As awards season draws to a close with the upcoming Oscars, so too does Vanity Fair’s inaugural Cocktail Hour, Live!, a virtual event series to recognize Hollywood and the talented artists who populate it.
The third and final act aired on Thursday, April 15, at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT, guided by “goddess” narrator Maya Rudolph and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones. The three-day series is presented by GREY GOOSE® Essences and Lancôme, and supported by Cointreau and Tequila Don Julio. Its finale included a rapid-fire Proust Questionnaire with Oscar-winning filmmaker Spike Lee, Notes on a Scene with Oscar nominee Sacha Baron Cohen, and a turn-of-the-century-themed trivia game that pitted the Lonely Island against Haim (with an assist from Rudolph). Cocktail Hour, Live! will support the Hollywood community and Los Angeles, with a portion of ticket-sale proceeds donated to the Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF) to help support COVID-19 relief efforts. For more information and to view all three acts on-demand through April 22, visit vf.com/live.
Ahead, a few highlights from act three, which featured Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried, Janet Mock, Phoebe Robinson, Jon M. Chu, Tracy Oliver, and Paris Hilton.
In a panel presented by Lancôme, former costars Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried reunited to celebrate David Fincher’s Mank, the ode to Hollywood’s Golden Age that earned Seyfried her first Oscar nomination. While the film’s subject matter seems finely tuned to the Academy’s tastes, the actor said accolades were far from the filmmaker’s mind when he was making the film. “The one thing David Fincher said to me on our first Zoom was, ‘This isn’t going to be an Academy thing. This isn’t going to be an awards thing,’” Seyfried recalled.
Despite Fincher’s disclaimer, Mank scored a field-topping 10 nominations and career-best reviews for Seyfried’s portrayal of misunderstood ingenue Marion Davies. Seyfried’s research for playing a real-life person will come in handy for her next project: Hulu’s The Dropout, where she’ll play disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. While Seyfried is not able to contact Holmes, she said, “I’ve glommed on to the things I do love about this woman already. And you know what a journey to be able to portray somebody—I mean, we’re all complex in our own ways. We all come from something. We all come from some kind of trauma or whatever it is. You know, right now [I’m] just finding the similarities between how I walk through life and how she walks through life—or how I think she does, based on her own interviews.”
During Moore and Seyfried’s catch-up, the pair also talked about Moore’s upcoming role in Dear Evan Hansen, what it’s like to film while pregnant, and when Seyfried will be slipping into those famous black turtlenecks.
Inspired by her column in Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue, contributor Jenny Lumet led a complex conversation about the idea of wokeness and its place in pop culture. The panel included a lineup of A-list talent, including Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights), Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip, 2019’s First Wives Club), Janet Mock (Pose, Hollywood), and Phoebe Robinson (2 Dope Queens, Doing the Most With Phoebe Robinson).
“For Black people and marginalized folks, or historically marginalized folks, we’ve always been woke, right?” Mock explained. “We’ve had no choice but to exist in a culture and in a society, in a world, where these systems were not necessarily built for us to thrive or survive.” Within that construct, each of the panel’s participants shared stories of their struggle to “make it” in Hollywood under different rules than their white, cis, and straight counterparts.
In the powerful discussion, Robinson discussed the double standard that exists for women and people of color in comedy; Chu spoke about his fight to make Crazy Rich Asians with an exclusively Asian cast; Oliver grappled with the difference between representation versus empowerment; and Mock reflected on the unique weight of being “the first.”
Boundaries don’t appear to be a word in Sacha Baron Cohen’s vocabulary. The Oscar nominee, celebrating nods for both his supporting performance in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and the script of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, walks us through a particularly daring sequence in the latter movie.
What begins with a father-daughter trip to a bakery alongside Maria Bakalova’s Tutar ends with confrontation in a pregnancy crisis center. Baron Cohen walks viewers through every prickly moment in the scene, in which Tutar “swallows” a marzipan baby from atop a cupcake. The 15-year-old character is then taken to said crisis center, where she’s dissuaded from getting an abortion. If the scenario sounds uncomfortable to shoot—it was. “This movie, I don’t know if I’m traumatized, but I definitely don’t want to go out and shoot another one of these movies ever again,” Baron Cohen said of playing his beloved Kazakh character. “They’re too hard, as you can see.”
Watch as the man behind Borat opens up about the art of satire and the tragic real-world events that inspired him to reprise his role.
In 2021, Paris Hilton is complicating everything the world thought it knew about her. Since the release of her confessional YouTube documentary, This Is Paris, last September, she’s been revealing the person behind her public image. In a wide-ranging, unfiltered conversation with Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox, Hilton got candid about owning her narrative after years spent being the subject of other people’s stories.
That starts with Hilton’s status as the OG influencer—a blueprint for making money and impacting pop culture that she cultivated in the early aughts. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, before there was social media, before there was even a name for the word influencer,” Hilton explained. “So back then, when I was doing all of this, people were like, ‘What is this? This is crazy.’ So now to see that it’s like turned into this whole new genre and a new job, it’s pretty incredible. I’ve always prided myself on being an innovator and ahead of my time.”
Hilton, who is recording music for a new album and hosting her own podcast, spoke to Fox about a variety of other hot topics as well: how quarantine shifted Hilton’s priorities from becoming a billionaire to starting a family, why she played a character on The Simple Life, and her heartbreaking reaction to Framing Britney Spears.
“Where once there was harmony, now war,” Andy Samberg declared at the beginning of a rousing game of trivia. Emceed by HQ host Scott Rogowsky, the match tested the turn-of-the-20th-century knowledge of the Lonely Island (Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone) versus Haim sisters Alana and Este, alongside pal Maya Rudolph.
Each team dueled for a charity of their choice—the Lonely Island selected East Bay Food Not Bombs, and Haim played for the Center for Reproductive Rights. It didn’t take long after establishing the rules for participants to engage in a healthy dose of trash talk. At one point, the Lonely Island was tasked with deciding which popular teen movie—10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, Cruel Intentions, or Fear—was not based on a famous book or play. “But if Cruel Intentions is just based on another movie…was that movie based on a book? I don’t know,” Schaffer wondered. “Might have been based on your mom,” Rudolph shot back.
Watch to hear Haim’s pitch-perfect rendition of “Mambo No. 5,” discover what does impress Shania Twain much, and find out which group bested the other in V.F.’s game-night trivia challenge.
Vanity Fair will donate* 20% of the actual purchase price of tickets (less taxes and fees) from vf.com/live. to support Motion Picture Television Fund from March 25, 2021, through April 15, 2021. All donations shall be made payable to the Motion Picture Television Fund, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Learn more at https://mptf.com/. Purchases are not tax-deductible as a charitable contribution by customers. Donations will not be made in connection with sales to residents of Georgia, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
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— Serena Williams, Michael B. Jordan, Gal Gadot, and more are coming to your favorite screen April 13–15. Get your tickets to Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour, Live! here.