n One that is shared with Reeves, the eccentric, thoughtful yin to Winter\u2019s quick and chatty yang, a \u201clifesaver\u201d with whom Winter most recently appeared on-screen in Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). \u201cI knew that this was a mammoth undertaking, and the only reason I felt we could pull it off was that it was the two of us together,\u201d he says. Working with Reeves provides \u201can immediate sense of comfort. I know I can trust him and he can trust me. We genuinely have each other\u2019s backs. There\u2019s no bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Alex Winter (left) as Vladimir and Keanu Reeves as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, in New York.<\/span> Photograph: Andy Henderson\/AP<\/p>\n Reeves and Winter, with ever-precise comic timing and inimitable chemistry, are the leaven in this bleak existentialist affair, lending lines such as \u201ctogether again at last \u2026\u201d a jolt of sweetness \u2013 and indulging in a flourish of air guitar. Indeed, Winter says, performing with Reeves again \u201cis like being in a band.\u201d (The two both play bass.) \u201cIt\u2019s this fluid give-and-take. Sometimes I\u2019m cooking and he\u2019s catching up. Sometimes I\u2019m catching up and he\u2019s cooking. Sometimes we\u2019re helping each other out of a hole. Sometimes we\u2019re just on a fucking groove and we look at each other and go: \u2018God damn, that was good! Where the fuck did that come from?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Vladimir and Estragon, two longtime friends with a vaudeville past, share qualities with the duo \u2013 particularly a \u201cquestioning of faith and life\u201d \u2013 that have drawn them together since their early 20s. \u201cWe were both really into literature and drama, but also just like, what the fuck is this world? How do you live in it?\u201d Winter laughs. How do you maintain artistic integrity and have a Hollywood career? How do you keep having fun? And, after the success of Bill & Ted\u2019s Excellent Adventure in 1989, how do you be famous?<\/p>\n By this point, Winter had already been acting over half his life. Born in England to two modern dancers, he first got on stage at age 10 in St Louis, Missouri; when he, aged 12, and his mother moved to New York following divorce, she got him a children\u2019s talent agent. Within a month, he was on Broadway opposite Yul Brynner in The King and I. He spent most of his high school years in Peter Pan, playing John Darling next to Sandy Duncan.<\/p>\n <\/span>Winter in Joel Schumacher\u2019s The Lost Boys (1987).<\/span> Photograph: Jane O\u2019Neal\/Warner Bros\/Kobal\/REX\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n Here, he developed the trademark discipline of a child actor \u2013 a subject he later explored in his 2020 documentary Showbiz Kids \u2013 and lasting emotional scars from prolonged sexual abuse by an unnamed adult who, he says, has since died. The \u201cnightmarish\u201d experience, which he did not reveal publicly until 2018, left him with \u201cextreme PTSD\u201d and mental fracturing that, as he told the Guardian in 2020, got \u201cworse and worse and worse.\u201d<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t talk about it and kept working, \u2013 first an off-Broadway play, then commercials, then NYU film school, then an audition for Joel Schumacher\u2019s vampire drama The Lost Boys. The director encouraged him to drop out. The part was small, but the movie, released in 1987, \u201ctotally changed my life\u201d. A year short of graduation, he moved to LA.<\/p>\n <\/span>Air guitar at the ready \u2026 Winter and Reeves in Bill and Ted\u2019s Excellent Adventure (1989).<\/span> Photograph: Orion\/Kobal\/REX\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n By the time Bill & Ted\u2019s Bogus Journey sequel was released in 1991, Winter had already shifted focus, directing music videos and commercials and co-creating the Idiot Box, a late-night sketch series for MTV. In 1993, he co-wrote and co-directed the cult hit Freaked, in which he played a former child star who is kidnapped and turned into a mutant by Randy Quaid. By 26, he was \u201cfried.\u201d Winter dismissed his agents and decamped for New York, then London, where he formed a production company. \u201cI just wanted to get the hell out of the public eye, and just be on the tube, going to my office in Soho and start a family,\u201d he says. He found a therapist, and started confronting the trauma of abuse. He had three children, the youngest of whom is about to graduate high school in LA.<\/p>\n And he began pursuing rangy nonfiction interests as a documentarian \u2013 first Napster, the download site that revolutionised the consumption of music; then Bitcoin and the dark web; then the Panama Papers, Blockchain and the iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa. His most recent documentary, 2022\u2019s The YouTube Effect, traced the video sharing platform\u2019s arc from cute novelty to conspiracy theory machine. \u201cMy career is where I want it, which is that I have the ability to do whatever interests me the most,\u201d he notes sagely. \u201cBut I would not have been OK had I not split.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Adulthood, which Winter co-produced from a script by Michael MB Galvin, brings some of Winter\u2019s prevailing concerns back into the realm of metaphor: two siblings, manchild Noah (Josh Gad) and strait-laced Megan (Kaya Scodelario), discover a literal skeleton in their parents\u2019 basement, triggering a deadly spiral of bad decisions fuelled by fear of financial and reputational ruin. The film, says Winter, \u201cis at heart about the unrelenting and unspoken impossibility of living in this culture today\u201d and the \u201cfallacy of the middle class\u201d in countries, such as the US and the UK, that are actively hollowing it out.<\/p>\n Winter has never been shy about his political affiliations. Earlier this year, he helped organise anti-Musk Tesla Takedown protests \u2013 and is quick to tie the siblings\u2019 absurd hijinks back to the larger US climate. In Adulthood, \u201cstress can subtly shift you into immoral acts, which is very much about the times that we\u2019re in, where people who were Bernie bros suddenly went Maga,\u201d he says. The very online, pathetic Noah draws, in part, on Winter\u2019s experience in the bowels of YouTube. \u201cHaving been around so many fanboy-type people because of my work, I feel like I know them very well,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t have contempt for them, but I do think they need to grow up.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Winter (bottom left) and Jonathan Ward watch Sandy Duncan fly across the stage in a performance of Peter Pan in the 1970s.<\/span> Photograph: Diana Walker\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Winter, long a chronicler of the internet\u2019s maturation, now has his sights trained on AI. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about an AI doc for about five years, and it hasn\u2019t been the right time because it\u2019s moving so fast,\u201d he says. During the writers\u2019 and actors\u2019 strikes, held in part over AI protections, Winter acted as an interlocutor of sorts, running Zoom consortiums for guild members with AI technologists, academics, copyright lawyers and patent experts. \u201cMost of the criticism is really fucking dumb,\u201d he says, \u201clike people who are out there saying, \u2018I\u2019m a leader in the anti-AI charge, and we have to create this law or that\u2019, and they just have no idea what they\u2019re talking about and none of it is ever going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n He is not anti-regulation, more pro accurate and clear information, and certainly anti-huckster. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of smart people in this space,\u201d with \u201cgood morals,\u201d he says. (This does not, he notes, include OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman.) But \u201cthe reality of it is there will be an enormous amount of carnage on the way to things being OK. In every area, from Hollywood to climate to journalism, people are getting fired all over the place. They\u2019re not getting replaced by a robot. They\u2019re just not getting replaced.\u201d<\/p>\n Economic stress, job displacement, the rightward shift toward authoritarianism to solve the problems it can\u2019t and won\u2019t fix \u2013 it\u2019s an old cycle, now playing out again, that brings us back to Godot, based in part on Beckett\u2019s experience in the French resistance during the second world war. Winter returns to a question posed by Estragon in act I \u2013 \u201cWe\u2019ve no rights any more?\u201d \u2013 as the duo submit to waiting for no one. Vladimir answers: \u201cWe got rid of them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEvery night, I say that line to Keanu: \u2018We got rid of our rights,\u2019\u201d says Winter ruefully. \u201cWe were fucking idiots. We did it again.\u201d And, as ever, the show goes on.<\/p>\n Adulthood is available on digital platforms from 17 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Six weeks ago, Alex Winter was on stage at the first night of previews for Waiting for Godot \u2013 the latest Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett\u2019s absurdist masterpiece, in which Winter plays the puttering Vladimir to Keanu Reeves\u2019s equally aimless Estragon. Winter is an old pro at live performance: he spent almost all of his<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1215,18873,3964,1519,1547,5859,14898,1394,2656,6803,8310],"class_list":{"0":"post-32777","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alex","9":"tag-damn","10":"tag-fame","11":"tag-god","12":"tag-good","13":"tag-groove","14":"tag-keanu","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-reeves","17":"tag-reuniting","18":"tag-winter"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}