
Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer) and Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in ‘Daredevil: Born Again’
Giovanni Rufino/Marvel
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details from Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again.
When Ayelet Zurer reprised her role as Vanessa Fisk, the wife of Vincent D’Onofrio’s supervillain Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin, in Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again, it would be a bittersweet journey for the acclaimed Israeli actress. Zurer had played Kingpin’s wife and closest confidante in the first three seasons of Netflix’s Daredevil before the series was canceled and then resurrected seven years later for Disney+ as Daredevil: Born Again.
Audiences were recently left shocked in the fifth episode of Season 2 when Vanessa, who had been taking on a bigger role in Kingpin’s criminal empire, is mortally wounded in an attack and initially survives long enough to be treated. However, she ultimately succumbs to her injuries by the end of the episode, sending Wilson into a fit of rage and despair.
“I love Vanessa,” Zurer tells Deadline. “It’s so bizarre because she’s so far away from me. She’s this morally complex art dealer connected to the crime world who serves a very specific aspect of Kingpin. She was written in a way where everything was about honesty and she’s a person who is so used to people lying to themselves and others – people with money, mostly because that’s how she views the world she is in – so she’s kind of jaded.
“But she grew into this very interesting character who could take a lot of shit and at the end of Season One we see her as part of the complete amalgamation of her and Wilson and they’re on the same path. She’s serving him, obviously, and we realize that all along she was serving him. Even though their paths were apart and it seemed like she might have been doing her own thing, she actually didn’t and she kept going on the same sort of narrative that completes him. It’s ultimately a really strong love story, which is always interesting to me because the antagonists are the people with the strongest love affair. It’s this delicious juxtaposition of menace and love.”
Zurer admits that when she first found about Vanessa’s arc this season, there were a lot of mixed emotions. Showrunner Dario Scardapane and executive producer Sana Amanat knew that Vanessa’s death would spark the rage in Kingpin that was needed to propel the future of the story and while the departure is a sad one, “it’s beautifully done.”

Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer) and Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in ‘Daredevil: Born Again’
Giovanni Rufino/Marvel
“In the second season, there’s a new threat coming into the picture and I think Vanessa is feeling it but the internal threat that she is feeling is not enough,” says Zurer. “[Kingpin] is enough for her but she’s not enough. He always wants more, he’s always hungry and always needs to fill another hole within himself to conquer more, get more control, to expand his dream and she starts to realize that it’s not quite sitting well. There is this real sensation that there is danger and that the level of danger is really spiking. But it’s all beautifully done because Dario wrote it in a way where it’s very internal.”
She continues: “I’ll always find her fascinating. I wish had even more to investigate with her but even though this is very much a comic book show with action, it’s the depth of the show that has always been so interesting to me. There has always been an attempt to talk about something deeper and that comes from the writers because they create really interesting juxtapositions for the story and for the characters.”
Zurer began her career in Israeli cinema and TV in the early ’90s where she won an Israel Film Academy Award for her role in Nina’s Tragedies and an Israeli Television Academy Award for her role in In Therapy. She was also nominated for her work in Shtisel. Her transition to Hollywood happened after casting director Nina Gold saw Zurer’s performance in 2004 film Something Sweet, which ultimately led to Gold casting her in Steven Spielberg’s Munich in 2005. Zurer went on to take roles in Angels & Demons with Tom Hanks and Man of Steel, the latter in which she played Superman’s biological mother.
More recently, she has returned as Queen Achinoam in a second season of Amazon MGM Studios’ hit biblical drama House of David. The series, which drew 22 million viewers in the first 17 days after its Season 1 launch, hails from Wonder Project’s Jon Erwin (Jesus Revolution) and Jon Gunn (Ordinary Angels) and tells the story of the ascent of the biblical figure David (Michael Iskander), who eventually becomes the most renowned and celebrated king of Israel.
The series follows the once-mighty King Saul as he falls victim to his own pride. At the direction of God, the prophet Samuel anoints an unlikely outcast teenager as the new king. As Saul loses his power over his kingdom, David finds himself on a journey to discover and fulfil his destiny. Zurer’s Queen Achinoam is wife to King Saul and not much is known of her in the original text, but the series presents her as a politically aware and emotionally complex royal figure, navigating life within Saul’s court during a turbulent period in Israel’s history.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a historical biographical series because these kinds of stories can easily go wrong,” she admits. “The retelling of the Bible can go really wrong, particularly when it comes to developing characters. But I met with the creators, and we talked about women at the time and how they didn’t have that much agency. Women were not allowed to own land, let alone have the ability to change or affect stories and I wasn’t interesting in taking part in a story where women were just tools of the story. I wanted them to have a real agenda.”
She then started listening to podcasts about historians talking about the Bible and began to realize that women at the time actually “did have a lot of power.”
“It was not always out in the front so much, but definitely behind the scenes,” she says. “I found some intriguing things about witchcraft at the time and the perception of it and the perception of women and their roles in those days and they overcame their limitations. That’s what really interested me.”

Queen Ahinoam (Ayelet Zurer) in ‘House of David’
Jonathan Prime/Prime/Amazon Content Services
House of David ultimately has become one of Zurer’s “favorite jobs” to date. Both series shot in Greece, and she says she found the entire process “incredibly collaborative” and fun.
Zurer says she was adamant that she didn’t want to make Achinoam into “a wicked queen” and wanted her to have a “very grounding reason to do everything she does.”
“I found faith for her was a really big thing, so I leaned on that,” she says. “When the rug is pulled from underneath her feel and she has to protect herself, she’s scared of losing her identity. So, by protecting the King and the Kingdom, she is protecting her identity. Some people will see her as just the bad Queen, but I don’t see it that way. She’s a very real woman in that time that would do anything to protect her family and that’s what she does, and I really fought for that.”
When it comes to choosing her roles, Zurer says that in addition to connecting with the character and the production team, she also thinks a lot about her audience. “I really feel like being an actor is a spiritual thing and you are serving a creation of some sort of subconscious and adding to the subconscious mind and maybe the conscious mind as well. So, I fell a little bit of responsibility in that space.
“You’ve got to do that because when you are a working actor, you are the luckiest person on Earth because you get to be in places of work with a lot of really talented and interesting people, travel the world and make money while doing your job. So, I’m very conscious of that and because of what it gives me, I feel like I have to be responsible of what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.”
At present Zurer is dipping her toe in the writing space and has three projects in development. While they are still too early to discuss, she does reveal that one is a film about a family that touches on the subject of autism, another is a show that she is developing and she also has a graphic novel in development. Zurer has previously illustrated two adult books, Shorts and Badolina by Gabi Nitzan.
“I have been writing and developing things for the screen for more than 10 years now,” she says. “I know how hard it is and I have such a tremendous respect for writers now. It’s so hard to finish writing something and then bring it to someone else to read.”
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As Larry David‘s comedic trip through U.S. history comes to an end, he took credit for one of the nation’s more recent presidential scandals.
On Friday’s season finale of the HBO sketch comedy miniseries Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance as himself in a sketch set in 2014, as David advised him to wear the now-infamous, outrage-inducing tan suit during his live press conference on military response to ISIS.
Following some banter on how the POTUS avoids stains, David accidentally spills juice on Obama’s suit jacket when he leaves the room. When the 44th president returns, the comedian recommends he wear the tan suit that Obama planned on taking it to Turin for NATO Summit, for “a daytime event, it’s outdoors, a little more casual.”
“First of all, it’s a gorgeous suit,” David declared. “And this is casual Friday!”
“It is a great suit,” admitted Obama, as David told him, “Oh boy, oh boy. I think this is the move. … Old lips won’t let you down. You’ll thank me!”
As Obama models the look, David gives him his signature, “Pretty good! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
“You sure about this?” asks Obama, as David assures him, “Never been more sure about anything in my life. People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”
Obama’s cameo in the finale comes as David marks the United States Semiquencentennial with the seven-part sketch comedy limited series, which recounts major events in U.S. history through the comedian’s signature observational humor.
David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner Jeff Schaffer, who serves as an executive producer on Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, previously told Deadline that Obama, who produced under his Higher Ground banner, reached out to his buddy David to ask if he’d be interested in making the show to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.
“When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away,” said Schaffer. “But the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.”
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Matthew McConaughey shows off his vocal skills (and some hidden banjo talents) with his latest role in The Rivals of Amziah King.
On Friday, Lakeshore Records released the single and music video for “Quill” from the original motion picture soundtrack, performed by the Oscar-winning and co-star Ben Hardesty, also featuring Miranda Zickler, Angelina LookingGlass and Andrea Pister.
Set in the backwoods of Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King follows the musically gifted Amaziah King (McConaughey) and his bluegrass-playing band of misfits while overseeing the premier honey-making operation in town. When Amaziah’s estranged foster daughter unexpectedly returns, he leaps at the chance to reconnect and create a family business. But the honey game is ruthless, and Amaziah’s rivals threaten to destroy everything he has built.
Premiering Aug. 14 in theaters, the Andrew Patterson-written-and-directed drama also stars Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Jake Horowitz, Tony Revolori and Kurt Russell.
Producers are David Heyman, Teddy Schwarzman, Jeffrey Clifford, Michael Heimler, James Montague and Will Greenfield.
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With their latest directorial outing, Jane Schoenbrun used subtle pieces of nostalgia to deconstruct the slasher genre.
The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer/director explained to Deadline that they wanted to create “a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary,” noting the frequent symbolism of candy and junk food as providing an atmosphere “that’s actually safe” while diving into a horror movie or exploring sexuality after trauma.
“There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe,” said Schoenbrun, who is non-binary. “Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, ‘Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.’”
In Schoenbrun’s latest film, Hannah Einbinder stars as queer director Kris, who is tapped to helm a new installment of the long-running Camp Miasma horror franchise. While courting Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, to reprise her role, the pair spirals into a psychosexual frenzy as the slasher’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), comes to life.
Acknowledging the problematic trans representation of horror films like Psycho (1960), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), Schoenbrun admitted the genre has been “catnip to me since I was 10 years old,” and they jumped at the chance to direct their own.

“So many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals … And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy,” they explained.
“But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants,” said Schoenbrun. “It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.”
Read on about Jane Schoenbrun’s love letter to the slasher genre with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, now playing in theaters.
DEADLINE: It was really fun to see the slasher genre through your eyes. Tell me about finding inspiration in that genre and “final girls.”
JANE SCHOENBRUN: I mean, it was the easiest thing in the world because it’s just one of those genres that has been catnip to me since I was 10 years old. I just raided the horror section of the video store as a kid from an age when I really shouldn’t have been doing that, like in 5th grade, I watched in the span of about one week, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I think that I was always drawn to movies and really anything entertainment where it felt forbidden in some way, like the thing on the tape, how is that even allowed? And that’s the thing that I love about a lot of my favorite slashers. Don’t get me wrong, I love like brutal ones, like I love Texas Chainsaw, that’s a nasty movie at its core, and that’s what’s so special about it. But so many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals of, OK, what’s the most outrageous way that like these like dumb kids can get killed? But watching it, it’s not about fear a lot of the time, it’s about joy and celebration. And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy. But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Sleepway Camp or Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface in drag. It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.

DEADLINE: I’m curious about the symbolism of all the processed junk food and the chandelier of wrappers.
SCHOENBRUN: The junk food in the movie, I forget when it found its way in there. It’s like so much of the movie is about, like I said, ritual, about being in a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary, whether that be Kris [Hannah Einbinder] in bed, with, you know, with Raisinets and the popcorn, watching a schlocky horror movie, or the two characters learning how to be present and enjoy sex after a lot of trauma. There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe. Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, “Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.”
DEADLINE: And one thing I really love—I just feel like it’s a theme in your work—is how it depicts the way media and entertainment influence us. Why does that inspire you?
SCHOENBRUN: I think it comes from a fascination and sensitivity to the complex relationship between what we think of as fiction and what we think of as reality, which we tend to, as a society, think of as pointing in one direction. Like, reality dictates fiction, not vice-versa, but when you actually look at the way the world works, it’s like one echoes off the other. And I think a complicated, sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful way, where the fiction, the cultural norms, the things we grow up looking at on our screens, the roles that we’re told people play, they kind of inspire us to create reality. There’s something liberating when you start thinking in that way. I think it’s a way of thinking that we as a culture, could do a lot more of. To think about the idea of fiction inspiring reality just as much as reality is inspiring fiction, is a potential path to liberating us from this hellscape that they’re telling us is the only way the world can be.

DEADLINE: And I know you have the Secretary reading. Tell me what it’s been like prepping for that and why you all chose that movie.
SCHOENBRUN: I mean, that was such a huge influence on on Miasma. There just aren’t that many fun and funny movies about deviant sex. And just the way that movie is like feather light while talking about really raw and taboo things, it is just really inspiring to me. And the dynamic between those two main characters is definitely one that had a lot of influence on on Kris and Billy’s [Gillian Anderson] relationship in Miasma. And it’s already to me a very queer movie in its way, but having Gillian reading the James Spader part and Hannah reading the Maggie Gyllenhaal part, I think it’s just gonna be like a very unique joy. Honestly, we’ve been prepping a little bit, but I think it’s just gonna be about getting up there and feeling the chemistry of it all, and just letting these folks who we have all gotten to know each other really, really well, but we haven’t actually done anything wacky and creative like that in a while, like as a reunion, it’s gonna be a real blast, I think.
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