DESUS &

A Long MERO
Talk With DUA LIPA
Steve
Buscemi OFFSET
BJARKE
Contagion INGELS
on the
Diamond WES
Princess LANG
Cruise Ship OTTESSA
MOSHFEGH
ONLINE
CERAMICS

ROBERT
PATTINSON
THE RE
AC
OFF
FIELD.
AL
TION IS
THE
WAT C H AT youtube.com/gqsports
 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

THIS WEEK I GOT a couple of texts from GQ fashion director Instead, we have to ask: What is
the opportunity here? What lessons
Mobolaji Dawodu that read, “Three years ago today.” The first does this time have to teach us?
included a video of me, wearing a waffle-knit Henley and a If we don’t learn new things about
head bandana, smoking a cigarette by a pool in Jinja, Uganda. ourselves and each other—and
replace some of our old, outdated
The other, sent a couple of days later, had a photo of me on a habits with new ways of being
rooftop high above Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Seeing those and working that point toward
a better future—the only takeaways
images, and remembering the In the absence of globe-trotting, from the crisis will be human
GQ Style shoot that took us there, why not try some soul spelunking? su≠ering, economic carnage, and
was a surprisingly emotional I just turned 39 years old. For distrust of government. Surely,
experience; the far-flung memories my birthday, I briefly considered surfing waves of anxiety and guilt
made me really feel the depth and roping friends and family into a big, is not the best way to survive
utter strangeness of the social chaotic Zoom call. But in the end, a pandemic.
distancing era on a new level. I took an afternoon o≠ work, shut So instead, I choose to see the
Since I became editor, it has been down my phone, and went for a isolation as a gift. I choose to activate
my intention to express a truly global really long walk. A birthday sojourn. my immense privilege—I am healthy,
vision of life and style through the Honestly, it was one of the best I am safe, I am working—with the
pages of GQ. Our prevailing ethos has parties I’ve ever had. transformative power of gratitude.
been that the world is smaller than I also keep reminding myself to And I choose to spend the still nights
ever. And that places like Jinja and hold on to the skills that we are and the elongated, commute-less
Addis are just a flight away—certainly all cultivating during these strange, mornings softly feeling whatever
no less reachable than L.A., London, melty days so we can apply them feelings I may be having. (Note: To do
or Paris. All you have to do is go. to whatever new way of life emerges this, you have to stay o≠ your phone.)
So that’s what we are always telling next. Skills like: How to lead a team It turns out that one of the most
our readers to do: Just go! of brilliant, hardworking people from mind-expanding trips you can ever
And then came the coronavirus. afar with just a Wi-Fi signal and an go on is to simply quiet your thoughts
Our new mantra, as evidenced by this iPad. How to navigate a potentially and see what it’s like just to be.
issue of the magazine? Stay home! dangerous exposure event—like going Who knew that hunkering
But what are those of us with to the grocery store. And how to down at home would be the wildest
an explorer’s spirit left with in the build plenty of mental and emotional adventure of all?
time of quarantine? Well, in this space into a marriage when there
new moment of Zoom days and can be very little physical space.
wide-open nights, we have an even I think it’s imperative that we not Will Welch
rarer opportunity: to go inward. squander this unique experience. EDITOR IN CHIEF

2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
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 CONTENTS

GQ Summer
QQ Magazine&Ebook Group: 970508760

The Fix Behind the Scenes

With the People Who
Make GQ
Summer Drops............................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Say His Name: YA H YA A B DU L- M AT EEN II . . . . . . . . . . 14 Contributor

Hall of Fame: Celebrity Weddings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

on How to Turbocharge Your

J OE HOL D ER
Immune System With Intentional Eating........... 26
ROXANNE BEHR
on the Rolex “Red Line”
W E S L A NG Visuals director
Submariner Watch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Without the ability to conduct traditional
photo shoots, GQ visuals director Roxanne
Behr asked subjects for “extra participation
Meet E R I C T H O M A S, Your Favorite Athletes’ and creative buy-in.” That’s exactly
what Robert Pattinson brought, shooting
Favorite Life Coach....................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 his own photographs from home. Behr
sent over some examples of self-portraits,
and Pattinson “absorbed it and made
something that was his own,” she says.
“The result was unexpected and exciting.”

Features
→
Cover Story: RO B ERT PAT T IN S O N .................... 38 STEPHANIE TRAN
Senior visuals
editor
“Neon orange is
Creativity in the Time of Quarantine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 the new black.”

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the

Diamond Princess. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

S T E VE B US C EM I Has Seen It All....... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 RIGHT, FROM TOP: COURTESY OF ROX ANNE BEHR; MAT T MARTIN (3)

↑
T YLER AUSTIN
Fashion
assistant
“My favorite
pair of shoes
are these Vans
from Opening
Ceremony.”

On the Cover
Photograph by Robert Pattinson.
Shirt (price upon request) by Dior Men.
Produced by MAI Productions.

4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
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 CONTENTS

GQ Summer

For our cover story on actor Robert Pattinson, see page 38.
Blazer, $3,600, and shirt, $875, by Louis Vuitton Men’s.

6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 P H O T O G R A P H B Y R O B E R T P A T T I N S O N
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 BEACH TOTE
Whether we’re sunbathing
D solo or together this
R summer, there’s no better
towel-and-sunscreen
O bag than L.L.Bean’s
P legendary made-in-Maine
S tote ($45).

To

L
E
U
M
A HINE
S
y
B

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y B E N A L S O P J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 1 1
 FLEECE SHORTS POOLSIDE SHIRT
Shia LaBeouf was right: You never have to leave
Cutoff sweat shorts are the cabana of the
the truth. We like Les mind in Tombolo’s
Tien’s garment-dyed irreverent printed aloha
relaxed-fit version ($155). shirts ($128).

LEATHER BIRKS
For the first time since
Birkenstock was
founded in 1774, the
brand’s iconic sandal
comes with a luxurious
leather-wrapped footbed
and leather sole ($460).

OXFORD SHIRT
JACKET
Miuccia Prada’s
magic is in transforming
EASY PANTS
pedestrian clothes
Drawstring waist,
into dreamy garments.
single pleat, easygoing
This season, the humble
cotton-linen fabric: The
oxford-cloth button-down
king of casual elegance,
has all the attitude of a
Brunello Cucinelli,
trucker jacket ($1,560).
has done it again ($1,275).

REUSABLE-
BOTTLE BAG
This summer we’re
swapping out our
crossbody bag for
LUXE TOWEL
a crossbody beverage
Every Hermès print has
pouch, thanks to
a story. These leopards
this collab between
were first designed for
S’well and Smythson
a beach towel in 1967 by
($525 for set).
Christiane Vauzelles, who
has created some of the
house’s most collectible
silk scarves over the past
half century ($450).

1 2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
 WHITE JORTS
Levi’s cutoff shorts have
been an unimpeachable
good-times style staple
since Woodstock ($60).

RAFFIA LOAFERS
When your summer
shoes—like these woven
TIE-DYED TEE
Concetto Limone
Just when you thought
loafers—look like they
you didn’t need any more
were pilfered from Hotel
tie-dyed gear, Versace
Il Pellicano in Tuscany,
jumps in the mix with
you know you’re doing
this could-be-vintage
it right ($395).
Medusa tee ($795).

NOUVEAU RACING
SHADES
For an angular take
on Steve McQueen’s
eternally cool look,
Bottega Veneta has
you covered ($375).

PRINTED SPORT
SHORTS
Because you can’t surf
in drop-crotch shorts,
Rick Owens’s latest
collection features sporty
above-the-knee nylon
swim trunks ($716).

KNIT POLO
PRINTED Fair warning: This made-
BUCKET HAT in-Italy knit by Orlebar
NYC-based milliner Brown might render
Albertus Swanepoel every other polo in your
sourced the waxed- closet obsolete ($445).
cotton shwe-shwe fabric
for this hat from his native
South Africa ($200).

STACKABLE
BRACELETS
Susan Alexandra’s
beaded bags and
hand-painted bracelets
have helped usher in
fashion’s Arts and Crafts
CHEVRON TOWEL revival (from top, $60,
Beach essentials: $70, and $108).
sunscreen, shades,
a few frosty beverages,
and an oversize Missoni
towel ($159).
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 1 3
 The
F i x

Fashion

With a new role in the

Jordan Peele–produced
remake of Candyman,
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II—a
former civil service worker—
suddenly finds himself in
rare new territory as a
Hollywood leading man.
B y G A B R I E L L A PA I E L L A

His

jixiansheng

1 4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
Name
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y T Y R E L L
S T Y L E D B Y
H A M P T O N
J O N T I E T Z
 Pe ak Tomato
E P. 18 0

On Salt E P. 15 9

E P. 174
It’s All In the Vibe
Liquid Gold
E P. 151

E P. 172
The Ice Cre am Man
Put an Egg on It
E P. 107

Acid Trip E P. 13 0

Pizza, Pizza!
E P. 173

Rice 2.0 E P. 161

. . . P L U S 2 30 + O T H E R E P I S O D E S A N D C O U N T I N G .

Download it where ve r yo u g e t yo u r po d cast s.

 ’M HAVING a ball,” Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II says,
I not for the first time
today. It’s early March,
people are still shaking
hands with one another, and the two
of us are sitting in a classroom at the
New York Academy of Art, study-
ing a Still Life 101 setup: a pitcher,
an apple, a few clementines here
and there. I am dutifully following
our teacher’s instructions with the
skill level of a neurotic third grader.
Abdul-Mateen, 33, is blithely slath-
ering burnt umber oil paint onto his
canvas, full speed ahead. He might as
well be wearing a beret.
Abdul-Mateen is not technically a
painter, but he will be playing one in
the upcoming Candyman, a reboot of
the iconic black horror movie about
the hook-handed ghost of a lynched
man who is summoned when you
say his name five times in front of a
mirror. He is rumored to also be star-
ring as Candyman himself, which has
inspired a new Twitter meme about
deliberately calling forth the vengeful
spirit if he looks like Abdul-Mateen—
which is to say, a solid six feet three
and incredibly handsome. It’s his
biggest role yet, one that cements
him in a covetable and comfortable
place: leading man territory. This fall
he’ll also be portraying Black Panther
Party cofounder Bobby Seale in the
Aaron Sorkin courtroom drama The
Trial of the Chicago 7, and he’s cur-
rently filming The Matrix 4, across
from Keanu Reeves. “I have these
moments where my sense of reality
slows down and I pull back and I can
see the bigger picture,” he tells me. “I
say, Wow, I’m really doing this thing.”
For Abdul-Mateen, his childhood
relationship to the original 1992
Candyman was less about the movie
itself and more about feeling an ambi-
ent terror of its titular bogeyman. “In
my imagination, Candyman lived
where I live,” he recalls. “Candyman
came to the projects, so that made
him real.” Abdul-Mateen, the young- P R E V I O U S PA G E
est of six children, grew up between Sweater, $1,895,
and pants,
New Orleans and Oakland. His father $1,075, by
practiced Islam, and his mother is Giorgio Armani.
Christian, but he eventually drifted Hat, $60, from
toward the latter’s faith, mostly JJ Hat Center.
because the church had teen nights Watch, $6,900,
by Grand Seiko.
where he could go hang out with girls.
Necklace and
These days he doesn’t strictly adhere ring, his own.
to either religion, choosing instead
to borrow from both. “Somebody T H I S PA G E, L EF T
has to go to hell,” he says, remarking Blazer, $2,250,
on what would happen to each of his by Canali.
Sweater, $1,490,
parents according to the other’s reli-
by Fendi Men’s.
gion. “And I just don’t think that God Pants, $3,095, by
is that petty.” Emporio Armani.
When he pushes up the sleeves of Necklace, his own.
his black sweatshirt to grab another Bracelet, $192,
paintbrush, I catch a glimpse of a by Saskia Diez.
small tattoo on each wrist: on the T H I S PA G E, A B O V E
right, two stick figures holding hands Sweater, $275,
to symbolize him and his dad, who by Stòffa.
died of cancer when Abdul-Mateen Pants, $871,
was 21. On the left, a ladybug, because by Jil Sander.
Socks, $32,
his mom calls him “bug.”
by Falke.
Abdul-Mateen is deeply earnest.
This is apparent whether he’s talking O P P O S I T E PA G E
about his childhood love of Dick Van Blazer, $1,500,
Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or by Paul Smith.
the active group chat he has with his Tank top, $59,
by John Elliott.
fraternity brothers. And he’s pretty
Pants, $750,
sensitive, he’ll admit, even if it’s an by Ermenegildo
aspect of his personality that he’s only Zegna. Necklace,
recently started to come to terms with his own.
 The
F i x

Fashion
 because of “a girl.” (When I ask him to
The clarify, he grins and politely leaves it
at “a girl.”) But he’s not without confi-
F i x dence. I ask him to hit me with his
worst audition story, a question that
tends to lead to a funny anecdote, and
he rests his hand on his chin to reflect
Fashion on this for a second before cracking a
furtive smile to himself. So…?
“That smile was actually because
the answer is, I don’t [have one],” he
responds. “I really love auditioning,
RIG H T
Blazer, $2,495, and I tend to audition really well.”
by Lanvin. Becoming an actor wasn’t even
Tank top, $660, part of Abdul-Mateen’s original game
by Salvatore plan. He studied architecture—had
Ferragamo. wanted to be an architect since he was
Pants, $295,
by Needles.
six years old—and ran hurdles for the
Shoes, $139, track-and-field team at the University
by Johnston & of California, Berkeley. After graduat-
Murphy. ing in the midst of the 2008 recession,
Necklace, he got a gig in city planning in San
$11,000, by
Francisco. He wasn’t designing build-
Tiffany & Co.
ings, but he was facilitating programs
B EL O W that taught architecture and planning
Shirt, $450, by to community kids, a job he loved
Ermenegildo until he got laid o≠. He was already
Zegna. enrolled in an evening acting class,
Sweater, $170,
and left with a lot of free time on his
by Our Legacy.
Pants, $2,900, hands, he decided to studiously read a
by Salvatore play a day—“a lot of bad plays”—from
Ferragamo. the Oakland Public Library before he

landed at the Yale School of Drama.
“There was something about [my
dad’s] passing that made me feel like
I didn’t want to have any regrets,” he
says. “And that gave me the audacity
to try to get into the best graduate
program in the country.”
Seeing his friend Marshawn
Lynch—they played basketball and
ran track against each other in
high school before reconnecting at
Berkeley—get drafted into the NFL
also nudged him toward pursuing
greater ambitions. “I became disillu-
sioned with the idea that the people
in the television were di≠erent,” he
remembers. “I said, ‘There’s someone
in the box that I know. Oh shit, I could
be in the box too.’ ”
After drama school he assumed
he would do small theater projects
and slowly work his way up to film.
It didn’t quite go that way. Almost
immediately he was cast as a smooth
disco-dancing gangster in Baz
Luhrmann’s splashy Netflix series,
The Get Down. A couple of years
later came the tentpole superhero
film Aquaman, in which he played
the villain Black Manta. (The day we
meet, hes wearing a Black Manta
baseball cap.) Even when he didn’t
realize he was killing it, he was
killing it.
Take HBO’s Watchmen, where he
thought he had signed on to play the
relatively minor role of Cal Abar—
Regina King’s hot, supportive hus-
band. Soon after filming started,
creator Damien Lindelof took Abdul-
Mateen aside to tell him that he was
actually the most important charac-
ter on the series: the godlike Doctor
Manhattan, a role that happened to
require full-frontal nudity and an
electrifying cerulean paint job.
In some ways, Abdul-Mateen is
still adjusting to how quickly he’s
ascended from making $23 an hour
straight out of college and thinking
he had it made to getting top billing
in blockbuster films. He’ll find him-
self complaining to his cousin about,
say, his long hours on set, but then
he’ll catch himself because, as he
puts it, “these are champagne prob-
lems.” He’s constantly trying to gauge
exactly how famous he is in real time.

1 8 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
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 The
F i x

Fashion

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Jacket,
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pants, $420,
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T-shirt,
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Les Tien.
Shoes, $395,
by Casa
Fagliano.

“I’m in this ambiguous place right now,
where I can’t tell what the score is out
in the world,” he says. “It tends to make
social interactions change from unas-
suming to awkward really quickly. And
that’s when it’s like, ‘Oh yeah. That’s
right. I do this thing.’ ”
Another indicator that he’s doing
this thing is his crazed schedule. Abdul-
Mateen has been traveling so much that
he hasn’t had his own place since early
2017. He’s eager to settle down in an
apartment, listing o≠ what he plans to
fill it with, objects so practical they’d
inspire a Shaker to beg him to live a
little: “A nice dresser. A good mirror.
A record player.” His preferred down-
time activity is similarly low-key—
binge-watching The O∞ce.
Although Abdul-Mateen grew up in
“a political household” thanks to his
father, it wasn’t until after Watchmen
that he realized he was in a position
where he could prioritize issues like
racism and representation in his work.
“I’m stepping into a place now where
I’m beginning to have the conversations
about responsibility. What are the sto-
ries that I want to tell?” he says. “I love
to go out and do silly, but I also want
to do more projects that are inspiring
and culturally relevant, because film as
a medium is so powerful.”
“It’s sneaky too,” he adds.
Abdul-Mateen uses a slender brush
to add a few finishing touches of reflec-
tive light to his apple, then rises from
his seat to examine the canvas from
afar. He’s visibly more pleased with
the result now. “As soon as I got up,
I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, I have to
step back,’ ” he says, taking stock of the
finished product. “I’m doing all right.”
gabriella paiella is a gq sta≠ writer.

2 0 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
 PROMOTION

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Available on
 ELVIS
PRESLEY
The Hall of & PRISCILLA
F i x Fame BEAULIEU
Las Vegas, 1967
The King hired
an MGM tailor
to conjure
up this famous
paisley silk
brocade tux.

When a
Postponed
Wedding
Just Means
More Time
to Perfect
the Fit
He was all set to get married this
summer—until the crisis hit.
Now GQ’s Cam Wolf is finding solace
(and outfit inspiration) in celebrity
wedding photos from decades past.
 HE N I G H T T H A T Tom
1. 1 2
Hanks shared his corona- TOM

T virus diagnosis—also the

night it was announced
HANKS
& RITA
WIL SON
that both the NBA season
and international flights would be Los Angeles,
1988
suspended—it was unlikely that many
White tie—more
people were thinking about the save-
formal than
the-dates posted on their fridges. But black—calls for
for those of us whose names appeared tails and a top
on those cards, a once-in-a-lifetime hat. Or you can
just wear a white
global pandemic caused a di≠erent
tie, like Tom.
kind of anxiety. My wedding was sup-
posed to be May 30, and in grieving its
loss I’ve found relief in a surprising 2.
RON
place: obsessing over old celebrity HOWARD
wedding-fit pics. & CHERYL
It started when I discovered that ALLEY
with my new wedding date—May 1, Burbank, 1975
2021—I’ll share an anniversary with Bold ruffles and
Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Check out a giant bow tie
will always look
The King in a black paisley tux and a
good with a smile.
crown of slicked-back hair. It got me
thinking: Should I use all the time
I now have before my wedding to get 3. 3 4
MICK
something similarly elaborate made? JAGGER
The options are truly infinite, as these & BIANCA
photos show. Should I go with a tuxedo PÉREZ-
MORA
or a suit? A double-breasted jacket or a MACÍAS
single-breasted one? Notch, shawl, or
OPPOSITE PAGE: SHUT TERSTOCK. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RON GALELL A/RON GALELL A COLLECTION VIA GET T Y IMAGES;

St. Tropez, 1971

peak lapels? I might regret wearing an
Breaking all
of-the-moment getup—or maybe there is the rules is as
something joyous about celebrating the relevant in 2020
very specific now. as it was in
PHIL ROACH/ALAMY; ALPHA-GLOBE PHOTOS, INC.; BET TMANN ARCHIVE/GET TY IMAGES; ALAMY; EXPRESS/GET TY IMAGES.

Celebrities are best known for wild 1971, when Mick

and company
outfits, but their wedding looks often invented breaking
reflect the kind of timelessness that all the rules.
won’t date your nuptial photos. Hanks
looks to have unearthed a new level of
4.
joy in a black tux stu≠ed elegantly with STING
a white pocket square. Stevie Wonder & TRUDIE
vibrates with happiness wearing a wide ST YLER
gum-baring smile and a black-and- Wiltshire,
white peak-lapel tux. England, 1992

Then there are guys who embraced Nautical formal

is just one of
the unmistakable nowness of their
the many ways to
wedding moment. Gaze in awe at the be brash with
absolutely dynamite powder blue tux your wedding fit. 5 6
on Ron Howard, or Sting looking regal
in a cropped jacket glimmering with 5.
golden hardware. These of-their-time JOHN
outfits radiate nostalgic charm. LENNON &
YOKO ONO
While timely and timeless are equally
valid options, I can feel myself suc- Gibraltar, 1969
cumbing to the tractor beam of sim- Lennon wanted
plicity. Sure, there’s something fun and to wear all white
but made it work
celebratory about unabashedly mark- with what he had:
ing your wedding date with an of-the- corduroys and
moment getup (a floppy Marni suit and a white jacket.
a Supreme tee, maybe?), but ultimately
it’s the classic looks here that make the 6.
wedding-day-fit bull’s-eye look massive. STEVIE
It’s a bummer that my wedding got WONDER
& SYREETA
delayed. But I’m taking solace in the fact WRIGHT
that while the crisis might dictate what
Detroit, 1970
year I get married in, nobody but me will
Isn’t she lovely?
decide what I wear. Yes, and that very
’70s suit still
cam wolf is a style writer for gq. looks just as fly.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 2 5
 The
Fitness
F i x

How to
Turbocharge 361667513

Your
Immune
System
With
Intentional
Eating
The global health
crisis has proven
that the state of
your immune system
doesn’t affect just
you—it also affects
your neighbor.
Here’s how we can all
eat our way to a
healthier planet.
By JOE HOLDER

GROOMING: BARRY WHITE FOR BARRYWHITEMENSGROOMING.COM

2 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y D A V I D W I L L I A M S
 PODCAST
Vanity Fair’s weekly Little Gold Men
podcast tracks the ups and downs of the awards races,
featuring interviews with the contenders, real-time
analysis, and actionable intelligence on what separates
the also-rans from the champs.
It’s the closest you can get to being inside the envelope.

Subscribe Now!
 EVER BEFORE HAS IT
The been so immediately
F i x N evident that the way
we treat our bodies
impacts our health
and the health of everyone around
us. We’re all out here fighting this
Fitness coronavirus together. Your hygiene
practices, the state of your immune
system—they all a≠ect me. And vice
versa. The choices we make around
food can also play a big role. There
are two questions I think about when
it comes to eating, especially right
now: What impact will this food have
on me? And what impact will it have
on the world?
Now, maybe that sounds a little
dramatic. Joe, I’m just trying to eat
this apple, bro. (Be sure to wash it
first!) I do get it. But food is one of
the many tools we have—such as
exercise, sleep, and mindfulness—
that can help us in priming our bod-
ies to perform at a high level. Or to
simply stay safe. Think about it this
way: Athletes tailor their nutrition
to perform at their peak. What if
we adopted a similar, intentional
approach and engineered our diets
to a specific mission? Right now that
has me wondering how we can eat as
a means to strengthen our immune
systems, protect our bodies, and
achieve our goals.
It’s aspirational, sure. But I’ve got
some thoughts on where we can start.
2 8 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
TREAT FOOD LIKE YOUR FIRST FOCUS ON WHAT YOU ADD TO YOUR
LINE OF DEFENSE. DIET—NOT SUBTRACT FROM IT.
Proper eating habits are part of your We’ve become obsessed with some-
first line of defense against intrud- thing I call “nutritional absolutism.”
ers. Because diet helps determine the Basically the idea that there’s only one
quality of your innate immune sys- “right” way to eat for everyone, be it
tem, along with things like sleep and paleo, vegan, Whole30, or any other
maintaining healthy stress levels. diet that tells you that its way of eat-
The innate system is your body’s ing is the only way. But that couldn’t
general protection; it sees some- be further from the truth. Di≠erent
thing bad on its radar and takes it ways of eating work di≠erently for
out. And the truth is, the standard everyone. Instead I’d argue we need
American diet has many of us chron- to quit framing how we eat around
ically inflamed—some people are weight loss. Our obsession with diets
so inflamed that their immune sys- is so powerful that even in a country
tems basically assume they’re a little driven by consumption, when it comes
bit sick all of the time. to eating, we’re concerned
When people hear Want to sneak in a solely with restriction.
about foods that can few more nutrients? I need to lose weight. Or:
“boost” their immune sys- Try our columnist’s I’m cutting out meat. That’s
tems, they think they’re go-to recipe. how you get someone who
some sort of magic cure. JOE’S SMOOTHIE
wants to live “healthier”
But the truth is that a real eating a bunch of packaged
immunity boost takes bars or meat substitutes—
1 cup dark leafy
time and consistency. greens processed foods that aren’t
For instance, rather than ½ banana even foods!
blasting a ginger shot ½ cup blueberries Base your choices on
in a moment of panic, ½ cup blackberries what you want to add into
try having one or two 3 Tbsp. hemp your life, not what you
seeds
grams of ginger a day for 1 tsp. nut butter
want to cut out of it. I want
a month—just buy pow- to gain energy. Or: I’m
dered ginger and dissolve Blend with water or choosing to eat these deli-
it in water. The slow and the nondairy milk of cious beets. We begrudg-
steady approach can your choice. ingly eat the things that
help reduce the amount are good for us. Let’s end
of inflammation in your body. Also, that. My plant-based diet isn’t about
eating nitrate-rich foods—think me cutting out fish, meat, or eggs. It’s
arugula and beets—can help thicken about me actively choosing to eat
the mucus in your gut, which func- whole plants. That said, I’ll probably
tions as an important line of defense have to start eating meat when I get
against germs. Remember, it’s not just older, since as you age, it’s harder for
about what you don’t put in your body. your body to integrate protein. Again,
It’s about what you do. it’s all about deliberate choices.
YOU DON’T NEED TO BECOME A
CHEF—JUST A VEGGIE WHISPERER.
Here’s one easy tip for incorporating
more nutrition-dense plants into
your diet: Learn how to cook your
own vegetables. Veggies on most
restaurant menus are overpriced,
and they’re just as easy to prepare
at home. Learn the art of plant food.
You want to order pizza? Order pizza.
That’s cool. But maybe eat it with a
side of Swiss chard or broccolini
you make yourself. If you’re able to
cook your vegetables yourself, life
instantly becomes easier, healthier,
and cheaper.
KEEP TRACK OF HOW
THE FOOD MAKES YOU FEEL.
One easy strategy that I suggest for my
clients is to keep a food diary. Every
week, pick a couple of foods. Research
what their benefits are and what they
can do for you (a simple Google search
will su∞ce). Pay attention to how you
feel after eating whatever it is and
write that down. Like, okay, I know
kale is good for me, but what is it
actually doing? Oh, it’s a good source
of iron. But what does iron do for me?
Iron helps deliver oxygen to the body.
But it also says plant sources of iron
are a bit harder to digest. How do
I improve my digestion? Well, vita-
min C might be able to help increase
my absorption of iron, and broccoli
and sweet potatoes are a rich source
of vitamin C. And so on and so forth.
That’s how you learn.
Food is so ingrained in our lives
that we often don’t think about it.
But that’s a mistake. Honestly, it’s like
handwashing. We didn’t think about
how important that was—until we
did. I think the coronavirus is teach-
ing people to be more mindful about
their personal wellness. You’ve got to
study a little bit to get better.
GET YOUR BLOOD WORK
DONE BY A DOCTOR.
Not everyone has the privilege of hav-
ing good health care. But if you can
a≠ord to enlist a doctor who will help
you do extensive blood work, then I
argue you should—not just because
it helps you know more about your
body, but because you being healthy
frees up health care resources for
other people. Now, blood work isn’t a
magic bullet, but it can arm you with
highly personalized micronutrient
information that you can instantly
use. Since I’m plant-based, there are
some things I’m more susceptible
to: I learned from blood work that I
was lacking in copper and in B12, so The
I tweaked my diet and adjusted the
supplements I was taking to compen-
F i x
sate. It’s just like athletics—having a
coach in your corner can help you. In
six months, maybe you’ve changed
the baseline of how good you can Fitness
feel—as opposed to just going 20
more years without even knowing
that feeling great was within reach.
SAY GRACE.
Saying grace does not have to be a
religious practice. It’s just a way to
practice mindful eating. Before you
eat, put your phone away, remind
yourself what you’re grateful for, let
the tension out of your body, and
take some deep breaths. That may
sound woo-woo, but it has concrete
e≠ects. It can activate your parasym-
pathetic nervous system, which helps
you digest your food and e≠ectively
absorb nutrients. So taking a moment
for grace might actually improve your
energy—and might even help you lose
weight. It’s also an opportunity to ↓
remind yourself what your purpose Want an easy way
to protect your
is (and why you eat what you eat). Not
immune system
everyone has access to healthy foods, (and your wallet)?
but hopefully you do. Express your Cook your veggies
gratitude, and dig in. at home.
 Time
Stands Still
As L.A. artist Wes Lang confronts
a changed world, he finds solace
in the simple pleasure of the
Rolex “Red Line” Submariner.

H A D J U S T finished making and I have barely taken it off since. We’re and elegant case expression that has
an exhibition for a gallery in all searching for comfort and something made Rolex the final word in watch design.

I Paris when the coronavirus

crisis hit. The show, and
everything else I was
working on, was immediately put on
hold. For the first time in years, I had no
deadlines. I figured I could occupy myself
in quarantine by drawing about death, a
constant theme in my work—but instead
I decided to let myself have fun. So I’ve
been using the extra time to work on an
idea that had been in my head for the past
familiar right now. This little piece of steel
from 48 years ago makes me stop and
appreciate all that I have at a time when
it’s easy to slide into despair.
Newman, McQueen, and Redford were
all steel Rolex guys. Newman, of course,
famously wore a Daytona. McQueen wore
a 1964 ref. 5512 Submariner. But to me,
Redford, who favored the Red Line Sub,
had the best taste of all. (He wears one
in All the President’s Men.)
The Red Line Sub, launched in 1969,
gets its nickname from the distinct
crimson Submariner script on the dial. It
was the first Sub to feature a date window
and was fitted with a bezel that is prone
to fading to a beautiful milky gray. But
the red script is the detail that collectors
really love—one of those rare aesthetic
deviations that can jack up the price of
a vintage timepiece exponentially.
I bought mine because it was
PHOTOGRAPH: WES LANG

18 months or so, a series of paintings of
classic American icons: Paul Newman,
Steve McQueen, and Robert Redford. (To
see my new large-scale charcoal portrait
of Redford, check out page 58.)
The day I started, I put on my 1972
Rolex ref. 1680 “Red Line” Submariner,
Introduced in 1953 at the forefront
of Rolex’s dive watch program, the
Submariner—thanks in part to its fans
in New Hollywood—is the timepiece that
most people picture when they think
of Swiss watchmaking. It embodies the
balance of rugged mechanical innovation
produced the year I was born. It wasn’t
until later that I discovered the Redford
connection—and now, when I seek
the comforts of timeless things that
transcend this disastrous moment,
whether in my work or on my wrist, that
connection is more powerful than ever.

3 0 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 0 0 0 0

HEALTH
Smarten Up To
Shrink Your Gut
Advice on how the right protein shake can help
you lose weight and build lean muscle BY CHRIS HANSCN
BEING A TRAINER, BODYBUILDER, and nu-
trition expert means that companies frequently
send me their products and ask for my stamp of
approval. Most of the time I dive into research,
test the product out, and send the company hon-
est feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to
give the product a try, because frankly, the in-
gredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather
drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a
chemical concoction.
Like my father always said, “What you put
inside your body always shows up on the out-
side.”
One protein shake that I received, that will
remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big
shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying in-
gredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful arti-
ficial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes,
preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of
proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard
you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing
for your muscles.
Disappointed after reviewing this “new”
shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favor-
ite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50,
has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So
are his clients.
While I firmly believe that the gym is a no-talk
focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein
$'9(57,6(0(17
shake are you recommending to your clients
these days?”
Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Pro-
tein shakes are old news and loaded with junk.
I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my
clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake be-
cause it’s the only all natural meal replacement
that works and has a taste so good that it’s ad-
dicting.”
Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decid-
ed to investigate this superfood shake called
INVIGOR8.
Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has
a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators
are actual scientists and personal trainers who
set out to create a complete meal replacement
shake chocked full of superfoods that—get
this—actually accelerate how quickly and eas-
ily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean,
calorie burning muscle.
We all know that the more muscle you build,
the more calories you burn. The more fat you
melt away the more definition you get in your
arms, pecs and abs.
The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined
to make the first complete, natural, non-
GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat
and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that
contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a supe-
rior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found
in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw
coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to pro-
mote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6,
9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens
like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorel-
la, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers
for improved mood and brain function. The
company even went a step further by including
a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in
optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes
so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutri-
tion you get from INVIGOR8.
While there are over 500 testimonials on Am-
azon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more en-
ergy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal
fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really
impressed me was how many customers raved
about the taste. So I had to give it a try.
When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike
most meal replacement shakes it smelled like
whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so
good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most im-
portant test, the taste test.
And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I
could see what Zee meant when he said his cli-
ents found the taste addicting.
I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me
burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years
to achieve total definition.
Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say,
shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsec-
tion wasn’t just easy. It was delicious.
Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can hon-
estly say that the results I’ve experienced from
INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing.
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 E23G671

The
Read
F i x

If you’re one of
the planet’s best
athletes, there’s
a good chance

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ZACH BEEKER/NBA/GETTY IMAGES; STREETER LECKA/GETTY IMAGES;
you’re texting
with Eric Thomas,
a motivational
coach with a
rare talent for
squeezing
greatness out of
the guys who are
already on top
CASSY ATHENA/GE T T Y IMAGES; COURTESY OF BEAST MODE DIGITAL
of the world.
B y L E S L I E PA R I S E A U

Meet Your Favorite Athletes’

Favorite Life Coach
0 2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y S I M O N A B R A N O W I C Z
 ENTITLEMENT I S N O T something

The Thomas personally identifies with. The

Read son of an 18-year-old single mother, he
F i x was raised in a working-class stretch
of Detroit, near Eight Mile. “I grew
up when the car industry was boom-
ing. Motown was booming,” he says,
ERIC THOMAS IS CARRYING A PAIR OF JORDANS and a black T-shirt, moving remembering the sound the street-
lights would make as they flickered to
quickly through the lobby of the Hilton Times Square. He almost life at dusk, his signal to hustle home
makes it to the elevator before he’s spotted. A hotel employee to his family. But home wasn’t always
approaches. It’s 8 a.m. and tourists are picking at fruit plates and idyllic. When he was 12 or 13, Thomas
learned from his mother that the man
sleepily flicking through their phones, but this guy is amped. He tells raising him wasn’t his biological father.
Thomas how thrilled he is to see him in person, how much he loves He felt betrayed and unmoored. “I was
disappointed. I just panicked. I grabbed
his work, how it all makes him feel so good. Thomas, in camouflage some clothes and ran,” he says. “I didn’t
shorts and a T-shirt, is swishing mouthwash but nods to the stranger even know where I was going.”
as they grasp hands. The man, still electrified, recedes to the lobby Over the next few years, he left home
frequently, sleeping in neighbors’
desk, shaking his head as if he can’t believe his good fortune. Thomas backyards and staying in friends’ cars
spits a minty stream into a nearby trash can and hops into the elevator. or hiding under their beds. At age 16,
he took o≠ for good. He got a graveyard
shift at McDonald’s so he had some-
place to be when the sun went down.
How is Eric Thomas this morning? break down into sobs and he wraps He slept in abandoned buildings when
“Blessed, man. So blessed,” he says, his them in an embrace until they can pull he had nowhere else to go. He heard
voice quiet, full, and resonant. He’s sin- it together. rodents scurry while he slept, and
cere—he’s never anything but sincere. After a hug outside the hotel, he recalls being shot at. The simplest
To those in the know, Thomas is Thomas jumps into a waiting Escalade parts of life required vigilance; he was
a rock star of self-improvement, an and heads west toward New Jersey. always on edge, living such an exposed
unassuming success guru whose It’s August 2019, a few weeks ahead existence. He says today he gets par-
work with some of the planet’s big- of the NBA season, and the league’s anoid sometimes and wonders if his
gest sports celebrities has made him brightest new hopefuls—84 first- and pangs of unease are synonymous with
a kind of celebrity in his own right. At second-round draft picks—are seques- PTSD. He still doesn’t sleep much, and
49, he’s one of the country’s top moti- tered there in a hotel for the Rookie he has become famous for his austere
vational speakers. (“Number one,” if Transition Program, a mandatory camp habit of rising each day at three in
you ask him.) His videos on YouTube that provides the players insights into the morning. He uses the predawn
are streamed by the millions, and on everything from media training to hours to stroll his neighborhood in
Instagram his following reaches into financial counseling. For the past four Lansing, Michigan, talking to God in
the seven figures. He works frequently years, the NBA has made sure that the the early-morning darkness.
with executives at companies like event features Eric Thomas too. In those late-teen years, when he
Nike, AT&T, Procter & Gamble, you As Thomas sees it, the real chal- was homeless, Thomas met a local
name it. If those clients have made lenges the young players face aren’t pastor who convinced him he had a
him wealthy, it’s his uniquely deep always obvious. He tells me that he gift—which changed his life. Whenever
relationships with some of the world’s imagines himself becoming a star at 19 Thomas talks about this moment, he
biggest stars that have made him cul- or 20 years old. “Forget the money—I points to his throat, as if every bit of his
turally influential—and helped make couldn’t have handled the influence,” magnetism—all of his charisma, intelli-
him recognizable to fans who aren’t he says, sinking into a chair before his gence, and drive—emanates from right
reading Tony Robbins. talk. He’s holding a mug of tea, heavy there. If you consider how it all turned
In many ways, he’s an outlier on the with honey, and he’s just gotten a mes- out, his prowess as a speaker was the
self-help circuit. Thomas isn’t selling sage on his phone from one of the orga- key that unlocked it all: career, fame,
shortcuts to success or feel-good bro- nizers of the rookie program. “They’re influence, fulfillment.
mides. He makes achievement sound saying they have an entitlement prob- Thomas matter-of-factly likens
OPPOSITE PAGE: COURTESY OF BEAST MODE DIGITAL

grueling. His knack is for transform- lem this year,” says Thomas. “I’ll have the moment when he first picked up
ing those he meets—a CEO, an NBA to talk to ’em about that.” a microphone to the day that Serena
All-Star, a guy manning the desk at a
hotel—into the sort of person who loves
digging deep and grinding hard.
Thomas glides out of the hotel,
and on West 42nd Street, a passing
young man does a double take. “ET?”
he says, eyes wide. Another starstruck
Teams looking for motivation came
moment. The man hands me his calling. Celebrities followed. Thomas
phone to get a photo of them throw-
ing up peace signs. Wherever Eric was like a secret weapon. If you were
Thomas goes, people stop him and
want—no, need—to tell him how much
teetering on the brink or needed a push
he’s helped them. Sometimes they to get to the next level, he could help.
3 4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
first grabbed a racket. I watched as he
explained this to a group of teenagers
who’d convened one morning on the
campus of UCLA for a leadership camp
held by NBA star Chris Paul. “Let’s
say you’re LeBron James or Michael
Jordan, you’re watching Dr. J,” he told
the teens. “I watched Martin Luther
King like that. I watched Marcus Garvey
like that. I used to watch Malcolm X like
that. I could see myself doing the exact
same thing.”
Paul and Thomas have been close
for years. Before games, Thomas sends
Paul voice memos with words of prayer
and encouragement. When Paul cre-
ated a new shoe with Nike just before
last year’s playo≠s, he had a pair dec-
orated with inspirational quotes from
his friend: “Be stronger than your
excuses.” “Look in the mirror. That’s
your competition.”
After he got his GED, it took Thomas
12 years to graduate from college. When
he did, he moved with his wife, Dede,
to Lansing, where he earned a master’s
and a doctorate in education adminis-
tration. Gradually he started speaking
locally, sharing his conviction that suc-
cess is a matter of perseverance. The
message might not have been novel,
but the passion behind it was.
In 2008 he posted his first lo-fi video
to YouTube. In it, Thomas is talking
to a group of students, telling them
an anecdote involving a near drown-
ing—a story that he says revealed the
secret to achievement. “When you
want to succeed as bad as you want
to breathe,” he said, “then you’ll be
successful.”
These were the early days of
YouTube, and “Secrets to success, Pt. 1”
wasn’t exactly a viral hit. It sat stag-
nant until 2011, when an improbable
little miracle was set in motion by the
magic of the internet.
A football player at East Carolina,
Giavanni Ru∞n, came across Thomas’s
stirring speech and sampled the audio
for a video of his own—an inspiring
training montage showing the running
back working out. Over some dramatic
music, a disembodied Thomas preaches
as Ru∞n sweats. “Most of you say you
want to be successful, but you don’t
want it bad. You just kinda want it.
You don’t want it as bad as you want to
party. You don’t want it as much as you
want to be cool. You don’t want success
as much as you want to sleep.” Though
I’ve watched the video a dozen times,
I still get chills.
Thomas’s message struck a nerve—
the video has been viewed 46 million
times on YouTube. Beneath it sit 21,000
comments. Thomas’s voice has been ris-
ing up from the abyss ever since.
The
Read
F i x
N O T O R I E T Y C A M E O N like a tsunami.
At first just a ripple, then a wave.
Athletes were drawn to Thomas’s
message—which often feels like some-
thing between a rousing locker-room
address and a sermon. Nearly a decade
ago, Thomas Davis, a linebacker for
the Carolina Panthers, got in touch.
He’d been watching the videos that
Thomas had continued posting to
YouTube, including a series called
Thank God It’s Monday, and he thought
his team might benefit from Thomas’s
encouragement.
Word got out. Other NFL teams
looking for insight and motivation
came calling—the Rams, the Dolphins, ↓
Eric
the Chiefs, the Lions, the Browns. Thomas
Celebrities followed. The actor Tyrese addresses
Gibson called. P. Diddy called. Thomas the NBA’s
was like a secret weapon. If you were newest
teetering on the brink or needed a push players
during the
to get to the next level, he could help.
league’s
Nowadays, Thomas holds seminars Rookie
and conferences all over the world, Transition
travels to two to three gigs a week Program.

The
Read
F i x
(when the world isn’t experiencing
a pandemic), and has a team of more
than 25 organizing and documenting
his appearances.
When it comes to the work he does
with athletes, he’s o≠ering far more
than mere pep talks. Pacers shooting
guard Victor Oladipo met Thomas
when he spoke at a team retreat in
Miami. They’ve been tight ever since.
“Once you build a relationship with
him, it’s everlasting,” Oladipo says. “It’s
not just that moment. Once he connects
with you, he’s with you.”
Wizards point guard Isaiah Thomas,
who has experienced tough hip inju-
ries during his nine-year professional
career and whose sister died suddenly
in 2017, hears from Eric almost every
day. “Four or five times a week, in the
early morning, he’ll send me a voice-
mail or a video,” Isaiah tells me. “It just
makes me want to get up and go and
grind. When I was rehabbing, I had a
lot of down days, and he texts me and
says, ‘Make sure your energy is at a 10,
because you can control that. It’s conta-
gious. It makes things happen.’ ”
Across the ranks of pro athletes,
Thomas counts a wide spectrum of stars
as friends. Panthers quarterback Cam
Newton, Cavaliers guard J.R. Smith,
Patriots linebacker Kyle Van Noy, the
Spurs’ Bryn Forbes, the Nuggets’ Gary
Harris, and Lions wide receiver Kenny
Golladay. He’s aware that part of the
reason athletes respect him is that he
doesn’t treat them like gods. (He also
isn’t paid for his one-on-one work.)
“They know I don’t want anything from
them,” he says. “When they listen to my
message, it’s like I’m all in one: It’s the
dad, it’s the preacher, it’s the teacher, it’s
the coach, it’s the cheerleader.”
He counsels them via text or over
the phone. He sees them in person.
Often he’s there in the locker room
before a big game, or maybe on a video
call when their world gets turned
upside down.
In March, just after the NBA called off
its season, Thomas dialed in to a Zoom
chat with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
He wanted to help the players think
di≠erently about the cancellation.
“What we’re experiencing now is life
giving us a full time-out,” he said. “What
do you do in a time-out? You reflect. It
ain’t like you don’t get to go back and
play. We’re gonna come out of this.
3 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
Who you gonna be when you come out?
When adversity strikes you need to ask,
‘Who am I? Who do I need to be?’ ”
ON THAT AFTERNOON last year when the
NBA rookies gathered in New Jersey,
they’re all dressed in hoodies and
sweatpants as they fold themselves
into conference-room chairs. Seeing
so many potential stars at once in this
unlikely state—rumpled, vulnerable,
a bit wary—feels a little like tiptoeing
through a pride of sleeping lions. So
much power, yet unchanneled, swells
in that beige ballroom.
When Thomas is introduced, it’s
mentioned that he’s the man whom
LeBron James takes leadership cues
from. When he grabs the mic, he opens
with a question: “You, six six, 200
pounds, African American male. Two
“I’m not playing. You ain’t as sweet as
Martin Luther King,” Thomas tells the
roomful of NBA newcomers. “You making
millions of dollars. You ain’t on his level.”
hundred years ago—dude look just
like you—what would he have been?”
Thomas looks around. “What would
he have been?” he repeats. His voice is
calm, conversational.
Someone raises his hand and says,
“A field person.”
Thomas laughs. “I like that,” he says.
“That’s a nice way to say that. He’s very
educated. Give me another name.”
No one says anything. Heads hang.
The men shift in their seats.
“Give me another name.” Thomas’s
voice has an edge now. There’s a cho-
rus of murmurs. “Say it out loud!” yells
Thomas. “The only thing you gonna be
is a slave. We fast-forward 200 years and
you can be whatever you wanna be.”
Thomas wants to provoke them.
Within 60 seconds, he’s pacing up and
down the aisle, his voice booming. He’s
just short of yelling—and he’s enlivened
a room of some of the wealthiest, most
physically powerful young men in the
world. Those limby bodies sit up a little
straighter. Ears are pricked, and fore-
arms are dotted with goose bumps.
Thomas points to the screen. “Y’all
look up to Michael Jordan, LeBron
James,” he says. “This is who I was
going to. I look at Martin Luther King,
and I’m a multi-millionaire from
talking.” Imagine if a transcendent star
such as King had been born a bit later,
Thomas says. “If Martin Luther King
was alive today, and he was in church
with his robe preaching, he woulda
had a swoosh on that joint. Martin
Luther King in 2019 woulda had a shoe,
The Dreams.”
Everyone laughs.
He stops, looks at everyone level.
“I’m not playing. You ain’t as sweet as
Martin Luther King. You got deals. You
ain’t at his level. You making millions
of dollars. You ain’t on his level. You
walking around here acting like you’re
sweet, but you’re sweet because of
some sacrifices other people made. You
got opportunities because some other
people died.” Thomas assures them
that he loves them, that he appreciates
their talent, but that they’re sitting in
the room because of sacrifices others
made. And then he poses the question
they’ll all be trying to answer the rest of
their lives: “I wanna ask you this: What
if somebody woulda gave Dr. Martin
Luther King 30 mil?”
For the next half hour, Thomas
compels them to consider the power
of their money and their influence—
as well as the brevity of their fame. At
the conclusion Thomas, who stands
five ten, is swallowed up in a crowd of
towering figures. They want to tell him
how much his work means to them,
how they grew up watching him, his
videos. They want to thank him. Over
the next hour, Thomas poses for photos
with player after player, hugging them,
advising them, urging them to take
none of this for granted.
On his way out, Thomas pauses to
say goodbye to a couple of players lin-
gering in the hallway. Zion Williamson
is the last one to approach him, and the
two bow their heads toward each other
as they exchange words. They take a
photo, embrace quickly, turn to go, each
pursuing the thing that feels as vital as
breath itself.
leslie pariseau is a writer living
in New Orleans.
 THE
REAL
ACTION
IS
OFF THE
FIELD.

WAT C H AT youtube.com/gqsports
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 3 9

10:02 a.m. PST //
6:02 p.m. GMT
ROBERT PAT TINSON: [blurry,
pixelated, unshaven] I don’t
know how this is going to work.
My phone broke, the internet
broke, everything broke. I’m
like, “What, why is everything
updating, and how do you stop
it updating?”
GQ: [blurry, pixelated, unshaven] You can’t update
anything. That’s dangerous.
I know. I don’t think I’ve ever pressed “update” in my life.
I’ve just always put it off for tomorrow.
Never update!
Wait, let me just try with my, let me just try and connect
my—ah, actually, you know what? I’m not even gonna
try and do a Bluetooth. I’m just gonna mute it the
old-fashioned way. My headphones. Um, how are you
doing? Where are you at?
THE OTHER DAY—OR WAS IT WEEK? A month? Robert
Pattinson struggles with days and dates, even under the
best of circumstances—production of The Batman, which
Pattinson was filming, shut down, along with most of
human civilization. “I almost immediately totally lost all
sense of time,” Pattinson says. He got that feeling, the one
we all have now, of pinwheeling through space and anxiety
and history. He says it was actually very familiar, that feel-
ing. “It’s a complaint which a lot of people have about me.
This total… I don’t have a sense of time. I think something
two years ago could actually be a week ago. It’s definitely
←← been a complaint about my personality.” He says three
OPENING PAGES
di≠erent people called him, to remind him to call me.
coat $1,430
shirt $900 He’s in London with his girlfriend, in the apartment
pants $775 the Batman folks rented for him. Still eating meals the
Craig Green Batman folks are providing, though the other day he
boots $1,400 got nervous, that they might just stop or forget. Or were
Dior Men the owners of his apartment going to need it back? He’d
come to London with, like, three T-shirts. The rest of his
OPPOSITE PAGE stu≠, he says, is in his place in Los Angeles, where he
blazer $3,600 actually lives. His internet in London is in and out. His
shirt $875 laptop mostly isn’t working. He has two phones, one of
Louis Vuitton Men’s which is getting reception, and so the whole system is
underwear, his own now running o≠ whatever two or three bars that one
phone is getting when he can find it: “Every internet
device is operating on this 3G, like, iPhone 4.”
The film studio hired a trainer who left Pattinson
with a Bosu ball, a single weight, and a sincere plea to
use both, but right now, he says, he’s ignoring her. “I
think if you’re working out all the time, you’re part of
the problem,” he says, sighing. By “you” he means other
actors. “You set a precedent. No one was doing this in
the ’70s. Even James Dean—he wasn’t exactly ripped.”
He says that back when he was the star of the Twilight
franchise, “the one time they told me to take my shirt o≠,
I think they told me to put it back on again.” But Batman
is Batman. Pattinson called another actor on the film,
Zoë Kravitz, the other day, and she said she was exercis-
ing five days a week during their exile from set. Pattinson,
well: “Literally, I’m just barely doing anything,” he says,
sighing again.
It’s possible that you couldn’t build a person more
suited to this experience. Pattinson, who turned 34 in
May, has spent his adult life separating himself from the
rest of the world. He was 21 when he was cast in the first
Twilight, as the lead vampire in what would become five
increasingly popular movies about teen lust in the Pacific
Northwest. The final installment of the franchise, which
turned Pattinson and his costar, Kristen Stewart, into
two of the more famous people in the world, came out in
2012 and grossed over $800 million worldwide. But by
that time, he was already mostly gone.
He was starring in David Cronenberg movies. He was
on sets in Australia, Canada, or New York City, where
he prowled the streets in disguise, trying to develop the
right outer-borough accent for Josh and Benny Safdie’s
Good Time. He was playing innocents, strivers, outsid-
ers, people who drooled and cried and jerked o≠, in mov-
ies from Werner Herzog, James Gray, Anton Corbijn. He
was becoming, film by film, one of the most interesting
actors alive. And when he wasn’t working? He was hid-
ing out. From paparazzi, at times. From the Hollywood
studio system, at others. From all the weird things the
world throws at young actors who already have so much.
He was wandering around houses in Los Angeles that
were too big, in neighborhoods where he couldn’t go
outside. “I spend so much time by myself, ’cause you’re
just kind of always forced to, that I can’t really remem-
ber what it was like not really having that kind of life-
style,” Pattinson says. Now he was talking to his friends
and family, who were having to do the same thing.
“I just realize, everyone is so, so vulnerable to isolation,”
he says. “It’s quite shocking.”
Claire Denis, who directed Pattinson in 2018’s High
Life, says she texted him the other day, checking in. “I
asked him if it’s not too terrible to be in confinement.
And he said, ‘Oh no, Claire. I can stand it.’ It’s so great to
be able to say that.”
Pattinson has Tenet, directed by Christopher Nolan,
which is supposed to come out in July. He has a smaller
movie, the gothic noir The Devil All the Time, that will
be released on Netflix this fall. The Batman was sup-
posed to come out summer of next year but has already
been moved to October 2021. After years of avoiding
big-budget films and the spotlight that comes with them,
Pattinson was in the midst of making a few giant mov-
ies in a row. Then the world stopped, and with it his
ambitions, tentative though they are or may have been.
Still, he’s been fortunate enough to ride out this peculiar

4 0 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
OPPOSITE PAGE experience unscathed, at least so far. He’s been fortunate
jacket $7,700 enough to know how to be alone as well as a person can
shirt $950 know how to be alone.
Dior Men
What he hasn’t figured out yet is how to do anything
else, like go outside. “I went for a run around the park
today,” he says. “I’m so terrified of being, like, arrested.
You’re allowed to run around here. But the terror I feel
from it is quite extreme.” He’s nervous that way. Just
going back into the world, whenever the world finally
comes back? That might be the hard part.
April 10, 10:16 a.m. PST // 6:16 p.m. GMT
PAT TINSON: Yesterday I was just googling, I was going
on YouTube to see how to microwave pasta. [laughs]
GQ: That’s not a thing.
Put it in a bowl and microwave it. That is how to
microwave pasta. And also it really, really isn’t a thing.
It’s really actually quite revolting. But I mean, who would
have thought that it actually makes it taste disgusting?
How are you actually surviving?
I’m essentially on a meal plan for Batman. Thank God.
I don’t know what I’d be doing other than that. But
I mean, yeah, other than—I can survive. I’ll have oatmeal
with, like, vanilla protein powder on it. And I will barely
even mix it up. It’s extraordinarily easy. Like, I eat out
of cans and stuff. I’ll literally put Tabasco inside a tuna
can and just eat it out of the can.
You’ve been training all your life for this, apparently.
I… It is weird, but my preferences are…just sort of eat like
a wild animal. [laughs] Like, out of a trash can.
ONE DAY I ASK Robert Eggers, who directed Pattinson
in last year’s The Lighthouse—in which Pattinson plays
a man driven to insanity and avian homicide by isola-
tion and loneliness—why he cast Pattinson in his movie.
“Well,” Eggers says, from his own solitude in Belfast,
4 2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
energy. Today he’s wearing a black Carhartt hat and
a white T-shirt and is alternating pulls of Coca-Cola
with pieces of Nicorette gum—just one after another
after another. “So disgusting,” he says cheerfully. He
starts and stops sentences like a broken carnival ride.
Sometimes he misplaces so many words in a row, inter-
spersed with so many heavy sighs and nervous laughs,
that you momentarily think he’s speaking a di≠erent
language entirely.
Pattinson is old enough now to admit there is a
method to the jittery way he approaches human con-
tact, a kind of calculation behind it. “I feel like I need
adrenaline just to even function,” he says. “Otherwise I’ll
literally just sit there. I’m just a grog. I hype myself up
into a state of nervous tension before almost anything.
I had the same process with every single job. I would
be super excited, had a ton of ideas about stu≠, and the
closer you get to the job, it’s the same cycle where your
confidence would completely fall out, you hate yourself,
and then you’re looking for any excuse. You’re looking
for the exit strategy before you’ve even started.” He says
his agents won’t even listen to his panicked calls to this
e≠ect anymore. They tell him: This is just your process.
“He has this very natural ability to make it seem like it’s
all chaos, it’s freestyle, he’s just going o≠ of the wind and
instinct,” John David Washington, with whom he stars
in Tenet, says. “But he’s very concentrated on what he’s
trying to do, despite his stories and his sentiments.”
Pattinson says he used to drink 5,000 cups of co≠ee
before interviews like this one, do them, then collapse
afterward “and sleep for two days.” He says he’d make
a point of saying the wildest thing he could think of.
“I liked saying sort of provocative things ’cause I thought
it was funny. I get very, very uncomfortable about doing
sort of earnest things.”
Suddenly he lunges for his broken computer. “Literally
just before this, I was trying to find my notes about the
movie, as well, and that, like—”
It takes a moment for me to realize what is happening.
What notes? What movie? It turns out he means Tenet.
It turns out he means the notes he wrote down last year,
back when he was starting the film. “When I was looking
at the notes,” Pattinson says, “I was thinking, ‘Oh yeah,
these are, like, pretty good notes.’ And that was what all
that shit’s about. It’s funny, ’cause I totally forgot, like,
I’d totally forgotten a lot of the character stu≠. Have you
seen the movie, by the way?”
“No.”
“I haven’t seen it, either.”
“Do you want to tell me what it’s about?”
“Even if I had seen it, I genuinely don’t know if I’d be
able to… I was just thinking, I just called up my assistant
20 minutes ago: ‘What the fuck do I say? I have no idea.’ ”
“What did your assistant say?”
“She’s a lot cleverer than I am. Like, she went to col-
lege and stu≠. And I’m just like saying all this stu≠, and
I was like, ‘Oh God, no. I can’t even bullshit my way
through this.’ ”
For a minute he tries, though. “This thing, it’s so insane,”
he says. He says they had a crew of around 500 people, and
250 of them would all fly together, just hopping planes to
di≠erent countries. “And in each country there’s, like, an
enormous set-piece scene, which is like the climax of a
normal movie. In every single country.” He says otherwise
jaded and hard-bitten crew members would come in on
tuxedo $5,200
shirt $650
hat $3,900
Dior Men

4 4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
their days o≠ to watch Nolan’s special e≠ects because they
were so crazy. He apologizes for not being able to say more.
He just doesn’t really know what to say.
A few days later I call Christopher Nolan himself, to
ask if Pattinson was fucking with me about not knowing
the plot of the movie he had just finished.
“The interesting thing with Rob is, he’s slightly fucking
with you,” Nolan says, laughing a reserved English laugh.
“But he’s also being disarmingly honest. It’s sort of both
things at once. When you see the film, you’ll understand.
Rob’s read on the script was extremely acute. But he also
understood the ambiguities of the film and the possibil-
ities that spin o≠ in the mind around the story. And so
both things are true. Yes, he’s fucking with you, because he
had a complete grasp of the script. But a complete grasp
of the script, in the case of Tenet, is one that understands
and acknowledges the need for this film to live on in the
audience’s mind, and suggest possibilities in the audience’s
mind. And he was very much a partner in crime with that.”

April 10, 10:37 a.m. PST // 6:37 p.m. GMT

PAT TINSON: [trying again to describe the plot of

‘Tenet’] I forgot a lot of things at the beginning of the
movie. I was so obsessed with watching Christopher
Hitchens debates. You know Christopher Hitchens?

GQ: Sure.
A lot of my character stuff, I was trying to do a Chris
Hitchens impersonation, and I completely forgot that
I was doing that until I saw my notes. I’m so curious.
I mean, I literally haven’t seen a frame of this movie.

Now I’m picturing Christopher Hitchens as

a time traveler.
He’s not a time traveler. There’s actually no time
traveling. [laughs] That’s, like, the one thing
I’m approved to say.

JULIETTE B I N O C H E S E N D S me an email, trying to

describe Pattinson, and some of it makes a lot of sense
to me (“Each time I see Rob, I always feel close to him.
It has nothing to do with time. I see his loneliness, his
need to talk, his need to share experiences”), and some
of it I wonder about. “His search for truth is relentless,”
she writes, and “that explains also his needs of going into
di≠erent worlds: movies and films.” I think by movies she
means the Hollywood stu≠ he’s just starting to do again
now, versus the independent films she’s starred in with
him over the years, starting with 2012’s Cosmopolis.
But Pattinson will quickly tell you that the split
between the two is barely a split at all for him. It’s
not that he is unaware of the perception, that he is a
pretty-boy leading man who has spent years repudiat-
ing both his prettiness and his leading man–ness. It’s
just that he doesn’t entirely agree with it. “I look at the
Twilight movies,” he says, “and I think in a lot of ways
they seem more like sort of existential art house movies
than the things that were intentionally that.” And then,
what came next, all the emphatically not-Twilight stu≠
he did—well, he did those films because they were his
taste all along, not because he was trying to prove some-
thing. “I grew up liking classic movies, and then I was
really into watching movies when I was a teenager,” he

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 4 5
THIS PAGE says. “I wanted to work with those people. But I didn’t And then they were kind of people who are very much
scarf $420 realize that you actually could.” on the front foot, like, dynamically making decisions.
Burberry Then he realized you could. He realized that casting It’s weird. If you keep playing parts, it actually does
agents and Hollywood didn’t know more about what he start to rub o≠ on you afterwards. So if somehow you
OPPOSITE PAGE
could do than he, Robert Pattinson, knew. “Because you keep playing passive losers, you kind of do feel like one
blazer $1,595
pants $695
get categorized quite quickly just by the way you look,” after a bit.”
Paul Smith he says. “And so if you’re a tall, kind of floppy-haired He’s honest about the fact that, in some ways, he was
scarf (worn
English guy, went to private school, and you start acting, just mapping his changing psychology as a human being
on head) $270 well, you’re in period dramas. But I don’t like period onto his work. He was evolving who he was through the
Turnbull & Asser dramas. And so you fight against that.” At some point, parts he was playing, from someone who felt like he
scarf (worn he tells me, he figured out that he was getting o≠ers didn’t belong to someone who was beginning to have
on neck) $170 for the blond guy when he wanted to be the other guy: fun, doing what he did, to someone who felt, well, in
Dior Men “I basically always wanted the roles which called for control for once. And then, last year, he hit a wall. Not a
socks (yellow and skinny guys with black hair.” work wall, per se, but a life wall, a career wall.
pink) $205 for pair And that’s how he came to play the roles that called “I started the beginning of last year with no job. And
and (turquoise and for skinny guys with black hair: whiny younger brothers I was calling my agent and just being like—I had gotten
red) $155 for pair
(The Rover), Hollywood wannabes and hangers-on (Maps good reviews in stu≠—and I was like, ‘What the fuck?
The Elder Statesman
to the Stars, Life), bedraggled explorers (The Lost City of Z, I thought this was a pretty good year, and I’m fucking
flip-flops, his own
High Life), and petty crooks (Good Time). starting the year like I’ve just done a pile of trash.’ ” And
necklaces (cross, “For a long time I liked doing parts about insecurity, what his agents said was: You’re not really on the list.
hand, and rectangular
where the energy comes from insecurity,” Pattinson That mythical list of A-list actors considered for A-list
pendants) $350 each
and (round and square says. “And then it kind of got boring a little bit, so then parts. Not necessarily because he wasn’t wanted. But
pendants) $260 each I liked to basically play the opposite, which is people because, they told him: “Everyone thinks you don’t want
Alighieri who have absolutely no shame and no fear afterwards. to do any of this stu≠.”
But what Pattinson was realizing was: Actually, he
did. He wanted more security, less doubt. “Just some-
thing which you could kind of rely on a little bit more,”
he says, sighing. “The problem which I was finding was,
however much I loved the movies I was doing, no one
sees them. And so it’s kind of this frightening thing,
’cause I don’t know how viable this is for a career.…
I don’t know how many people there actually are in the
industry who are willing to back you without any com-
mercial viability whatsoever.”
It was right around then, in the early part of last year,
that Christopher Nolan, the one director who makes
what are essentially art house films—in their singular-
ity of vision and purity of execution—at the biggest and
most commercial levels in all of Hollywood, called. Nolan
says he’d seen the stu≠ Pattinson had been doing in Good
Time and The Lost City of Z and been fascinated with it.
“Rob seemed to be in exactly the right place in his career
to want to come along and invent with me,” Nolan says.
And Pattinson found that he was. He was ready to give
the list a shot again.
And then, on maybe the first day of shooting Tenet,
Pattinson got cast as Batman too.

April 10, 11:16 a.m. PST // 7:16 p.m. GMT

GQ: Can I ask why The Batman is something you

wanted to do? I can think of a lot of reasons to want to
do it. But I can also, frankly, think of a lot of reasons
to not want to do it.
PAT TINSON: What are the reasons not to do it? [laughs]

Well, you just starred in a Christopher Nolan film;

Nolan has already made three iconic Batman
films. Also, I think of you as being a pretty specific
actor, and Batman is as much of an archetype as
it is a character to be played.
I think sometimes the downsides—which I’ve definitely
thought about—the downsides kind of seem like upsides.
I kind of like the fact that not (continued on page 95)
 Unprecedented times call for
unprecedented ideas—and bold new experiments.
So we asked some of our favorite creative minds
what they’re discovering about art, and about
themselves, in this age of isolation.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 4 9

suits nearly every day since he
started making them, almost
two decades ago. So he wasn’t
going to let the coronavirus
pandemic stop him, not
even after Governor Andrew
Cuomo’s stay-at-home order
spurred millions of New Yorkers
to reach for their comfiest
drawstring pants. “Wouldn’t
you be disappointed if I said
I was sitting here in sweats?”
Browne said over the phone in
mid-April. “I like structure,
so I like the idea of treating the
day like any other day. I still do
some type of exercise, and then
I get dressed. I think it’s nice
to keep a sense of normalcy.”
When Thom Browne says
“normalcy,” he means it. Some
designers find inspiration in
the euphoric fashion of ’90s
underground club kids; some
look to the gender-bendy
codes of ’70s rock-and-roll
gods. Browne has built a
fashion empire on a style
subculture that is less sexy
but no less potent: midcentury
white collar office workers.
Even though Browne can’t
go to his garment-district
Browne’s design process always
begins with abstract sketches
like these, for his upcoming
spring-summer 2021 collections.
5 0 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y
in every morning. The week
we spoke, he had begun
sketching his spring-summer
2021 collections out of his
apartment on Central Park
West, where he lives with his
partner, Met Costume Institute
curator Andrew Bolton, and
his canine muse, a wirehaired
dachshund named Hector.
Browne usually designs eight
collections—encompassing
over 200 looks in total—per
year. So while we’ve been busy
tending to our sourdough
starters, he’s been getting a
head start on the clothes that
under normal circumstances
would be presented at the
fashion shows in June and
September. “I don’t mind being
home,” Browne said. “I very
rarely do more of my creative
collection work in the office,
2 0 2 0
avant-garde territory. In recent
years, they have featured a
flock of models wearing full
bird of paradise plumage,
a ballerino in a seersucker
tutu, and a ghostly 10-foot-tall
unicorn puppet prancing down
the catwalk. But Browne has
revealed little about how an
idea travels from his imagination
to cloth.
Until now: Every Thom
Browne collection starts as a
series of interpretive geometric
sketches that represent the
shapes and proportions in the
collection. “I’ve always used
this method,” Browne said. “I
never get locked into a specific
fashion sketch, per se, at the
beginning. I like collections to
start from proportion and basic
shapes, and then we work it into
something more realistic after.”
The sketches might look
more like Philip Johnson floor
plans than the makings of
something you might wear.
That’s because they’re closer
to blueprints than garment
patterns. A square could
represent a short jacket; a
rectangle, a larger piece of
outerwear; a triangle, a skirt.
It’s slightly inscrutable to
the observer, but Browne, who
has figured out how to make
LeBron James look cool in a
shrunken suit, has an uncanny
sense for balancing shapes.
These sketches reveal the
abstract and artful thinking
that goes into developing his
masterful mash-up of radical
and traditional.
Browne demurred when
asked to decode his sketches,
but in the face of the
THESE PAGES, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DIA DIPASUPIL/GET T Y IMAGES FOR NYFW, THE SHOWS; COURTESY OF THOM BROWNE (2)
coronavirus pandemic, one
thing is certain: The next
Thom Browne collection,
however and wherever it is
shown, will be in conversation
with the crisis. “I don’t like
to get overly political with my
collections. But you can’t
not comment on it,” he said.
“[The crisis] has definitely
influenced how I want people
to see the men’s and women’s
collections coming up. Because
it’s not some little moment
in time. It’s something that all
of us will remember for the
rest of our lives.” But don’t
read a somber note in Browne’s
sketches. “I’m not specifically
toning down the collections,
but I’m definitely showing
them differently, and showing
them in a way that you sense
the moment we’re living in,” he
continued. “People still want
to see interesting ideas, and
I think that’s the responsibility
of being a designer. People
want to see something new,
especially since the dystopian
time we’re living in has been
somewhat heavy. I think there
is a little bit of ‘Okay, we’re
getting through this—it’s time
to see something beautiful,
and something provocative,
and something intellectually
stimulating.’ ” — S A M U E L H I N E
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 5 1
 o Th
and f late e new
Joe nigh , Le
l t tt
GQ Mart , Dan erma
abo inez iel B n-a
ut (a ak pp
epi bein .k.a. T er (a. roved
cen g fu h k k
ter nny e Kid .a. De ings
of t fro Me sus
he m r
pan hom o), ch Nice)
dem e in at w
There’s been so much bad ic. the ith
news and real suffering, in
New York especially. Has it
impacted your ability to be
funny? DESUS NICE: I’m scared to Do you think this pandemic
death of this virus, and it’s like, will permanently alter the
“Are we really doing a comedy psyche of New York City?
show while people are dying?” DESUS: It definitely will, but
At the same time, you’re kind not necessarily in a bad way.
of helping people get through There’s gonna be a renewed
this, so it’s a double-edged sense of pride, and I think
sword. THE KID MERO: You gotta people have kinda taken
think about all those people. the city for granted. I’ve
People on the front lines. The been here my whole life,
essential workers. The health walking through Grand
care workers. The least we can Central Station and
do is give them a little respite being like, “Eh.” The
from the day they just had. next time I walk through, I’m
A few belly laughs after the probably gonna cry because,
misery of so much death and like they say, it’s the greatest

Desus’s and
Mero’s instant
self-portraits from
home: Desus in the
Bronx (above); Mero
with his family in
New Jersey.

He’s from Pittsburgh. I’ll

bet he can at least cook a
OPPOSITE PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: MARIO GALLUCCI

Primanti Brothers–style
cheesesteak. MERO: Yeah,
I’m done. ’Cause he’s gonna
have weed and cheesesteaks,
and that’s all I need. And he’s
definitely into video games.
DESUS: You know what, I would
like Ariana Grande. We could
do, like, karaoke. I don’t know,
she could shave my head. I don’t
know. She probably knows how
to make some good tomato
sauce. We’ll make it work.
—A RT Y N E LS O N
 Where are you quarantining? To what degree would you say
Portland, Oregon, at my house. Chris Johanson, the work that you’re making is
Meditative
Homeostasis
“about” the crisis? The virus
Describe your experience of Painting 2, is in the painting, so is the political
the crisis in a few words or house and anxiety, but there is a lot of love in
a sentence. Serenity prayer/ acrylic paints on the painting too. Everything goes
illuminated existence. recycled canvas, in the paintings.
19" x 19"
What kind of work have you What have you been reading,
been making? I’ve been making watching, and/or listening to? I’m
paintings on recycled canvas with as little reading The Missing of the Somme by
paint as possible, focusing on calmness Geoff Dyer and Object-Oriented Ontology
while I slowly paint. I try to gently let my life by Graham Harman. Watching the Criterion
painting under be what it is. Make room while I paint to Collection’s new streaming service.
quarantine is a form process uncomfortable thoughts like dying Listening to basically the whole catalog
of meditation. or whatever heavy thought I might need to of Mississippi Records and a bunch of
be with. solo jazz-piano stuff.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 5 3
 The Ethiopian
American
photographer is
spending time in his
Los Angeles studio
drawing, painting,
and building surreal
worlds in the form of
evocative still lifes. So
to what degree is this
new work about the
pandemic? “None?”
he says. “But maybe
we won’t know
until we’re out of
this crisis.”

Quarantine Freestyle
(study of objects in the
studio), photographed
at Erizku’s studio in
Los Angeles.

5 4 G Q . C O M J U N E 5 J U L Y 2 0 2 0
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 5 5
 Dua Lipa’s self-
portraits, shot in the
yard of her Airbnb.

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF DUA LIPA

5 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
 Ever since her apartment flooded, the
chart-topping pop star has been riding out
quarantine with boyfriend Anwar Hadid
in a London Airbnb. She caught up with
GQ from the couch, her home base for
promoting her new album—and possibly for
recording her next music video.

How have you made this the dark part underneath.

Airbnb feel like home?
I brought card games and
candles, canvases and paints.
Even bringing our own herbs
and spices from my flat makes
it just feel ours. It’s got a garden
and enough space to dance
in the kitchen. Also I dyed my
hair pink.
Did Anwar help with the dye
job? I jumped in the shower,
washed my hair, and then tied
Anwar dyed the top. I waited
15 minutes, got back in the
shower, washed it all off. And
that was it. Easy.
What’s something you’ve
learned about yourself,
creatively, since distancing
began? I’ve realized I’m quite
antsy. I have to get out of bed
and create a routine. I might be a
little OCD with that kind of stuff.
People have been asking, “Have

you been making music during sweats. I wanted to reiterate that

this time?” I haven’t. But this this is glitz and glamour from
is a good time to start thinking home; that’s as glamorous as it’s
about where I want to go next. going to get.

You’ve had two of the most Future Nostalgia has been a

talked-about videos of
quarantine in your Corden
and Fallon performances.
How’d you put those together?
I’d be lying if I say that I wasn’t
stressing out and welling up
with tears being like, “I don’t
know how I’m going to pull this
together.” But it was also a
way to be like, okay, how can we
still do this? For Corden, it was
easy—I just filmed myself singing
“Don’t Start Now” on my own
on the computer and on my
phone, and then I had everybody
in my band and my dancers do
their own one. Everybody’s like,
“How did you not get latency?”
It was prerecorded!
It’s a lot more stressful
when you’re a one-man show,
when—and I know this is a very
privileged problem—I have to
do my own hair and makeup and
try to make myself look good on
a day that I probably don’t feel
cute because I’ve just been in
big hit. How will you continue
an album campaign with more
singles without being able
to leave home? We’ve banked
a lot of images for other single
covers. And we’re creating
other visuals from home. If it
comes to it, I’ll pull a super-’90s
greenscreen performance.
I saw Drake post a video, which
looked greenscreened—[with
someone] on the wing of a
plane. If that’s what it’s going
to come to, so be it.
I have to imagine you’re
familiar with creating music
and videos on the go, anyway.
I always go into sessions with
little things written down, or
a voice note, or a little poem,
or even a song-title idea or a
memory or a feeling. I’m used
to writing things down. If I have
a video idea, I jot that down.
In my Notes app, my notes are
endless. —B R E N N A N C A R L E Y

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 5 7
 Wes Lang,
More Than This,
charcoal on paper, 90" x 84"
 What kind of work have you
been making? I’m mostly
focused on a series of new
large-scale works about Robert
Redford, Steve McQueen, Paul
Newman, and the world around
them. Cars, watches, living the
high life. I decided to make work
that makes me happy and that
puts a smile on my face.
To what degree would you say
OPPOSITE PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: EVAN BEDFORD. THIS PAGE, PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF AARON ADAMS.
the work that you’re making is
“about” the crisis? I’m coming
at this as an opportunity to
take the time to explore
subjects I have been fascinated
with my whole life, which in turn
is giving me a very clear and
positive outlook. We are all going
through the same situation
worldwide. It’s scary, dark,
filled with death, compromise,
discipline, separation, but I have
hope we will come out the other
side stronger than we have ever
been. It’s not so much “about”
the actual crisis; it’s an exercise
in keeping positive and hopeful
in a time filled with nothing but
the unknown.
What have you been reading,
watching, and/or listening
to? Lots of Criterion Channel
movies (Eyes of Laura Mars,
Contempt, Belle de Jour, to
name a few). Watch websites
(Hodinkee and SJX, mostly).
Classical music. Lots of
classical music. Calms my mind
and fills me with joy and hope.
The menu is not the challenge. plate, with gravy and mashed
It’s pretty easy to put a small potatoes. Nobody gave a fuck
menu together. The creative about duck roulade. I think
part is in building systems. of that as a lesson about what
So we have two kitchens, people are going to want when
400 feet apart. One cook in this is over. Do we really need
one kitchen and another 10-course meals after this?
in the other. We have one person Does anyone wake up and say,
who comes in, scrubs up, “I really have a hankering for
sanitizes, does prep, sanitizes, a 10-course tasting menu”? Can
and leaves. Then another we think of some other way to
person comes, sanitizes the bring people joy? — A S TO L D TO
space again, and leaves. B R E T T M A RT I N
A third person delivers food
to the trunks of cars. People
have preordered. They’ve
already paid.
I still struggle with “Am
I doing the right thing?” We
could just as easily stay home.
I’m doing it to keep my staff
busy and sane, to support local
farmers, and to be making food
for the community.
I think we need to become
radical with our hospitality. You
can be creative and comforting.
I was working in New York on
9/11, and I remember that first
Thanksgiving after. We put The vegan master
duck roulade on the menu, chef waters his
other fancy dishes. And tomato, broccoli,
and pepper
everybody wanted the turkey
seedlings.
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 5 9
Sketches from the architect’s master

Quarantined on Mexico’s Yucatán

Peninsula, the visionary Danish
architect hails the power of 3D printing
and unveils his biggest ambition yet:
a master plan to save the planet.

My family and I are inside a
nature reserve in the Yucatán,
at my friend’s house. He’s
an architect himself and the
founder of two hotels, Be Tulum
and Nômade. He purchased 80
kilometers of decommissioned
train tracks and built the
house from the wooden trestles.
The windows slide apart, so
it’s open in all directions. I can
see a lagoon on one side, with
freshwater crocodiles, and
the Caribbean on the other.
I will never again have an office
as nice as this.
Our firm has offices
in Barcelona, London,
Copenhagen, and New York,
so we were already prepared
for remote collaboration.
The big change is we’re not
Last year we started a
project with the working title
Masterplanet. It might seem
megalomaniacal to make a
master plan for the whole
planet, but we’ll be 10 billion
people in 2050, so we have to
design for it. We’ve tried to boil
down the greatest challenges
facing humanity, including
the main sources of climate
change: energy production,
agriculture, industry. One
of the things we noticed is if
we want to be as sustainable
as possible, then in a small
building, a house, a lot of things
that are technically possible
are not always feasible. But as
you move from house to block
to neighborhood to city to the
entire planet, you get more and
us to have a little more time on
our hands to think about where
we’re going and how we’ll get
there—at least in my personal
case, it’s incredibly productive.
One example: After
Hurricane Sandy, we imagined
a kind of surge barrier for New
York City that could double as
a park along the southern tip
of Manhattan. We’re breaking
ground on four miles of the
East River portion as soon
as the corona crisis is over.
It’s the ultimate pragmatic
utopian kind of strategy. During
quarantine, our work has
become more decisive, more
disciplined by the difference
it’s going to make in the world.
We no longer have the joy of
holding a physical model in

using physical models. All
our modeling staff are using
our 3D printers to make
face shields and visors for
hospitals in New York and
Spain. The New York office is
making almost 5,000 a week,
and Copenhagen 1,000 a
week. The lesson I’m learning
from the coronavirus is that we
have to think and act globally.
We are a single biosphere on
a single planet.
more possibilities for solutions.
Maybe the real gift—if you
want to call it that—of the
pandemic is that until now
we’ve been so incapable of
acting in the face of climate
change. I think we’re going to
emerge from this collectively
galvanized in ways we haven’t
been before. Even when
everything gets canceled and
you get quarantined, it’s not
like the world stops. For all of
THIS PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: NICHOL AS HUNT/GET T Y IMAGES. ART WORK: COURTESY OF BJARKE INGELS.
our hands, and that’s been a
reminder that our work is not
just about desirable forms
and beautiful materials. It’s
driven by values and ideas. As
an architect, you don’t have
political power, because you’re
not writing the rules. And you
don’t have financial power,
because you’re not writing the
checks. What you do have is the
power to give form to the future.
— A S TO L D TO E R I C W I L L S
 Model Anna
Herrera in London,
photographed
by Elizaveta
Porodina from
her home
in Munich.

For the Munich-based experimental fashion photographer,

the crisis has brought “a short period of despair and panic,
followed by a wave of hyperactivity, euphoria, inspiration, and
a deep, calm gratitude for the lessons I am learning.”

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 6 1
 Original design
created for GQ by
Online Ceramics.

6 2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
Though the coronavirus shutdown has put a steady stream of
summer collaborations on pause, Alix Ross and Elijah Funk,
the artists behind Online Ceramics, are taking advantage of the
downtime to expand the universe of psychedelic skeletons, cosmic
mindfulness, clean eating, and earth magic that animates their
graphics. “We haven’t felt this creatively free since the start of the
brand,” Ross says. “There’s actually more time to access ourselves
during this,” Funk adds. “So it’s leading to more creative thought.”
While quarantining at home, they created an Online Ceramics
design for GQ that reflects where the two artists have been finding
inspiration under lockdown. Unpack the dense symbolism and
you’ll find a quote from ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, text from
a Wiccan spell, bean sprouts from Funk’s garden, and a selection of
albums and books for isolation. “The overall energy of what we do
comes from these things,” Funk says. “They are all Online Ceramics
in a way.” — S A M U E L H I N E
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 6 3
 New York City
nightlife alive in her
own unusual way.
Julia Fox, playing the hustling
hottie girlfriend to Adam
Sandler’s antihero Howie,
emerged from Uncut Gems as
a once-in-a-generation talent.
Just before the pandemic,
Fox—who is 29, or 30, or 28,
depending on what you
read—was plotting a big new
life, filing for divorce, and
moving to “the utopia that is Los
Angeles.” The world couldn’t
wait to see what this magnetic
persona would do next.
Now, with the crisis in full
swing, she says, “there is
nothing coming in.” But the
woman who embodies the art
of staying out all night has
still found a way to do just
that, roaming through the
empty, moonlit Big Apple.
These pictures capture one
6 4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y
Richie Shazam logged 22,000
steps strolling the new,
dystopian cityscape. “You can
do whatever you want outside
because no one’s there,” she
says, ruminating on her attire
for this photo shoot.
After these nightly
constitutionals, it’s back to
her hotel, where she watches
movies—rather than curate some
amateur film-fest of obscure
whatevers (you poseurs!), she’s
taking advantage of the glorious
randomness of hotel cable
programming—until eight in the
morning. Then she goes to sleep,
wakes up around 3 p.m., and
once darkness falls, she writes,
working on a podcast script and
a book proposal.
Then it’s back out to the
streets. “I saw a bunch of guys
trying to break into an ATM,” she
says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is
really fucking anarchy. No one
gives a fuck.’ So every time I go
out, I bring my Mace with me.”
— R A C H E L TA S H J I A N
Julia Fox, photographed in
downtown Manhattan in the
middle of the night by her best
friend, Richie Shazam.
OPPOSITE PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID M. BENET T/DAVE BENET T/GET T Y IMAGES
2 0 2 0
 dog down a trail from my house that
weaves through neighbors’ backyards,
past an orchard of blooming lemon and
orange trees, along an empty reservoir
that he’s keeping an eye on the course because people
keep trying to break in: “They’re like junkies with their
golf.” I laugh at that, but he says, “No, I’m serious. It’s
a real problem.” Golf is a real problem? I see the guy
is sincere, and stressed. I, too, can blow small things
control, I guess.
My dog pulls me away and we turn up the
hill onto Sierra Madre Villa Avenue, a long
and curvy street that leads back into my
neighborhood, Pasadena Glen, at the foot of
the San Gabriel Mountains. A flock of lime
green parrots rules this enclave. I respect
these birds. They are descended from a
group of pets that escaped and formed
an alliance, a crew of flying misanthropes,
loyal, brave. They screech and take to the sky
with such vibrant force I feel envious, trudging
up this hill, which should be easy for me, but today
it isn’t. Everything seems to take extra effort these
days. Despite fatigue, though, I am trying to keep to
a disciplined schedule: Wake, breakfast, write, walk,
lunch, write, chores, Zoom, dinner, movie, sleep.
I wonder if the birds know that something is amiss
They don’t seem upset about it.
I think they’re flying around
more freely. There’s less
pollution since we were ordered
to stay home. I haven’t driven
my car in over a month. The
last time I did, it was to meet a
journalist from the L.A. Times
for an interview in the parking
lot of a public park. That was
the last time I’ve been farther
from home than the golf course.
My husband, Luke, has been
spending weekdays at his house
in the desert near Palm Springs.
As writers, we’re taking self-
the extreme. So
I am really alone
here in Pasadena
most of the time.
I’m trying to take advantage of the solitude and have
spent a lot of my time communing with my house,
which was built 75 years ago by an eccentric bachelor
named Herman Koller. He used stones and brick and
tile from all over the Southwest to build it. Some of
the stones came from a church after it was damaged
in an earthquake. There’s a mission bell on top of
the house. Koller built the house himself, placing
every stone by hand, and he lived
here alone until he died in the late
’60s. The yard is lush, with giant
birds-of-paradise, rampant jade,
and towering palms and cacti. So
the place feels like a sanctuary,
like an apocalypse.
I was supposed to be on a
a mystery one day while walking her dog.
time to see it reach readers. Publication got delayed.
Like everything. Up until the quarantine, I had been
in workaholic mode for many months, trying to meet
deadlines for film scripts before the book was to come
out. To be honest, I’m grateful to have some downtime,
away from the interviews and travel arrangements and
free from my own maniacal ambition. I’ve
only lived in Pasadena for six months.
It was a weird transition to
move to the suburbs from
my old East Hollywood
apartment, which
was across from an
elementary school and
right near the heliport
of a hospital. I have
always preferred a home
and workspace with the noise of
ambient city life. Now I have the
birds. And squirrels. They
say there are bears in the
mountains. I hear coyotes
at night howling up in the
hills. My dog growls anytime
Illustrations by Emma Kohlmann
trapped here.
In 2018, I published
a book about a young
woman who doesn’t
leave her apartment for
a year, My Year of Rest
and Relaxation. The Holed up in a
protagonist embarks on recording studio outside
London with his girlfriend
much as possible in an and a few musicians, the
frontman of the 1975 caught
up with GQ via FaceTime,
spliff in hand, ready to
an uptick in sales of My Year since social distancing
riff on a big question:
began. I suppose people are curious to read about
how another person successfully self-isolates. How do you make art out
But there is a stark difference a reader will quickly of a nightmare?
discover: My character self-isolates electively, for
personal reasons, selfishly, not to protect herself
and others from the spread of a virus. “This book is
eerily prophetic,” someone commented recently. A
lot of novels can seem ahead of their time once some

at a book festival in Austin.

Don DeLillo was being
interviewed onstage and
taking questions from the
audience. When it was my
turn at the microphone,
I told him that his novels
seemed to me to be
miraculously prescient
and asked if he had

to repeat itself in novel ways. But

I do believe that inspiration comes from somewhere,
that we can tap into truth if we really try, that time
is collapsible and circular. Not that it matters now.
Every day is the same.
When your worst fears are realized, it’s tempting
to think you have invented them, like this is all a bad
dream, and if you can just change your mind, then
reality will change along with it. As a writer, isolation
and solipsism are kind of unavoidable. When I am
absorbed in writing a novel, reality starts twisting to
reflect and inform everything I’ve been thinking
about in my work. That’s normal.
That’s part of the miracle of creation, one could
say, or it’s the mind organizing the details of life into a
narrative that logically orients the writer back to her
own story. A trap of perception, maybe. In some ways,
this quarantine is the ideal creative environment.
risks in my music that I would never take in my
to linger on a word or image or gesture real life.” That’s my duty. Just make powerful art.
and watch it develop into drama Otherwise I’m just here for escapism, and people can
through a language of its own. It also get laughing gas or weed, which are probably better
takes a lot of time. I haven’t had time to than bad music. — A S TO L D TO S A M S C H U B E
write fiction in a year and a half. I’m
trying to see this period as a blessing Matty Healy in his studio
in that way. The light side of the outside London, photographed
darkness. (continued on page 96) by Pari Dukovic in New York.

6 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0

The director of
The Lighthouse, last year’s
movie about isolation
and madness that has taken
on new relevance, chats
from Belfast, where he’s
working on his
next film, a Viking
revenge saga.
before production began. Now I’m working
in the spare bedroom of an apartment.
Everyone else went home, aside from a
few heads of department. The armorer
is working on armor in his apartment.
Everyone feels lucky to have work.
It’s easy for me to get absorbed in my
work, to let that obsession destroy any
depression I’m having. I’m usually depressed
for a weekend, maybe a week. I drink and
cry, and then I dive into work. But we have a
toddler, which changes things. Because my
Robert Eggers’s
quarantine reads:
Valkyries, Vikings,
and a little
Norse drama.
him—but it’s harder to work in the way that
we’d want to. In a kind of extreme way.
In my work, I write about people
behaving badly so that I can behave well
in my own life. If I was as dark as the
characters in my films, nobody would
want to hang out with me. My in-laws
6 8 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
His large-scale
installation works fill
galleries around the world
and are typically made
in a Brooklyn warehouse.
But COVID-19 has sent
him into his modest
basement studio to paint
anxiety in vibrant red.
You can go for walks, but it’s strange
Describe your mental or
emotional experience of
the crisis in a few words or a
back. We have dates to resume prep and sentence. I’m feeling sad for
production. But of course, we don’t know. those who have experienced
In the meantime, I’m catching up on loss but hopeful that we will
movies. The Criterion Channel has been get over this soon.
the best thing ever. I’m ashamed to say
this—like, David Lynch will take me to task What kind of work have you
for this—but I was in the grocery store been making? Mostly small
parking lot for two hours, so I watched Klute paintings and drawings.
on my phone. My D.P. was like, “Do you want
THIS PAGE, PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: KEVIN WINTER/GET T Y IMAGES; COURTESY OF ROBERT EGGERS.
could you actually see on your phone?”
I’m not on social media, but I am aware
could make something that
time. I guess The Lighthouse
everyone was like, “I will not
attempt Lighthouse levels of
drinking turpentine.”
OPPOSITE PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF RASHID JOHNSON.
I do wonder what kind of
of this. People have done so
more informed you could be
the happy postapocalyptic movie? That
might be important. But that’s probably
not for me to make.
“weave a mysterious thread of fate and
you cannot escape it.” And that’s what
you do? — A S TO L D TO Z A C H B A R O N
Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Drawing,
oil on cotton rag, 30" x 22"
 Larry David, Post
Malone, André
3000—Nocito’s
portfolio of GQ
shoots is a wild
ride with a gang
of extraordinary
figures. But in
times like these,
who’s more
extraordinary
than your own
family? Nocito’s
been documenting
his through the
crisis from home in
L.A. What’s been
his experience
during this
historic moment?
“Pure example of
powerlessness,”
he says.

Jason Nocito
photographed
wife Meghan,
daughter Ramona,
and dog Jiggs at
home in L.A.

7 0 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 0 0 0 0
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 7 1
 The Pulitzer-winning novelist speaks with GQ’s
Brett Martin about his solitary life at the foot of the Great Smoky
Mountains, where he’s writing (about a virus!) and contemplating
the present moment as both a reckoning and an opportunity.
Novelists are old hands at social distancing. Our work
depends on a fair amount of self-isolation. What’s
interesting now is to think about people who have
had constraints forced upon them. I wrote The Overstory
larger communities that extend beyond
into the latter. It’s an immense communal
gesture we’re undertaking. To think of
taken away and be rushed into this other mode of being
is, in itself, a kind of work of art.
That’s by far the most generous and optimistic way
I’ve heard the current state of affairs described.
It seems as though you had an eye out for just this
kind of event. I did spend six years writing a book
exploring how the commodity mentality diminishes
meaning, and the prices we pay for alienating ourselves
from the rest of the living planet. It also explores the
chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, the emerald ash
borer, the pine bark beetle—all these devastations
we’ve inflicted on other species—sometimes with
100 percent fatality rates. Fortunately our case fatality
rate [in this pandemic] is much lower, dodging the
bullet in a way that few people realize.
What’s your writing routine?
For most of my life, the ritual was
to get to work at seven or eight in
the morning and work for five or six
hours, until I had 1,000 words I was
proud of. Then the afternoon was
mine, to read or edit or go outside.
That changed quite a bit after I
moved down to the Smokies. Now
my routine is contingent on what the
world is doing: the weather, the time
of year, how high the rivers are, what’s
blooming. When you live like that, your
work becomes more robust and efficient.
If I start to walk in the woods, I’m usually
overcome with ideas. I have to sit down on
the trail, with a notebook. I never feel like
I’m slogging through my work anymore.
Illustrations by Emma Kohlmann
I didn’t get my 1,000
if I don’t get my miles
in, I’ll feel anxious.
And how has that changed these past few weeks?
My days now are similar, with the exception of not
being able to do that 15-mile hike. The virus hit at the
first moment of spring in Appalachia, when the spring
ephemeral flowers come out: hundreds of species that
germinate and bud and bloom in a couple of weeks. It
was my salvation for the first weeks to walk those trails,
a reminder of the vitality of life that was so different
from the panic and despair that was setting in to the
human world. Then the National Park Service said,
“This park has to close.” Because everybody is
going to come for their salvation and we’re going to
have Times Square in Cades Cove. My initial reaction
was despair, even anger. Here was my connection
to health, and now I don’t have it. But then I started
thinking, There will be this half million acres free of
human presence for the first time in centuries. And
I thought, That’s great. That’s beautiful. Let us do
with our non-presence something as useful as our
presence might have given us.
Are you still able to reach those states of
creative openness you just described? I can step
out of my house. I can look out the window. More
than anything, I can visualize and remember. I’m
reminded of a John Muir quote: “I only went out for
a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,
for going out, I found, was really going in.” We’re now
all having to discover the reciprocal quality of that
aphorism: We have to discover how going in can also be
THIS PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID LEVENSON/GET T Y IMAGES
a way of going out.
Not to be vulgar, but are you getting your 1,000 words
done? Pretty close. The enforced reading has also
been a lovely boon. I think many of us have thought,
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be housebound for a while,
to read that stack of books? I’m also renewing contact
with old friends. I hear that from (continued on page 97)
 Fanny Latour-
Lambert’s
boyfriend, Cabinet
Chatoyant, in
her apartment
in Paris.

For a recent GQ feature, the Paris-based fashion photographer captured

the greatest distance runner on the planet, marathoner Eliud Kipchoge, as one
of the most elegant. Now she’s turning her camera on the only willing subject she
has, her boyfriend, tattoo artist Cabinet Chatoyant. What’s her experience of the
crisis been? “It fluctuates between me enjoying this guilt-free time to relax
and just be lazy,” she says, “and me wanting my life back very badly.”

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 7 3

What kind of work have you been
making? I have been working on painting
items from popular culture in Guatemala
and things found around Antigua. Coffee
Katherine Bernhardt
Gracias a dios y Pepsi #staysafe
Spray paint on concrete brick wall, 10' x 10'
Mate is popular at the breakfast table
here, so I’ve been painting it. It’s hard to
find, though, since birds here swoop
onto the table and fly off with it in their
beaks. They prefer it to any of the other
types of sugars and sweeteners available.
I also found a Little Caesars pizza box
in the street the other day while on a walk.
I’m painting that too.
Where are you making work, and is that
typical or unique to this situation? I love
working outside and working at different
spots around the hotel grounds. The vibe
feels kind of like scenes when Penélope
Cruz is painting from the film Vicky Cristina
Barcelona, one of my favorite movies!
To what degree would you say the work
that you’re making is at all “about” the
crisis? Some of it is about the crisis
(the mural), and some works on paper focus
on it. And all of it is about Guatemala,
where I am unexpectedly located, thanks
to the borders being closed.
What have you been reading, watching,
and/or listening to? I read the local daily
newspaper, Prensa Libre. To put this crisis
in perspective, I have recently reviewed the
introduction in Boccaccio’s The Decameron
and am about to read El amor en los tiempos
del cólera, by Gabriel García Márquez. And
I have just finished bingeing Tiger King. And
I am listening to my usual music: Bad Bunny.
THIS PAGE, PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF K ATHERINE BERNHARDT. OPPOSITE PAGE, PHOTOGRAPHS, CATHERINE COHEN:
B R I A N M U L L E R. M EG A N STA LT E R : N I C K STA LT E R.
 to do that on Live?
Megan Stalter: I’m very up and
down. I’ll be crying for two hours
and then on Instagram Live
dressed as a farmer.

CC: Raise your hand if you

cry-sobbed today. [Both raise
hands] Okay, switching gears.
What’s the role of com in a
pandem? I miss that goo-goo-ga-ga
laughter.
MS: It’s helped watching my
friends’ IG Lives, but it is crazy CC: My mom tuned in and
how many people go Live at
night now.

CC: If I don’t go Live, I’ll

vaporize.
all my followers!”

The comedians caught up

via Zoom—Megan (top right
and above) from her apartment
in Brooklyn, Catherine from
her boyfriend’s family’s place
in the Berkshires.

MS: I miss you so much.

CC: Talking to you is the only

medicine I need.

Watch an extended Zoom

conversation between Stalter
and Cohen at GQ.com.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 7 5
 The L.A. gallery
veterans have an air of indie swagger
that’s rare in the big-money art world.
Now they’re reconsidering the role of the
gallery and imagining a new kind of
art-viewing experience.
Galleries like Blum & Poe
serve a certain civic role, given
that five days a week anyone
can walk through their doors
and vibe on the culture. With
stay-at-home orders currently
in place, Jeff Poe, cofounder
of the gallery with Tim Blum,
believes it’s time to retool
existing protocols. “Shifting
online is what’s happening out
of necessity,” he says. “But
we can only see art on a flat
screen. Scale is lost. It’s harder
to feel. End of the day, the
engagement is, and always will
be, fundamental.”
At the same time, says Blum,
the business they went into
the pandemic with might look
quite different from the one
that comes out of it. “Random
ideas have come to me,” Blum
says, including live music and
other events, or pop-up food
nights. “I’ve also been thinking
about the restaurants who
don’t have any clear future
when this passes. Perhaps we
lend our gallery to chefs and
restaurants to do a meal where
they get the majority of the
benefits? Be a nice way to
create community and a kind
of bridge to healing.”
7 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y
For now, however, both
remain optimistic that on the
other side of this bomb blast
the art world might ease off
its Wall Street–fueled fever
state and angle back toward
something more in line with
the way things were when
they first hung their shingle:
“Hopefully the communication
and dialogue around art will
go back to content and quality
as value over the economics
of the art market,” Blum says.
“And there will be a return
to the primordial nature of our
feelings about art, as well
as a focus on authentic
content and a desire for the
experience of art to be one
of a road toward healing
and consciousness.” Poe’s
predictions are punctuated by
a punk, pragmatic flavor.
“Galleries will have a heightened
online presence by presenting
more supplemental content, as
we are seeing now. I do think this
will stay. But ultimately that
conversation is secondary. I like
my content live,” he says. “You
want to watch porno or make
love?” — A R T Y N E L S O N
Tim Blum (left) and Jeff
Poe, by Blum & Poe artist
Julian Hoeber.
2 0 2 0
At home with
Cardi B and baby
Kulture in L.A., the rap
star is cooking up
harder fits than
ever—and reworking
the next Migos record.
Offset’s quarantine pad in L.A. is basically an
enormous walk-in closet. Enter through the front
THIS PAGE, ARTWORK: © JULIAN HOEBER, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND BLUM & POE, LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK/ TOKYO
door and you might have a Daisy Buchanan–level
meltdown, but over Chrome Hearts jeans instead of
Gatsby’s dress shirts. Offset has turned his living
room into a laboratory for fits, with rare jawnz from
Kapital, Louis Vuitton, Chrome Hearts (of course), and
obscure Japanese brands you can find only at local
shop Departamento, piled high on every surface. “To
be honest, I like to get dressed so much, I’ll find myself
putting fits on and taking pictures in the driveway
just so I can have some content to give to my fans
while we’re sitting at home,” Offset said while showing
off his fashion archive on FaceTime. “Every day I’m
throwing a different pair of shoes on, and I ain’t really
going nowhere. I love drip so much.”
When he isn’t taking fit pics in the driveway, the
Georgia-bred rapper is recording in his home studio
and working on a new concept for the next Migos
album via regular calls with Quavo and Takeoff. That’s
right: It might not be called Culture III. “[Quarantine]
has just given me a harder grind, a harder drive, on
the inside,” Offset said. “Ever since ‘Bad and Boujee’
went No. 1 and then we dropped Culture and Culture
II, I’ve heard the word culture so much. As artists you
challenge yourself—you have to keep moving forward.
So I’ve been thinking of a plan to make something as
powerful or more powerful [than Culture].”
And of course, Offset and his wife, Cardi B, are using
their rare mutual downtime to do quarantine couple
things, like binge-watch Tiger King. When asked
whether lockdown has brought him and Cardi closer
together, Offset was unequivocal: “Yessir. Both our
time and both our schedules be hectic, so we’re taking
advantage of that. But,” he continued, “we’re both
ready to get back to work.” — S A M U E L H I N E
Offset in Los Angeles, photographed by
rayscorruptedmind in New York.
Artwork by Ryan McNamara.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 7 7
7 8 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
 From her home in the
Bronx, the peripatetic
photographer—who
has collaborated
with A$AP Ferg, Dev
Hynes, and Solange,
to name a few—is
using a projector to
bring the forbidden
outside in. What’s
kept her going through
the crisis? “Spike
Lee’s MasterClass.
Fight Club. A Guide
to Recognizing Your
Saints. Leon Bridges’s
Coming Home.”

Renell Medrano’s bedroom in the Bronx.

 AT THE START OF THE

DOUG BOCK CLARK

UNCOVERS WHAT TWO HARROWING WEEKS
TRAPPED ABOARD THE OCEAN LINER FELT LIKE—FOR UNSUSPECTING TOURISTS,
CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK, ONE ILL-FATED CRUISE SHIP BECAME A SYMBOL FOR THE
PANIC AND CONFUSION THAT WOULD SOON
ENGULF THE GLOBE.

FOR FRIGHTENED CREW MEMBERS,

EVEN FOR THE CAPTAIN HIMSELF.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 8 1

They had no idea about the danger. Not as
they crowded around the famous cham-
pagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted
cruise passengers watched as golden bub-
bly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses,
filled the stemware below. Then the drinks
were passed out. Hand to hand to hand.
Guests clinked coupes and posed for pho-
tos, making the evening feel momen-
tous. It was their fourth night aboard the
Diamond Princess—a floating city of a
ship that had been churning south from
Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still
unaware of how much their journey would
transform them, and even the world.
The Four Amigos, as a pair of American
couples called themselves, skipped the
champagne waterfall, which happens on
almost every Princess Cruises excursion. The
60-something traveling companions had seen
it before on their annual cruises together.
They were happy to turn in early for the eve-
ning, thankful for this two-week break from
their busy lives. Carl and Jeri Goldman run a
mom-and-pop radio station that broadcasts
local news and high school sports to a sub-
urb of Los Angeles. Mark and Jerri Jorgensen
oversee a rehabilitation center that special-
izes in pornography addiction in the red
rocks of St. George, Utah. This year, espe-
cially, they needed the respite of the cruise.
Recently, Jeri Goldman’s father had died; Carl
had struggled with his health. None of them
had been paying much attention to the news
as they flew to Japan to board the ship. When
they landed in Tokyo, Carl noticed an abnor-
mal number of people wearing face masks,
but he thought little of it.
Indeed, for the first four days, there seemed
to be nothing amiss as the 18-story ocean liner
“ANYBODY WOULD BE SCARED FOR THEIR LIFE,”
SAID ONE CREW MEMBER. “WE KNEW PEOPLE WERE DYING.”
HE DESCRIBED COLLEAGUES JUMPING INTO SCALDING SHOWERS OR WASHING THEIR HANDS
powered south through the East China Sea.
As it did, the ship’s 2,666 guests luxuriated in
a dozen or so di≠erent restaurants, a multi-
tude of bars and nightclubs, four pools, a spa,
a casino, and more. All the while, an army of
more than a thousand crew members stood
ready to gratify their every whim.
Five days into the voyage, the ship docked
in Hong Kong, and as the Four Amigos dis-
embarked, health o∞cials scanned their
foreheads for fever with thermometer guns.
Apparently, a mysterious virus was scything
through mainland China. At first the People’s
Republic had attempted to cover up the
flu-like disease, but things had gotten so bad
that in the industrial city of Wuhan, nearly
8 2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
600 miles north, some 11 million people were
being quarantined and local hospitals were
bursting with casualties. In Hong Kong, so
far, the response was modest. Foreigners were
being screened at the ports, schools were sus-
pended, and several Lunar New Year events
had been canceled. But as the Four Amigos
toured the city and watched a light show daz-
zle the skyline, the throngs weren’t noticeably
diminished. After all, you couldn’t halt life.
For a week more, the Diamond Princess
cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable
kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the
karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed
street food in Taiwan. But once there, panicky
headlines and more temperature guns made
the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they
considered themselves safe, unaware that
an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had
coughed through the first third of the cruise
before disembarking in Hong Kong—had
been admitted to a hospital, where it was dis-
covered that he was infected with COVID-19.
When the ship was two days away from
returning home to Yokohama, a typo-riddled
email from a Hong Kong port agent arrived
in the inboxes of cruise line personnel, alert-
ing them to the danger that had been found:
“Would kindly inform the ship related parties
and do the necessary disinfection in needed.
Many thanks!”
O∞cials at Princess Cruises say the com-
pany had learned of the infected passenger
hours earlier, when they were tipped o≠ by
a news report. Before long, they received
another, clearer warning, this one sent by
an epidemiologist from the government of
Hong Kong. But seemingly nothing was done
aboard the ship that aroused the concern of
most passengers, including the Four Amigos.
Cruise line o∞cials maintain that the day
after the ship received the first warning, its
crew began sanitizing public areas more
frequently, put out extra hand sanitizer, and
switched bu≠et utensils more often.
Of course, such measures couldn’t be
expected to do much against a virus that was
currently crippling China—especially on a
cruise ship, an environment designed to pack
people in and then entertain them with com-
munal activities. And the virus had already
had ample time to attack people’s lung cells
until they coughed it into the air, where it
might linger in a mist for three hours. Then,
if the virions weren’t inhaled, they could
still settle on an elevator button or a roulette
wheel and survive up to three days, waiting to
hitchhike on an unsuspecting hand to an itchy
nose. At this point in the cruise, the coronavi-
rus could be anywhere and in anyone.
On what was supposed to be the cruise’s
final night, February 3, while the Four Amigos
were enjoying a multicourse meal in the mir-
rored Savoy Dining Room, they all agreed
that they hoped the trip would never end.
Suddenly the ocean liner’s intercom came to
life. In his Italian-inflected English, the ship’s
captain told all on board about the infected
passenger. Accordingly, he said, when the
Diamond Princess reached Yokohama,
everyone would need to stay on the vessel for
an extra day while Japanese health o∞cials
screened them. The Jorgensens gave each
other a look that said: What does that mean
for us? But soon enough, guests went back
to their surf and turf. Before long, the baked
Alaska was paraded out, accompanied by
marching band music and diners festively
waving their napkins.
The Four Amigos soon retired, but many
of the other passengers continued their eve-
ning at the Skywalkers Nightclub or took in a
show at the 740-seat theater. They were still
on vacation, after all. Dealing with the real
world could wait.
2. Security
Growing up in claustrophobic Mumbai,
India, Sonali Thakkar had been desperate
to see the world. She ended up spending
her early 20s pinging between continents
as a security patrolwoman aboard several
Princess ships. The long hours she spent
managing the gangway—monitoring those
who boarded and disembarked—could be
taxing, but she’d happily put up with a lot for
the chance to earn about twice what she’d
make at home.
Not long after the captain’s announce-
ment, the 24-year-old Thakkar received an
urgent call ordering her to the gangway. The
ship had sped up to reach Yokohama early,
and soon she was standing at the weakly illu-
minated gangway, squinting into the liquid
dark of the harbor while the ship anchored
slightly o≠shore.
It was freezing outside, and down here by
the waterline, Thakkar could hear none of
the cheer of the parties going on hundreds
of feet above. Her radio crackled, announc-
ing the approach of several small Japanese
boats, which drew alongside the hulk-
ing ocean liner. Even before the captain’s
announcement, the crew had heard rumors
of an infection, but Thakkar claimed that
management told them not to worry. Now,
as she counted roughly two dozen Japanese
OPENING PAGES: STR/JIJI PRESS/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES. THIS PAGE, FROM LEF T: YARDLEY WONG (2); MARK JORGENSEN.
health care workers in protective gowns and
masks being helped aboard by deckhands,
she began to get an inkling of how bad things
might actually be.
Not long before midnight, the captain
reportedly returned to the intercom, finally
ending the evening’s revelry, ordering every-
one back to their rooms.
In the morning, the Japanese health care
workers fanned out across the ship to assess
the virus’s spread. Passengers, including the
Four Amigos, expected to disembark the fol-
lowing day. But when the next morning came,
the captain’s voice again rang out from the
speakers barnacled to the walls and the ceil-
ings. Nine passengers and one crew member
had tested positive for COVID-19. All passen-
gers were to return to their cabins, where
IN HOT WATER UNTIL THEY HURT. AS THE DAYS DRAGGED ON,
THE SERVICE WORKERS BEGAN TO QUESTION IF
THEIR SACRIFICES WERE WORTH IT.
they would remain quarantined for two
weeks by order of the Japanese government.
Rather than release 3,700 potential vectors—
who could infect Japan or their farther-flung
homes—public health o∞cials were trans-
forming the Diamond Princess into a floating
quarantine center.
Thakkar was given a mask and a new
set of duties: patrolling the hallways in her
naval-looking uniform. Guests would open
their doors and, from their thresholds, ask
what was going on. But all she could tell them
was to go back inside and remain calm—she
didn’t know anything more herself. Of course
From left: the
scene in the ship’s
crowded atrium;
ill-equipped workers
tend to thousands
of guests; the Four
Amigos (from left,
Mark and Jerri
Jorgensen and Carl
and Jeri Goldman).
Thakkar was concerned about contracting
the illness. But she also told herself that she
was no longer the timid girl who had never
left India: She was a Princess Cruises secu-
rity employee, and she was going to do her
duty—even if that had unexpectedly changed.
Once she had guarded the passengers from
the outside world; now she was protecting
it from them.
3. Inside
As Hong Kongers, Yardley Wong and her
husband had been aware of the outbreak
before many others on the ship—and the
loss of a close friend to SARS, a similar virus,
17 years earlier, primed them to take this
outbreak seriously. The 40-something cou-
ple had worn masks and practiced some
social distancing measures since the start
of the cruise; after the captain’s initial
announcement, they locked themselves
away in their cabin, even as many guests still
roamed the ship.
While they waited anxiously for the
Japanese health care workers to reach them,
they ordered room service, and when it
arrived, they sanitized the utensils before
eating. Sometimes Wong heard the crinkle
of plasticky protective gear in the hallway,
and through the peephole in the door, she
glimpsed blurry figures in surgical masks and
gowns—though they always passed by.
Finally, around 11:30 p.m., o∞cials arrived
to take their temperature—and found no sign
of fever, though it was hard to tell because the
couple and the health workers barely spoke
a common language. Wong and her husband
went to bed thinking they were okay but were
woken by a knock at 4:30 a.m. This time the
figures at the door had upgraded to hazmat
gear: face shields, goggles, and shoe coverings.
They swabbed the Wongs’ mouths. Wong then
watched as her sample was inserted into a tray
alongside what seemed like a hundred other
vials—and she wondered what these tests
meant about the virus’s spread.
For the Wongs, the world shrank to a room
of about 150 square feet, much of that taken up
by a queen-size bed. The primary decoration
was a big TV and two large mirrors hung facing
each other to create the illusion of spacious-
ness. There were no windows, and this rela-
tively cheap cabin was about as far from fresh
air as possible: on an interior hall of a middle
deck, near the laundromat. These weren’t
the sort of accommodations highlighted in
advertisements.
Wong and her husband might have found
this confinement easier to endure if they
hadn’t been traveling with their then six-year-
old son, who was sharing their bed. To occupy
him, they had the TV and an iPad, on which
he played Fortnite. At first they used in-room
exercise routines to burn o≠ his energy, before
passengers were eventually granted an hour
each day on deck, during which time they tried
to run him ragged while carefully staying six
feet away from others.
But they couldn’t distract their boy from the
fact that the situation (continued on page 91)
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 8 3
BY
GABRIELLA
PAIELLA

PHOTOGRAPHS
BY FANNY
LATOUR-LAMBERT

STYLED BY
JON TIETZ

Steve Buscemi
has seen it all.
He was hit by a car
and a bus as a kid,
was once stabbed
in a bar fight,
volunteered as a
firefighter during
9/11, and somewhere
along the way
became one of the
most accomplished
film actors of his
generation. And
then tragedy struck:
In 2019, Buscemi
lost his wife of
over 30 years. In a
rare interview,
Hollywood’s most
beloved misfit opens
up about anxiety,
loss, and the hard
work of getting
through it all.

8 4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
 first time at an airy Italian restaurant a short
walk from his place. Neither of us knows it
yet, but this cloudless March Wednesday is
one of the last normal days on record, before
New York City all but shuts down because
just pure experimentation with shapes and colors. “Yellow has of the coronavirus and we are collectively
been a color that I didn’t think that I was going to use much, advised to confine ourselves to our apart-
but I do like the brightness of it,” he says. “I thought in the ments. As it turns out, my last sit-down
restaurant meal until who knows when is
beginning that I would be expressing something dark within this lunch, with Steve Fucking Buscemi. He
me. Maybe it does, but it’s been surprisingly fun.” ¶ Buscemi has the spinach frittata.
At 62, Buscemi has spent a lifetime playing
has a whole three-story brownstone to himself in Brooklyn’s lunatics and weirdos, outcasts and oddballs,
idyllic Park Slope neighborhood, which is basically Sesame his wiry frame a guitar string thrumming
Street if the Muppets were gluten-intolerant and wore fashion with rage or taut with the deep discomfort
of simply existing in the world. The crown
clogs. He moved here back in the early ’90s, long before it jewels of his visage are his heavy-lidded blue
became a punch line about yuppies. I live here too and can eyes, one of the most recognizable sets in
the business, which can jut out maniacally
confirm he is a neighborhood institution: There’s our famous or drown in subdued sorrow. When he pulls
o≠ his black baseball cap, I’m struck by how
muted and relaxed his features are, as if
park, there’s our famous food co-op, there’s students in this hypothetical writing class they’ve all agreed to a nonaggression pact.
Steve Buscemi. About a decade ago, a blog be a touch intimidated by the presence of, Buscemi also carries himself with an unob-
briefly existed that was devoted entirely to well, Steve Buscemi? (Imagine critiquing Mr. trusiveness at odds with his various personas,
cataloging the miscellaneous items—a dis- Pink’s manuscript in workshop.) He ponders down to his urban camouflage: a straightfor-
embodied doll head, a Van Morrison cassette that possibility for a second and reconsiders ward dark gray button-down, black jeans and
tape, a hat with a fake ponytail attached—left the idea. glasses, a navy jacket and scarf. He has said
out on the actor’s stoop. “I’d probably be too afraid,” he insists. before that he did not realize his teeth were so
Occasionally discarding tchotchkes is crooked until he saw himself on film. They’re
nothing compared with his current cleaning S O M E A C T O R S M A K E a show of their supposed much more harmonious in person, save for
project, which is more a one-man archaeo- humility. For Buscemi, that quality seems to one prominent exception: a slightly feral
logical excavation of his life. The house feels su≠use his entire being. Despite his involve- snaggletooth, top left, that peeks out when he
too big for him these days, so he’s consider- ment in several cultural touchstones of our laughs—which he does reflexively, nervously.
ing renting out a floor or even moving, which time—from Coen brothers classics to Adam Often. It feels like an old friend.
would be a huge blow to neighborhood Sandler blockbusters, from 30 Rock to The At this point, Buscemi has surrounded
morale. Mostly Buscemi wants to ensure that Sopranos—he cannot turn o≠ the modesty. us so consistently in such varied work
his son, Lucian, a musician in Los Angeles, When he first directed an episode of the that he might as well be air. He has been a
won’t have to inherit so much of his “junk.” HBO Mob drama, all he could think was “Oh, stingy, sarcastic criminal (Reservoir Dogs),
“He’d be the only one when I’m gone,” my God. I don’t belong here. Why would they a loudmouthed, louche criminal (Fargo), a
Buscemi says matter-of-factly. “It’s him that’s listen to me?” (That Sopranos episode would heavy-metal rocker turned hapless crimi-
going to have to go through everything.” be “Pine Barrens,” considered by many to be nal (Airheads), and a guy whose only crime
And yet, as he putters around, unearthing the best of the entire series.) When he went to is having too many opinions about jazz
forgotten memorabilia—old letters and post- the SAG Awards earlier this year, he wanted to (Ghost World). A neurotic screenwriter (In
cards, flyers from shows—he’s finding it hard meet the cast of Fleabag but still felt nervous the Soup) and a neurotic director (Living in
to part with them. “I’m kind of a hoarder,” about introducing himself to Phoebe Waller- Oblivion). A gloriously inept private detective
he admits. “It’s just a slow process, because Bridge. During this very interview, when we (30 Rock). A downtrodden bowler (The Big
I always get caught up in reading stu≠.” hit a brief pause in conversation, Lebowski). A guy literally named
Buscemi began this undertaking after his wife, he asks me semi-apologetically, ←← Crazy Eyes (Mr. Deeds). “We used
the artist and choreographer Jo Andres, died “Have I been a hard person to PREVIOUS PAGE to joke that he was our genera-
of complications related to cancer in January talk to?” (Not even close.) He is vest $1,195 tion’s Don Knotts, but he’s more
2019. In wanting to diligently archive her endearingly understated and pants $695 Jimmy Stewart in a way,” says
Giorgio Armani
work, he has found himself sifting through the genuinely modest, as if oblivious the independent filmmaker Jim
remnants of over 30 years together. to how others perceive and con- shirt $485 Jarmusch, who has been friends
Givenchy
He’s rediscovered some of his own old textualize him. Even though, as with Buscemi for more than 35
work too. Detailed drawings from his high Pete Davidson (who helped cast → years and cast him in several
school days. They remind him that he needs Buscemi in the upcoming movie OPPOSITE PAGE projects. “He portrays humanity.”
to make more time for things like that, hence The King of Staten Island) and blazer $3,750 Though it’s di∞cult to imag-
all the painting in the kitchen. That used to Daniel Radcli≠e (who costars shirt $890 ine a world without Buscemi
pants $2,450
be his priority—creativity for creativity’s sake. with Buscemi on the TBS comedy onscreen, about a decade ago
tie $195
“Maybe I should take a creative-writing anthology series Miracle Workers) shoes $890 he thought he was done acting.
class,” he wonders out loud. “I’ve never put it to me separately, he is “Steve Celine by Hedi Thought he’d peaked, that he
done that.” Fucking Buscemi.” Slimane might as well devote himself
Not to discourage Steve Buscemi from pur- I meet Buscemi (he says it boo- socks $4 to directing full-time. “I just
suing new hobbies, but wouldn’t the other sem-ee, not boo-shem-ee) for the Uniqlo couldn’t really see where it was

8 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
going,” he says. “I felt like I was at an odd
age where I was too old to play some char-
acters, not old enough to play other charac-
ters.” Then, in a brilliant casting turn, the
character actor’s character actor landed the
lead as political boss and gangster Nucky
Thompson on the HBO Prohibition drama
Boardwalk Empire. Show creator Terence
Winter says that even Buscemi did not see
it coming. “When I called him to tell him he
got the role, he was so ready to be rejected,”
Winter recalls. “I said, ‘Steve, we’d like to
o≠er you this role.’ And he said, ‘Well, it was
really an honor to be considered.’ ”
Since Boardwalk Empire ended, in 2014,
Buscemi has had the luxury of working
only when he wants to. Older Buscemi has
primarily been drawn to levity and, most
recently, an element of camaraderie. In the
’80s he worked as a firefighter, a real-world
experience he draws from for The King of
Staten Island, in which Buscemi plays the
wizened Papa, who could very well be the
alternate-universe version of himself had he
become a lifer. Director Judd Apatow gave him
the option for the character to be either the fire
chief or simply a senior member of the com-
pany. “At first I was sort of excited about play-
ing a fire chief,” Buscemi tells me. “But then
I thought, No, I want to be one of the guys. Just
one of the guys.” In the first season of Miracle
Workers he played God, but he much preferred
his season-two character, a medieval peasant
named Edward Shitshoveler. “God was fun,
but he was sort of isolated from everybody,” he
says. “And he was kind of a downer.”
There is one recurring theme from
Buscemi’s previous work that he is determined
blazer $4,390
Tom Ford
shirt $590
pants $1,190
Tom Ford at
Mr Porter
to leave behind. “I don’t have the tolerance for
violence that I used to,” says the man whose
most famous of many cinematic deaths
involved getting hacked to bits with an ax and
then shoved into a wood chipper in Fargo.
After he got whacked on The Sopranos, he
made a half promise to himself that he would
stop taking on roles where he was murdered.
(“Where does it go after you get killed by Tony
Soprano? That should be the cuto≠.”) And then
there’s the problem of playing the killer too.
There was one particular scene on Boardwalk
Empire, where Nucky shoots a teenager in the
back of the head, that gave him pause. “It was
hard for me to divorce myself from the feelings
that it was actually me doing it,” he says.
Speak to colleagues and friends of
Buscemi’s and you will hear one word
repeated over and over and over again: kind.
“Everybody loves him,” says David Chase, cre-
ator of The Sopranos. “He feels a lot for other
people, but he’s very uplifting,” Jarmusch
tells me. “I know this sounds ridiculous, but
I just feel so honored to know him as a friend.”
Jarmusch, by the way, says Buscemi is an
“incredible” dancer. “Yeah, you got to get him
loosened up and then ‘Hey, Steve, let’s see you
hit the dance floor.’ He’s really good.”
Enthusiasm and excellent dancing aside,
the actor seems to inspire a particular rever-
ence in those who grew up watching his work.
Simon Rich, the creator of Miracle Workers,
cites how Buscemi’s younger costars on the
show look up to him. “It’s how I imagine
younger players on the Lakers probably feel
around LeBron James,” he says. “Like, ‘Shoot.
I’d better bring my A-game because I get to
play with this guy.’ ”
JUST W H E N B U S C E M I should have been
comfortably entering his icon era, personal
tragedy struck. Andres was diagnosed with
ovarian cancer in 2015. She went through
chemotherapy, was in remission for a stretch.
The cancer came back with a vengeance in
2017. When Buscemi talks about the last years
of his wife’s illness, his voice catches. “The
pain was the hardest thing,” he says softly.
“People who are going through that, it’s pain-
ful. It’s painful to die from cancer. There’s just
no way around it.”
Buscemi and Andres met in 1983, when
they were living across the street from each
other in the East Village. Buscemi had devel-
oped a crush on her from afar and would
rush out to walk his dog when she was on
her way to or from work, hoping to run into
her. She had separately seen his face, without
realizing it, on handmade posters advertising
“Steve and Mark,” the experimental comedy
duo Buscemi performed in with the actor
Mark Boone Junior, and would joke to her
friend, “I’m going to snag that guy.” Later,
when Andres found herself in Buscemi’s
apartment, she saw (continued on page 90)
blazer $3,200
shirt $680
pants $950
tie $220
Gucci
sunglasses, his own

grooming by kumi
craig for the wall
group. tailoring
by todd thomas.
set design by
molly findlay for
walter schupfer
management.

J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 8 9
 S T E VE BUS CEM I
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 8 8
one of those posters and the cosmic coinci-
dence dawned on her. “I still remember when
she went, ‘That’s you,’ ” he says, smiling.
Back then, Buscemi had a day job as a
firefighter. At the behest of his father, a sani-
tation worker, he and his three brothers had
taken the civil service exam, a surefire path to
steady and decent employment. Buscemi had
originally landed in the city from the clapboard
suburb of Valley Stream, Long Island, to take
acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre &
Film Institute—again thanks to his father, who
had suggested the classes to stop his son, adrift
and miserable after finishing high school,
from running o≠ to Los Angeles to chase his
dreams. (Buscemi eventually memorialized
that aimless period in his sublime 1996 direc-
torial debut, Trees Lounge.) Buscemi paid for
the lessons with the $6,000 he received from
the city after being hit by a bus when he was
four, during his early-childhood years in the
Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York.
(He was also hit by a car when he was eight
and stabbed by a stranger in a bar fight while
out with the actor Vince Vaughn in 2001.
“I came close to death,” he says, casually reflect-
ing on the latter incident. “That was probably
the closest I’ve been, besides being hit by a bus
and a car.”)
Buscemi would spend four years at Engine
Co. 55 in Little Italy. At first he kept quiet
about his theatrical aspirations around his
coworkers. “They already thought I was
kind of a weirdo, because I lived in the East
Village,” he says. “So I kept my mouth shut
and my head low and just tried to get along.”
Then one night, he got pretty drunk at a par-
ty—“firefighters always look for an excuse to
have a party”—and started working the room,
imitating all the guys. It was a hit. “They
started coming to see the plays that I was
doing,” he says. “They were really supportive.”
If it took Buscemi a minute to find his com-
munity on the job, he was also feeling like an
outsider to the downtown scene flourishing
around him. “I was very shy,” he says. “I would
look around the East Village and see all these
cool-looking people and felt like I could not
fit in.”
By the time he and Andres got together,
he was much more enmeshed, thanks to the
show with Boone Junior. “Between both of our
worlds, there was always somebody doing a
show or a place to go to hang out,” he recalls.
Andres, slightly older and renowned in the
performance-art world, was a huge early
influence in expanding his understanding of
what could be possible. “Jo really trusted her
intuition and would just kind of put images out
there and didn’t feel the need to have to explain
9 0 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
it or have to make sense,” he says. “She just had
to feel a certain way, like she was trying to evoke
a feeling, or a mood.” For Buscemi, ever anxious
and analytical, Andres helped him to tap into
his intuitive side and trust himself more.
After booking the part of a gay man dying
of AIDS in the 1986 movie Parting Glances,
Buscemi took a temporary leave from the
firefighting department that would end up
being permanent. “I really believed that
[Parting Glances] would get me more work,”
he says. “It got me an agent. It didn’t get me
more work right away, but it did get the ball
rolling.” (The movie feels dated now, but a
young, sneering Buscemi blows everyone else
out of the water.) The work really picked up for
Buscemi after 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, from a
first-time director named Quentin Tarantino.
And he credits Willem Dafoe, an actor who
“did independent film but also did commercial
work,” as an inspiration for how to model his
budding career. “It just showed me a way that
you can do both,” he says.
By then Buscemi and Andres had gotten
married, had Lucian, and settled into a qui-
eter rhythm of life in Park Slope. Their nights
traipsing around the East Village until 4 a.m.
gave way to Little League games in Prospect
Park. Andres continued to create work that
was sublimely dreamy and avant-garde, like
Black Kites, a remarkable mixed-media short
film, based on the journals of a Bosnian art-
ist during the siege of Sarajevo, that hit the
festival circuit in 1996. The couple started
a regular meditation practice and bought a
property upstate where they could escape the
city and get some fresh air. Even as jobs sent
him around the world, they would make sure
to never go three weeks without seeing each
other. “It just became unbearable after three
weeks,” Buscemi says. The one exception was
when he was filming the movie John Rabe
in Shanghai, when Lucian was a teenager.
“I thought, at the time, Well, he’s in high
school. He doesn’t care,” he remembers. “I
really feel like, Oh, I wish I was around more.
With parenting, it sometimes doesn’t matter if
you’re relating to your kid or talking. Just the
fact that you’re there goes a long way, even if
they’re ignoring the hell out of you.”
Before Andres died, Buscemi says, he hadn’t
thought much about death. “If I should hap-
pen to go not suddenly, I hope I could be as
present as Jo was,” he says now. “She led the
way. She was surrounded by friends and fam-
ily. She really faced it. She didn’t have fear,
but she’d run with it. I really don’t think she
was afraid of dying. I think it was just a whole
series of ‘Oh, I don’t get to do this anymore.’ ”
WHEN BUSCEMI CALLS me from his home a
few weeks later, the world around us is com-
pletely altered by the pandemic. Well, mostly.
“It doesn’t feel that much di≠erent from what
I do when I’m not working,” he admits. “Except
that I would usually go out more.”
Buscemi’s life has been composed of lay-
ers of distinct New York City experiences:
the blue-collar childhood in far-flung East
New York, the formative years in a since
vanished East Village scene, the quiet and
quasi-suburban Park Slope adulthood. He has
been present for the city’s worst moments in
recent memory, rushing over to Ground Zero
after September 11 to spend 12-hour days
clearing ash and debris from the fallen towers,
to be there for the guys from his old firefight-
ing company. But the coronavirus response is
something new. Something that is, by design,
singularly isolating.
“One of the things that I think a disaster
brings out is that people really support each
other and help each other,” he says. “It feels so
weird not to be able to be with people.” The
other day, he and one of his brothers brought
their mother cupcakes and flowers at her
assisted-living center on Staten Island for her
birthday but could talk to her only through
the window. “That’s been the hardest thing,”
Buscemi says, sighing. “She has a pretty good
sense of humor about the whole thing, but it’s
hard on us all.”
He’s been keeping busy, though. Painting
some. Indulging in Turner Classic Movies,
specifically the “Noir Alley” programming that
airs on weekends, because “it just feels so good
to be watching a movie on a Sunday morning.”
Buscemi is also supposed to play Chebutykin
in a much anticipated production of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters this spring, alongside Greta
Gerwig, Oscar Isaac, and Chris Messina. It is
slated to be his first theater work in nearly two
decades. They’ve already held a virtual cast
meeting, and so Buscemi has found himself in
the same boat as those of us with far less glam-
orous jobs: “I have to learn Zoom, because
everybody’s Zooming.”
And, of course, there’s all that cleaning
to keep him occupied. He tells me he’s come
across some old childhood cartoons, just
ri∞ng on what he saw in the pages of Mad
magazine. This talk of cartoons gets him
thinking: “You know what kills me? When
The New Yorker comes and I look in the back,
and they have those cartoons, I would love,
one day, to be able to think of one. I look at
them and I just go, Why can’t I think in that
way? I’m always shocked when I see who the
winners are, and I go, Oh, right, of course, but
then I go, How does somebody think of that?”
Then he remembers a bit that Andres used to
do, when she would send in her submission for
the caption contest but it would always be the
same joke: “Does the pope shit in the woods?”
“It actually works for a lot of them,” he
points out.
In grieving, Buscemi has had days when
he feels like he’s underwater and doesn’t
want to be comforted. Other days when he’s
immensely grateful to have friends and family
to lean on for support. Last fall, when he had
to fly to Prague to film something after Andres
died, he was racked with anxiety about being
so far from home. The process is anything but
linear. I ask him how he’s weathering it now,
with so much uncertainty swirling around us.
“It’s been over a year now since Jo passed,
and I’m just starting to feel lighter,” he says. “It
is very strange that, oh, now this is happening.
If it was another personal thing, I think that
would be really hard.
“But the fact that everybody’s going
through it doesn’t feel as isolating,” he con-
tinues. “It feels like it’s something that we’re
doing together.”
gabriella paiella is a gq sta≠ writer.
 DIAMOND PRI N C E S S N I GHTM A R E
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 8 3
was quickly worsening. On the second day of
the quarantine, the captain announced that
the number of cases had doubled to 20. The
following morning, February 7, there were 61.
Fear stu≠ed the cramped room. The Wongs
still hadn’t heard back about the results of their
tests and had to hope that no news was good
news. Infected passengers, they had gleaned,
were being taken o≠ the ship. Through their
peephole, the Wongs had watched neighbors
be escorted down the hall with hastily packed
bags by men in hazmat suits, presumably en
route to Japanese hospitals.
Yardley Wong distracted herself by helping
others. Using her fluency in English, Mandarin,
and Cantonese, she acted as a one-woman
switchboard for older passengers who didn’t
know how to use the internet, taking messages
from family and friends via social media and
then relaying them through the ship’s tele-
phone lines. She appreciated that Princess
Cruises was trying to ease the situation, making
the ship’s usually expensive Wi-Fi available for
free and o≠ering psychological counseling over
the phone. The company had already promised
to refund the trip and pay for guests’ journeys
home. Still, passengers were growing restive,
blaming the cruise line for everything from
a lack of clean bedsheets to lost medications,
including essentials like insulin.
Meanwhile, Japanese o∞cials were strug-
gling with their response. Lacking enough kits
to test everyone on board, they reportedly left
feverish Americans in their cabins for multiple
Thakkar decided to take
the situation into her
own hands. She video-called
an Indian news station.
“We are requesting for help
from Indian government,”
she said in accented English.
days before finally sending them to hospitals
where they tested positive. Passengers were
given N95 masks and alcohol wipes, but this
seemed risibly inadequate, given the rapidly
growing number of infections. Day five: 69.
Day six: 135. Many passengers felt underin-
formed, left to piece together details from
news reports. Some hung banners o≠ the
side of the ship—one apparent bedsheet was
painted with a plea for help: “Serious lack of
medicine, lack of information.”
Eventually, Wong’s son asked her, “Am I
going to get it?”
Normally, Wong would have tried to ease his
worry, but she couldn’t deny reality. “If either of
us gets it, we may not be able to see each other
for a while,” she said. Her son started crying.
Later he said, “Mama, I don’t want to be
here anymore. I just want to go home.”
Now she wanted to weep. “Just a few
more days,” she promised him. “Just a few
more days.”
4. “The Passenger Is King”
From the glass-walled bridge of the Diamond
Princess, Captain Gennaro Arma endeavored
to protect the souls entrusted to him. He had
brought them to harbor but not yet to safety.
Arma had been with the cruise line for more
than 20 years and looked like the movie-star
version of a gracefully aged captain. He’d
grown up on the Italian coast, enchanted by
his seafaring family’s stories, and landed a job
as a Princess Cruises cadet not long after grad-
uating from maritime school. He rose rapidly
through the ranks, and when the Diamond
Princess made its maiden voyage, in 2004,
Arma was its senior second o∞cer. By 2018,
he was the captain.
Arma was undaunted by high-stakes chal-
lenges—in fact, he relished them. But this was
unlike anything he’d faced before. And now,
rather than having the absolute authority that
he typically had at the helm, he was following
orders from both the Japanese government
and his corporate command chain. He was
working, he later told me, with “no playbook,
no dedicated training, no dedicated protocol.”
With the aid of Japanese o∞cials and his crew,
Arma was essentially trying to convert his ship
into a colossal luxury hospital and oversee the
logistics of food delivery, sanitization, and
health care for a small town. In his daily P.A.
announcements, he exhorted guests and crew
alike to rise to the challenge, repeating the
motto that it was only through pressure that
coal became a Diamond Princess.
Most of the 1,045 crew members responded
with enthusiasm to Arma’s leadership—
at least at the beginning. Kitchen sta≠ers
pivoted from restaurant service to deliv-
ering three meals a day to 1,337 cabins.
Dede Samsul Fuad, a gee-whiz 28-year-old
Indonesian dishwasher, worked 15-hour
shifts, scraping food o≠ plates and steaming
them in an industrial dishwasher. He had
heard of doctors in Wuhan falling sick after
working too hard, but the motto drummed
into him by supervisors had always been
“The passenger is king.” Fuad, Thakkar,
and other members of the crew I spoke with
took sincere pride in working hard during
such a time of need. But it was also true that
being a dishwasher or security guard on the
Diamond Princess was a dream job that they
couldn’t a≠ord to lose—as it was for the other
Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Ukrainians,
Hondurans, Venezuelans, and other citizens
of 48 mostly developing nations who made up
the majority of the ship’s frontline sta≠.
Though masks and gloves were handed out,
the crew had little training in dealing with a
disease of this virulence. “Anybody would be
scared for their life, because day by day more
and more people were getting infected,” said an
Indian crew member who asked for anonymity,
as did other sta≠, afraid of retaliation from
Princess Cruises. “And we knew people were
dying.” The Indian man described colleagues
delivering food and then running back to their
cabins to jump into scalding showers or wash
their hands in hot water until they hurt. As the
days dragged on, the service workers began to
question if their sacrifices were worth it.
Another Indonesian dishwasher described
watching the virus tear through the large
kitchen where he worked shoulder to shoul-
der with some 150 people—a number that
declined as fewer showed up for work. A lit-
tle less than a week into the quarantine, he
started feeling ill. He wasn’t sure it was the
coronavirus, but he decided to quarantine
himself in his tiny room for 15 straight days,
reasoning that if Princess Cruises couldn’t
protect him, he’d protect himself.
Most of the crew were housed in quarters
beneath the passenger decks. There were no
giant windows with sweeping ocean views,
no scintillating chandeliers. Hallways with
exposed piping led to small rooms packed
with bunk beds. The crew could quickly tell
that their home was becoming a hot spot,
especially the mess hall, where more than
100 people at a time might visit the bu≠et.
Later, a report released by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention validated
this fear, noting that in the early stages of
the outbreak three fourths of all the infected
crew members were food-service workers—
employees who could easily spread the disease
to other crew and passengers.
Some sta≠ers tried to take whatever pre-
cautions they could. An Indian man told me
that he ate only packaged foods—and boiled
all his own drinking water in his room with
an electric kettle—and avoided getting sick.
But he was lucky, and some of the employees
accepted getting infected as inevitable. As a
CDC report would later show, not long into
the quarantine the disease was infecting more
crew than passengers, who were hidden away
in their cabins while the sta≠ kept working.
For government o∞cials and corpo-
rate leaders, the question of whether it was
fair—or even safe—to quarantine the passen-
gers but not the crew was obscured by the
priority to keep the ship operational. And so
the poor took care of the rich, and the citizens
of less powerful nations served those from
more powerful nations, and the Diamond
Princess remained a miniaturized version of
the global order—because what other way
could things go?
Once all the passengers had been trained
to stay in their rooms, Thakkar returned to
her normal post at the gangway, where her
main activity was now counting the infected
passengers as they were escorted o≠ the ship.
Most of them walked to waiting ambulances,
but some left on stretchers. On the eighth
day of quarantine, she counted 39, bring-
ing the total to 174. A native of the tropics,
Thakkar had bundled up for the northern
winter, but by the end of that shift, she was
shivering—and coughing. She called the ship’s
doctor, who ordered Thakkar to isolate herself
in her windowless cabin.
Eventually, she tested negative, but her
roommate was found to be positive and was
taken away. Thakkar was left to worry what
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 9 1
 DI A M ON D P R I N C E S S N IG HTMARE C O NTINUED
her own symptoms meant. She dreamed of
home and the aloo paratha her mother made.
On her phone, she scrolled through headlines
about the virus’s dangers. Quarantines, it was
becoming clear, are designed to protect only
those on the outside—those on the inside have
to fend for themselves.
Thakkar decided to take the situation into
her own hands. She video-called an Indian
news station. “We are requesting for help
from Indian government,” she said in accented
English, her face hidden by a surgical mask,
her eyes bright with fear. She and other sta≠
“do not want to stay in the same environment
that we are, since we have found out there are
coronavirus-infected people.”
Thakkar wasn’t the only one desperate
enough to launch this kind of modern SOS, as
a fellow Indian, a cook, had already been issu-
ing video appeals via Facebook to the prime
minister of India. Fuad, the Indonesian dish-
washer, who was so resolute at the start, would
also later beg his government to rescue him.
In making her plea, Thakkar joined
hundreds of others broadcasting from the
Diamond Princess, some with serious mes-
sages, others using their moment in the his-
torical spotlight to write reviews of their every
meal. Indeed, many passengers essentially
streamed life on the inside with their smart-
phones. And what wasn’t being FaceTimed
up close was being captured from afar by TV
cameras set up onshore. Helicopters buzzed
the ship and literal boatloads of journalists
pulled alongside as international interest
in the ordeal intensified. The world couldn’t
look away, because the coronavirus was now
surfacing in scores of nations, and it was
becoming clear that what Thakkar and the
rest were su≠ering might provide a glimpse
of what everyone would soon endure. Indeed,
the number of Diamond Princess cases was
exploding to such an extent that by day nine,
when it reached 218, the ship had more cases
than every nation in the world except China.
5. The Suite View
Six decks above where Thakkar was
entombed, the Goldmans and the Jorgensens
watched the drama unfold from their neigh-
boring mini suites. On their combined bal-
cony, they had a view of men in hazmat suits
marching passengers to ambulances, but it
didn’t seem likely to them that they’d get sick.
They were the kind of seniors who hit the gym
rather than putting on pounds by the pool
during cruises, who always took the stairs,
and who still seemed to have more vigor than
many people half their age.
Certainly the quarantine was an inconve-
nience: They had to frantically shu±e sched-
ules and delegate business tasks back home.
But they were able to work remotely, even if
they had to wake up at 2 a.m. to account for
the time di≠erence. Otherwise, the quaran-
tine had its bright spots: Fancy meals were
delivered to their door, the balcony provided
ample fresh air, and thanks to being in con-
nected quarters, their best friends could come
over whenever. Both couples’ suites contained
two areas, each with its own TV, an essential
convenience for the Goldmans, who could
never agree on whether to watch sports (Carl
9 2 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
Goldman) or the Hallmark Channel (Jeri
Goldman) and would otherwise have (some-
what) jokingly bickered over the remote.
Ultimately, the Americans recognized they
were lucky, and they were determined to look
on the bright side of things.
This mindful optimism was actually the ori-
gin of their friendship. The Goldmans and the
Jorgensens had met about a decade before at a
motivational life-coaching training. Together,
all four now subscribed to a set of teachings
that boiled down to “the law of nonresistance,”
as they described it—fundamentally, making
the best of the current moment. They had all
used it to overcome the doldrums of middle
age, and the Jorgensens taught a bit of it in
their rehab center. Now, as Jerri Jorgensen
said, “this is a chance for me to see if I’m ready
to live what I’m teaching.”
To stay fit, they made an obstacle course
and raced through their joined rooms, and
they washed their laundry in the bathtub to
reduce the workload on the crew. The four
shared a similar, zany humor, and the hus-
bands played goofballs to their deadpan wives
to relieve everyone’s anxiety with laughter.
Carl even began blogging his upbeat perspec-
tive of life on the ship: “My wife’s reaction to
the toilet paper” being delivered “was like giv-
ing her a diamond ring.”
Unlike Thakkar, they never feared for their
lives or livelihoods. They were healthy and
had American passports and successful busi-
nesses, and a senator’s aide had personally
assured them that their situation was being
monitored. But as the four watched a movie on
the evening of Valentine’s Day, not long before
the quarantine was scheduled to end, Jerri
Jorgensen became feverish. They didn’t call
the ship’s medical center, figuring they’d see
how she felt the next morning—and by then
she was better.
Coincidentally, a knock rattled the door that
morning. Several days earlier, the Jorgensens
had been swabbed because Mark was taking
immunosuppressants for a kidney transplant,
putting him at increased risk for the coronavi-
rus. Now the test results were being delivered
by Japanese health workers in hazmat gear.
They didn’t speak English, so they thrust a
piece of paper toward Mark, showing a pos-
itive result. “Wow, okay, when do you need
From the ambulance,
Jerri Jorgensen watched
out the window as they
drove for hours. The day
darkened. Streetlights
sharpened. She had no idea
where she was being taken.
me?” Mark said. But the masked head shook
no. It was Jerri Jorgensen who was being sum-
moned. Jerri: a mountain biking and workout
fanatic, the Amigo who had always been the
healthiest. On day 12, she became one of the
285 positives from the Diamond Princess.
Jerri wasn’t given long to load a backpack.
She chose not to take anything sentimental—
just her passport, wallet, some toiletries, and
a book called The God Who Weeps. It taught
an appropriate lesson for the time, she said,
that “God is not this ruler with a magnifying
glass, waiting for us to screw up so he can zap
us, but sympathizes.”
It wasn’t an option for Mark to join her, and
when the time came, Jerri told him, “See ya
when I see ya,” trying to lighten the moment.
Then, following the law of nonresistance, she
let an ambulance bear her away, telling her-
self: Next adventure! She watched out the win-
dow as they drove four hours beyond Tokyo’s
conurbation. The day darkened. Streetlights
sharpened. She had no idea where she was
being taken.
Not long after she left, the remain-
ing Amigos found out that all of the 428
Americans aboard the “floating petri dish,”
as Carl called it, were going to be evacuated
by the United States government. Mark con-
sidered rejecting the o≠er, but eventually he
and the Goldmans decided that there was no
point in him waiting; he wouldn’t be able to
see his wife in the hospital, anyway—and he
could always fly back if she took a turn for the
worse. For the first time, Carl’s lighthearted
blog took on a dark tone. “We are shaken and
devastated that we have been removed from
our friend,” he wrote. “The next league of our
journey may take days. I am uncertain when I
will be able to post again.”
6. The Hot Zone
Even before the world’s attention fixated on
the Diamond Princess, James Lawler knew
what was coming. Lawler, an infectious dis-
ease specialist and a director at the Global
Center for Health Security, had previously
worked on pandemic preparedness in the
White Houses of both George W. Bush and
Barack Obama. As disturbing data had begun
emerging from Wuhan, Lawler and numer-
ous other infectious disease experts and
senior government o∞cials had kept up a
worried discussion on a private email chain
titled “Red Dawn.” On January 28, while most
of the world was oblivious to the exploding
pandemic, Lawler had written darkly: “Great
Understatements in History…Pompeii—‘a bit
of a dust storm[,]’ Hiroshima—‘a bad sum-
mer heat wave[,]’ AND Wuhan—‘just a bad
flu season.’ ”
But what, exactly, the federal government
should do about the emerging pandemic, as
well as the Americans trapped in increasingly
dire straits aboard the Diamond Princess,
was unclear. By early February, the Trump
administration’s Coronavirus Task Force was
debating responses to the spiraling catastro-
phe. The CDC recommended not bringing the
American passengers home—the thinking
being that they might carry the disease with
them to the United States, which still had very
few confirmed cases, and Japan could capably
handle the quarantine.
But as the number of infected ship guests
exploded, one American passenger, Arnold
Hopland, called his friend, Republican con-
gressman Phil Roe of Tennessee. Hopland
is a doctor, and his detailed testimony of
the unfolding disaster convinced Roe that
action needed to be taken. At a congressional
briefing about the coronavirus, Roe managed
 DI A M ON D P R I N C E S S N IG HTMARE C O N TINUED
to catch the attention of Robert Kadlec, a
senior o∞cial in the Department of Health
and Human Services, with promises of an
“ace in the hole on this ship” who could o≠er
“on-the-ground” intel.
An international conference call was
arranged in which Roe and Hopland spoke
with senior o∞cials from the Trump admin-
istration, the CDC, and the State Department.
From his room on the ship, Hopland made
the case that he and other Americans could
be safely repatriated and then quarantined in
the United States. If they weren’t evacuated
soon, he argued, they would be in danger.
Congressman Roe backed Hopland up. “I’m
an old country doctor,” said Roe, who once
practiced as an ob-gyn, “and I was like, ‘Let’s
get them o≠, or they’ll be infected.’ ” Kadlec
and the others were convinced.
When the government decided to act,
o∞cials knew exactly whom to call: James
Lawler, who combined years of scientific
expertise with field experience in the world’s
most dangerous hot zones. Along with a
Harvard physician, Lawler joined up with
a squad of 15 professionals from Federal
Disaster Medical Assistance Teams. O∞cials
from the United States and Japan had already
been discussing disaster-evacuation scenar-
ios in preparation for the scheduled Summer
Olympics in Tokyo. Now they activated those
protocols to smooth the American medical
team’s arrival. On Friday, February 14—around
the same time Jerri Jorgensen was developing
her fever—Lawler and his team assembled in
the lobby of a Yokohama hotel.
Their plan was to test all the Americans
aboard the Diamond Princess for the corona-
virus—and then, 72 hours later, fly at least the
uninfected ones out on chartered cargo jets.
Those who tested positive would presumably
be transferred to Japanese hospitals.
On Saturday morning, Lawler and three
other American physicians followed a
Japanese doctor onto the Diamond Princess.
They were wearing special helmets and
breathing oxygen fed from hoses via their hip-
mounted respirators—high-end machines
called PAPRs that Lawler considered so
important that he had made a stopover in Los
Angeles to acquire them on his way to Japan.
But through his face shield, he watched their
street-clothed guide “screwing around with”
his surgical mask, surprised that another med-
ical professional could be so cavalier.
As they marched through the cruise ship
galleries—eerie as a circus turned into a
crime scene—he noted that some of the
Japanese health workers were not observing
quarantine protocols. While a portion were
outfitted in hazmat gear, others were simply
wearing blue bonnets and surgical masks.
He spotted passengers moving freely around
some parts of the ship and regularly clothed
crew, wearing only masks, swabbing down
the hallways. No wonder the disease had con-
tinued its wildfire spread. He began to worry
about the Japanese health workers who
were shuttling between the ship and the pier
where the rest of his team waited. As soon as
he disembarked, he warned the Americans to
isolate themselves as best they could and to
keep six feet away from the Japanese health
care workers at all times.
Lawler wasn’t the only one who considered
what he was seeing dangerous. Kentaro Iwata,
an experienced Japanese virologist who vis-
ited the ship, later broadcast a video in which
he described the quarantine as “completely
inadequate in terms of infection controls.”
Ultimately, at least six Japanese bureaucrats
came down with the virus from the Diamond
Princess, as did a Japanese health worker. And
Japanese o∞cials eventually acknowledged
the quarantine was flawed.
On Saturday afternoon, Lawler learned that
the evacuation planes previously scheduled to
arrive Monday night were now going to be on
the ground the next day—Sunday. His team’s
ambitions to test everyone were reduced
to making sure that all the passengers were
healthy enough to endure long, uncomfort-
able flights home on cargo jets.
As the crowd pressed
onto the cargo plane, few
people heeded directions
to sit. Instead, they fought
toward portable toilets
that had been secured to
the rear of each plane.
The following morning, Lawler’s response
team divided into three units and spread
out across the ship, checking the American
passengers. He estimated that he walked
10 miles that day in his heavy gear. It was
around 10 p.m. when he tracked down the
last American, in the crew quarters. When
Lawler exited the Diamond Princess, his
countrymen were filing o≠ the ship in a cold
rain, their luggage hauled toward a line of
buses by Japanese in hazmat suits. Dozens of
Americans decided to stay behind for various
reasons, but those consenting to be evacu-
ated were now headed to the airport.
As they left, Lawler rushed back to the
hotel, packed, and then, together with the
Harvard doctor, frantically searched the
deserted streets for a taxi, worried they were
delaying the evacuation flights. It was around
1 a.m. when they finally found a ride, and the
cabbie earned a big tip by racing the wrong
direction up one-way streets to the airport.
But rather than missing their planes, the
doctors found them empty, except for crew.
Something was very, very wrong.
7. The Goat Rodeo
The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with
the 325 other American evacuees, were still
waiting on the buses. They had spent three
hours idling on the pier and then, once they
drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two
more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a
sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt.
They were exhausted. And more problemati-
cally for the largely elderly group: The buses
had no bathrooms.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it
was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the way-
laid evacuees was being decided. Around the
time the travelers were exiting the Diamond
Princess, Japanese o∞cials had blindsided
their American counterparts with the news
that some of the passengers boarding the buses
had actually tested positive several days before.
Soon many of the highest-level members of the
Trump administration’s coronavirus response
team, including Anthony Fauci, were arguing
about what to do. Representatives from the
CDC continued to fear spreading the virus.
William Walters, the State Department’s chief
medical o∞cer, wanted to bring everyone
home anyway. Those urging the evacuation
noted that the planes had been prepared with
isolation units to contain the sick.
As the debate raged, the evacuees demanded
to be let o≠ the buses to find a bathroom. Carl
was breathing so hard his masked breath
fogged his glasses as he strained to control his
bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally,
a few were allowed to relieve themselves in
bottles beside the bus or were brought to a
nearby terminal.
In the end, Walters and the State Depart-
ment won the argument. Kadlec, the o∞cial
from Health and Human Services, supported
Walters and later said that “the notion of leav-
ing Americans behind at that stage of the oper-
ation was not acceptable.” But the CDC, still
worried about airlifting the virus to America,
disagreed with the decision so vehemently
that it refused to be named in the news release
announcing it. (O∞cials from the CDC did not
respond to requests for comment.)
Finally, after the lengthy and complicated
process of being cleared remotely by Japanese
immigration, which contributed to the delay,
the passengers rushed o≠ the buses and made
for the jets. From his vantage, waiting on one
of the two planes, Lawler saw the incom-
ing stampede of seniors. He had hoped for
an orderly boarding, but instead the scene
resembled “a goat rodeo,” he said, using a mil-
itary term from his 20 years as a Navy doctor.
“There was just chaos.”
As the crowd pressed onto the cargo
plane, Lawler watched as sleep-deprived
nonagenarians stumbled through rows of
ancient airline seats, bolted into place across
trip-hazard tracks that normally held pallets
of supplies. Few people heeded his directions
to sit. Instead, they fought toward four porta-
ble toilets that had been secured to the rear
of each plane.
The holds of the toilets quickly filled;
two soon reached capacity and were taped
o≠. “The back of the plane just reeked,” said
Mark. “People were throwing up back there.
It was so disgusting.” Once in the air, Carl
estimated, the lines for the toilets on his
plane ran about 50 people long and took 30
minutes to get through. Jeri Goldman said
the “smell was unreal. We had to put our-
selves under a blanket, it was so bad.” Jeri
eventually escaped by knocking herself out
with Benadryl, and Carl was so exhausted he
fell asleep without aid.
But a few hours later, Carl woke, fever-
ish. A temperature check, and then he was
marched to the back of the plane, which had
been cordoned o≠ by a large plastic sheet,
duct-taped to the fuselage. There he tried to
ignore the coughs of the other passengers
and the stench now emanating from right
beside him.
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 9 3
 DI A M ON D P R I N C E S S N IG HTMARE C O NTINUED
Lawler was on the second plane, separate
from the Three Amigos. During the 16 hours
of flying, Lawler ministered to evacuees—
continuing his two-day, nearly sleepless mar-
athon of doctoring—and was not surprised
when some started showing symptoms in the
air. He had already guessed that many were
still incubating, but once he had his orders
that everyone was coming home, he thought
this was for the best, given that America would
have the capacity to quarantine and treat
everyone e≠ectively.
When the flights landed in America, CDC
o∞cials took over the care of the asymptom-
atic passengers, such as Mark, who deplaned
and would be quarantined for two weeks on
military installations. Meanwhile, the patients
who’d tested positive at the last minute and
midflight, as well as their spouses—includ-
ing the Goldmans—continued on to Omaha,
Lawler’s home base. When they arrived, Carl
felt strong enough to deplane on foot, but he
was instructed to get onto a stretcher—which
made for dramatic TV footage as he was
wheeled across a tarmac packed with ambu-
lances. Emergency vehicles convoyed the sick
to the University of Nebraska Medical Center,
where Carl was transferred into America’s
only federal quarantine unit. Finally the goat
rodeo could end, and Lawler and his team
took command of every detail of his patients’
treatments. Still, he was forgiving of the
improvised repatriation. “Overall, that’s a
remarkable feat,” he said. “It was the best any-
one could do, given the circumstances.”
8. Homecoming
Carl Goldman was sealed away in an isolation
room on a special floor of a medical building
in downtown Omaha. Most of the time he
communicated with his doctors through a
double-paned window or a computer monitor
and microphone. It was by video that he was
informed that he had been o∞cially quaran-
tined by a second government, his own. Carl’s
experience of the disease was relatively mild—
mostly a low fever and a cough—so he sweated
and drank voluminous quantities of Gatorade
while also trying to keep his life as normal as
possible, keying away on his iPhone, calling
into work, and resolutely updating his blog.
As Carl’s quarantine extended, the
number of infections worldwide boomed
exponentially—into the tens of thousands,
then hundreds of thousands, and then, with
the undiagnosed included, most likely into
the millions.
Soon it was announced that two elderly
passengers from the Diamond Princess had
perished from the virus. Then a third. Then a
sixth. “Our vacation,” Carl blogged, “has now
turned beyond tragic.”
A month blurred past. Carl’s fever faded,
though it took longer for him to overcome his
cough. He paced, trying to regain his strength.
Carl had long ago lost what the Four Amigos
jokingly called “the Great Quarantine Race.”
His wife, Jeri, had finished her quarantine
nearby, but never tested positive, displaying a
hardiness she attributed to a mushroom pow-
der and four-times-a-week cryotherapy ses-
sions. Before long, she was back in California,
overseeing their radio station again, though
9 4 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
feeling something like a leper, as her return
sparked panic in their community.
The Jorgensens were also home. Jerri
Jorgensen’s coronavirus infection had been
luckily anticlimactic, and her greatest trial at
the Japanese hospital occurred when Google
mistranslated constipation while she was try-
ing to communicate with her doctors. Once
her 14 days were up, she flew home and was
soon back to slickrock mountain biking. Not
long after being quarantined on the military
base, Mark Jorgensen had tested positive. He
was airlifted to a hospital in Utah and then,
as he had no adverse symptoms, eventually
released to spend the rest of his quarantine at
home, where he and Jerri cohabitated while
wearing masks and staying six feet apart.
By the time Carl was released, in mid-
March, the World Health Organization had
declared the coronavirus a global pandemic.
An investigation by the
Miami Herald linked
74 deaths to cruise
ship outbreaks while
emphasizing that
the true number was
probably higher.
America’s longest-serving quarantinee was
a di≠erent man from the one who’d left for
his cruise—his hair grown shaggy as that of a
prophet returning from the wilderness. When
he arrived home, his dogs licked him and his
wife hugged him, and the physical contact
alone felt like winning the lottery. That night,
Jeri handed Carl the TV remote, for the first
time, he claims, in their entire marriage. He
selected the nightly news, filled with predic-
tions of economic depression, and of a death
toll worse than any war. It wasn’t just that he’d
changed; the world had changed too.
9. The Locked Church
By the time Carl left quarantine, Jan Swartz, the
president of Princess Cruises, had spent weeks
sleeping with her phone at hand. Her days of
crisis management began early and ended
late. From 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., she commanded
the company’s response from a situation room
in its California headquarters. Twice she flew to
Japan to keep closer tabs on the operation and
greet disembarking passengers. But even when
the Diamond Princess was finally emptied in
Yokohama, her trials continued.
In early March, an outbreak discovered
aboard the Grand Princess required 2,000
passengers to be quarantined. Later that
month, some 2,700 passengers who’d disem-
barked from another ship, the Ruby Princess,
were asked by the Australian government
to self-quarantine—at least 22 deaths would
be connected to this outbreak, and a homi-
cide detective would later be tasked with
investigating whether the crew had misled
authorities. (In a statement, Swartz said that
Princess Cruises would cooperate, calling the
inquiry “an opportunity for all to learn from
this tragic event.”)
Reporters for Bloomberg Businessweek
found that executives at Princess and Holland
America Line—which are run by the same
parent company, Carnival Corporation—
kept ships sailing despite being aware of the
coronavirus danger. Roger Frizzell, the chief
communications o∞cer for Carnival Corpo-
ration, said it was “utterly absurd to believe
a cruise vacation company had any fore-
sight that COVID-19 would become a global
pandemic when…governments and experts
around the world had no such insight at the
time.” Cruise ships operated by other com-
panies were similarly caught up in the crisis.
Eventually the CDC would find evidence of at
least 25 ships incubating the coronavirus, and
an investigation by the Miami Herald would
link 2,787 infections and 74 deaths to cruise
ship outbreaks while emphasizing that the
true number was probably higher.
In mid-March, the day after the World
Health Organization declared the corona-
virus a worldwide pandemic, Swartz finally
called a stop to all her cruises. Critics said the
decision was long overdue. “We were making
the decision as quickly as we could,” Swartz
told me, “based on the information that we
had.” Within a day, all other major cruise lines
also called a halt. The cruise ship era had
ground to a stop, and possibly ended forever,
as the industry faces unprecedented legal and
financial challenges.
Before long, Yardley Wong and her hus-
band and son were settling back into a
semi-normal version of life in Hong Kong—
the whole family having dodged infection
after their preemptive self-imposed quaran-
tine. Hong Kong was successfully stamping
out minor flare-ups of the virus, for after
discovering its first case just three days
after America found its own, it had quickly
introduced many of the regulations that
the United States would adopt only months
later—social distancing, travel restrictions,
and closing public institutions and schools.
The decisive actions of Hong Kong and other
places—such as Taiwan, South Korea, and
New Zealand—meant they had just a tiny
fraction of the number of coronavirus cases
in America. Their quick e≠orts had actually
been informed by insights drawn from the
Diamond Princess: As the ship became a
self-contained floating experiment, it pro-
vided one of the world’s best data sets on
the virus, confirming crucial facts about
how the disease spread, especially through
asymptomatic carriers.
In late March, the CDC reported that out
of the Diamond Princess’s 3,711 passengers
and crew, 712 had tested positive. Eleven
Americans were still hospitalized in Japan.
Nine people had died. These numbers were
infinitesimal compared with the vast casual-
ties steadily accumulating across the globe,
but these were a few of the original germs
from which a huge tragedy would grow.
Most regions were not dealing with their
outbreaks as successfully as Hong Kong, espe-
cially America. “We’re prepared, and we’re
doing a great job with it,” President Trump
declared on March 10. “Just stay calm. It will
go away.” Two days later, Lawler wrote to
numerous senior government o∞cials on the
“Red Dawn” email chain and desperately urged
 DI A M ON D P R I N C E S S N IG HTMARE C O N TINUED
implementation of stronger virus-control mea-
sures, similar to what “has worked in Hong
Kong.” The 80-page email chain, first quoted
in the New York Times, documents in extraor-
dinary detail the White House’s failure to heed
numerous warnings in time to stop the virus.
“We are making every misstep leaders initially
made…at the outset of pandemic planning in
2006,” Lawler declared. “We have thrown 15
years of institutional learning out the window
and are making decisions based on intuition,”
he wrote, predicting catastrophe. During his
time working for Bush and Obama, Lawler
had participated in simulations of similar pan-
demic scenarios, and what he was seeing now,
he told me, was “kind of like watching a movie
that you’ve watched before.”
When the time came for Captain Arma
to leave the ship, the Diamond Princess was
ROBERT PAT TI N S O N
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 4 6
only are there very, very, very well-done ver-
sions of the character which seem pretty
definitive, but I was thinking that there are
multiple definitive playings of the character.
I was watching the making of Batman & Robin
the other day. And even then, George Clooney
was saying that he was worried about the fact
that it’s sort of been done, that a lot of the
ground you should cover with the character
has been already covered. And that’s in ’96, ’97?
Yeah, 1997.
And then there’s Christian Bale, and Ben
A±eck’s one. And then I was thinking, it’s
fun when more and more ground has been
covered. Like, where is the gap? You’ve seen
this sort of lighter version, you’ve seen a kind
of jaded version, a kind of more animalistic
version. And the puzzle of it becomes quite
satisfying, to think: Where’s my opening?
And also, do I have anything inside me which
would work if I could do it? And then also, it’s
a legacy part, right? I like that. There’s so few
things in life where people passionately care
about it before it’s even happened. You can
almost feel that pushback of anticipation,
and so it kind of energizes you a little bit. It’s
di≠erent from when you’re doing a part and
there’s a possibility that no one will even see
it. Right? In some ways it’s, I don’t know… It
makes you a little kind of spicy. [laughs]
Hello? Hello? [Phone disconnects.
Pattinson calls back.] What happened?
My phone died on me. What were you saying?
empty. Thakkar, Fuad, and many other crew
members had been airlifted home by their
governments—though long after the Amer-
ican evacuation, and only after they issued
more pleas on social media.
Before bidding goodbye to the ship, Arma
had stood alone on the glass-walled bridge.
The normally stoic captain was emotional. He
had been with the boat since it was built and
had guided it safely through every storm, until
this one. He felt like he understood what he
called her “beautiful soul.”
One last time, he switched on the P.A., in
order to speak to the ship itself. It wasn’t her
fault, he told her. He promised that they would
see each other again, and he wished her a good
night, his words echoing in the vacant galleries
and cabins. They had done their best, he and
his ship—and like all good captains, he was the
You were talking about fear. You were
gearing up to say something I was
excited about regarding terror and
Batman, but now I’ve lost the thread.
My, um, my publicist always calls me up after
an interview, and she’s like, “Is there any-
thing, like, is there any kind of fires you set
now? What do I have to fix for you now?” And
I’m like, “I don’t even remember anything
I said.”
A F E W D AY S L AT E R ,Pattinson decides to
cook for me. Or cook in front of me, anyway.
FaceTiming, we agreed, was hard, exhaust-
ing. We were a little sick of looking at each
other. But what can two men do together when
they’re on di≠erent continents, in di≠erent
time zones? Pattinson thought: cooking. He
had notions of Top Chef, of us photographing
our respective refrigerators and then battling
it out. (Neither of us has really seen Top Chef.)
But then he looked in his refrigerator, and “the
ingredients that were here are just so totally
independent of each other. There’s no way to
put them together.” So he went to the corner
store, and now here he is, with a plan.
I wish I could tell you whether what I’m
about to describe here is a bit, or a piece of
performance art, or is in fact sincere—even
now, I don’t totally know. I think parts of it
are real and parts of it can’t be real. “He’s not
mean,” Claire Denis says about Pattinson.
“But he’s always trying to escape a little. He
doesn’t want you to put your claws too deep
in him. Sometimes I forget, and I’ll send him
a text with something a little personal. And
he will always answer: hahahaha. ‘This is the
limit, Claire.’ You know?”
I know.
Anyway, the story Pattinson tells to preface
what he is about to do is roughly this:
Last year, he says, he had a business idea.
What if, he said to himself, “pasta really had
the same kind of fast-food credentials as burg-
ers and pizzas? I was trying to figure out how
to capitalize in this area of the market, and
I was trying to think: How do you make a
pasta which you can hold in your hand?”
last person to leave. As he strode o≠ the gang-
way in his crisp uniform, he was the very image
of debonair fortitude. Except his true expres-
sion was hidden behind a protective mask.
It was a mid-March night when he returned
to his seaside Italian hometown. Everything
was locked down; the streets were deserted.
At Italy’s overwhelmed hospitals, hundreds of
patients were perishing every day. Arma asked
his driver to stop at an ancient basilica, which
held an icon that had succored seafarers for mil-
lennia, through medieval and modern plagues.
In times like this, what more could a man do?
The Catholic captain bowed his head, and out-
side the locked church, he prayed. For himself
and his family. For the souls of his former pas-
sengers. For the dead, and for those still living.
doug bock clark is a gq correspondent.
He says he went so far as to design a pro-
totype that involved the use of a panini press,
and then, he says, he went even further, set-
ting up a meeting with Los Angeles restau-
rant royalty Lele Massimini, the cofounder of
Sugarfish and proprietor of the Santa Monica
pasta restaurant Uovo. “And I told him my
business plan,” Pattinson recalls, “and his
facial expression didn’t even change after-
wards. Let alone acknowledge what my plan
was. There was absolutely no sign of anything
from him, literally. And so it kind of put me o≠
a little bit.” (Massimini says: “It’s 100 percent
true, everything he told you.”)
Nevertheless, Pattinson says, he conceived
of a brand name for his product, a soft lit-
tle moniker that kind of summed up what
he thought his pasta creation looked like:
Piccolini Cuscino. Little Pillow. He thought
he’d give the product another go, with me
now: “Maybe if I say it in GQ, maybe, like, a
partner will just come along.”
So he now takes hold of the bag that he’s
brought from the corner store, out of which
he produces the following:
One (1) giant, filthy, dust-covered box of
cornflakes. (“I went to the shop, and they
didn’t sell breadcrumbs. I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck it!
I’m just getting cornflakes. That’s basically the
same shit.’ ”)
One (1) incredibly large novelty lighter. (“I
always liked the idea of doing a little flambé,
like the brand name, with kind of burnt ends
at the top.”)
Nine (9) packs of presliced cheese. (“I got,
like, nine packs of presliced cheese.”)
Sauce. (Like a tomato sauce? “Just any
sauce.”)
He puts on latex gloves. He pulls out some
sugar and some aluminum foil and makes a
bed, a kind of hollowed-out sphere, with the
foil. He holds up a box of penne pasta that he
had in the house. “All right,” Pattinson says.
“So obviously, first things first, you gotta
microwave the pasta.”
I watch as he pours dry penne into a cereal
bowl, covers it with water, and places it in
the microwave for eight minutes. He says
using penne is already new territory for him.
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 9 5
 RO BE RT PAT T I N S ON C O NTINUED
Usually he uses…well… “Do you know the
pasta that’s, like, a little, it’s like a blob, a sort
of squiggly blob?”
“Gnocchi?”
“No, no, no, no, it looks like—what would
you even call it? It looks like a sort of messy…
like, the hair bun on a girl.”
“I have literally no idea what you’re talking
about,” I say.
“There was one type of pasta that worked.
It definitely wasn’t penne.”
Nevertheless, penne and water in the
microwave for eight minutes. In the mean-
time, he takes the foil and he begins dumping
sugar on top of it. “I found after a lot of exper-
imentation that you really need to congeal
everything in an enormous amount of sugar
and cheese.” So after the sugar, he opens his
first package of cheese and begins layering
slice after slice onto the sugar-foil. Then more
sugar: “It really needs a sugar crust.”
Then he realizes that he’s forgotten
the outer layer, which is supposed to be
breadcrumbs but today will be crushed-up
cornflakes, and so he lifts the pile of cheese
and sugar and crumbles some cornflakes
onto the aluminum foil before placing the
sugar-cheese back on top of it. Then he adds
sauce, which is red. The microwave dings,
and Pattinson promptly burns himself
on the bowl of pasta. He sighs, heavily, look-
ing at it. “No idea if it’s cooked or not.” He
dumps the pasta in anyway. At this point, his
spirits have visibly begun to flag. “I mean,
there’s absolutely no chance this is gonna
work. Absolutely none.”
The little pillow now mostly built, he pours
more sugar on top of it and then produces
the top half of a bun, which he hollows out,
places on top of the rest of whatever the hell
this thing is, and…begins burning the top of
the bun with the giant novelty lighter. “I’m just
gonna do the initials.…”
“You look like you’re cooking meth,” I say,
because he does.
“I’m really trying to sell this company. I’m
doing this for my brand.”
At this point, he accidentally ignites one of
his latex gloves, which promptly melts onto his
palm. He yells in pain. Then he gingerly holds
up the finished product: some approximation
of a P, followed by a C, for Piccolini Cuscino,
burned into the top of a hamburger bun.
He starts wrapping the whole thing up
with more aluminum foil, and then compacts
it, and then wraps it some more, and then
squeezes it again. Suddenly he stops: “Can you
actually put foil in an oven?”
I say yes, you can, but what you absolutely
cannot do is put foil in a microwave. And he
says cool, cool, and then he goes looking for his
oven, which he’s never used before, and this
is a nice house, so there are multiple options,
and the one he settles on, well: It looks like
another microwave to me. He assures me it
is not.
“I reckon probably…10 minutes?”
He puts the aluminum sphere, the little pil-
low, into what he thinks is an oven and I think
is a microwave. He attempts to turn it on.
“I actually knew how to do this before,” he tells
me. “I literally did this yesterday. And now it’s
just impossible. It’s going to look like I can’t
cook at all.”
9 6 G Q . C O M J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0
He fumbles at some more buttons. “Oh, oh,
oh,” he says, excitedly now. “A thousand watts,
there you go.”
Proudly he is walking back toward the
counter that his phone is on when, behind
him, a lightning bolt erupts from the oven/
microwave, and Pattinson ducks like some-
one outside has opened fire. He’s giggling and
crouching as the oven throws o≠ stray flickers
of light and sound.
“The fucking electricity…oh, my God,” he
says, still on the floor. And then, with a loud,
final bang, the oven/microwave goes dark.
In the silence, Pattinson and I both stare at
the mysterious piece of machinery built into
the wall behind him.
“Yeah, I think I have to leave that alone,”
he says, sighing again, picking himself o≠ the
floor. “But that is a Piccolini Cuscino.”
April 15, 10:35 a.m. PST // 6:35 p.m.
GMT
PATTINSON: Who else have you talked to? Have
you talked to, uh, Claire Denis or any of those
other people?
GQ: Yeah, I was actually going to ask
you who else I should call. Who knows
you well?
Uh… Who else?… It’s always weird, then, isn’t
it? I almost want to ask people who really
don’t like me.
You want me to talk to somebody
who hates you? Can you tell me who
hates you?
That would be really fun. [laughs] That would
be so funny. Someone I barely know. “Hey, can
you do an interview about me?” I always felt
that would be such a good insult. You just send
it to a massive actor’s agent to say, like, “Hey,
I’m just wondering, like, um, would you like
to be his assistant?” [laughs] There’s no come-
back to it at all.
You’re a true chaos agent.
I’m definitely that only in my own mind.
[laughs]
talking, as people do these
F I N A L LY W E G E T T O
days, about anxiety. The standard: How are
you holding up? Pattinson says he’s fine, really.
“I’m definitely much more calm than I used to
be. If this was a few years ago or whatever, it
would be a whole di≠erent story.”
He says, in his 20s, for a time, he felt noth-
ing but fear and uncertainty, but somehow
that’s changed. “I think I just got older. I feel
like I have less to prove,” he says. “Or it seems
more fun proving it. It seems like it’s a fun
game instead of, I don’t know, just basically
a nightmare.”
There are still things he does that other
people regard as weird or compulsive. Many
things, in fact. Robert Eggers says Pattinson
is almost “Andy Kaufman–esque in real life.
Rob’s so beyond dry that it’s, like, meta. You’re
like, ‘Is that funny?’ Like, ‘I have no idea what’s
going on.’ ” He has a habit of contacting people
he admires, over and over again, but he also
freely admits that his sense of time is shaky,
and so unfortunate misunderstandings can
happen. “I’ve been emailing this guy recently
who’s absolutely terrified of me,” Pattinson says.
“He eventually passed my email on to one of the
actresses in his movie so she would speak to me
instead so I wouldn’t email him anymore. And
I thought it had been, like, two years and six
months, in between each email, but it’s only,
like, a few weeks apart.”
His family is in London, and “I’ve defi-
nitely been trying to help my family find,
like, a calm, I guess. I think I probably ended
up finding a new level of patience in myself.
That’s probably, that’s probably a major thing.
Um, but um—”
“Is that normally your role in your family, to
be the source of calm?” I ask.
Pattinson laughs at this, for a long time.
“Uh…no. I’ve definitely taken, I’ve anointed
myself that. I’ve somehow convinced myself
that I can be a family therapist.”
“Are they buying it?”
“You just never know.” He starts laughing
again. “I think that maybe it’s one of the things
where you kind of just keep speaking at some-
one until they’re exhausted. They don’t have
any energy to be upset anymore. It’s just ther-
apy of attrition.”
“That seems to be your gift, right? Emailing
people over and over again and so on.”
“And once someone points it out, I’m like,
‘Oh, my God!’ Or I deny it.” And then Pattinson
seems to run out of laughter, midlaugh.
He looks up, then down, and sighs one last
heavy sigh.
“But yeah,” he says. “I think… Like… I think
everybody thinks it’s a pretty weird time.”
zach baron is gq’s senior sta≠ writer.
OT T E S SA M OSH F EG H
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 6 6
And without the reflectivity of a world out-
side Pasadena Glen, I can only mine myself
for material. What do I want to write during
quarantine? One’s mind might go into
futuristic postapocalyptic sci-fi, but mine
wants to go backwards, in particular 600
years backwards, to the late Middle Ages
in Eastern Europe. I’ve been thinking a lot
about Christianity, the paradigm of good and
evil, mind control. My new writing projects
include a characterization of a corrupt village
priest in the 1400s.
As I walk up Sierra Madre Villa, a dark
figure crosses the street toward me. I see that
he is wearing a clerical collar. Immediately,
 OT T E S SA M OS H F EG H C O NTINUED R I C HARD P OWE RS

I want to stop and ask him questions from
six feet away: “Did you see this coming?” “Is
this Judgment Day?” But the priest barely
lifts his face to look at me. He looks gravely
lost in thought. “How are you doing?” I ask.
He gives a slight wave of his hand and draws
the corners of his mouth up in an attempt
to smile, says nothing. His head hangs low.
He looks troubled, depressed. I wonder how
this is for him, if his faith is being tested, if
he feels accountable to his congregants to
make sense of all this, a responsibility I could
never imagine.
I am very moved by organized religion,
but my personality won’t let me identify as a
member of a group. I do have a ridiculously
inflated sense of uniqueness. I feel certain
that I will always be the exception to the rule.
I tend to exclude myself from common expe-
rience in general, as if I am not human. I want
to see myself as separate, not aloof but coolly
observant. So I self-exclude. I reject associa-
tion so that I can feel superior, untouchable,
safe. I struggle with the negative side e≠ects
of this attitude, and I’m interested in why
I learned to cope with life in this particular
way. Those that know me well might protest
that I’m a very loving, sweet person, and
that’s true. But my inner attitude, however
abstractly, is that of a loner. This pandemic
has highlighted the benefits of this attitude:
I don’t feel lonely. I thrive in isolation. But
a part of me has atrophied by consequence
over my 38 years. I’m trying to identify this
weak spot through my writing. Where can
I grow? How can I get stronger? As I write,
I feel a subconscious excavation is under way,
like I’m digging through layers of sediment to
the bones of some long-buried self. I’m scared
of what I’ll find there, but I like being scared
of myself.
My dog is happy and tired by the time we
get home from our walk. I check the mailbox,
then wash my hands. I look at my to-do list
and cross out “walk.” I make myself a ham-
burger. I sit and eat it. I cross out “lunch.” And
then I get into bed with my computer. This
is where I’ll stay until around five, when I’ll
get up and do the dishes. Luke sends me a
text. It’s a YouTube video of an episode of The
Honeymooners. Norton teaches Ralph how to
dance in that dingy, gray New York City apart-
ment. It’s hilarious, especially because in this
clip someone has superimposed a Grateful
Dead song over what was originally “The
Hucklebuck,” a catchy jazz dance tune from
1949. I google “The Hucklebuck,” then “rent
parties,” then Langston Hughes quotations.
I find one that makes me wonder: “Writing is
like traveling,” he said. “It’s wonderful to go
somewhere, but you get tired of staying.”
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 7 2
a lot of people. We’re all shaken up enough
to suddenly say, “I need to reestablish con-
nections that have lapsed.” We’re all a bit
bewildered, and that’s a lovely word because it
means we’ve been made wild again.
I’ve heard you say that, with The
Overstory, you wanted to create a work
in which the trees themselves were a
kind of protagonist. Can you see this
virus as a character in the story we’re
in now?
We’ve been hypnotized by this idea that we
won the battle against nature, that the only
modern story left is our battle with ourselves.
The coronavirus is a refutation of this idea.
We haven’t even begun to see the ways in
which that notion is going to fall apart. How
to survive sheltering in place is the smaller
part of the question. The larger part is how to
incorporate the reality in this moment into the
larger story we’re telling about ourselves and
our place here.
How does one manage to work in the
face of fear and anxiety?
This is a matter of life and death for a
huge part of the country, and that can’t be
overlooked. We’re not going to come out of
this with the same degree of nonchalance or
willful ignorance about the large percentage
of our country whose lives are so vulnerable.
But there’s also a strange sense of vitality
I’ve been witnessing: people tapping into
creative reservoirs.
Do you have any faith that it will survive
past the extremity of this moment?
Humanity never comes out of calamities
the way it went into them. Do I think this is
the end of capitalism? No. Do I think the oil
industries are going to pay a tremendous price
and that that leaves space for conversion to
renewable energy? Yeah. There are all kinds
of ways this sudden cessation of the cycles of
consumption is going to produce di≠erent
responses to how we, to use the crude phrase,
“start the country up” again. And if you think
of the pandemic as a kind of sped-up version
of this huge crisis of climate change, those
arguments that said “We can’t stop; it’s too
costly” are blown out of the water. I think
this moment will give strength to those who
have argued that all we need is the will to live
di≠erently to bring about true change.
My book keeps coming back to this passage
from Thoreau’s notebooks: “Live in each
season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the
drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to
the influences of each.” We, for however long
it lasts, have had to resign ourselves to the
reality of living systems and the revenge of the
living planet. And we are also possibly reaping
the benefits of that more reflective mode of
being that self-isolation brings about.
What are you working on?
I’m probably around the halfway point with a
draft of a book exploring what it would take to
bring human beings back into the community
of ecosystems. Having written this book that
explored our alienation, I want to share what it
would take to change this thinking about what
a meaningful life is. And this book, as I had it
plotted out, actually has as its climax a natural
catastrophe driven by a viral agent. And so the
biggest consequence to my work right now is
to have to go back and rethink my entire story,
now that I have a sense of what it actually
means to live through something like this.
How right were you about how things
would happen?
What I was not good at expecting was the
rapidity and comprehensiveness of human
response. I figured that society as a whole
would be much more recalcitrant and much
longer in denial than turned out to be the
case. It’s remarkable. For all the partisan civil
war, the obfuscation, the accusations of fake
news and denial of science that so much of
American discourse has been based on in
recent years, I am relieved to stand back and
say, “Okay. When push comes to shove, we are
willing to trust science.”
So I see the book changing profoundly.
There’s an anecdote about Proust at the
end of his life. You know, Proust dictated all
his work to his maid. And on his deathbed
he summoned his maid and said, “Can you
go get the manuscript [of Remembrance of
Things Past]? I want to redo the death scene
of Bergotte, now that I know what I’m talking
about.” I feel like all of us who have ever written
about the calamities we’re hurtling toward
now have to summon the manuscript and say,
“I’d like to redo that, now that I know a little bit
about what I’m talking about.”

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J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 0 G Q . C O M 9 7
 FINAL SHOT

The One-Minute
Isolation Chris Johanson

Self-Portrait
In addition to asking these four visual
artists to share their work and
insights for our sprawling project on
creativity in the time of quarantine,
we requested a little something extra:
a self-portrait, drawn in less than a
minute. Here are the results. (Turn to
page 48 to see pieces that took them
a bit longer to make.)

Wes Lang

ARTWORK: COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

Rashid Johnson

Katherine Bernhardt

9 8 G Q . C O M J U N E 9 J U L Y 2 0 2 0
THE NEW MEN’S P ARFUM