michael angelo covino co stars in the paul greengrass/tom hanks western news of the world that was released on christmas, 2020. i’ve been sitting on these photos for quite a while. looking back, i see the draft of this post from december of 2019, over a year ago. at first i was waiting for the release of covino’ s film, the climb, for which these were shot. this is a film he directed, starred in and co wrote with kyle marvin (also pictured below), and was actually the expansion into a feature length film of a previous short of the same name. the climb, unfortunately, was due to be released in march of 2020. just after everything shut down and theaters quickly became a relic of the before-times. in the climb covino plays a man who has an affair with his best friend’s fiancé. the first part of the film (and the entirety on the initial short) consists of covino confessing this fact to his friend (played by kyle marvin, also pictured below) and their ensuing confrontation. i was reminded of these photos again after seeing the poster for the bob odenkirk film, nobody, which uses a similar conceit. remember, though, the photos here were shot a year and a half ago. also worth remembering is that people getting punched in the face is a tale as old as time.
when we shot these photos michael was just about to leave to film news of the world. he was self conscious about his hair being messy, as he had been told to let everything grow out for filming. he was excited to be a movie villain, [spoiler alert] potentially killed by the nicest man in hollywood.
it was one of those shoots that i just felt very lucky to do — two subjects who were game for anything, were clearly so talented and funny and unselfconscious and just on the verge of being too famous to do silly things like this with no publicists around to tell them otherwise.
