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Oracle.com slash CBS. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. After a tumultuous, some might say endless campaign season, it's hard to believe there are just 30 days until the election, which brings into focus one of the most critical and controversial issues surrounding this election, the actual process of how we vote. This morning, Robert Costa takes us to Georgia. Just one of the states imposing a growing list of rules, some worry could undermine the work of those who tally our votes and help America decide the true will of the people. As the chance to register ends in some states and early voting begins, we went down to Georgia, a battleground state where changes to voting rules could set the stage for a contested count of the vote. What's really on the horizon in Georgia after election day? What's possible in terms of the turmoil? Chaos, frankly.
Coming up on Sunday Morning, Democracy on the Ballot. Kathy Bates has been on Hollywood's A-list ever since her chilling Oscar-winning performance in Misery back in 1991. Now she's taking on one of the truly iconic roles in television history. She'll be talking about that and more with Ben Mankiewicz. At 76, Kathy Bates has plenty of reasons to smile.
I'm just having so much fun. I never in a million years thought I would have this. Madeline Matlock. Yes, Matlock like the old TV show. She has a lot to say about her show Matlock and her new outlook on life. Thank you very much. So what left her speechless?
Find out with Kathy Bates later on Sunday Morning. He's a music superstar whose creativity seems to know no boundaries. Caliph Asane heads to Paris to catch up with a very busy Pharrell Williams.
Pharrell Williams has made some of pop music's biggest hits. Now he's got a new film that tells his life story with Legos. How hard is it to create a Lego figurine that looks like you?
It was a lot of work, you know, and dealing with Lego where there's like no noses and pretty much every character has a square jawline. It's an interesting feat. The animated Pharrell Williams later on Sunday Morning. Also ahead this Sunday Morning, Elizabeth Palmer marks the first anniversary of the horrific October 7th attacks in Israel.
Lee Cowan introduces us to a young man with autism making beautiful music. Tracy Smith catches up with pop star Sabrina Carpenter. Dr. John LaPook talks with Delia Efron about the real life happy ending that's inspired a new show on Broadway. And more on this Sunday Morning, October 6th, 2024.
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Discounts not available in all states and situations. We're officially less than a month away from election day and voting rights are under the microscope like never before. We've asked our Robert Costa to take a closer look. With just a month to go before election day, Sabrina German sees herself as an essential worker for democracy. The first three words in the preamble, it says we the people, meaning that we as public servants, we're working for the people.
To make sure that they have a fair choice and a voice for the candidates that they're choosing. The director of voter registration in Chatham County, Georgia, German finds herself in the spotlight as she works to comply with sweeping changes to state election rules. You have a thousand challenges in one county?
Yes. The overhaul in Georgia has many fronts from the Republican majority on the state election board to the Georgia legislature, which has made it possible for individuals to file a flurry of challenges to the voter rolls. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the agenda behind some of the challenges. Attorney Colin McRae chairs the nonpartisan county registration board where he has served for two decades. In a recent set of names that were submitted to us, it included hundreds of college students, and it didn't take a lot of research to figure out that all of the college students whose registrations were being challenged all attended Savannah State University. Historically black university.
Historically black university. While these issues might seem local, they have a national political charge, and former President Trump has weighed in on the campaign trail, praising Republicans on Georgia's election board. They're on fire. They're doing a great job. Three members, three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.
They're fighting. Sunday morning reached out to the members of Georgia's election board praised by Trump. They have long defended their work, and one member told us the controversy over their efforts is quote manufactured to suit some other agenda. What's happening in Georgia is just one example of how challenges to the vote are roiling the nation, and the question remains are recent changes to state election laws addressing real problems, or is it just politics? I've been looking and researching the quality of our voter lists for about 25 years now, and there's no question that right now our voter lists are as accurate as they've ever been. So why is there so much suspicion then of voter rolls? We see a lot of the claims about the elections driven just by outcomes.
They're not about the actual process. David Becker directs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C., and is a CBS News contributor. The voter lists are public. They could have challenged these things in 2023 or 2021 or 2019. They're waiting until right before the election, which tells you that they're not actually interested in cleaning up the list. What they're really trying to do is to set the stage for claims that an election was stolen after presumably their candidate loses. The 2020 election still casts a long shadow. State officials like Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican secretary of state, are bracing themselves for another contested election. In January 2021, Raffensperger got an infamous call from then President Trump asking to find votes so Trump could win.
All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have, because we won the state. You resisted so much pressure in 2020 to not certify the election in Georgia. If you face pressure again in 2024 to not certify the presidential election, can you give your word that you will resist once again, wherever the pressure is coming from? I'll do my job. I'll follow the law and I'll follow the Constitution.
Raffensperger will once again oversee and certify Georgia's elections. Are any of the changes put forward by the state election board necessary? No. Not one?
Not one. You say things are safe and secure in Georgia, yet this election board keeps making rule after rule after rule. What's going on? I think that many of them are living in the past and they can't accept what happened in 2020. One of the things about voter suppression is that it always looks innocuous.
It always looks reasonable, except it's not. Part of that change was the 1965 Immigration Act. Professor Carol Anderson is an author and voting rights activist who teaches at Emory University. What's happening in Georgia with voting rights is that you have a massive change of demography happening. So you have a growing African-American population, you have a sizable Latino population, you have a sizable and engaged Asian-American population.
And so it is a power clash between a vision of a new Georgia and a battle between the vision of the old Georgia, our old ways. Do you ever get nervous? Do you ever think about walking away? Every day.
Every day? It's that tough. Yeah. Chatham County's Sabrina German may be weary, but she and Colin McRae say their experience in 2020 has prepared them for whatever comes next. Did you take it personally when former President Trump asked the Secretary of State of Georgia to go find votes, 11,000 votes? Of course. I took it personally. Any criticism of the system is a criticism of the individuals who make up that system. Again, the truth will come out.
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And you're about to meet someone who understands that sentiment better than most. He has a whole world and a whole life within his brain that for him is completely normal. 20-year-old Jacob Rock is living with severe autism. He's among the roughly 30% of people on the spectrum who are unable to develop functional speech. He says yes and eat. That's it?
That's it. He lives in Los Angeles with his father, Paul Rock, and his mom, Lisa Newman. She's a little camera shy. But they both say Jacob's frustration of being unable to communicate sometimes resulted in self-harm. He would punch himself in the face. He's very forgiving, but he gets angry when people ignore him or people pretend he's a child. That really gets him.
I mean, it's got to be lonely for him, but it's lonely for you too. Yeah, well you always wonder what's going on. Speech and music therapists, neurologists, they all tried to unlock a way for Jacob to communicate. Typing was one way. For seven long years, everyone, including his mom, who was a third grade teacher, tried to help him use a keyboard. But Jacob's progress was slow. Some of his school teachers assumed it was because Jacob had a low IQ. Here is the host of Jeopardy.
His dad, who worked from home, never believed that. He spent hours together watching Jeopardy. And he says Jacob always seemed to be absorbing it all. And then there was music. He got a piano. He would play it all the time.
Rudimentary. He doesn't actually play, play. Paul, a music events producer, always had classic rock playing in the house. And for Jacob, the louder the better.
The whole autism trope of they hate loud noises is true probably for many kids, but not for him. In 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic, Paul began working almost every day on Jacob's typing skills. Now, for 16 years, everyone, including Paul, had been calling him Jake. But on this day, he surprised everyone by typing that he'd had enough. He wanted to be called Jacob, not Jake. That's what he said?
Yeah. It was the first time he'd typed out a full sentence, unprompted. By the time we showed up almost two years later, Jacob was pretty chatty. I am calm and I want to say that being a happy, happy subject of this piece is very exciting. He uses a text-to-speech app on an iPad.
I am so interested in going to the garage to see... It's a form of augmentative alternative communication that allows him to type out words and sentences, which are then played back. He took us into his bedroom, full of musical instruments. And when we asked him to play something for us, he gave us a very teenage response.
I am damn great at this when no one is here, but I am nervous. Jacob's ability to type was like water on fertile soil. He began communicating in ways even his dad wasn't really prepared for. So he started typing poems. It was a very emotional poetry and very beautiful poetry and expressing his feeling that, you know, this is my life. And it turned out that life also had a secret soundtrack. Six months after he started typing on that app, Jacob announced that he had a symphony in his head. A full 90-minute, six-movement orchestral composition that he wanted to get out.
I am calm when I have my symphony to listen to because really the sounds of my brain are on the screen. He called it Unforgettable Sunrise. Why the title?
That's his Unforgettable Sunrise, which is typing and expressing himself. Jacob couldn't play music. He couldn't read music.
He certainly couldn't score it. So how did something as complex as a multi-part symphony get from Jacob's brain to the page? I thought, please don't ask me.
Why? It was scary. It was an enormous task.
Rob Laufer, a musician and friend of the family, agreed to try. It became clear that Jacob could not communicate actual notes to me. But he was hearing definite melodies and he could not communicate it. Jacob would painstakingly type out detailed instructions for every measure, every movement. In the beginning he wanted five piano bangs.
How long? And he goes, well, the first one lasts for five seconds. The next one lasts for ten seconds. And he just had it really clear in his head.
I mean, like, the seconds. As for the notes themselves, Jacob would describe them in terms of an emotion or an image. He wanted a five-minute mountain of sadness. And I was like, yes!
I can do that! If anything, what his music communicates is that Jacob's inner life is often in turmoil. He wanted the horns to come in really abrasive, but then they go to an uplifting, joyful...
They fill the air with sweetness. But then it goes back and forth. Sweet. Chaotic. I wish we could hear what's in his head.
This might be close. I don't know. Every time he made a change, it lifted the thing up and made all this sense. It's been a long debate about whether nonverbal people like Jacob are actually typing on their own or whether their communication is being facilitated by hopeful parents or caregivers. Because there are a lot of people who discount the communication that goes on with the typing. They think it's not real.
They think it's not real. And then he pulls out his index finger and he just types out each letter one at a time. F-E life. In fact, during our conversation, Jacob became visibly frustrated because he feared his typing wasn't clear enough. I am angry that damn ability to type is not always as good as I want, yet I want to tell my story. You're doing great!
You're doing great! After two years of composing and arranging, Jacob and Rob finally had the music down on paper. Through Paul's nonprofit, the Wild Honey Foundation, Paul raised $110,000 to bring it to life. Including having the University of Southern California's 55-piece orchestra perform it. In the audience that night were others living with autism. One of them even wrote Jacob a fan letter. I also typed to communicate. It read, I enjoyed your show beyond words. They met and Jacob now says he's composing a musical just for her.
This one he's calling Happy Love. I think most great creativity is by people who are marginalized and they feel that intensity. That pain?
The pain, just a desire to create and express that pain. I think when you can't speak, you've got that in spades. The best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all.
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Meet? Knows how to dream up a fairy tale storyline. You have a play that's going to open up on Broadway. Yeah, I know how amazing is that. How amazing is that?
But Ephron's Broadway debut later this month comes directly from the pages of her life. He had prostate cancer. It had spread to his bones. The doctor said we've done all we can. Delia, you write about the most intimate things, but now your life is on the stage for everybody to see.
That is an interesting problem because I am basically introverted. So this, this is not easy. But she sure makes it look easy. When we first interviewed Ephron two and a half years ago, she'd just finished a best-selling memoir, Left on Tenth. Now she's turned that book into a play. My husband died. Telling her remarkable story of beating the odds.
Emmy Award winner Juliana Margulies plays Ephron. Now he wasn't going to be here. It's the story of a woman who loses her beloved husband of 38 years. Hi Delia.
Peter Rudder here. A man from her past drops into her life and she falls madly in love. The most wonderful thing has happened. I've fallen. What?
What is it? And then shortly afterwards I got diagnosed with a terrible disease, a fatal leukemia, and I survived. That's right. Seven years ago, because of her blood cancer, Delia Ephron was given four months to live. I'm so, so sorry. She'd already lost her sister Nora and her husband Jerry to cancer. But she somehow found love again and got married in the hospital while undergoing chemo.
To love and to cherish. I should say in full disclosure, we're dear friends. And in fact, I was visiting you in the hospital when you got married. Margulies! You were at my wedding.
You photographed it. I love you very much, dear, you're mine. Five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman is directing the play. It's about second chances. Second chances in love and life. And being brave enough to take those second chances. Because most people aren't. The two women share something in common they wish they didn't.
I sadly lost my husband to AML, to leukemia. So when I started to read the play, I knew everything about what was going on. I didn't have to research anything because I had lived it too. How do you direct the turn from humor to tragedy and back again? It's tricky, actually.
But it's a trick Stroman mastered as we watched, tagging along every step of the way. What's better than starting rehearsal for a Broadway show? Nothing! From the first meet and greet, to an early rehearsal, to the stage of the James Earl Jones Theater. Part of me was the person who wasn't sick, who had walked into that clinic room believing she was healthy.
How could I not be healthy when I was so gloriously happy? They're saying it's a rom-com, and it is, it's romantic, and it's funny, and it's wonderful. But bring tissues.
In case you need them. Stage legend Peter Gallagher plays Peter Rudder, Efron's newfound love. Will you marry me? Is that a yes?
Yes! The play is about two people falling in love who are not in their 20s or 30s, they're older than that. And what's the significance of that? Well, you know, you're closer to death. Everything is precious, and I think that's another thing that the audience is going to recognize and feel.
Delia had been in the hospital 100 days. Are there life lessons in this play for all of us? One day, I could stand. We plan our lives out as a young person. Oh, I want to get married, I want to have children, I want to have a career, you know, you make all these things. But then you don't think, oh, what's going to happen to me after I'm 50? And another day, I could dance. What life do I want then?
It's a much more open book. And this is about seizing those years and really creating something. Tomorrow is October 7th, a date now infamous for the tragedy it represents in Israel and across the Middle East.
Elizabeth Palmer looks back on the grim anniversary and its aftermath. A year ago, all the young people in these photographs were alive. They'd come here to a music festival, and they danced throughout the night, never dreaming that shortly after dawn, they'd be kidnapped or killed. On October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists shot their way out of Gaza, through Israeli border posts, and then heavily armed, on foot and on motorcycles. They stormed the music festival.
It was mayhem. Over eight hours, the Hamas terrorists killed more than 360 people and kidnapped 40 more. Others launched a pitiless assault on kibbutzim, murdering and kidnapping children, even babies. Israel's response was immediate. It bombed Gaza, and then sent in ground troops. The mission? To destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages.
A year later, neither has been accomplished. In November, briefly, there was celebration. A seven-day ceasefire saw Palestinians who'd been jailed by Israel released, and Hamas let 180 Israeli hostages go. There was joy for their families, but it was a cruel blow for the families of hostages left behind.
Yair Moses' father, now 80, is one of them. So we just believe and feel that he's still alive, and hoping that he gets some connection with his capture, and they're treating him in a decent way. What are your thoughts on your government's negotiations for the hostage release? We feel they can do much, much more.
They need to do much, much more. 97 hostages are presumed to still be in Gaza, along with 2 million Palestinians trapped in a sliver of land that remains under Israeli bombardment night and day. The target is Hamas.
The collateral damage can be anyone else, no matter how small or innocent. All year, the world looked on in horror. It's time for this war to end, for the day after to begin. But the day after in Gaza looked exactly like the day before, and so has every day since. The Gaza Health Authority, run by Hamas, says more than 40,000 Palestinians have died, and Gaza lies in ruins. We're almost a year into this war now, and the prospect of a ceasefire still looks vanishingly remote. If and when we get there, there's going to be a massive rebuilding project. Look at the scale of the destruction, the cost and the difficulty unimaginable. But the immediate difficulty is the politics. We will win!
We will win! Night after night, thousands of Israelis vent their fury with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-right allies. For, as they see it, pursuing victory instead of the hostages' release. We see that our government are full of s***.
Excuse my language. And they do nothing. Our Prime Minister is a liar. They believe he's stalling on a deal with Hamas. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is in hiding, last seen, according to Israeli intelligence, in a tunnel days after the massacre.
He's stalling on a deal, too, vowing to fight on. As for Gaza's civilians, it's too dangerous for them to criticize Hamas openly, but you can imagine what they can't say. For a year, the hostages have been Israel's national crisis and international cause. We know some of them will never come back. There is still hope for others. But on the eve of the anniversary, that hope is dwindling.
Israel's government has led the country into a bigger, wider war, and a homecoming has never looked so remote. This plan is serviced by Credit Karma Credit Builder and requires a line of credit and savings account provided by Cross River Bank member FDIC. Hey, podcast listeners! Great news! All your favorite comedy podcasts can be enjoyed ad-free on Amazon Music. Listen to your favorite music, plus top podcasts, completely ad-free on Amazon Music, included with your Prime membership.
Dive into a world of laughs by downloading the Amazon Music app for free, or go to Amazon.com slash ad-free comedy, that's Amazon.com slash ad-free comedy, to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. 10 years ago, this song, Happy, was an international sensation for Pharrell Williams. But music is just one of the creative outlets for this most versatile of artists, as Kelefa Sané discovered. So you told me you do some of your best work in the rain. When it's raining. Not in the rain.
Not in the rain, but when it's raining. On a rainy day in Paris, Pharrell Williams was at the headquarters of Louis Vuitton, living the dream. This is your office?
Uh, more like a dream space. Last February, Williams was appointed the Men's Creative Director. When you got this offer to come here, was there any uncertainty that this is what you wanted to do? I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. How's your French? It's there.
I'm sure it's better than it was a couple years ago. Oh, I know way more words than I can speak, but I think that's an effect of, like, Duolingo. Shameless plug. He oversees a staff of 200 and has already launched four new collections. His most recent, at UNESCO, paid tribute to the variety of the human race. Right now, what you're seeing is, you see this color gradient.
We started from the darkest all the way to the lightest. What's the most satisfying part to you? Is it watching all these looks coming down the runway? You're going to hate this answer. All of it. All of it is satisfying. Come on, man.
It's a dream. For more than three decades, he's been helping to make some of pop music's biggest hits, from Hot in Here to Hollaback Girl, while helping to bridge the gap between pop culture and high fashion. He says the runway is just another way for him to show people who he is. I always want to evoke a sense of joy, because I feel like the world, there's a deficit of joy. But I imagine you do still have to pay attention to, are people buying these clothes that I made? Sure. That's where you start questioning the success, but like, man, you've got to enjoy it.
If you enjoy it, nine times out of ten, somebody else is going to enjoy it. Go ahead on the set. Hey, Pharrell.
Hey, how you doing, man? You know what would be cool is if we told my story with Lego pieces. Seriously? Now there's something new to enjoy. Piece by piece, an animated Lego movie about his life, directed by the award-winning documentarian, Morgan Neville.
And build it piece by piece. Last month, we caught up with Williams at the Toronto Film Festival. He says he still can't believe he got to make this film. I'm from a marginalized community where we often hear the word no all the time. You know, for whatever reason, we got a lot of yeses. This seems like one of your superpowers is getting people to say yes to things they might otherwise say no to. It wasn't that hard. It's just harder for people who look like me. When we tell it in Lego, now it's universal.
Replace black with LGBTQIA or Indian or Asian or short or plus size. Anything. You know, Lego is the great equalizer. I felt like everybody else was like, oh, that's an odd child. He's odd.
And that crushed my spirit. As a boy growing up in a Virginia Beach apartment complex, Williams, a self-described misfit, saw and heard the world differently than most people. I was seeing colors. It's called synesthesia. For me, sight and sound are connected, so they send ghost images to each other. It's a condition, but also at the same time it's a gift because I don't know how I would make music if I couldn't see it.
That's the way that I conceptualize it. With his childhood friend Chad Hugo, he formed a duo called the Neptunes. They were discovered by the music producer Teddy Riley, who saw them perform at a high school talent show. In 1992, around the time of his 19th birthday, Williams helped Riley write a hit single called Rump Shaker.
If it wasn't for Teddy Riley, I wouldn't be sitting here right now. Because I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where there was no music studio or music industry or anything like that. The Neptunes produced a string of hits, and then Williams branched out on his own, becoming a real pop star. His voice was everywhere.
Although Williams himself had mixed feelings about it. I had a song called Beautiful with Snoop, right? Girls heard me singing that. I heard Mickey Mouse.
I swear to you, when you just get a moment and you just listen, you'll never be able to unhear it again. But that's what I hear. Sexy Mickey Mouse. No, not sexy. Just Mickey Mouse.
Regular Mickey Mouse, just saying. It was wild for me. By the early 2000s, Williams says he felt lost. Why did you get lost? I had moved away from being a student, and things became formulaic that was troubling to my spirit. And I could no longer feel what I was doing.
He rebounded by being a bit more open to new ideas. Working with Daft Punk on Get Lucky. And Robin Thicke on Blurred Lines. And the producers of Despicable Me Too asked him to write a song for the soundtrack.
Something happy. I would have never written a song called Happy. It was commissioned for me to do. And on top of that, I didn't think I was going to have any more hit records. The universe was like, well, not only are you wrong about that, but I'm going to have three different commissions come from three different places and these are going to be the biggest records for you. It just humbled me because it was like, I couldn't be pompous.
I couldn't be arrogant. Naturally, Williams, now 51, created the theme song for the new movie. He played it for us in Paris. He's put a music studio in his office so he can make songs while simultaneously working on the next Louis Vuitton collection. But he says he never feels as if he's on the clock. People's livelihoods are depending on you coming up with some stuff. Does that pressure ever take some of the joy away from it? It's not a pressure. It's a privilege.
It's never a pressure? It's a privilege. You can't go wrong when your aim is to enjoy what you do. You can't go wrong. Okay, it's time to commit.
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That's Bombas.com slash WONDERY code WONDERY. I feed you, I clean you, I dress you, and what thanks do I get? Oh, you bought the wrong paper, Annie. I can't write on this paper, Annie.
Well, I'll get your stupid paper, but you just better start showing me a little more appreciation around here, Mr. Man. Her chilling role in the big screen version of Stephen King's Misery earned Kathy Bates an Oscar back in 1991. Now she's taking on an iconic role of a different sort. She talks with our man in Hollywood, Ben Mankiewicz. So, welcome to Jacobson Moore. This is the litigation floor where Matty sneaks in.
Jacobson Moore is not a real law firm. Here's my chair over there. But this is real work for Kathy Bates, the star of Matlock, a new CBS show with a surprise twist and a sly wink to the original Matlock, which of course starred Andy Griffith. I'm Matty, informally. Formerly Madeline Matlock.
Yes, Matlock, like the old TV show. We see there's this funny thing that happens when women age. We become damn near invisible. Nobody sees us coming.
I think it's going to resonate with a lot of people. Yeah, I think a lot of us feel invisible this day and age. Even you? Yep, I do.
I mean, they have trams with tourists who come here and sometimes I have to stand in front of the trams and just say, hey, hey, don't look at that stage over here. Look at me. Truth is, we've been looking at Kathy Bates for a long time. Like the other great actors of her generation, Bates does more than play characters. She absorbs them. In Richard Jewell, About Schmidt and Primary Colors, Fried Green Tomatoes.
He died. Even the Water Boy. In Misery, James Caan said being terrified of Kathy Bates came easily. I just wanted to be the best I could be and that's still who I am. And I love that.
That's how I recognize it because I have to dig deep so that it can look easy. Born in Memphis, Bates began pouring herself into her parts as soon as she took a theater class at Southern Methodist University. Seeing the actors that were there that first, my first freshman year, I had this moment in my solar plexus.
I'll do anything I have to do to be part of this. Her parents, Langdon, an engineer, and Bertie, a housewife, supported her. They paid her tuition and put off retirement. My father literally had a heart attack after two or three years of giving up. He had to spend a fortune that we didn't have sending me to Southern Methodist University and went to work when he was in his seventies.
They gave up so much. I was born into a world... She made her movie debut in 1971 at 22 in Taking Off. It was such a personal song I wrote in Backyard Swing. You wrote that song when you were 16? It took seven years to land her next movie and first speaking part in Straight Time starring Dustin Hoffman.
I just don't think it's good that he see you right now. By the early eighties, she was earning raves on Broadway playing a deeply depressed daughter in the play Night Mother. Bates got a Tony nomination, but the part in the Hollywood version went to Sissy Spacek. It hurt. What I thought was a shame is that we had spent two years working on those roles. How fascinating it would have been to see that on film. That was a great loss. Losing out on the part lit a fire under Bates.
She moved to Los Angeles, putting her in a position to land the role of a lifetime. But you're not good. You're just another lying old dirty birdie. And I don't think I'd better be around you for a while.
Annie Wilkes, who kidnaps and tortures her favorite novelist in Misery. Trust me. God's sake!
It's for the best. Annie, please! You gave her this humanity. You said Annie Wilkes is not a movie monster. She's a human being. She was always reaching for something she couldn't have. She wanted to be a hero.
Totally misguided, of course. But she wanted to nurture people, take care of people, be worshipped, and just became totally obsessed with this guy. And I gotta tell you, I have that side to me.
I certainly know what that feels like. She'd win the Oscar and remembers exactly how her mother reacted. When I won the Oscar for Misery, she said, I don't know what all the excitement about. You didn't discover the cure for cancer. I forgot to thank her that night. You know, you did thank her.
At the end of your speech, you thanked her. No, I did not. I did not. You go back and look at it. I didn't. We did go back and look. Then we showed her. My family, my friends, my mom at home, and my dad, who I hope is watching somewhere.
What do you think of them? Thank you. Why did I think I didn't thank her?
Oh, what a relief. Why does that mean so much to you? Because she should have had my life. When she died, I said, come into me. I wanted her spirit to come into me, even though we had so many difficulties. I wanted her spirit to come into me and enjoy everything I was enjoying because of what she'd given up. Wow.
Thank you so much for that. Now 76 years old, Kathy Bates says she's never been happier. She's a two-time cancer survivor and eagerly addresses her dramatic weight loss. It's only recently that I've solved that problem in my life and shed 100 pounds, and it's taken years to do it.
I did it with mindfulness on my own and with determination. I was able to go to Armani and buy a gorgeous dress for the Emmys and walk out in a size 10. So I'm just luxuriating in all of those moments.
But maybe I'm overthinking. And Matlock has brought Bates nothing but joy and has restored her faith in the business. After a movie she made, she won't say which one, reminded her of what's wrong with Hollywood. I think when you feel that kind of betrayal, it really devastates. So that's where the retirement talk came from, and then you're shooting this show that you're incredibly proud of, and you're like, okay, I'm not retiring. It can be great. It's fantastic. I think it's one of the most wonderful roles I've ever had to play. You can feel the joy on the set, and you can feel how we've all come together. So to be clear, not retiring? Not retiring.
I'd love to stay with the show as long as it runs, and I hope it runs a very long time. Excellent. That's Greenlight.com slash Wondery. Calling all shoppers, Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop, because you earn cash back at over 3,500 stores. Fashion, beauty, electronics, home essentials, travel, dining, concert tickets, and more. Your favorite stores like Ulta, Urban Outfitters, and Neiman Marcus pay Rakuten to send them shoppers, and Rakuten then passes on part of that payment to its members as cash back. Cash back is deposited directly into your PayPal account, or Rakuten can send you a check. You can even maximize your savings by stacking cash back on top of other deals, like store sales and coupons. You're already shopping at your favorite stores. Why not save while you're doing it?
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Your cash back really adds up. It's one of the latest worldwide hits from Sabrina Carpenter, cementing her status as one of music's biggest stars. She talks with Tracy Smith for the record. At just over five feet tall, Sabrina Carpenter is one of the giants of the pop world. Her latest album, Short and Sweet, debuted at number one, but that's not the half of it. Her first three singles all hit the top five of Billboard's Hot 100 in the same week.
The only other music act to do that was The Beatles back in 1964. It's a testament to her talent and the will to keep going no matter what. We met her at a rehearsal studio in rural Pennsylvania, not far from where she grew up. Does it feel like home here, like the air, the smells? The air's better, the water's better, the bread's better.
And it was a better place to practice her stage show in relative privacy, away from the paparazzi. Here we go. This is so cool. Oh my goodness.
Ta-da! Her new concert stage is a giant dollhouse. There's a piano, a fireplace, a bedroom, and a long curved staircase that she navigates and heals, of course. There's also an army of support people behind the scenes, but the show itself is all Sabrina. Beneath all the frilly outfits is a backbone of steel. What do you think is the biggest misconception about you?
How much time do we have? You think they're alive? Yeah, I think a misperception is that I don't write my music. I think a lot of people think because I have a producer and co-writers that I love that I'm sitting in the room on my phone not writing songs. In fact, she wrote or co-wrote all of her recent songs. At just 25, with her clever lyrics playing everywhere, and her image head to toe on the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine, Sabrina Carpenter seems to have just exploded on the music scene, but it took her more than a decade to get here. She's one of four girls born to Elizabeth and David Carpenter, and young Sabrina showed a love of music early on. They never told me to stop singing, and I think that psychologically really probably helped me. She started posting singing videos on YouTube, and then at 13, this happened, a part in the Disney Channel's Girl Meets World. Awards are a scam. A girl like me never had a chance.
Matthews never had a chance. She also kept making music, and by 2020 had already recorded four albums when she landed the lead role in Tina Fey's Broadway hit, Mean Girls. It would be a turning point in her career, but not like she'd hoped. So I rehearsed for about three months in New York, and we opened our first two nights, and then COVID humbled me, humbled me very quickly. I sent home and just was like, wow, I feel like I could do eight shows a week, you know, and I've been training for it, and now it's just like silence.
But the silence was a blessing. Hunkered down at home, Carpenter crafted her deeply personal album, Emails I Can't Send. And when it was released in 2022, it launched her to the next level of fame. Sabrina, how are you? She's learned to live her life under the celebrity microscope. For the past year, she's been dating Irish actor Barry Keogan, who you might recall made a splash in the Oscar-nominated Banshees of Inasheron.
You probably wouldn't ever want to, I don't know, fall in love with a boy like me, would you? Last spring, she cast Keogan as her no-good boyfriend in the music video for her hit Please, Please, Please. I understand wanting to keep her personal life personal, but then why put Barry in the Please, Please, Please video?
I am genuinely, like, a not even biased opinion. I was like, who's the greatest actor that I could find for this music video? And he was next to me in a chair, and he was so excited about it, and he liked the song, which is great. He's a fan of the song. He actually does like your music. He does like my music a lot, yeah.
Of course, he's not alone. Her shows now sell out night after night, something she got a taste of when she opened for Taylor Swift's blockbuster eras tour last year. It's a lot for any 25-year-old, and she credits her mother with helping her through it all. How much has your mom helped to keep you grounded? She's so selfless and has been that way her whole life with me and my sister, so yeah, I'm not going to cry. I love her so much.
Oh, it's sweet. What do you think is the best advice she ever gave you? You know, not to take everything so seriously all the time, so that's been really helpful.
And then also, I'm like still on like three sentences ago. My mom's such a positive person. I don't think she's ever made me feel like what I was doing was too much, ever.
Sabrina Carpenter is now eight shows into an international tour, and as her profile keeps growing, so does the pressure. There's always going to be stress. There's always going to be anxiety. There's always going to be drama, I think, but for me, like being able to laugh about it is really important, so I would say that. And also, caffeine, because without caffeine, I wouldn't be doing this interview right now. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning.
You can find out more about yourself by filling out a quick survey at Wondery.com slash survey. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a loved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her, and she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. He turns to a journalist for help.
That's me, Carmilla. Kill List is a true story of how one writer uncovers a global conspiracy, taking matters into his own hands to warn those whose lives are in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can binge all episodes of Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. At a time when we're debating where policing is going, we're going to tell you where the police came from. They wanted me to write about the New York City Police Department, but without using the words violence or corruption, which is effectively impossible. A story of how the largest and most influential police department in the country became one of the most violent and corrupt organizations in the world. It doesn't matter if you're a self-emancipated mob person or if you're free. They're just sending people back to the south, kidnapping them. When officers with the power to fight the danger become the danger.
I was terrified. I'm not going to talk to the police because they're the ones who are perpetrating this. Who am I going to talk to? From Wondery and Crooked Media, I'm Chinger Akumanika, and this is Empire City, the untold origin story of the NYPD. Follow Empire City on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
