PETER LINDBERGH'S WOMEN

Even if you’ve already picked up the print edition of our latest issue—and if you haven’t, you can do so here—it’s worth taking a look at our brand-new iPad version, which you will actually be able to read on the train.

Liya Kebede has been on top of the fashion world ever since the moment Tom Ford cast her in that Gucci show back in 2000. Since then, she has become a mom of two, started her own business, acted in a few movies, and established her maternal health charity organization. While some of these accomplishments are the result of years of hard work and dedication, others seem more about being in the right place at the right time.

A resonator is a type of guitar built for a sound many generations old. It hums and shines, as if an acoustic guitar was broadcast through a tinny phone line. Rather than a wood sounding board, the heart of the guitar is a metal cone, ornately decorated, that brittles the sound and projects it even without electronic amplification. Resonators are rarer now; they’re hard to come by. But they carry a unique magic in their sound, their history, and their owners.

Johnny Flynn’s resonator is a bit of a mystery. “No one knows where it was between 1940 and 2004, which is when I bought it,” Flynn says. “It has quite a strong spirit.”

This was a big weekend for Desiree Akhavan. Last Friday, her debut film, Appropriate Behavior, hit American theaters, the culmination of twelve months of festivals, screenings, and prizes, including a nomination for an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. “It was just a roller coaster,” she says of the past year spent promoting her movie, a Sundance favorite she wrote, directed, and starred in that led to comparisons to Lena Dunham and her being hailed as, yes, the voice of a generation. “Some parts are really, really fun, like sinfully fun, and then some parts are such bullshit. It’s a really funny mix of lovely and terrible, but mostly lovely.”

In this article from the ninth issue, we spoke to Ezra Miller about his dark turn in We Need to Talk About Kevin, well before the talented young actor was cast in what could be a life-changing role as The Flash. Here, we learn about his process, his life, and his inspirations.

Ever since we began back in 2008, we have worked with photographer David Mushegain every issue to bring you a collection of some of the raddest people from all around the world. David shoots and gets to know the young kids he meets on his travels, through his friends, or just walking down the street, and we are always happy to share his discoveries with you.

In just one year, the rising theater actor Jay Armstrong Johnson has gone from supporting role to star billing, with a lead performance in the revival of Leonard Bernstein’s classic On the Town, which opens tonight. Today, we revisit our Spring 2013 feature on the young Texan, who discusses his early start as a dancer, his NYU dreams, and his path to Broadway.

The young actor Zachary Booth is already a familiar face on stage and small screen, where he played Glenn Close’s son throughout the run of Damages. He takes on another big-name matriarch tomorrow with the opening of Last Weekend, a family drama in which Patricia Clarkson plays his mother. Today, we revisit our earlier profile of Booth, then on the verge of his breakout role in Keep the Lights On.

In just one year since we first featured him, Domhnall Gleeson has gone from the sidelights to the limelight. From supporting roles in Anna Karenina and Never Let Me Go, Gleeson is now—however reluctantly—one of Hollywood’s most promising lead actors, starring opposite Michael Fassbender in Frank earlier this year. Gleeson’s latest film, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, has become a winter smash, and he’s since signed on to a film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. But buzz is already building over his starring role in Star Wars: Episode VII, directed by J.J. Abrams. We catch up with the young Irish actor just before his life changes forever.

In Marisha Pessl’s début novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the narrator, the overeducated and metaphor-happy Blue van Meer, describes a fellow classmate’s eyes as “the color of a kiddy pool (blue, green, suspicious hints of yellow),” a strikingly precise approximation that applies equally well to Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, star of the new film I Origins. The Spanish actress’ unique pigmentation comes thanks to sectoral heterochromia, a rare genetic mutation that writer and director Mike Cahill, in a stunning coincidence, had already assigned to her character Sofi before ever meeting her.

The biopic is, in many ways, a tricky proposition, a form where the carefully-researched realism of history and the emotional impact of drama can blend in a uniquely powerful way. The flip side is the difficulty of doing justice to the memory of a man who lived, especially one who is revered throughout the fashion world. “When you’re playing an icon such as Yves Saint Laurent,” says Pierre Niney, the 25-year-old French actor who does just that in the new film Yves Saint Laurent, “people have their own different expectations, so it’s hard to find the right balance. It’s hard to play someone who existed because of those expectations, but at the same time, he existed, so you have the model.”

Tao Okamoto is a woman of many talents—model, actress, philanthropist, and, now, muse. In celebration of her fifteenth year in a famously fickle business, a show of fifteen exclusive photographs by some of the industry’s most interesting new talents will go on display in New York tonight in a show set to open to the public tomorrow for one day only. Okamoto, who has long been one of modeling’s most recognizable faces, says she relished the opportunity to play a variety of roles for her collaborators’ cameras, which captured her over the past year since her film début opposite Hugh Jackman in The Wolverine. “I told my agents how much I enjoyed the acting experience and how I wanted to bring something I learned from that craft to where I used to belong,” she explains of the show’s genesis, “which is, of course, modeling.”

It seems like Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman has been in everything we’ve liked this year. From David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to AMC’s The Killing, Kinnaman now stars in the big-budget reboot of RoboCop. We caught up with the breakthrough actor as he was becoming a household name.

Rising Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts is on a tear. From a starring role opposite Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone to the upcoming Suite Française with Michelle Williams and Far From the Madding Crowd with Carey Mulligan and Tom Sturridge, his profile is set to explode this year. Now, as the new face of Louis Vuitton, The Last looks back at our first interview with the future star.

Fares Fares has come a long way since he and his younger brother Josef started their careers, as actor and director respectively, making Swedish comedies in the early 2000s. Their beloved 2003 film Kopps drew its humor from the painstaking lack of action for the Swedish police and offers a compelling juxtaposition to the dramatic heights of Fares’ most recent appearance, hunting down Osama bin Laden with SEAL Team Six in the Academy Award-winning blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty.

We’ve been around awhile now, and we know a lot of our readers might not have had the opportunity to experience our earlier issues. So we wanted to give you the chance to discover one of our favorite stories from our archive. Some of them feature actors, musicians, or artists who eventually made it big, talents we are proud to have tapped early in their careers. Some have brilliant writing, and some have beautiful photography. Some have both. But all of them are so great we thought they deserved a second chance. This week we present Jauretsi Saizarbitoria’s Spring 2009 profile of Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan, then just a budding Michelle Williams lookalike fresh off wrapping An Education.

In a way, they are characters straight out of a typical romantic comedy: Ali, the rough, wounded fighter with a heart of gold, and Stéphanie, the delicate flower whose inner strength allows her to overcome painful tragedy. The two meet cute in a nightclub. He has a son, she has a boyfriend. They circle each other warily for weeks, and it’s no surprise when they end up in bed together. But Rust and Bone is nothing like your typical romantic comedy—there are few laughs, and little in the way of traditional romance—and, thanks to a pair of brutally powerful performances from Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard—Ali and Stéphanie are utterly unlike any pair seen on screen in recent memory.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the title of filmmaker Terence Nance’s début feature, which premiered in the New Frontier selection at Sundance this January. It is a ninety-minute dissection of Nance’s own inability to find love. Through various forms of animation, an omniscient voiceover, and live-action re-enactments, Nance provides an intimate portrayal of the women he’s pursued and the quixotic attempts with which he’s pursued them. The Sundance Film Festival described it as “explosively creative,” and, indeed, one has to set aside normal expectations of a feature film when watching Oversimplification. Hollywood structure does not abide. Rather, Nance tells his story like a singer-songwriter. It has verses, a chorus, and an occasional solo. Fact is second to impression, the narrative is nonlinear, and characters express themselves directly to the camera. When speaking about the film, Nance mentions blues musicians like Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson as some of his key influences.