long day's journey into night movie

Jessica Lange Says Delayed “Long Day's Journey Into Night” Film Is 'Finally Finished' (Exclusive)

"It was a project that we all loved and were passionate about" Lange tells PEOPLE of the upcoming film, which also stars Ed Harris and Ben Foster

The long wait for the Long Day's Journey Into Night film might be finally over, Jessica Lange tells PEOPLE.

Filming for the new movie adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning play wrapped in November 2022, Deadline reported, with Lange reprising her role as morphine-addicted matriarch Mary Tyrone — the part she first played in the 2016 Broadway revival to great acclaim (and to her first Tony Award ).

Like that production, this Long Day's Journey Into Night was primed to be a major awards contender. Not only was it stacked with a superstar cast (like Ed Harris as Mary's husband James, and Ben Foster as their alcoholic elder son, Jamie), but it came from theater director Jonathan Kent, in his film debut.

But a release date for the film has yet to be announced.

Related: Alicia Keys, Jim Parsons and More 2024 Tony Awards Hopefuls React to Their Nominations: 'This Is Wild'

Now, two years later, that end looks near. "It's finally finished," Lange, 75, tells PEOPLE at the 2024 Tony Awards Meet the Nominees press junket, where she was celebrating her leading actress Tony nomination for her role in Mother Play . "You'll be able to see it in theaters."

She went on to say that financial problems factored into the delay.

"It was a project that we all loved and were passionate about, but the money was never fully there so it was always scraping together a little bit here, a little bit there," Lange says. "And I think now, maybe, we finally have finished it. Hopefully!"

PEOPLE reached out to MGM Studios for comment.

Financial problems have plagued the Long Day's Journey Into Night movie since filming began in Wicklow, Ireland in September 2022.

Related: Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger Make a Move in Broadway's Mother Play (Exclusive)

A day after cameras went up, production shut down, The New York Times reported, when lead producer Gabrielle Tana discovered their biggest chunk of financing had fallen through. The cast then spent weeks waiting patiently as Tana got the money to start again,

“We were shocked at first, of course, but never once did we think it wasn’t going to happen," Lange told the outlet.

The down had it's benefits, especially when it came to the performance. "As tough as it was when the money fell out, it was the most rewarding film acting experience I’ve had in quite a while,” said Harris, explaining that he was able “to sit back, think about the character, calm down, and just be this dude rather than worrying about playing such a classic, important role.”

They also were able to bond as a cast. "We just hung in, went to the pub, took long walks," explained Lange. "We really became friends and cared deeply for one another, because we were going through the same thing. I think that in some way it added to our intensity and passion for doing this."

First adapted for the screen in 1962 with Katharine Hepburn as Mary, the play has been made into four films, the last a 1996 film from Canadian director David Wellington.

Lange played Mary initially in a 2000 revival in London that later moved to Broadway.

In the 30 plus years since Lange made her Broadway debut, she's finally doing something for the first time on stage: originating a role.

"It's never been done before," Lange tells PEOPLE. "So of course, going into a piece like this, you wonder if it's going to work. But it's been wonderful. And then to be recognized for the work? I'm thrilled."

Related: 2024 Tony Awards: Sarah Paulson, Jeremy Strong, Rachel McAdams and More Nab Nominations — See the Full List

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

Written by Paula Vogel, the play follows Lange as Phyllis, a single mother who the audiences follows over multiple decades as she parents her two children, played by Emmy winner Jim Parsons and Tony winner Celia Keenan-Bolger.

It's been nominated for four 2024 Tony Awards, including featured actor nominations of Parsons and Keenan-Bolger, and best play.

The 2024 Tony Awards will take place on Sunday, June 16 at Lincoln Center's David H. Koch Theater in New York City. Viewers can watch the show on CBS and Paramount+ beginning at 8 p.m. ET. Select awards will also be handed out on a preshow that will stream on Pluto TV.

Tickets for Mother Play are now on sale.

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People .

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Long Day's Journey Into Night

• Episode aired Mar 10, 1973

On a day in the summer of 1912, the family of retired matinee idol James Tyrone grapples with the morphine addiction of Tyrone's wife Mary, the illness of their youngest son Edmund, and the ... Read all On a day in the summer of 1912, the family of retired matinee idol James Tyrone grapples with the morphine addiction of Tyrone's wife Mary, the illness of their youngest son Edmund, and the alcoholism and debauchery of the older son Jamie. As day turns into night, guilt, anger, d... Read all On a day in the summer of 1912, the family of retired matinee idol James Tyrone grapples with the morphine addiction of Tyrone's wife Mary, the illness of their youngest son Edmund, and the alcoholism and debauchery of the older son Jamie. As day turns into night, guilt, anger, despair, and regret threaten to destroy the family.

• Michael Blakemore
• Eugene O'Neill
• Laurence Olivier
• Constance Cummings
• Denis Quilley
• 5 User reviews
• 1 Critic review
• 1 win & 2 nominations total

• James Tyrone Sr.

• Mary Tyrone

• James 'Jamie' Tyrone Jr.

• Edmund Tyrone

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Did you know

• Trivia The Broadway play by Eugene O'Neill opened at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York on November 7, 1956, ran for 390 performances and won the 1957 Tony Award for the Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1957.
• Connections Featured in The 25th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards (1973)

User reviews 5

• MickAstonDavies
• Apr 9, 2010
• March 10, 1973 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• ITV - Independent Television
• Independent Television (ITV)
• Kestrel Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 41 minutes

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Long Day's Journey Into Night

Where to watch.

Rent Long Day's Journey Into Night on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Long Day's Journey Into Night may flummox viewers looking for an easy-to-follow story, but writer-director Gan Bi's strong visual command and technical risk-taking pay off.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Hong-Chi Lee

Sylvia Chang

Wildcat's Mom

Yongzhong Chen

Zuo Hongyuan

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Long Day's Journey Into Night

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, sidney lumet, katharine hepburn, ralph richardson, jason robards jr., dean stockwell, jeanne barr, photos & videos, technical specs.

On a warm day in 1912, the Tyrone family gathers at their summer home in New London, Connecticut. James, the father, is an aging popular actor whose early privations have led him to devote his career to a second-rate but commercially successful play. Mary, his convent-bred, Irish Catholic wife, has just returned from a sanitarium after supposedly being cured of drug addiction. Jamie, the eldest son, has made a half-hearted attempt to follow his father's profession but now is reduced to a life of alcoholism and cynicism. The youngest son, Edmund, a 23-year-old would-be writer, comes home penniless and ill after working as a merchant seaman. In the course of the day, Mary's fear that Edmund has tuberculosis causes her again to use morphine; and when the illness is confirmed, the family's repressed anguish, pride, and insecurity surface in bitter quarreling fueled by alcohol. The day ends as the three men sit and listen in silence as Mary lapses into her own private hell. They know that tomorrow it will all begin again.

Jack J. Dreyfus Jr.

George justin, boris kaufman, andré previn, ralph rosenblum, richard sylbert.

Award Nominations

Best actress, long day's journey into night.

Long Day's Journey into Night

Filmed in New York City. Also 180 and 176 min and eventually cut to 136 min for some engagements. Copyright claimant: First Co.

Miscellaneous Notes

Voted Best Actor (Robards, also for his work in "Tender Is the Night") and One of the Year's Ten Best Films by the 1962 National Board of Review.

Voted One of the Year's Ten Best Films by the 1962 New York Times Film Critics.

Winner of the Acting Ensemble Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival.

Released in United States March 1975

Released in United States Winter January 1, 1962

Released in United States March 1975 (Shown at FILMEX: Los Angeles International Film Exposition (A Film Tribute to Nobel Prize-winning Authors) March 13-26, 1975.)

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, long day's journey into night.

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Time moves differently in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," a sensuous, dream-like Chinese drama set in and around the Southeast mainland city of Kaili. The first half of the movie—which only shares a title with Eugene O'Neill's play of the same name—is a disorienting mix of flashbacks and flash-forwards. We follow emotionally withdrawn drifter Hongwu Luo (Jue Huang) as he chases after a woman that he can only vaguely recall. He remembers her in stages: each new place that he revisits—physically and in his memories—brings him closer to her, a woman who may or may not be the enigmatic Kaizhen ("Lust/Caution" star Wei Tang). Or maybe her name is Qiwen Wan, like the movie star. It's hard to tell since time slips through Luo's fingers as easily as the rainwater that darkens Kaili's skies and then seeps into the foundation of almost every building. This is a city—and a mind—that's perpetually on the brink of collapse. How do the locals survive? Why is Luo looking for Kaizhen? What's the point of this story?

The answer to these and many other questions are a matter of faith. Because "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is a slow, fragmented drama that has become somewhat renowned for its inclusion of an hour-long 3-D tracking shot that only occurs about halfway through the movie. And because Luo's quest is, for the most part, about blind devotion. Everybody he meets is missing something, though they stubbornly try to do without it. A dead parent, a missing friend, a dog that doesn't hunt (or smell) as well as he used to ... and a girl that got away. Everything's breaking down around Luo, but some things endure, mysteriously, inevitably. Writer/director Gan Bi ("Kaili Blues") asks viewers to follow Luo as he drives, walks, and sometimes flies around Kaili in search of the woman of his dreams, hoping to achieve the same kind of magical personal breakthrough as everybody else: everything will be all right if I can get ___ back.

"Long Day's Journey Into Night" forces viewers to be simultaneously hyper-aware and un-self-conscious about the fact that they are watching a movie that, in several scenes, is presented in real time. Like the movies of arthouse godfathers Andrei Tarkovsky and Kar-wai Wong, Bi's movie is slow and melancholic. He encourages viewers to feel their way through modestly-scaled, impressionistic moments of beauty that are inevitably blurred by his characters' subjective, imperfect memories. These moments seem to go on forever, especially in the first half of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," when Bi's characters are surrounded by fogged-up mirrors, rippling puddles, and shuttered doorways. Corridors seem to lead on forever and there's always another room—or building, or street—beyond the one we're looking at. 

You really have to feel your way around "Long Day's Journey Into Night" since so much of Luo's progress can only be understood by the way that he, during the movie's 3-D section, imagines a reality that's more sensible than the one he's drifting through during the movie's first half. Think of the way that our minds use dreams—and movies, as Bi points out when he sits down to watch a 3-D film in a crumbling Kaili theater—to recycle our waking anxieties for the sake of creating a new narrative about ourselves. Now imagine a story where the dream/movie version of events is just as confusing, if a bit more soothing, than the waking world that Luo (the audience's stand-in) comes from. In this dream version of events, characters are capable of making progress. Even if there's always a conditional element to that progress: if Luo beats a nameless 12-year-old (Hong-Chi Lee) at ping pong, then the boy will show Luo how to get home. And if Kaizhen sings one song for Luo, he'll leave her alone. Movies facilitate these otherwise impossible reunions, as Luo explains early on, through voiceover narration: memories are partly true and partly made-up, but movies are all fiction. Thank goodness. 

So Luo, a self-described "naive" character, keeps wishing and trying to understand himself better. Everything is breaking down in his corner of the world, so the only way to persist is to dream of small moments of overwhelming beauty or exhilaration: a scooter ride with a long-lost friend; a kiss with a lover; a heroic gesture for a stranger who often gets overlooked. Every step climbed, every song sung, every game played ... it's all a matter of devotion and faith. As I was watching "Long Day's Journey Into Night," I was reminded of a jaw-dropping sequence from Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia," the one where a Russian poet tries to keep a candle lit as he trudges slowly across a seemingly endless pool of water. As a passive viewer, watching this scene was an act of faith: I hoped for a happy outcome and held my breath while I waited. "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is full of such moments: you hold your breath and hope that the moment lasts. 

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Film Credits

Long Day's Journey Into Night (2019)

140 minutes

Huang Jue as Luo Hongwu

Tang Wei as Wan Qiwen

Sylvia Chang as Wild Cat's mother

Lee Hong Chi as Wild Cat

Chen Yongzhong

Zeng Meihuizi

Original Music Composer

• Chih-Yuan Hsu

Director of Photography

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• Jinsong Dong

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Review: Bi Gan’s time-bending noir ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ is a magical piece of filmmaking

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Good new movies, regardless of what others may tell you, are never in short supply. Enter any theater in Los Angeles and you are more than likely to find one worth your time. What you are less apt to find is enchantment: a picture that succeeds, through some alchemy of dazzling trickery and genuine feeling, in recapturing the pleasures of what was once commonly known as “movie magic.”

But lo and behold, an honest-to-God, how’d-they-do-that enchantment has slipped into theaters this week, and as is fitting for a work of such transparently pure cinema, words seem even less adequate than usual to the task of describing it.

The glory of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a full-body swoon of a movie from the 28-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is an ingenious, nearly hour-long sequence that was shot in an unbroken take and then converted to 3-D in post-production. It constitutes the second act and the emotional centerpiece of this moody, mind-bending romantic noir, and it ranks among the great poetic and technical achievements in recent cinema. (While the movie can be seen in standard two-D, the three-D version begins screening this week only at the Landmark, and is strongly recommended in that format.)

But I am getting ahead of myself, which may be fitting for a movie so unbound by temporal constraints. The first half of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” consists of shorter individual shots and sequences, but its progression is still dizzying, slipping freely and without warning among flashbacks, reveries and present-tense reality. Like an upstart Alain Resnais, Bi treats cinematic time as a toy to be played with, and he has little interest in explaining the rules of his particular game.

At the beginning, whatever that means, an ex-casino manager named Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) has returned home after his father’s death to Kaili City, in China’s subtropical Guizhou province. (The city also provided the setting of Bi’s beguiling 2015 debut feature, “Kaili Blues,” which anticipates this movie in its fragmentary storytelling and jaw-dropping command of the camera.) As Luo returns to his old stomping grounds — a restaurant run by his stepmother, a tunnel glimpsed through a melancholy sheet of rain, a flooded old building with gorgeous undulating light patterns on the walls — his every forward step draws him backward, inexorably, into the past.

As you have probably guessed, this “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has little to do with Eugene O’Neill. A more literal translation of the Chinese title would be “Last Evenings on Earth,” which also happens to be the title of a collection of short stories by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño — most of them, like this movie, about lonely wanderers on the margins of society. At once a cultural magpie and an unabashed show-off, Bi has structured his movie as a labyrinth of allusions, drawing on such classics of head-trip cinema as David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Tropical Malady” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.”

He owes perhaps his greatest stylistic debt to Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong auteur best known for his magnificent art-house romance “In the Mood for Love.” Wong’s influence here is like a pulse, beating steadily beneath those gorgeous surfaces: It’s there in the voiceover that wraps every image in a veil of melancholy; the seductive, near-fetishistic attention to detail; and the undeniable resemblance between Luo and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Wong’s most famous leading man.

Most of all, it’s there in the directors’ shared obsession with themes of lost time and remembrance. Memories of Luo’s past acquaintances keep resurfacing, including a childhood friend, nicknamed Wildcat, who died years ago at the hands of a local gangster (Chen Yongzhong), and a beautiful former lover, Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei, “Lust, Caution”), who has long since disappeared. It is Wan whom Luo cannot let go of, and you soon realize that whenever she appears, always wearing a green dress, we are lost in the mists of memory.

A sense of disorientation is a wholly appropriate response to a movie in which the past is both irretrievable and unshakable. But even at its most openly baffling, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” never loses its seductive pull. You learn to follow not the flow of exposition but rather the flow of images, as Bi invests crucial motifs — a broken clock, a pomelo fruit, a book containing a magic spell — with a piercing, almost totemic significance. The flow is sometimes quite literal: From the floods to the rain, there is water, water everywhere, until the production design itself seems to be swimming in tears of regret.

And then, just when it seems to have reached its formal limits, the picture triumphantly slips its own representational bonds. About halfway through, Luo enters a movie theater and dons a pair of three-D glasses, which is your cue to do the same. Immediately you are transported alongside him into a gorgeous nocturnal landscape, gently borne aloft by the steady, graceful movement of the camera. (Yao Hung-i, Dong Jingsong and David Chizallet are credited as directors of photography.) Without blinking or looking away, that camera floats after Luo as he emerges from a dark cavern, rides a motorbike along a road and then ziplines down into a mountain village with a billiard parlor, where still more beguiling encounters await.

“Once you know you’re dreaming, it’s an out-of-body experience,” Lu says at one point, putting words to the act of lucid dreaming. And you have rarely encountered a more lucid dream than this. In contrast with, say, “Gravity” or “Birdman,” which achieved their long traveling shots largely through digital editing and visual effects, this sequence was choreographed and executed, with no small difficulty, in real time. (Comparisons can be drawn to other analog one-take wonders such as Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” and Sebastian Schipper’s “Victoria.”)

The effect is one of sustained tension and wonderment, a state that compels both heightened attention and woozy surrender. For close to an hour, you watch as this metaphysical Rube Goldberg device plays out, as a succession of formal delights and narrative surprises are harmonized into a single, flowing movement that feels both utterly convincing and thrillingly irrational.

The film theorist André Bazin wrote that a long take, with its depth of focus, could bring “the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.” That’s true enough of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” except that it occupies a space where reality and dream have inextricably merged. Details from the first half turn up mysteriously in the second. A game of table tennis or billiards creates an agonizing logistical and philosophical suspense. Luo meets a woman, Kaizhen, who’s a doppelganger for Qiwen (and also played by Tang), in one of the movie’s more obvious quotations from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

Are we being told the same story twice, in two equally hypnotic registers of dream logic? Is the second half, a dreamlike emanation from the first, or vice versa? “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” doesn’t just refuse to answer those questions definitively; it asserts that multiple answers — multiple realities — can coexist. In one sublime feat of cinematic prestidigitation, Bi forges new possibilities by which movies can defy the constraints of logic and represent the unrepresentable. When he refuses to cut away, he isn’t just performing a stunt; he’s giving voice to an obsession. He wants the movie to go on forever. He isn’t alone.

------------

‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’

Mandarin with English subtitles

Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes

Playing: The Landmark, West Los Angeles, and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena

[email protected] | Twitter: @JustinCChang

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Long Day's Journey Into Night review – an exhilarating slo-mo hallucination

Mystery, passion and fear permeate the obsessive reverie of a man searching for his lost love, which takes flight in an audacious 3D dream-fantasy sequence

T here is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams – with influences from David Lynch , Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Wong Kar-wai . It is a film about obsessive love, lost love, and that Dantesque dark wood in which, in middle-age, you can suddenly find yourself, with a longing for the past and a creeping dread of the future.

Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) is a former casino manager who has returned to the depressed home town he left 20 years before, because of the death of his father. In the family restaurant, run by his now-widowed stepmother, Luo finds a broken electric clock (one of many images indicating the treachery and unmanageability of time) and having removed the back to change the battery, he finds an old photo, apparently of a woman with whom he was passionately in love in the old days. This is Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei). She was the girlfriend of a local bully and gangster Zuo Hongyuan (Chen Yongzhong) who murdered Luo’s friend, known only by his nickname Wildcat (Lee Hong-chi), whose mother (Sylvia Chang) ran a local hairdressing salon where Luo himself once worked. Then Zuo simply disappeared – on the run, or perhaps murdered himself?

Luo and this beautiful young woman, remembered in flashback wearing a distinctive green dress, pursued a doomy affair, while she feared that this dangerous former lover would reappear. And then Qiwen herself vanished, and Luo drifted away. His return has triggered an obsessive need to find her again, and to delve into his memory for clues. Just when we have acclimatised ourselves to this remarkable and enigmatic reverie, Bi raises the stakes halfway through by taking Luo into a cinema showing a 3D film, and then gives us an entire hour-long 3D dream-fantasy sequence in one unbroken shot, in which Qiwen is to reappear as a new person – the sultry and melancholy karaoke singer Kaizhen. (The film is being screened in 3D and 2D versions, and it is impressive either way.)

The effect is a kind of slo-mo exhilaration. And the film reflects deeply on the nature of memories themselves: they can be unreliable, and illusory as dreams, but perhaps the same is true of our present experience. Luo says: “The difference between films and memory is that films are always false … but memories vanish before our eyes.” Perhaps it is only falsity, the fictional falsity of cinema, or any representative art, that gives memories their structure and substance. Novels and movies have encouraged us to think of our memories as “flashbacks”: distinct, cogent scenes that we have mentally excerpted from a lost flow of time. But perhaps they are entirely different from that, and different also from dreams. They are closer to subliminal flashes, things with no articulated substance until we create one for them. Memory becomes a creative act, a developmental fleshing-out of a fleeting glimpse or feeling.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a noir movie in its way, with moody cityscapes, pool halls and wrecked buildings – the kind of buildings that in a European film of 60 years ago would obviously denote wartime destruction. That is not quite what is being suggested here: these are buildings that are being knocked down, perhaps to create something brand new, in keeping with Chinese prosperity. There is an extraordinary moment when Luo asks someone if Kaizhen is going to be on the bill at a certain club – yes, comes the reply, and in the morning the whole building is to be torn down. And where is Luo right now? Asleep in his 3D movie, dreaming everything we see? Or is it rather that the film simply uses that moment to ascend to a higher order of mystery? It is sometimes exasperating when a film suggests that everything has been a dream anyway, but Bi has let you invest just enough in the material reality of Luo’s unhappy new obsession with lost love, and his realisation that this is the only real thing that has ever happened to him. His love affair has been a waking dream, and the nearest thing to its fulfilment is this eerie new epiphany: that she is gone, and that everything must soon be gone, but that he has been vouchsafed a final new vision of her beauty at the moment of parting.

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Long Day's Journey into Night

Original title: 地球最后的夜晚.

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Long Day's Journey into Night is 26564 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 25683 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Vir Das: For India but less popular than Endgame.

Luo Hongwu returns to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years ago. He begins the search for the woman he loved and whom he has never been able to forget.

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‘three kilometers to the end of the world’ review: emanuel parvu’s drama an expansive tale of corruption and lies – cannes film festival , jessica lange & ed harris wrap new movie version of ‘long day’s journey into night’.

By Andreas Wiseman

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Filming has wrapped on an under-the-radar screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night , starring Jessica Lange , Ed Harris , Ben Foster and Colin Morgan.

Well known British theater and opera director, Jonathan Kent, has made his feature directorial debut on the project, which has been filming in Ireland. Above is a first image from the production.

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Foster will play their wayward, charming and hard-drinking elder son, Jamie. And Colin Morgan (Belfast) is the bleakly optimistic and consumptive younger son, Edmund – a portrait of O’Neill himself. David Lindsay-Abaire ( Poltergeist ) adapted the play for screen.

Set on one single day in August 1912 at the family’s Connecticut seaside home, the story follows the Tyrone family as it faces the looming dual spectres of Edmund’s potentially fatal consumption diagnosis alongside his mother Mary’s increasingly fragile and anxious state of mind. The family knows that the situation threatens to return her to the severe morphine addiction that was only recently overcome.

Filmed on location in County Wicklow, Ireland, the film is financed by Magnoliamae Films, BKStudios, Brouhaha Entertainment and Fetisoff Illusion. It is produced by Gabrielle Tana ( Philomena ), Bill Kenwright ( Cheri ) and Gleb Fetisov ( Loveless ).

As first reported by the Irish Times, filming was briefly halted after just a few days when a financier unexpectedly exited the project but those issues were resolved soon after when BKStudios stepped in.

Executive producers are BKStudios’ CEO, David Gilbery ( The Lost Daughter ), and head of production is Naomi George ( My Pure Land ). The film is co-produced with Redmond Morris and his Irish production company Four Provinces Films.

Eugene O’Neill’s classic play has been adapted multiple times for the big and small screen including versions by Sidney Lumet and Jonathan Miller.

Lange is repped by CAA and Untitled Entertainment; Ed Harris by CAA and Ziffren Brittenham LLP; Ben Foster by United Talent Agency; Colin Morgan by United Agents.

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Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand

The porn star testified for eight hours at donald trump’s hush-money trial. this is how it went..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

It’s 6:41 AM. I’m feeling a little stressed because I’m running late. It’s the fourth week of Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial. It’s a white collar trial. Most of the witnesses we’ve heard from have been, I think, typical white collar witnesses in terms of their professions.

We’ve got a former publisher, a lawyer, accountants. The witness today, a little less typical, Stormy Daniels, porn star in a New York criminal courtroom in front of a jury more accustomed to the types of witnesses they’ve already seen. There’s a lot that could go wrong.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today, what happened when Stormy Daniels took the stand for eight hours in the first criminal trial of Donald J. Trump. As before, my colleague Jonah Bromwich was inside the courtroom.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s Friday, May 10th.

So it’s now day 14 of this trial. And I think it’s worth having you briefly, and in broad strokes, catch listeners up on the biggest developments that have occurred since you were last on, which was the day that opening arguments were made by both the defense and the prosecution. So just give us that brief recap.

Sure. It’s all been the prosecution’s case so far. And prosecutors have a saying, which is that the evidence is coming in great. And I think for this prosecution, which is trying to show that Trump falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal, to ease his way into the White House in 2016, the evidence has been coming in pretty well. It’s come in well through David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, who testified that he entered into a secret plot with Trump and Michael Cohen, his fixer at the time, to suppress negative stories about Trump, the candidate.

It came in pretty well through Keith Davidson, who was a lawyer to Stormy Daniels in 2016 and negotiated the hush money payment. And we’ve seen all these little bits and pieces of evidence that tell the story that prosecutors want to tell. And the case makes sense so far. We can’t tell what the jury is thinking, as we always say.

But we can tell that there’s a narrative that’s coherent and that matches up with the prosecution’s opening statement. Then we come to Tuesday. And that day really marks the first time that the prosecution’s strategy seems a little bit risky because that’s the day that Stormy Daniels gets called to the witness stand.

OK, well, just explain why the prosecution putting Stormy Daniels on the stand would be so risky. And I guess it makes sense to answer that in the context of why the prosecution is calling her as a witness at all.

Well, you can see why it makes sense to have her. The hush money payment was to her. The cover-up of the hush money payment, in some ways, concerns her. And so she’s this character who’s very much at the center of this story. But according to prosecutors, she’s not at the center of the crime. The prosecution is telling a story, and they hope a compelling one. And arguably, that story starts with Stormy Daniels. It starts in 2006, when Stormy Daniels says that she and Trump had sex, which is something that Trump has always denied.

So if prosecutors were to not call Stormy Daniels to the stand, you would have this big hole in the case. It would be like, effect, effect, effect. But where is the cause? Where is the person who set off this chain reaction? But Stormy Daniels is a porn star. She’s there to testify about sex. Sex and pornography are things that the jurors were not asked about during jury selection. And those are subjects that bring up all kinds of different complex reactions in people.

And so, when the prosecutors bring Stormy Daniels to the courtroom, it’s very difficult to know how the jurors will take it, particularly given that she’s about to describe a sexual episode that she says she had with the former president. Will the jurors think that makes sense, as they sit here and try to decide a falsifying business records case, or will they ask themselves, why are we hearing this?

So the reason why this is the first time that the prosecution’s strategy is, for journalists like you, a little bit confusing, is because it’s the first time that the prosecution seems to be taking a genuine risk in what they’re putting before these jurors. Everything else has been kind of cut and dry and a little bit more mechanical. This is just a wild card.

This is like live ammunition, to some extent. Everything else is settled and controlled. And they know what’s going to happen. With Stormy Daniels, that’s not the case.

OK, so walk us through the testimony. When the prosecution brings her to the stand, what actually happens?

It starts, as every witness does, with what’s called direct examination, which is a fancy word for saying prosecutors question Stormy Daniels. And they have her tell her story. First, they have her tell the jury about her education and where she grew up and her professional experience. And because of Stormy Daniels’s biography, that quickly goes into stripping, and then goes into making adult films.

And I thought the prosecutor who questioned her, Susan Hoffinger, had this nice touch in talking about that, because not only did she ask Daniels about acting in adult films. But she asked her about writing and directing them, too, emphasizing the more professional aspects of that work and giving a little more credit to the witness, as if to say, well, you may think this or you may think that. But this is a person with dignity who took what she did seriously. Got it.

What’s your first impression of Daniels as a witness?

It’s very clear that she’s nervous. She’s speaking fast. She’s laughing to herself and making small jokes. But the tension in the room is so serious from the beginning, from the moment she enters, that those jokes aren’t landing. So it just feels, like, really heavy and still and almost oppressive in there. So Daniels talking quickly, seeming nervous, giving more answers than are being asked of her by the prosecution, even before we get to the sexual encounter that she’s about to describe, all of that presents a really discomfiting impression, I would say.

And how does this move towards the encounter that Daniels ultimately has?

It starts at a golf tournament in 2006, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Daniels meets Trump there. There are other celebrities there, too. They chatted very briefly. And then she received a dinner invitation from him. She thought it over, she says. And she goes to have dinner with Trump, not at a restaurant, by the way. But she’s invited to join him in the hotel suite.

So she gets to the hotel suite. And his bodyguard is there. And the hotel door is cracked open. And the bodyguard greets her and says she looks nice, this and that. And she goes in. And there’s Donald Trump, just as expected. But what’s not expected, she says, is that he’s not wearing what you would wear to a dinner with a stranger, but instead, she says, silk or satin pajamas. She asked him to change, she says. And he obliges.

He goes, and he puts on a dress shirt and dress pants. And they sit down at the hotel suite’s dining room table. And they have a kind of bizarre dinner. Trump is asking her very personal questions about pornography and safe sex. And she testifies that she teased him about vain and pompous he is. And then at some point, she goes to the bathroom. And she sees that he has got his toiletries in there, his Old Spice, his gold tweezers.

Very specific details.

Yeah, we’re getting a ton of detail in this scene. And the reason we’re getting those is because prosecutors are trying to elicit those details to establish that this is a credible person, that this thing did happen, despite what Donald Trump and his lawyers say. And the reason you can know it happened, prosecutors seem to be saying, is because, look at all these details she can still summon up.

She comes out of the bathroom. And she says that Donald Trump is on the hotel bed. And what stands out to me there is what she describes as a very intense physical reaction. She says that she blacked out. And she quickly clarifies, she doesn’t mean from drugs or alcohol. She means that, she says, that the intensity of this experience was such that, suddenly, she can’t remember every detail. The prosecution asks a question that cuts directly to the sex. Essentially, did you start having sex with him? And Daniels says that she did. And she continues to provide more details than even, I think, the prosecution wanted.

And I think we don’t want to go chapter and verse through this claimed sexual encounter. But I wonder what details stand out and which details feel important, given the prosecution’s strategy here.

All the details stand out because it’s a story about having had sex with a former president. And the more salacious and more private the details feel, the more you’re going to remember them. So we’ll remember that Stormy Daniels said what position they had sex in. We’ll remember that she said he didn’t use a condom. Whether that’s important to the prosecution’s case, now, that’s a much harder question to answer, as we’ve been saying.

But what I can tell you is, as she’s describing having had sex with Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is sitting right there, and Eric Trump, his son, is sitting behind him, seeming to turn a different color as he hears this embarrassment of his father being described to a courtroom full of reporters at this trial, it’s hard to even describe the energy in that room. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. And it was just Daniels’s testimony and, seemingly, the former President’s emotions. And you almost felt like you were trapped in there with both of them as this description was happening.

Well, I think it’s important to try to understand why the prosecution is getting these details, these salacious, carnal, pick your word, graphic details about sex with Donald Trump. What is the value, if other details are clearly making the point that she’s recollecting something?

Well, I think, at this point, we can only speculate. But one thing we can say is, this was uncomfortable. This felt bad. And remember, prosecutor’s story is not about the sex. It’s about trying to hide the sex. So if you’re trying to show a jury why it might be worthwhile to hide a story, it might be worth —

Providing lots of salacious details that a person would want to hide.

— exposing them to how bad that story feels and reminding them that if they had been voters and they had heard that story, and, in fact, they asked Daniels this very question, if you hadn’t accepted hush money, if you hadn’t signed that NDA, is this the story you would have told? And she said, yes. And so where I think they’re going with this, but we can’t really be sure yet, is that they’re going to tell the jurors, hey, that story, you can see why he wanted to cover that up, can’t you?

You mentioned the hush money payments. What testimony does Daniels offer about that? And how does it advance the prosecution’s case of business fraud related to the hush money payments?

So little evidence that it’s almost laughable. She says that she received the hush money. But we actually already heard another witness, her lawyer at the time, Keith Davidson, testify that he had received the hush money payment on her behalf. And she testified about feeling as if she had to sell this story because the election was fast approaching, almost as if her leverage was slipping away because she knew this would be bad for Trump.

That feels important. But just help me understand why it’s important.

Well, what the prosecution has been arguing is that Trump covered up this hush money payment in order to conceal a different crime. And that crime, they say, was to promote his election to the presidency by illegal means.

Right, we’ve talked about this in the past.

So when Daniels ties her side of the payment into the election, it just reminds the jurors maybe, oh, right, this is what they’re arguing.

So how does the prosecution end this very dramatic, and from everything you’re saying, very tense questioning of Stormy Daniels about this encounter?

Well, before they can even end, the defense lawyers go and they consult among themselves. And then, with the jury out of the room, one of them stands up. And he says that the defense is moving for a mistrial.

On what terms?

He says that the testimony offered by Daniels that morning is so prejudicial, so damning to Trump in the eyes of the jury, that the trial can no longer be fair. Like, how could these jurors have heard these details and still be fair when they render their verdict? And he says a memorable expression. He says, you can’t un-ring that bell, meaning they heard it. They can’t un-hear it. It’s over. Throw out this trial. It should be done.

Wow. And what is the response from the judge?

So the judge, Juan Merchan, he hears them out. And he really hears them out. But at the end of their arguments, he says, I do think she went a little too far. He says that. He said, there were things that were better left unsaid.

By Stormy Daniels?

By Stormy Daniels. And he acknowledges that she is a difficult witness. But, he says, the remedy for that is not a mistrial, is not stopping the whole thing right now. The remedy for that is cross-examination. If the defense feels that there are issues with her story, issues with her credibility, they can ask her whatever they want. They can try to win the jury back over. If they think this jury has been poisoned by this witness, well, this is their time to provide the antidote. The antidote is cross-examination. And soon enough, cross-examination starts. And it is exactly as intense and combative as we expected.

We’ll be right back.

So, Jonah, how would you characterize the defense’s overall strategy in this intense cross-examination of Stormy Daniels?

People know the word impeach from presidential impeachments. But it has a meaning in law, too. You impeach a witness, and, specifically, their credibility. And that’s what the defense is going for here. They are going to try to make Stormy Daniels look like a liar, a fraud, an extortionist, a money-grubbing opportunist who wanted to take advantage of Trump and sought to do so by any means necessary.

And what did that impeachment strategy look like in the courtroom?

The defense lawyer who questions Stormy Daniels is a woman named Susan Necheles. She’s defended Trump before. And she’s a bit of a cross-examination specialist. We even saw her during jury selection bring up these past details to confront jurors who had said nasty things about Trump on social media with. And she wants to do the same thing with Daniels. She wants to bring up old interviews and old tweets and things that Daniels has said in the past that don’t match what Daniels is saying from the stand.

What’s a specific example? And do they land?

Some of them land. And some of them don’t. One specific example is that Necheles confronts Daniels with this old tweet, where Daniels says that she’s going to dance down the street if Trump goes to jail. And what she’s trying to show there is that Daniels is out for revenge, that she hates Trump, and that she wants to see him go to jail. And that’s why she’s testifying against him.

And Daniels is very interesting during the cross-examination. It’s almost as if she’s a different person. She kind of squares her shoulders. And she sits up a little straighter. And she leans forward. Daniels is ready to fight. But it doesn’t quite land. The tweet actually says, I’ll dance down the street when he’s selected to go to jail.

And Daniels goes off on this digression about how she knows that people don’t get selected to go to jail. That’s not how it works. But she can’t really unseat this argument, that she’s a political enemy of Donald Trump. So that one kind of sticks, I would say. But there are other moves that Necheles tries to pull that don’t stick.

So unlike the prosecution, which typically used words like adult, adult film, Necheles seems to be taking every chance she can get to say porn, or pornography, or porn star, to make it sound base or dirty. And so when she starts to ask Daniels about actually being in pornography, writing, acting, and directing sex films, she tries to land a punch line, Necheles does. She says, so you have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real, right?

As if to say, perhaps this story you have told about entering Trump’s suite in Lake Tahoe and having sex with him was made up.

Just another one of your fictional stories about sex. But Daniels comes back and says, the sex in the films, it’s very much real, just like what happened to me in that room. And so, when you have this kind of combat of a lawyer cross-examining very aggressively and the witness fighting back, you can feel the energy in the room shift as one lands a blow or the other does. But here, Daniels lands one back. And the other issue that I think Susan Necheles runs into is, she tries to draw out disparities from interviews that Daniels gave, particularly to N-TOUCH, very early on once the story was out.

It’s kind of like a tabloid magazine?

But some of the disparities don’t seem to be landing quite like Necheles would want. So she tries to do this complicated thing about where the bodyguard was in the room when Daniels walked into the room, as described in an interview in a magazine. But in that magazine interview, as it turns out, Daniels mentioned that Trump was wearing pajamas. And so, if I’m a juror, I don’t care where the bodyguard is. I’m thinking about, oh, yeah, I remember that Stormy Daniels said now in 2024 that Trump was wearing pajamas.

I’m curious if, as somebody in the room, you felt that the defense was effective in undermining Stormy Daniels’s credibility? Because what I took from the earlier part of our conversation was that Stormy Daniels is in this courtroom on behalf of the prosecution to tell a story that’s uncomfortable and has the kind of details that Donald Trump would be motivated to try to hide. And therefore, this defense strategy is to say, those details about what Trump might want to hide, you can’t trust them. So does this back and forth effectively hurt Stormy Daniels’s credibility, in your estimation?

I don’t think that Stormy Daniels came off as perfectly credible about everything she testified about. There are incidents that were unclear or confusing. There were things she talked about that I found hard to believe, when she, for instance, denied that she had attacked Trump in a tweet or talked about her motivations. But about what prosecutors need, that central story, the story of having had sex with him, we can’t know whether it happened.

But there weren’t that many disparities in these accounts over the years. In terms of things that would make me doubt the story that Daniels was telling, details that don’t add up, those weren’t present. And you don’t have to take my word for that, nor should you. But the judge is in the room. And he says something very, very similar.

What does he say? And why does he say it?

Well, he does it when the defense, again, at the end of the day on Thursday, calls for a mistrial.

With a similar argument as before?

Not only with a similar argument as before, but, like, almost the exact same argument. And I would say that I was astonished to see them do this. But I wasn’t because I’ve covered other trials where Trump is the client. And in those trials, the lawyers, again and again, called for a mistrial.

And what does Judge Marchan say in response to this second effort to seek a mistrial?

Let me say, to this one, he seems a little less patient. He says that after the first mistrial ruling, two days before, he went into his chambers. And he read every decision he had made about the case. He took this moment to reflect on the first decision. And he found that he had, in his own estimation, which is all he has, been fair and not allowed evidence that was prejudicial to Trump into this trial. It could continue. And so he said that again. And then he really almost turned on the defense. And he said that the things that the defense was objecting to were things that the defense had made happen.

He says that in their opening statement, the defense could have taken issue with many elements of the case, about whether there were falsified business records, about any of the other things that prosecutors are saying happened. But instead, he says, they focused their energy on denying that Trump ever had sex with Daniels.

And so that was essentially an invitation to the prosecution to call Stormy Daniels as a witness and have her say from the stand, yes, I had this sexual encounter. The upshot of it is that the judge not only takes the defense to task. But he also just says that he finds Stormy Daniels’s narrative credible. He doesn’t see it as having changed so much from year to year.

Interesting. So in thinking back to our original question here, Jonah, about the idea that putting Stormy Daniels on the stand was risky, I wonder if, by the end of this entire journey, you’re reevaluating that idea because it doesn’t sound like it ended up being super risky. It sounded like it ended up working reasonably well for the prosecution.

Well, let me just assert that it doesn’t really matter what I think. The jury is going to decide this. There’s 12 people. And we can’t know what they’re thinking. But my impression was that, while she was being questioned by the prosecution for the prosecution’s case, Stormy Daniels was a real liability. She was a difficult witness for them.

And the judge said as much. But when the defense cross-examined her, Stormy Daniels became a better witness, in part because their struggles to discredit her may have actually ended up making her story look more credible and stronger. And the reason that matters is because, remember, we said that prosecutors are trying to fill this hole in their case. Well, now, they have. The jury has met Stormy Daniels. They’ve heard her account. They’ve made of it what they will. And now, the sequence of events that prosecutors are trying to line up as they seek prison time for the former President really makes a lot of sense.

It starts with what Stormy Daniels says with sex in a hotel suite in 2006. It picks up years later, as Donald Trump is trying to win an election and, prosecutors say, suppressing negative stories, including Stormy Daniels’s very negative story. And the story that prosecutors are telling ends with Donald Trump orchestrating the falsification of business records to keep that story concealed.

Well, Jonah, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Of course, thanks for having me.

The prosecution’s next major witness will be Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer who arranged for the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen is expected to take the stand on Monday.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a defiant response to warnings from the United States that it would stop supplying weapons to Israel if Israel invades the Southern Gaza City of Rafah. So far, Israel has carried out a limited incursion into the city where a million civilians are sheltering, but has threatened a full invasion. In a statement, Netanyahu said, quote, “if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone.”

Meanwhile, high level ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been put on hold in part because of anger over Israel’s incursion into Rafah.

A reminder, tomorrow, we’ll be sharing the latest episode of our colleague’s new show, “The Interview” This week on “The Interview,” Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with radio host Charlamagne Tha God about his frustrations with how Americans talk about politics.

If me as a Black man, if I criticize Democrats, then I’m supporting MAGA. But if I criticize, you know, Donald Trump and Republicans, then I’m a Democratic shill. Why can’t I just be a person who deals in nuance?

Today’s episode was produced by Olivia Natt and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Lexie Diao, with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Will Reid and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

• May 17, 2024   •   51:10 The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
• May 16, 2024   •   30:47 The Make-or-Break Testimony of Michael Cohen
• May 15, 2024   •   27:03 The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System
• May 14, 2024   •   35:20 Voters Want Change. In Our Poll, They See It in Trump.
• May 13, 2024   •   27:46 How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China
• May 10, 2024   •   27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand
• May 9, 2024   •   34:42 One Strongman, One Billion Voters, and the Future of India
• May 8, 2024   •   28:28 A Plan to Remake the Middle East
• May 7, 2024   •   27:43 How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth
• May 6, 2024   •   29:23 R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot
• May 3, 2024   •   25:33 The Protesters and the President
• May 2, 2024   •   29:13 Biden Loosens Up on Weed

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Jonah E. Bromwich

Produced by Olivia Natt and Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Lexie Diao

With Paige Cowett

Original music by Will Reid and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

This episode contains descriptions of an alleged sexual liaison.

What happened when Stormy Daniels took the stand for eight hours in the first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump?

Jonah Bromwich, one of the lead reporters covering the trial for The Times, was in the room.

On today’s episode

Jonah E. Bromwich , who covers criminal justice in New York for The New York Times.

Background reading

In a second day of cross-examination, Stormy Daniels resisted the implication she had tried to shake down Donald J. Trump by selling her story of a sexual liaison.

Here are six takeaways from Ms. Daniels’s earlier testimony.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state criminal courts in Manhattan. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

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