9/2/2023 0 Comments Josh charles![]() ![]() “Having done just five years doing work on The Good Wife-that I was proud of with an incredible group of people-I want to do stuff that’s completely different,” Charles says. That’s meant a lot to the film because it really is, to me, unlike anything I’ve ever done or ever seen.”Īnd doing something he’s never done and never seen is that very thing we’ve all been hearing about as we search for answers from Charles regarding our despondence over his Good Wife exit. More than that is the people that do respond to it have been really supportive and vocal. “It has its share of people who really love and some people who really don’t get it, and that’s OK with me. “I knew going in that this was a really challenging script,” Charles says. The New York Times ran an all-out rave of the film when it debuted at Cannes, calling it “delightful, and delightfully eccentric…a blast of pure cinema.” The Playlist, on the other hand, called it “too oblique, too delighted with itself, and frankly, too dull to admire…much.” Their critical colleagues concurred in equally, wildly disparate fashion. “But narratively it’s so unusual.”Īnd as is the case when indie films are “so unusual,” the response to Bird People, which premiered at Cannes before screening in Toronto, has been extremely passionate and extremely divided. The second half follows a French maid in her early twenties whose curiosities about the personal lives of her guests literally takes flight one night (which should give you a hint about what the title means, and why this isn’t your typical indie drama). The first half of Bird People follows a Silicon Valley businessman named Gary Newman (Charles) who, while wandering Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport and its clinical adjacent hotels on a work trip, has an existential crisis of sorts: he quits his job, tells his wife he’s leaving his family via Skype, and spirals down the rabbit hole. And the less you know about the elements that make it so batshit crazy, the more likely you are to be engrossed by its strangeness. This is an aggressively difficult movie to explain without making it sound batshit crazy-because as weird and polarizing as it is it is also kind of spectacularly beautiful and adventurous. The less you know the better.”Īll of this is true. You have to go into a cinema and let the lights go down. It’s definitely a film that you have to experience. “You can explain what it’s about, but it’s not easy to put into a logline. “It’s not a film that’s easy to explain,” he tells me, fresh from showing off the movie, directed by French auteur Pascale Ferran, at the Toronto Film Festival. And we’re getting a glimpse at what that might mean with his first movie released since his Good Wife exit hitting theaters this weekend. The answer that Charles, mostly known for his superb TV work on shows like Sports Night and In Treatment, has given when being constantly implored to explain himself, is that he, basically, was ready for a new creative challenge. Even Margulies in her Emmy acceptance speech for Best Actress this year said it: “ What were you thinking?” And Charles has had to face a firing squad of questions demanding to know why he left, how he could do this to us. Awards have been campaigned for and won to honor the way the show’s writers and actors dealt with Will leaving the show. The story of how it was orchestrated-by co-star Julianna Margulies, no less-has been endearingly documented. In the time since Charles’s mid-season exit from the show, his departure has become an obsession of sorts amongst TV fans. And also if you have a taste for excellent television you would have watched it already and grieved alongside the rest of us. (We won’t spoil what happens, though you probably have figured it out. If you watch the sensational CBS drama-and if you watch it then you are obsessed with it-then you remember every brutal pang of the heart-stopping, world-rocking, grief-stricken despair you felt when you watched Charles’s shocking last scene as Will Gardner on The Good Wife. All Rights Reserved.Where were you when you found out that Josh Charles would no longer be on The Good Wife? ![]()
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