James Gray’s 2022 “Armageddon Times” was based on the director’s Jewish childhood in 1980s Queens, New York. It’s the story of his early teenage friendship with a Black classmate and his relationship with his Jewish grandfather (played by Anthony Hopkins), who escaped antisemitic persecution in the former USSR.
The film featured Anne Hathaway as Jewish mom Esther Graff, a stand-in for Gray’s own mother. Esther was a complex Jewish mother figure. Hathaway, who isn’t Jewish, took inspiration for the role from her late Jewish mother-in-law, Jacqueline Banks.
For Gray’s newest film, “Paper Tiger,” which takes place just a few years later, he had hoped Hathaway would reprise a similar role: a fictional stand-in for his Jewish mom, but this time in a completely different story. This character has a different name, though the plot is also based on his actual history. But Hathaway was busy filming Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”
“So I said, OK, shit — that means neither of them are going to be available,” Gray recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone. “So then I thought, well, who do I want to work with? Who is a woman from New York, who is Jewish, who would authentically understand this world? And then I thought to myself, ‘Who’s like the biggest female star in the world right now? It’s a Jewish woman from New York!'”
That woman was Scarlett Johansson.
Gray wrote Johansson a letter (a letter!) and after quickly reading the script, she told him: “I would love to be a part of this.”
In “Paper Tiger,” which is out in theaters nationwide on Nov. 20, Johansson plays Hester Pearl, the mother of teens Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Benjamin (Roman Engel), who is, like James Gray’s own mother once was, dealing with a cancer diagnosis. (Gray’s mother died from brain cancer when he was young.) Hester is hiding the terminal diagnosis from her family while trying to keep them together, as their father Edwin (Miles Teller) and their uncle Gary (Adam Driver), an ex-cop with lots of connections, get embroiled in a scheme with the Russian mafia.
In “Armageddon Times” — which Gray claims is 98% autobiographical, while “Paper Tiger” is about 90% so — Jeremy Strong played the fictional version of Gray’s father. But for “Paper Tigers,” Strong was busy playing Jewish Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and was thus unavailable. Actor Miles Teller plays Edwin instead; apparently Gray originally thought Teller was too young for the role, but his agent convinced him that he was not. Gray impressed with Teller, and both Driver and Johansson were enthused about the actor taking the role.
Plus, Gray recounted: “He’s also Jewish, you know, and from New Jersey, so I thought, well, this is going to work.”
We can’t wait to see all these dynamic actors bring a new James Gray story to life on the big screen later this year.
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