A YEAR WELL SPENT In tumultuous 2020, we were drawn to the familiar. Norah Jones, Andy Cohen, Humberto Leon and more on the classics they discovered and rediscovered in the past few months.
Illustration: Joe McKendry
IT FEELS almost callous to call anything a silver lining in 2020, but during this tumultuous year, many people eagerly took shelter in culture, high and low. Film, TV, books and music gave us relief and a center of gravity. In the interest of tallying up the silver linings and seeking recommendations to help us weather the next few months, we asked 18 well-known cultural figures to share their favorite quarantine discoveries and comfort fare. Many were drawn to the familiar. Actor Jon Hamm, for example, spent part of his downtime consuming comedies from the 1970s and 1980s that he remembered from his youth. “I found myself, like a lot of people, going back to what feels comfortable and knowable, because so much of our existence in the last eight months has been uncomfortable and unknowable,” he said.
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Others took this strangely antisocial period to get acquainted with a classic work of art they’d always pledged to tackle. This was the year to gorge on Wong Kar-wai films or sink into Tolstoy. And then there was Slime. The gooey substance adored by children and shunned by parents might not be everyone’s idea of a cultural touchstone, but musician Norah Jones, we learned, is a recent convert and vouches for its therapeutic properties. For his part, Swizz Beatz thrilled at excavating Marvin Gaye. “I was in that zone, just digging up everything I could find from him,” he told us. Candice Bergen found herself happily burrowing into the “Wolf Hall” trilogy and keeping company with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief.” As she admitted, “I’m behind on stuff. I’ve just gone into sludge mode.”
Jon Hamm
Actor; co-starring this month in the film ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ and next year, ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’
Quarantine Discovery ’70s and ’80s comedy classics that he grew up with, such as ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ‘48 Hrs.’ and ‘Fun with Dick and Jane.’ “A lot of iconic comedies, the tone of which and pace of which they don’t really make anymore,” said Mr. Hamm. Also on the list: the 1985 Chevy Chase film “Fletch.” (It was recently announced that Mr. Hamm will star in a reboot.)
Up Next Finishing current TV series like “Lovecraft Country” and “The Queen’s Gambit.”
Courtney B. Vance, Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors in HBO’s ’Lovecraft Country.’
Photo: Eli Joshua Ade/HBO
Swizz Beatz and Timbaland
Music producers and founders of the Verzuz webcast series, where hip-hop and R&B notables compete with one another
Quarantine Discovery Timbaland has been consumed by Prince’s discography, especially his self-titled 1979 album. “I started to dive into the sonics, just trying to understand the difference between warm tape and digital because I feel like Prince had cracked the code when that album came out.” Mr. Beatz has been listening to a lot of Marvin Gaye. “It’s just a classic. Even the Marvin Gaye albums that weren’t famous, you know, ‘Here, My Dear,’ and so many of them that were never mainstream records but then you go back and find these discoveries.”
Up Next Timbaland: “I really listen to Swizz’s Zone Radio [on Instagram Live] and get inspired. I think I’m gonna go back to his Middle East Zone Radio and just vibe out to that, because he was playing a lot of records that I think I might have missed.”
Timbaland spent part of his quarantine studying Prince albums.
Photo: Getty Images
Jamie Lee Curtis
Actor, founder of My Hand In Yours, an online boutique that benefits the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and podcast host and producer behind the Audible children’s series ‘Letters From Camp’ and ‘Good Friend,’ a soon-to-launch iHeartRadio podcast on friendship
Quarantine Discovery “My child and their fiancé sat distanced from my husband and myself over an outdoor meal, and then with all doors and windows open, sitting 20 feet apart, watched the film ‘Sonic the Hedgehog.’ It wasn’t something I would have ever seen. My husband and I, with our disparate tastes and backgrounds, also devoured a Nordic noir show from 2011 called ‘The Bridge.’ It was spectacular.”
Up Next “I’m not somebody with a lot of predigested ideas. I sort of wait for new things to make their way into my consciousness.”
Jamie Lee Curtis and her family screened ‘Sonic the Hedgehog.’
Photo: Everett Collection
Norah Jones
Singer-songwriter. Last October, she released cuts from recent live-streaming shows as part of the deluxe edition of her album ‘Pick Me Up Off The Floor’
Quarantine Discovery “Slime. I resisted it for a long time. But finally, I had nothing to do, with a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, and it’s getting cold out…I got some slime and it was a game-changer. I think I even liked it more than they did. It’s like therapy. I just keep touching it, stretching it.”
Up Next Comedy shows like “PEN15” and the “SmartLess” podcast with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett. “I feel like at this point in the quarantine, I’m excited to watch stuff that makes me belly laugh.”
Kwame Onwuachi
Chef, author of ‘Notes from a Young Black Chef,’ and a judge on next year’s season of ‘Top Chef’
Quarantine Discovery “‘The Alchemist’ [Paulo Coelho’s 1988 novel]. It’s a story of aspiration, going with the flow, opening yourself to what the world is offering you, and knowing that the journey is the reward. In terms of films, ‘Paid in Full’ is in heavy rotation for me. It’s about what the crack epidemic in Harlem did to people and how they survived.”
Up Next “‘Conversations with God’ by Neale Donald Walsch. I really want to wrap my head around that book.”
The 2002 film ‘Paid in Ful’ is a favorite of chef Kwame Onwuachi’s.
Photo: Everett Collection
Charles Yu
Author of ‘Interior Chinatown,’ 2020 National Book Award winner
Quarantine Discovery “Wong Kar-wai’s ‘Fallen Angels.’ His most famous films—rightly—are ‘Chungking Express’ and ‘In the Mood for Love,’ but I love the intimate tone on ‘Fallen Angels,’ the way it feels like it goes inside the characters’ lives and in their heads, with basically a crime story. It mixes emotion and humor with something that’s visceral and exciting.” Mr. Yu also introduced his teenage kids to “The Twilight Zone.”
Up Next “‘The Wire’ or ‘The Sopranos.’”
Wong Kar-wai’s 1995 film ‘Fallen Angels,’ which author Charles Yu says is too often overshadowed by the filmmaker’s other works.
Photo: Everett Collection
Zac Posen
Fashion designer
Quarantine Discovery Hollywood history. “I read ‘Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer’ [by Scott Eyman], which was really important to my understanding of how they built the studio system. Another fun book I read that felt very time-capsule, but also very of-the-moment, was Paul Rosenfield’s ‘The Club Rules: Power, Money, Sex, and Fear—How It Works in Hollywood.’” Mr. Posen has also taken an interest in gardening. “I really learned about soil and light in ways that I never thought I would.”
Up Next “Two friends of mine just finished wrapping their TV series, ‘Yearly Departed,’ and that’s going to launch on Amazon on New Year’s. I’m very excited about that.”
Candice Bergen
Actor, co-starring this month in the HBO Max film ‘Let Them All Talk’
Quarantine Discovery A longtime admirer of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” books, Ms. Bergen read the trilogy’s final book in quarantine. At more than 700 pages, “it was a monster of a book,” she said. “It was, like, page 330 and I saw that I wasn’t even close to being halfway finished with the book. I sort of lost my will to live except she’s such a compelling writer. I also re-watched ‘The West Wing’ and saw ‘To Catch a Thief’ for about the 500th time. Grace Kelly and Cary Grant were the two most stunning human beings I’ve ever seen—and Cary Grant a little bit more stunning even than Grace.”
Up Next “I was thinking of going back to a Dickens novel, as well as Jane Gardem’s 2006 book ‘Old Filth.’ One of my favorite novels.”
Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 ‘To Catch A Thief.’
Photo: Everett Collection
Andy Cohen
Host of ‘Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen’ and this month, returning as co-host of CNN’s ‘New Year’s Eve’ with Anderson Cooper
Quarantine Discovery “I watched ‘Game of Thrones’ in its entirety while I was sick with Covid and recuperating. Everyone I know has seen it, so I’d always thought, ‘If I fall in love, maybe the person I fall in love with won’t have seen it—we can watch it together.’ But a global pandemic came before I fell in love so I viewed it as a great opportunity to watch.”
Up Next “I’m watching ‘The Reagans’ documentary on Showtime right now.”
Among Andy Cohen’s diversions this month is watching Showtime’s four-part documentary series ‘The Reagans.”
Photo: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Hrishikesh Hirway
Host of ‘Song Exploder’ podcast-turned-Netflix series that deconstructs songs with the artists who made them
Quarantine Discovery “I finally watched ‘ER,’ which I had never seen before. It was such a huge part of culture in the ’90s and beyond but I never actually saw it. My wife and I have watched the entire first four seasons so far. But it’s a very intense show so one of the other things I’m always looking for is something sweet, a show that features really nice people trying to be nice. In that spirit, I started watching ‘Ugly Betty.’ America Ferrera’s just so charming. It’s definitely very dated—the language around a trans character is appalling. But the family dynamics are just incredibly heartwarming.”
Up Next He’ll likely consult his spreadsheet. “In 2006, I started keeping track of all the movies I was going to see in the theater. And then later, that became a Google doc that I could share with friends so we can all see and keep track of what the others were watching. Now it’s a mix of movies and TV shows.”
The TV series ‘ER,’ which Hrishikesh Hirway took advantage of his downtime this year
Photo: Getty Images
Scott Sternberg
Fashion designer and founder of Entireworld
Quarantine Discovery Electronic ambient music. “I know the canon, like, Brian Eno and Tim Hecker, all the obvious ones. But I spent so many hours just expanding my knowledge of ambient music…you know, ambient jazz music, movie scores, nature sounds—that’s what I geek out on.”
Up Next The films of the Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang and Asian cinema in general. “I’ve watched his great movies but I know there’s a lot more Asian cinema—Korean, Chinese, Japanese cinema. There’s a lot to dig into with 1980s and 1990s Asian cinema.”
Hsiu-Ling Lin and Tsai Chin in Edward Yang’s 1985 film ‘Taipei Story.’
Photo: Everett Collection
Karina Longworth
Film historian and host of the podcast ‘You Must Remember This’ about the early days of Hollywood
Quarantine Discovery The extended director’s cut of the 1991 Wim Wenders film “Until the End of the World.” “It’s this incredibly ambitious sci-fi epic [that’s also] kind of about love in the time of apocalypse. I found myself just absolutely glued to the screen.”
Up Next “My husband [filmmaker Rian Johnson] and I just started watching ‘The Crown.’”
Solveig Dommartin in the 1991 Wim Wenders film ‘Until the End of the World.’
Photo: Everett Collection
Andrew Rannells
Actor, co-starring this month in the Netflix musical ‘The Prom’; and author of ‘Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood’
Quarantine Discovery “My boyfriend and I realized that we had never seen ‘The Sopranos’ before. And it’s one of those things that when people ask if you’ve seen it, you sort of—not lie exactly—but sort of sidestep it and pretend like you know what you’re talking about.”
Up Next “I just discovered on my HBO Max subscription that there is a Turner Classic Movie add-on thing there… So I’m starting a bit of a dive through that. I just watched ‘The Honeymoon Killers,’ which is this movie from 1969. It’s super over-the-top.”
Andrew Rannells finally met ‘The Sopranos’ this year.
Photo: HBO
Julie Curtiss
Artist; London’s White Cube Gallery will exhibit her work in May 2021
Quarantine Discovery “‘Atomised,’ the 1998 novel by Michel Houellebecq, a French author that I always heard about and hadn’t read anything by. It was kind of raw and really dark but I really liked that one. I also read Ocean Vuong’s ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,’ with my lady-artist book club. That was very beautiful.”
Up Next The HBO series “Succession.” “I became curious about it after my dealer at Anton Kern Gallery told me it’s fun to imagine what kind of art the characters in the series collect.”
The HBO series ‘Succession’ is on Julie Curtiss’s list of shows to stream next.
Photo: Peter Kramer/HBO
Humberto Leon
Co-founder of fashion brand Opening Ceremony and chief marketing officer of Chifa, a Peruvian-Cantonese restaurant in Los Angeles that opened in November
Quarantine Discovery “The sitcom ‘Girlfriends.’ I’ve been obsessively watching that from beginning to end and realizing how much I love all the characters. It’s been really fun kind of seeing myself in each of them.”
Up Next Rereading Amy Tan’s 1989 novel “The Joy Luck Club.” “Now, more than ever, I feel the pride in my being Asian and Peruvian…I feel like Amy Tan’s book talks a lot about owning that pride but also all the obstacles that you face coming into America as an immigrant. We’re living a different perspective than back when she wrote it but there’s something interesting about revisiting that and seeing all the progress that’s been made and all the faults.”
The TV series ‘Girlfriends,” which Humberto Leon says he’s been obsessively watching recently.
Photo: Everett Collection
Emily Adams Bode
Fashion designer behind menswear brand Bode
Quarantine Discovery The 2013 essay collection “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. “It was great to be able to be barefoot on the grass reading this book.”
Up Next “Everyone’s like, ‘I’m gonna workout,’ or ‘I’m gonna read,’ or ‘I’m gonna cook’—but you kind of go into a survival mode. It’s kind of hard to capitalize on free time.”
Andy Hunter
CEO and founder of Bookshop, the online platform empowering indie bookstores
Quarantine Discovery Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” “I have a three-volume set that I’ve been carrying around since a friend lent it to me when I was 24. So for about 25 years, I’ve never gotten rid of it and never cracked it. Somebody pointed out that there was a resurgence of people reading ‘War and Peace’ during the lockdown, so it seemed like the time to take that on.” Nine months into quarantine, Mr. Hunter admits he still hasn’t finished the book. “But I have been impressed with how undaunting it is when you actually crack it. It’s a really lively, engaging read.”
Up Next “Lizzo. I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old daughter and I’m really loving experiencing pop music with them.”
Lizzo performing at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards.
Photo: Getty Images
—Edited from interviews by Raymond Ang
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