British GQ - May 2022_downmagaz.net

MAY 2022 GQ 99

E J I O F O R G R E W U P in south London. His “It’s like choosing between parents, → made money in the U.S. and globally mother and father, who had moved to the UK in the 1960s to flee the Biafran war, sent isn’t it?” he says. “I have a lot of coat £4,200 made it possible for more diverse him to the private Dulwich College, which strong connections to both places sweater £3,100 films with Black stories to be made. is where he came across acting. The school’s so I always think it’s an addition jogging bottoms theatre soon became a sacred space. It was to your psychology and cultural “I will never forget someone in during a school production of Measure for perspective as opposed to tak- £1,900 the industry telling me that films Measure when Ejiofor realised that act- Dior with Black leads don’t sell interna- ing could be a space for telling the truth. (Ejiofor, in Igbo, means truthfulness.) ing something from one place and engaging tionally,” adds McQueen. “Chiwetel helped to “I remember all the sexual politics, the frustra- tions, the humiliations and all these dynamics somewhere else.” change that misconception.” at play in that play, and thinking as a teenager it’s incredible because these conversations In 2007, I was one of the people who queued “Historically, we’ve watched from a distance bubble under the surface but are not explicitly talked about, yet through the lens of theatre for hours to see Ewan McGregor and Ejiofor in stories set during the enslavement of Africans you can openly express them.” Othello at the Donmar Warehouse. I remember in the Americas,” Woodard tells me by email. When Ejiofor was 11, he and his family went to Nigeria for a family wedding. Ejiofor and his being stunned by Ejiofor’s performance, which “But Chiwetel’s patient unfolding of the free father, Arinze (Igbo for ‘Thank God’) were driv- ing along the motorway when their car collided was deservedly recognised with the Laurence man Solomon Northup’s slide into bondage with a truck. Ejiofor, left with broken bones and in a coma, was the only survivor. He bears a scar Olivier Award for Best Actor. The beauty of see- allows no such safety. Instead, we are forced to from the accident across his forehead. ing him on stage is there’s no hiding from his take that descent, experiencing the terror and I tell him that I, too, lost my father suddenly at a young age. “Grief is something you live intensity. His delivery of the line “Reputation, ultimately the ‘triumph’, with him.” with forever in different ways,” he says, looking straight into my eyes. “When you lose a parent reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my rep- Ejiofor is himself now enmeshed in the young, it has a profound effect on the way you view life. At an early age you realise the value of utation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, Marvel universe, returning in Doctor Strange some things and the preciousness of life itself, which is something most people acquire later and what remains is bestial”, has remained In The Multiverse Of Madness (in cinemas on 5 on. Certain fears or neuroses you definitely carry. Some are justified but you do lose a lot of with me right up until we meet. This time I am May). Once upon a time, Ejiofor – Shakespeare ideas about knowledge.” He pauses. slightly closer than row three. purist, dramatic force – might have seemed an “I don’t know if it was due to my father pass- ing away, but I have gaps in my knowledge that We talk about Shakespeare. There’s a line in odd fit for the MCU. But he was into comics as I have to acquire for myself as I go through the journey of life.” Hamlet – “Give every man thy ear but few thy a kid: “All the Alan Moore stuff, Watchmen and I talk about my father and he listens, careful voice” – that has been taken to mean “Listen to 2000AD, when it was always quite niche and to let me say my piece. With loss comes many side effects, which we compare at length. I won- many, speak to few.” I ask if he prefers to speak nerdy, so it’s been fascinating to see the expan- der what the loss has done to his confidence. “I think neurosis is a more creative space [than or listen. He pauses to consider the question. sion of that,” he says. confidence] but it can be paralysing,” he says. “Those little fears you pick up along the way “I like to listen, but only when I can’t speak,” he Despite also loving theatre as a kid, Ejiofor grow into such major branches of your person- ality, and they define the ways you approach smiles. “I love to listen in a form where some- never had any concept of combining the two, things. But such fears are just an illusion you’re creating. I have been lucky enough to break body’s explaining something and there’s no nor the world of interconnected, multi-plat- some of the fears I had – and when you do, you recognise your genuine path and personality in way of interacting. But if I can engage myself form mega-franchises and straight-to-stream- a richer, deeper way.” by interjecting then I sometimes can’t resist ing spin-offs. “The theatre was my universe Ejiofor’s mother, Obiajulu (Igbo for ‘my heart is at peace’) still lives in West Norwood, as do that. You don’t want to die with the music in when I fell in love with acting and even film many of his mates and school friends. “I have very solid ties to that side of town and love you – you’ve got to get it out.” and TV seemed so removed from where I was being around Selhurst Park – I just love the atmosphere there,” he says. Ejiofor loves foot- at,” he says. “I wouldn’t have even been able to ball. Crystal Palace has always been his team. Right now they are in good form, about which N E A R L Y A D E C A D E has passed since Ejiofor’s imagine the world as it is now.” he is delighted: “It’s exciting to be watching really good top flight football again.” seminal performance in 12 Years a Slave. As There is little that we know about Doctor His other footballing love is Nigeria (the important as critical acclaim and awards are Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Ejiofor Super Eagles). Ejiofor is proud of his African heritage, as much as he is British. When – the film won three Oscars – the long-term is resistant to spoilers). For many fans, the most England play Nigeria, who does he support? impact of that film continues to bear fruit. promising factor is the return of horror mae- “[Its] overall cultural significance was incred- stro Sam Raimi, whose original Spider-Man ibly powerful and continues to resonate,” he trilogy laid the groundwork for today’s comic says. Not only did it rejuvenate a conversation book franchises. around Black-centric cinema that had stag- “Sam is embedded in the lore and cre- nated in the 2010s, Ejiofor believes it led to a ation of this genre,” says Ejiofor. “As I think variety of films being greenlit that would never Scott [Derrickson, director of the first Doctor have been made. “There’s an argument that Strange] said, it was really exciting that Sam part of the success of 12 Years led to the deci- was coming in as a legendary figure in his own sion to push forward Black Panther,” he adds. right and it felt like such a strong match for Dr “If you look at the films made before and Strange’s own mercurial energy. There’s some- after 12 Years you’ll see the difference,” Steve thing very layered about the work that Sam McQueen, that film’s director and a friend of does. It’s deep but he always maintains this Ejiofor, tells me. “The film changed the indus- kind of mystery and slightly magical quality try and Chiwetel was a huge part of that. The that sits perfectly within this film.” fact that a film about slavery with a Black lead I ask him how he feels about the spoiler cul- and supporting actors had critical success and ture that swirls around every Marvel project. “It’s going to take sustained generational efforts to deprogramme ideas of racial heirarchy, but BLM has been very successful.” 100 GQ MAY 2022

MAY 2022 GQ 101

102 GQ MAY 2022

←← jacket £1,530 shirt £520 Brioni → jacket £1,990 Alexander McQueen rollneck £129 Johnstons of Elgin MAY 2022 GQ 103

jacket £1,678 rugby shirt £332 rollneck (underneath rugby shirt) £273 trousers £350 Dunhill Photographed with Google Pixel 104 GQ MAY 2022

He smiles. “It seems so perverse to me,” his “It is a shame that so much smile broadens. “I never understand why peo- of Britain’s colonial history and ple want to spoil a movie, or why you would want to engage with it, which will inevitably understanding of racial politics is spoil your entertainment of the film. It speaks brushed over in school curriculums.” to the impatience in us I think.” GROOMING, CARLOS FERRAZ. SET DESIGN, KING OWUSU. common culture that came as a result of slave for negativity,” he says. “These systems were Ejiofor is less interested in the rumour-mill trading and colonialism,” he says. “Nowadays, created in a completely different time to the and more excited to explore what the success it’s incredibly rare for a white author to write one we live in now. For example, we inherit of Marvel’s films can tell us about ourselves. about a Black person like Shakespeare did in these conditions of geography, place, time, “The dynamics in the fantasy world are also in Othello, in an empowered way. It is a shame history, and there are simply socio-political our world,” he says. “Fantasy is so rich at being that so much of Britain’s colonial history and reasons why we hold onto them but I don’t able to set a tone for those things that have a understanding of racial politics is brushed over think there is any real need for nation states subliminal engagement with our consciousness in school curriculums because people should be as a concept. and our lived experiences. I think we’re deeply allowed to come to their own conclusions based influenced by them, in terms of the hormones on an informed understanding of history or lit- “The way we’re educated often escalates that are released. Watching something that erature of one’s own country. That is a tragedy some of these feelings that have no real merit, we’re so engaged with bodes the question of for any community.” and only continue to create division in our how we then chase the feelings of thrill, excite- discourse. There was a time when these struc- ment and satisfaction in our own lives. Right We’re talking as we approach the second tures created extraordinary wealth for a lim- from the start, fantasy has played this dual anniversary of George Floyd’s death. Ejiofor ited number of individuals, and that’s why they game, which is why it’s so engaging.” has always been very vocal on the fight for were enforced as an idea. But we’re past that racial equality and in 2020 he was one of many time. Now we as people collectively need to There’s something Shakespearean in Karl actors to sign an open letter calling for an end embrace moving past the idea of nationality,” Mordo, Ejiofor’s character, a hero who turned to racism in the UK entertainment industry. says Ejiofor. He pauses for his last mouthful of against his friends at the end of the last I want to know if he thinks the industry has mushrooms on toast, but he’s on a roll. Doctor Strange for breaking what he saw as an changed. “I’m happy and excited by the nature immutable moral code. Ejiofor is fascinated of conversation, the opening up of conversa- “I was born in London in the late ’70s, and by people who are motivated by a sense that tion. I think we all have to allow each other to that on paper means x, y, and z, but the ques- they’re doing the right thing, even if that turns come to the conference of ideas, and to try to tion for me is does it need to continue to be out to be complicated. “Karl [Mordo] holds in make real changes in the world. And I think the something that we collectively engage with? himself all of these personal, slightly dark jeal- understanding of how we change in our inter- Is there a way of de-escalating concepts of ousies and complexities that he’s ashamed of, actions with each other is going to affect how nationalism and elevating the idea that we’re which are very natural human instincts, so that we change in our interactions with the planet all connected, we’re one human race, and these psychology is quite accessible.” at large,” he says. things” – nations, he means – “are like a foot- ball team. These things are not things to fight Ejiofor the philosopher is back. We discuss “Progress is going to take the time it takes. over. They’re not things to kill over. They’re not motivation, and whether humans are addicted We’re looking at 300 to 400 years of program- things to destroy other people and their lives to status. “We love to have something over other ming in the western world to basically despise over. They are simply inherited labels that people, we love to have a sense of elevation, and people of darker skin colour. I mean, it has been are ultimately completely meaningless.” He because we refuse to acknowledge our love of part of the DNA and the structuring of the west- never explicitly mentions the war in Ukraine, status it becomes much more insidious in our ern world, and the nature of what is required to although it’s clearly on his mind. day-to-day operations and the way we deal with deprogramme some of those energies is not an each other,” he says. “To the point where most overnight thing,” says Ejiofor. The waitress hovers to collect our plates and of the world’s conflicts are somehow generated I’m surprised to see hours have passed since by this need for status.” He knows that actors have influence, both we sat down. This is what it’s like to be around in their audiences and their access to the polit- Ejiofor; there is no real downtime with him. He’s Ejiofor’s next project is playing the lead in ical class. Ejiofor was awarded an Order of the always engaged, always questioning, always The Man Who Fell To Earth, Showtime’s new British Empire (OBE) in 2008 for services to trying to work out what he doesn’t know. 10-part TV version of David Bowie’s classic 1976 the arts (upgraded to a CBE in 2015) and poli- film. Ejiofor found filming the series challeng- tics is not something he shies away from. “It’s I ponder what he’d said about how when you ing, he says, although in a good way. (Given that going to take a sustained generational effort to lose someone you feel like you’re missing some his opening lines are “How did we get here? To deprogramme these ideas of racial hierarchy, secret they might have told you. “Part of the this place?” quickly followed by “I am an immi- but BLM has been a very successful campaign prolonged sense of grieving is holding on to grant, a refugee. To survive I had to be reborn”, to get the west to think in a certain way. And things you think you missed out on, whether it’s easy to see why.) “There was a lot to try to a lot of the west has tried to remove some of they are true or not,” Ejiofor says. “You can’t get achieve in terms of the arc of this character and that programming. But it’s a long and arduous to the bottom of that but, in a sense, that’s not his journey. To keep it grounded but to allow it process because certain people cling to it in a the point. The point is you want to keep the feel- to be heightened was tough because I am play- very fervent way.” ing alive of care and of love and connection.” ing a character that is evolving. It’s quite com- plicated because of the richness of the language These are the kind of things he thinks about: There’s still a lot he has to learn. But he has and the ideas from [creators] Alex Kurtzman the problems the world faces, whether one per- figured out one thing. “As you get older you find and Jenny Lumet.” son can ever make a difference, how he can use out the secret knowledge isn’t really secret. It’s his influence, as it is, to make positive change. just that you haven’t accessed it yet.” The first time Ejiofor read Othello, he says, “We are surrounded by negative outcomes he was struck by how Shakespeare was writ- because we have systems that ultimately push mike christensen is gq’s European ing about a Black general in the Venetian army. Lifestyle Editor. A man respected, blessed with authority, dyna- mism and romance, yet who ends up being undermined by a white man. “Shakespeare was writing free of the over-politicisation of race, the introduction of racial hierarchy and the MAY 2022 GQ 105

These nine trainers – and one hyped-up clog – embody the bold spirit of creativity and collaboration that defines fashion right now. PHOTOGRAPHS BY BOBBY DOHERT Y SET DESIGN BY ANDREA STANLEY 106 GQ MAY 2022

LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S X NIKE AIR FORCE 1 BY VIRGIL ABLOH Curious about how monumental this Virgil Air Force 1s were auctioned off for an earth- yellow concoction – are perhaps even Abloh-engineered link-up between Louis shattering £20 million in total, setting a more desirable than the now historic Vuitton Men’s and Nike actually is? Sotheby’s new sales record for trainer and fashion OGs, so expect to move some serious New York has an answer: in January, 200 auctions in the process. The latest colourways – mountains to get your mitts on a pair limited-edition pairs of LV-embossed an icy white and a chromed-out black-blue-and- (prices upon request). —YA N G -Y I G O H

ADIDAS X GUCCI GAZELLE When Gucci unveiled its much- heralded partnership with Adidas on the runway in February, there were plenty of fanciful Alessandro Michele flourishes on display. Matching mohair hats and sweatsuits. Flowing silk tracksuit gowns. High-heel three-striped boots. But the biggest showstopper of them all might also have been the simplest: Adidas’s iconic Gazelle (£575), doused entirely – from the canvas uppers to the gum midsoles – in Gucci’s righteous monogram print. —Y. G . 108 GQ MAY 2022

BALENCIAGA DEFENDER When you’re on a streak as blazing hot as Demna Gvasalia, you need a pair of kicks bold and freaky enough to keep up with you. Enter the Balenciaga Defender (£830): a techy, early-noughties- ish runner with monster-truck- ready treads bolted to its base. The supersized results feel a little Mad Max, sure, but the calming monochrome tones park them firmly in the realm of wearability. —Y. G .

COMME DES GARÇONS SHIRT X ASICS GEL-LYTE V For its fourth collaboration with fellow Japanese titan Asics, Comme des Garçons zeroed in on the Gel-Lyte V (£280) – a legend among performance runners and streetwear kids alike since its 1993 debut. In designer Rei Kawakubo’s capable hands, it’s been face-lifted to a wild new dimension, plastered with stark leopard spots to sync with the black-and-white motif that dominated CdG Shirt’s spring- summer ’22 collection. —Y. G .

BOTTEGA VENETA RIPPLE You can stroll barefoot through freshly cut grass, or you can just wear the lawn on your feet instead. Bottega Veneta’s latest viral footwear creations – from Daniel Lee’s final year for the house before his departure last November – are skate-inflected slip-ons fashioned from a velvety chenille corduroy planted atop space-age ridged soles (£650). —Y. G . MAY 2022 GQ 111

NIKE AIR JORDAN 4 MILITARY BLACK Among classic Air Jordans, the Jordan 4, designed by Tinker Hatfield and originally released in 1989, has a particularly fervent cult following among sneakerheads. Over the years, it’s been released in dozens of colourways and collaborative editions, but it’s never been available in a steely white- and-black – until now (price upon request). —SAMUEL HINE 112 GQ MAY 2022

GIVENCHY TK-360 Givenchy creative director Matthew M Williams calls the new TK-360 sneaker (around £830) his “dream shoe.” Williams’s dream is a radically original one, even for a designer known for exploring cutting- edge technology in his garments. The entire football-boot-esque creation flows like one seamless knit, down to the fully integrated sole. What will trainers look like in the future? Probably like this. — S . H .

NIKE PEGASUS TURBO NEXT NATURE Nike was founded 51 years ago as a running brand, and the latest Pegasus trainer (price upon request), out this year, represents the zenith of those decades of aesthetic and material innovation. Made with over 50 per cent recycled material, it’s one of the Swoosh’s most sustainable runners yet. It’s also one of the fastest, weighing in at a feathery 272g and sporting an elite Zoom X foam midsole, which is the most energy-responsive sole Nike makes. — S . H .

DIOR X BIRKENSTOCK TOKIO MULE If anything encapsulates the current menswear moment, it’s that clogs and mules can harness as much hype as trainers. And the Dior x Birkenstock Tokio Mule (£1,450) is the most hotly anticipated clog in fashion history. Kim Jones dedicated the autumn- winter 2022 Dior Men’s collection to Christian Dior himself, who was an avid horticulturist. This Birkenstock – embroidered with a bouquet of the flowers that inspired Dior throughout his life – is Jones’s version of the French couturier’s gardening shoe. — S . H . MAY 2022 GQ 115

116 GQ MAY 2022

Can Anyone Stop George Russell? GEORGE RUSSELL IS FORMULA 1’S HEIR APPARENT. HANDPICKED TO JOIN MERCEDES F1, HE’S RACING ALONGSIDE SEVEN-TIME WORLD CHAMPION LEWIS HAMILTON AS PART OF THE MOST DOMINANT TEAM IN MOTORSPORT HISTORY. NOW HE NEEDS TO PROVE HE’S WORTHY OF THE HYPE. WORDS BY SAM WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS BY MADS PERCH STYLED BY ANGELO MITAKOS MAY 2022 GQ 117

←← E O R G E R U S S E L L W A S G O I N G 200mph in a car that wasn’t teammate Valterri Bottas at the first corner. “There was his, in a seat that didn’t fit him. It was November 2020, one point I thought to myself… ‘I’m gonna win this,’” he OPENING PAGE under floodlights in the Bahraini desert. Russell – a tells me. But disaster struck. On lap 63 the team put the 22-year-old Formula 1 driver with no wins to his name – wrong tyres on his car, meaning he had to re-pit. This put jacket £310 was playing substitute for Lewis Hamilton. The seven-time him down to fifth. Then, on lap 78, a puncture. He rejoined Tommy Hilfiger world champion had caught COVID-19. Russell had been the race in 14th. Two devastating blows that were entirely Collection in the toilet – during a late-night barbecue with his then out of his control. He fought back, but ninth was all he t-shirt £75 team, Williams F1 – when Mercedes boss Toto Wolff deliv- could muster. No podium, no glory, no coming of age story Sunspel ered the news. “I was thinking, ‘Why is Toto calling me at – just a measly few points. “I’m absolutely gutted,” he told two in the morning?’” the team, “but I’ve fucking loved it… I hope we’ll get this → opportunity again.” hoodie £130 But with just a day to go before the race weekend began, gilet £420 Mercedes had no time to make changes to Hamilton’s car. At If Bahrain was an audition, Russell got the role. He Tommy Hilfiger 6ft 2in, Russell is six inches taller than Hamilton; he had also greets me with a fist bump more than a year later – a Collection gained 8kg in muscle since his last seat fitting at Mercedes. Mercedes driver for real. We’re in Barcelona, a pristine trousers £650 It meant the car’s seat belts dug into his body. “My arse was February day at pre-season testing, on the plush rooftop Tod’s bigger than the chassis allowed,” he tells me. Meanwhile, his of the team’s motorhome. It’s a round-the-world base for a feet, jammed into shoes too small, were compacted into the travelling family that loves going fast. Russell, having just car’s carbon fibre monocoque. “When you’re squeezing in, turned 24, is reclined – tanned, arm outstretched, squinting you want to be comfortable,” he says. “You want to feel like in the sun. But he isn’t relaxed. you’re home.” Home it was not. But Russell delivered, miss- ing pole position by 20 milliseconds – a brutal reminder that “I’ve got this spot,” he complains, leaning forward and Formula 1 revolves around the finest of margins. There are pointing at his nose. “We need to Photoshop that out. just 20 drivers on the starting grid. More people have been in It’s horrendous.” space than won a Grand Prix, and only the top ten finishers in every race receive championship points. Those points are Before Russell has even completed his first racing lap critical, rewarding teams with funding and prestige depend- for Mercedes, he’s being touted as the team’s future – a suc- ing on their finishing position at the end of every season. cessor to Hamilton, a driver who has rewritten the sport’s There’s a video of Russell, in tears, at the 2021 Hungarian rule book. But with the seven-time champ approaching 40 Grand Prix. He’d just scored his first-ever point for Williams, – ancient in F1 terms – the team needs its next leading man, the typically back-of-the-grid team he raced with for three a driver capable of continuing a record winning streak of seasons from 2019. It meant everything to him. eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships. Russell is calm, despite pressure and increasing fame. “I was having a When the Bahrain Grand Prix arrived, Russell was no haircut and I had a couple of people taking a photo of me,” longer an underdog. He was filling in for the greatest ever; he laughs. “Like, there is a logistical side of this… where am leading legendary champions like Fernando Alonso and I going to get a haircut now?” Sebastian Vettel off the start line; overtaking temporary For Russell, racing used to just be a throwaway thing. The first time he drove a go-kart, there was no lightning strike, no heavenly calling. “You don’t think ‘this is your life’, you just think ‘this is fun’,” he says. Russell grew up on a race track – his older brother, Benjy, had his own success- ful career in motorsport. It wasn’t until the age of 12 that racing became Russell’s everything. His dad Steve worked every hour in agriculture to fund his obscene dream (“£50K a year if you want to compete, £200K if you want to win” is his estimate for the yearly costs for junior drivers nowa- days). On Friday nights they’d all pack up and drive wher- ever racing called them. His dad was his engineer and his mum would take notes. “Every single test day, every sin- gle race, every single heat, she’d write everything down,” Russell says. “The tyres I was on, the tyre pressures, the sprocket, the engine, the carburettor settings, the axle, the spacers on the front, the width of the tyres at the rear.” Russell, in childish naivety, wasn’t always aware of the price of this devotion. “As a kid you don’t think that it costs money. You just think, ‘Oh, we’re going racing’.” It wasn’t sustainable. At 16, his father told him he had to find his own sponsorship. “If not,” his dad added, “you won’t be racing in two years.” So he dropped Toto Wolff an email and asked to meet. Says Wolff: “Russell came to our headquar- ters in Brackley [eight miles from Silverstone] in a suit and tie, with a PowerPoint presentation on why he was someone we should consider for our junior programme.” 118 GQ MAY 2022

MAY 2022 GQ 119

“I was having a haircut and I had a couple of people taking a photo of me. Like, there is a logistical side to this: where am I going to get a haircut now?” 120 GQ MAY 2022

The pressure to deliver on and off the track has never At 6ft 5in and with a voice that would make a basso pro- ←← lifted. “If you have all of this momentum and a lot of people fundo envious, 50-year-old Wolff is an imposing force. Since talking about you, but then you don’t immediately deliver, he became team principal of Mercedes in 2013, he’s led OPPOSITE PAGE it’s very easy for that little glimmer to be extinguished very them to an unrivalled run of 111 victories in 159 Grand Prix. quickly,” F1 presenter Will Buxton tells me. “But George had His approach is just as direct and honest as his drivers’. jacket £900 this amazing fortnight where he jumped into the Formula “When you deal with me, you’re never gonna get any bull- Paul Smith Renault EuroCup, took pole and won a race – in a car and a shit. I’m never gonna lie to you,” he tells me. “Sometimes championship he wasn’t used to. Then he went into the F4 it can be a bit hurtful, but my wife always said that I’m the shirt £80 season finale: pole, race win, won the championship. Then most hurtful to the people I love the most, because I want Tommy Hilfiger he went and tested a whole load of cars in the final stage of them to do the best.” the Autosport Young Driver awards. He was the youngest Collection driver ever to have been even considered for that award and With 20 drivers, the competition in Formula 1 is undeni- the youngest driver ever to win it.” ably fierce. But the fiercest of all often comes within – from ↑ your teammate. Driver duos are sensitive things, and when jacket £580 Getting to F1 has not been quick, despite being part of a team has a car capable of winning races – and by exten- a junior programme for one of the sport’s most decorated sion championships – tensions can flare. t-shirt £60 teams. And even when Russell arrived, he didn’t have Tommy Hilfiger much opportunity for action. At Williams, it’d be a chal- It happened at Mercedes in 2016, between Lewis lenge to overtake another car, let alone compete for wins. Hamilton and then-teammate (and that year’s eventual Collection None of which stopped him from earning the nickname Mr world champion) Nico Rosberg. It was Wolff ’s first real trousers £195 Saturday for his qualifying performances. At 2021’s bizarre test as a team leader – “I was learning on the job” – and Belgian Grand Prix – cut short due to bad weather – he where he had the first real chance to put his tough love Belstaff even bagged a podium spot ahead of Hamilton, who was into championship-defining action with a harsh reminder in a far superior car. “He is probably the most complete to his drivers: their on-track antics affected everyone at young driver I have ever seen or worked with,” says Gwen Mercedes and he wouldn’t hesitate to pull them out of the Lagrue, Mercedes’ driver development adviser. “He has an car if it continued. By comparison, Rosberg’s replacement, extraordinary capacity to analyse, understand and adapt Valtteri Bottas, had been the reliable deputy at Mercedes himself into the working environment. He’s naturally curi- ous, and when you are pairing all that to his intelligence, he’s reached a certain level of perfection in many areas.” As the 2022 season gets underway, the question remains whether he can perform at the front of the pack. “Well, I’ve been racing for 17 years, and 14 of those I was at the front,” Russell reminds me, confidently. “I think as soon as I’ve got a race or two under my belt, I’ll be back to normal.” Russell is obsessed with the minutiae and not bothered about the big extravagances. He explains he’s “too tight” for champagne and private yachts. When we speak in mid-Jan- uary, during a pre-season fitness camp in Lanzarote, he’s busy worrying about eggs. “More oil, less oil. More this, more that,” he says, sincerely, explaining the trickiness of maintaining a consistent diet when you’re in 20 countries in 23 weeks. Fitness is unbelievably demanding – an aver- age driver’s heart beats at 160 to 180bpm for the entire 90-minute race – and maintaining that level of fitness across an entire season is nigh-on impossible. This will be by far the most difficult year of his life. Although his conversation has a unique style – it comes across as guarded, even blunt – Wolff describes it as a pre- cision that can “hide the racing driver at first sight.” Russell only really relaxes in his environment, gesturing at the cars and grandstands around him in Barcelona. One person in the garage tells me drivers all become like this to some degree – they’re eventually as much a part of the car as its engine. Russell even had communication training with the RAF, to learn to be direct, efficient. It comes in handy at 180mph. He’s happy with his choice to forgo a life off the track – he left school at 14, has never been to a live concert and proclaims his favourite film to be Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen – because it’s made him a better racer. “There are so many people in life who want to be good at every- thing,” he says. “And that’s just not realistic, because you end up being average at everything.” “Drivers are not soft,” says Wolff. “I haven’t met one who was Mr Nice Guy. But I’ve met very determined and focused people who were very successful, and who [could] still be a nice person.” MAY 2022 GQ 121

“Lewis and I have a good were lucky to walk away. The stewards deemed no driver relationship. But I’m in at fault – but Russell didn’t see it that way, slapping Bottas’ F1 because I want to be helmet and calling him a ‘fucking prick’ before storming world champion and if I’m off the track. “I made myself look a bit of a dick,” he admits. going to be world champion, “If I look back on how I handled that, I’d probably laugh at I’ve got to beat everyone – myself and say ‘what were you doing?’ I just looked like an Lewis included.” idiot, like I’d lost the plot. And to be honest, for a second, I probably did lose the plot.” → until his departure at the end of last season, guaranteeing GROOMING, PAUL DONOVAN. jacket £310 second-place points but never quite managing to bring the Going into the season, Wolff is prepared for any eventu- trousers £220 race-day performance to take his own championship title. ality between his two drivers. “You can’t tell a man who has Tommy Hilfiger been in a go-kart from the age of six, having been sent out Collection The arrival of Russell is on course to shake that dynamic in the rain alone, that ‘now you’re a part of the team, you t-shirt £75 again – something made even more complex by Hamilton’s need to drive for the team’,” he says. “It’s ingrained in them Sunspel devastating disappointment at the end of last season, in to be alone out there – to be opportunistic.” shoes £375 which he lost to Max Verstappen. Both men went into the Jimmy Choo final Abu Dhabi GP level on points, but an immensely con- In Mercedes’ garage in Barcelona, Russell prepares to go socks £13 tentious call from race control while the race was under out for his first test run of the 2022 season. A brand-new Falke safety car saw Verstappen make a last-lap pass to take the helmet, an all-new steering wheel, a totally new car with title. Race director Michael Masi was removed from his role all-new rules designed for closer on-track racing. The team a few months later. “It just truly was not fair, it was reckless scurries around the car like ants, engineers with specific and, ultimately, not within the regulations,” says Russell. jobs at the front and rear. The sound of bolts being tight- ened and parts of the car being adjusted is constant back- Despite Mercedes winning its eighth Constructors’ ground noise. Every single person here is critical to turning Championship last year, it took a while for Wolff to process it into a race-winner. For Russell, that means using all the the season’s controversial end. “Nothing’s going to bring patience and focus he has to limit his challengers. “In an that trophy back, but in a way you can be a winner with- ideal world, we just want to be battling one another,” he out necessarily having won on paper. And I love this sport says of himself and Hamilton. “We don’t want to be battling because it’s so honest – the stopwatch never lies. It did in with the Red Bulls and the Ferraris. So we need to work the last race, but I will find my love again with the sport.” together and push each other to be able to achieve that.” Hamilton recently said he was more “dangerous” than That means he might – just might – be happy to play ever, and there’s the risk that Russell could be collateral. second fiddle for now. “I want to win... obviously. I want “He will want to destroy everyone and show that ‘I am to win today. But you give me the choice of winning today Lewis Hamilton, the greatest there has ever been,’” Buxton and having an average future, or learning today and then predicts. “But then, if George comes in and plays the def- 10 years of success – it’s an easy choice.” erential No. 2, and Lewis stays around for the next three seasons, that’s three seasons of George being No. 2. He’s not The garage is sacred and secret. No phones, no photos. there to be a No. 2. It is such a complex, complicated and One engineer is cutting millimetres of foam to pad out potentially catastrophic situation the team finds itself in.” Russell’s seat with just enough for his ribcage. He’ll be sub- jected to 6Gs at high speed corners, and the fit must be It’s one that’s been further complicated by Mercedes’ perfect. The car itself is extraordinarily loud: watch a race difficult start to the 2022 season, marred by a car that’s on TV, at full volume – now double it. You’re still not close nowhere near as fast as those made by Red Bull and Ferrari. to being sat in the garage for real. It’s like being sat next For now, Wolff describes Hamilton and Russell as “lions to a T-Rex with a distortion pedal shoved down its throat. getting to know each other.” Two completely contrasting Russell gives the throttle a nudge and the room jolts from generations that accept their roles – master and successor. the torque. Tyres squeal. Fumes clog my nose and throat. The importance for Wolff is that they don’t compromise the It’s intoxicating. He pulls a couple of burnouts down the pit team’s success again. Part of this will also mean contending straight. This is racing. with racing against Verstappen. “I think Max’s approach – and this is George’s phrase since he was in go-karting – is A few laps and he’s back in and hoisting himself out of ‘win it or bin it’,” says Wolff. “George approaches it more the cockpit. The ants scuttle back to work – it’s a never-end- from an intellectual standpoint, while having all the skills.” ing push for performance, with every test, race and season pivotal to progress. “People ask me ‘what’s your goal this Russell insists he isn’t interested in any rivalry. “The fact year?’ and I never say ‘to be world champion’. That’s obvi- is, Lewis and I have a good relationship,” he says. “They’ll ous,” he says. “How are you going to be world champion? twist my words slightly to blurb a headline, such as me try- You’ve got to work on the process.” ing to take Lewis’ crown away or whatever. But I don’t feel like that. I’m in F1 because I want to be world champion, If Russell can do what he’s been hired to – be it in the that’s obvious. And if I’m going to be world champion, I’ve first race or even the first season – he’ll enter a select group got to beat everyone – Lewis included.” of British F1 icons: Hamilton, Button, Hill, Mansell, Clark, Stewart and Moss. But Russell isn’t taking his eye off the Tests of character come whether you want them or not, minutiae. He’s taking it corner by corner, gear shift by gear and Russell’s precise and intelligent race craft has cracked shift. For all the early hype and accolades, he has every- before. In 2021, he crashed into Bottas at 200mph, sending thing still to prove before the season’s start. shreds of carbon fibre and clods of glass flying. Both drivers “I’m an F1 driver who’s only scored 20 points in his career from 60 races,” he says. “Just because I’ve signed with statistically the greatest team of all time, today that doesn’t mean anything. I’m going up against the greatest driver of all time – I need to show and prove to people that they signed me for a reason.” sam white is a culture writer based in London. 122 GQ MAY 2022

MAY 2022 GQ 123

Born as a primetime satire of Middle America, The Simpsons has become something else: the inspiration for all kinds of high art, from the runways of Balenciaga to the canvases of KAWS. GQ goes inside the minds of the show’s creators – and gets a rare interview with Matt Groening – to explore our most influential sitcom’s second life. BY M.H. MILLER ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID SILVERMAN



the team behind The Simpsons produced a video by a luxury fashion house – and cost £200. Even Lichtenstein broke down the barriers for the French luxury fashion house Balenciaga for a culture that’s obsessed with recycling between high and low art, helping make the that debuted in October at Paris Fashion Week. intellectual property – we’ve seen no fewer than mundane a meaningful source of inspiration (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) It eight live-action movies starring Spider-Man in – a vision The Simpsons extended beyond featured the show’s characters walking a run- the past 20 years – The Simpsons is ubiquitous. the 20th century. The show debuted just as way in Balenciaga designs, and was, depending In a bizarrely sincere music video for the Bad the Berlin Wall was coming down, and today, on your world view, what you might call a long Bunny single “Te Deseo Lo Mejor,” the pop star, 33 years later, it’s still broadcast in the UK on commercial for the brand or a short episode of animated in the classic Simpsons style, reunites Sky (before being shown later on Channel 4). the show. David Silverman, a veteran Simpsons Homer and Marge after an argument. Artists Die-hard fans tend to agree that The Simpsons’ producer and animator who directed the short, mine the show for material, as its imagery, like first decade was its classic era, and yet there is describes it as “one of the hardest things I ever Mickey Mouse and the McDonald’s arches, has still no limit to the show’s vast influence. did.” Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s artistic become a stand-in for American materialism. director and, like a lot of 40-somethings, a fan It’s now a cliché to observe that the The of The Simpsons since childhood, gave note after In 2019, the designer NIGO sold a painting by Simpsons accurately predicted various note, trying to strike the right balance between the artist known as KAWS that depicts, rather moments in 21st-century history, among caricature and sincere presentation of his cloth- faithfully, the cover of a 1998 album performed them the Greek debt crisis, the minting of a ing. “Simpsons characters,” Silverman says, are by the show’s characters: the extended cast of trillion-dollar bill (later contemplated during “quite different from human proportions, so in The Simpsons posed like the cover of the Beatles’ the Obama administration to solve the prob- some respects we took great liberties. Cheating, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (The CD lem of the debt ceiling), and, in what could we call it.” It took a year’s worth of work and was priced at £10; the KAWS painting went for have been a Faustian bargain to stay on the in the end gave the people something they £10.5 million at Sotheby’s.) And the conceptual air for another 20 seasons, a joke from season didn’t know they needed: an animated Homer artist Tom Sachs made a series of paintings of 11 about a Donald Trump presidency destroy- Simpson – a loveable oaf who once gained Krusty the Clown, the cynical, burnt-out host ing the U.S. economy. The Simpsons at its best four stones to qualify for disability so he could of Bart and Lisa’s favourite TV show, some understood where the world was headed. work from home – posing in a red Balenciaga featuring the hucksterish Krusty Brand Seal There’s a season-seven episode that I think puffer jacket, a more recent iteration of which of Approval slogan that graces all the dubious about all the time, which opens with a bear costs £2,150. products to which the clown lends his name wandering into Springfield. The townsfolk (guns, pregnancy tests, crowd-control barriers, storm Mayor Quimby’s office, demanding pro- That the fashion industry now looks to The etc): “It’s not just good. It’s good enough!,” which tection, so he institutes a “bear patrol,” which Simpsons for inspiration is odd for a group of America might as well adopt as its motto. uselessly monitors the town with armoured characters who have, for the most part, never trucks and military jets. When the citizens changed outfits. But Bart – with his skateboard We’re now at a point in history when gener- discover that the mayor had to raise taxes to and his malleable mind – is a proto-hypebeast ations of people have scarcely known a world pay for this service, they return to his office, if ever there was one. And in a recent episode without The Simpsons. “The first 10 seasons chanting, “Down with taxes.” Quimby asks an parodying contemporary fashion, The Weeknd were a defining cultural phenomenon,” Sachs aide, “Are these morons getting dumber or just voiced the owner of a white-hot new streetwear tells me. “Why was it so important? It was main- louder?” The aide checks his clipboard and company, Slipreme. Adidas has a Simpsons stream and subversive at the same time. It grew responds, “Dumber, sir.” trainer line, and Nike has made a shoe with a out of punk culture and represented a popular Marge Simpson colourway (featuring swathes mistrust of government and police, and the cor- All sitcoms are topical to a degree. Their of blue, like her hair, and light green, like her porations who control them. Because it was ani- aim has always been to provide a window into dress), which fetches an ungodly average price mated, it got away with murder. It could say and how a family or friend group lives at a given of £650 on the resale market. show things that were too violent, outrageous, moment in time. But The Simpsons went far or anarchistic for broadcast television. And it beyond this arrangement. The series seemed From the outset, the show’s creators always happened every week for a decade.” to do nothing less than create the world we understood its business cachet. In the ’90s, The now live in.  Simpsons flogged chocolate bars and plastic key At the height of the show’s popularity, in rings – and mocked itself for its craven commer- 1990, 28 million people tuned in every Sunday W H A T I S I T A B O U T this show – a cartoon, now cialism. As one Springfieldian says after encoun- night. Sachs recalls a moment when he real- entering early middle age, from the same U.S. tering the latest example of the Simpson family ised just how influential the show had become, network – Fox – that gave us such world-historic selling out (an ad for a record, The Simpsons Go even in the loftiest realms. One night in 1994, turds as The Chevy Chase Show, Alien Autopsy, Calypso!), “Man, this thing’s really getting out he was in the audience at the National Arts and Temptation Island – that lingers in the poi- of hand.” Three decades later, it’s a testament to Club, housed in a Victorian Gothic Manhattan soned well of our shared consciousness? I can’t the show’s longevity, not to mention American mansion opposite Gramercy Park in New York, remember the number of my bank account, but progress, that the Simpsons still appear on key when Roy Lichtenstein, the 20th-century I can recall various scenes from the first 12 sea- rings, only now they’re made out of calfskin – painter known for his appropriations of comic sons of The Simpsons with a clarity that would book imagery, was awarded the institution’s suggest they were my own cherished mem- medal of honour. It was a Sunday night, and ories. There’s a joke among television writers what did Lichtenstein do in his acceptance – especially those working on animated shows speech? He thanked everyone for opting to miss – that “The Simpsons already did it,” which has a new episode of The Simpsons to support him. “The first 10 seasons were a defining cultural phenomenon. And because it was animated, it got away with murder.” —TOM SACHS 126 GQ MAY 2022

Animator David Silverman’s preliminary drawing of Marge in a golden ballgown from Balenciaga’s spring-summer 2020 collection. ILLUSTRATION: MAT T GROENING/ THE SIMPSONS™ AND ©2022 20TH TELEVISION. become shorthand for the futility of an origi- office, he hung a comic strip from Groening’s a possibility that Simon, the pessimist among nal thought in a post-Homer world. In its first syndicated Life in Hell. It was called “The Los the show’s creators, had a philosophy of “13 and decade, The Simpsons lampooned nearly every Angeles Way of Death.” (The methods were, in out”: 13 episodes and then on to the next thing. facet of the end of the 20th century and the hor- order: gun, car, drugs, sea, air, police, war, fail- It was one of the animators – Silverman, whom rors it wrought, in jokes that seem disturbingly ure, and success.) Brooks called a meeting with Groening now describes as “the soul” of The prescient today: from the misery of corporate Groening, who, unwilling to part with Life in Simpsons’ animation team – who met Brooks at branding (“We can’t afford to shop at any store Hell, created The Simpsons right there in the a Christmas party and convinced him the show that has a philosophy,” says Marge) to the folly reception area, using his own family as models. needed to be its own series. “He got drunk,” of the justice system (another of Marge’s droll He didn’t even change their names except for Brooks says, “pinned me against the wall, and observations: “You know, the courts might not his own – the oldest boy on the show went from told me passionately how much he felt that we work any more, but as long as everybody is vid- Matt to Bart, “which I thought was a funny had a chance to be a half-hour show, how there eotaping everyone else, justice will be done”). name,” he tells me.  hadn’t been one in 25 years, and how important Even the eventual horrors of the Fox conglom- it would be for animation.” The last primetime erate were pinpointed by The Simpsons, in a Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie animated sitcom to run for more than three joke dating from when [right-wing chat show began life in the waning days of Ronald seasons was The Flintstones, which was first host] Tucker Carlson was writing columns for Reagan’s presidency as short segments on The screened in 1960. “He was two inches away from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “The network Tracey Ullman Show, a series that never quite my face and you saw the caring,” Brooks con- slogan is true: watch Fox and be damned for found an audience itself. They were spun off tinues. “It was a key moment for me. It put this all eternity!” into their own show in December 1989, and kind of religious thing in it.” (“I might have got things moved quickly from there. “Do you a little carried away,” says Silverman, adding, “America has certainly turned into remember the movie Tootsie?” Brooks says. “I’m glad I spoke up.”) Springfield,” says Matt Selman, who is, along “There was a moment when she became a with Al Jean, the current showrunner. “I’m celebrity, and they show this montage of mag- At the time of the 1989–1990 season, the most gonna generously say: good people are easily azine covers? That actually happened to us. popular primetime network television shows in misled. Terrifyingly easily misled. That’s always There was a magazine called Satellite Times, the U.S., according to the Nielsen ratings, were been in the DNA of the show, but now it’s in the and they put us on the cover. And I put that Roseanne, The Cosby Show, and Cheers. The first DNA of America. It was a show about American on my wall. Because we were actually on the season of The Simpsons was popular enough to groupthink, and how Americans are tricked – cover of something! And the next minute, the make the top 30 – one of the only reasons Fox by advertising, by corporations, by religion, by entire wall was covered. And then the show survived its early days. The show’s balance of all these other institutions that don’t have the became whatever it was and is. There’s a sincerity and satire resonated with an audience best interests of people at heart.” moment that can happen to you when you’re whose lives had been shaped by two disparate pulling at something and it goes past you, and threads: nearly four decades of popular network It’s hard to imagine just how unexpected the you’re just trying to keep up.”  TV and the ever-present fear of nuclear holo- show’s resonance initially was for its creators. caust. That Homer works at a nuclear power “It has to be timing, right?” a slightly flum- Fox was then a new network, trying to gain plant where the pipes drip radioactive waste moxed James L. Brooks, a co-developer, along traction, and Brooks was a producer with clout, and the whole place teeters on the brink of with Matt Groening and the late Sam Simon, so the suits let the creators do whatever they a Chernobyl-like meltdown keeps him tells me by phone. Brooks was already a legend wanted – the kind of perfect storm that allowed grimly topical. before The Simpsons, having swept the Oscars The Simpsons to become so popular. During with his 1983 film Terms of Endearment. (“The the creation of the first season, the idea that the Even very good shows from this time must director of some of the best movies ever,” show would continue for decades and become be defended for being of their era, but an early Groening describes Brooks to me.) In Brooks’s a part of the pop-culture ether was so remote Simpsons episode can still feel like a comedy MAY 2022 GQ 127

about the present, or a message from a possible Bart: I’ll tell you the truth, Dad. I wasn’t good at it – possibly the gold standard of Simpsons com- future. “Animation is a real evergreen medium,” right away, so I quit. I hope you’re not mad. edy, which both Brooks and Groening named Jean says. “If there was a real Bart, he’d be 40 Homer: Son, come here. [Bart sits on his knee as among their favourite moments in the series now. But in animation you’re forever young.”  and soft orchestral music begins to crescendo.] – is when Homer, trying to teach Bart a lesson Of course I’m not mad. If something’s hard to about safety, accidentally attempts to jump the Groening says it was Brooks who told every- do, then it’s not worth doing. You just stick that Springfield Gorge on a skateboard. “It’s Homer one to try to forget they were working on a guitar in the closet next to your shortwave radio, trying to impress his son,” Groening says. “He cartoon altogether – to strive for emotional your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we’ll go inadvertently skateboards off the edge of the resonance rather than plain silliness. This is inside and watch TV. gorge. He’s flying through the air, and with mis- another reason why the show is, as Selman puts Bart: What’s on? placed confidence, he thinks he’s going to make it, “the only thing from the ’90s that still exists.” Homer: [Lovingly] It doesn’t matter. it. Then he suddenly falls. He hits the side of the It helped to have an immensely talented cast. cliff all the way down and very painfully lands Brooks points to a season-two episode in which If The Simpsons had merely produced a funny on the ground. He’s then hit in the head by the Lisa falls for a charming substitute teacher, satire of the American sitcom, it would not have skateboard. Then a helicopter airlifts him out voiced by Dustin Hoffman, who by the end of endured as it has. The above exchange in par- of the gorge on a gurney, and he hits his head the episode leaves town for his next gig. The ticular is far more than just a good joke, though again on the canyon wall. Then he’s placed on two have a tearful farewell, and Brooks insisted it is that as well. Whether encountered today, a mobile gurney, and pushed into the back of that Hoffman and Yeardley Smith (who voices or in real time in the spring of 1992, when Kurt an ambulance. The ambulance takes off, goes Lisa) get in the same room together, acting face-to-face, to record the scene. It’s a heart- breaking moment, as Lisa says goodbye to the only teacher who has ever taken her seriously.  With that episode, says Groening, “We realised, like, look what we can do.”  A S M U C H A S the world has transformed since Silverman’s rough sketch of Homer as King Kong fighting a dinosaur, the ’90s, the way the show is put together for the episode “Treehouse of Horror III,” which aired in October 1992. remains largely unchanged. “Somebody says something funny and somebody writes it down,” Cobain was the most famous musician on the about 10 feet, and then hits a tree. The doors of as Brooks puts it. The jokes have kept the show planet and Bill Clinton was running for presi- the ambulance open up, and Homer goes back alive – and many have outlived the various sub- dent, it was a life philosophy for a burgeoning over the cliff.”  jects they mocked. “All these little empires, they generation of slackers who would internalise rise and fall,” Silverman says, “and we just kind this insight and eventually grow into a world The Simpsons didn’t create this kind of of keep chugging along. Like a comedy glacier, of depressed, anxiety-ridden adults. If nothing humour – Groening credits Buster Keaton – just drifting in.” else, it manages to distil, in just a few lines, the but they did perfect it. “What’s your favourite experience of growing up a privileged little white Simpsons joke?” is a question that’s reverberated The Simpsons broke through all the senti- boy in America in the 1990s, a perpetually disap- for three decades. Homer is my hero (as Meyer ment and created a new kind of sitcom – fun- pointed member of what Homer once referred to describes him to me, “untroubled by restraint, nier, weirder, more conceptual – that remains as the “upper-lower-middle class.”  deliberation, or regret… a truck with no steering the default mode of TV comedy. “I think we wheel”), but if pressed, I’d tell you my favour- cleared a beachhead for the invasion of spik- The other defining category of Simpsons ite comes from Marge, who seems to grow fun- ier, twistier comedy in primetime,” says George joke is a bit that goes on much longer than nier as I get older. There’s something about her Meyer, one of the show’s greatest writers. “The expected. Often funny right out of the gate, it intense rationality that feels so dignified. It’s print comedy we loved, like National Lampoon then stops being funny, and continues until it’s from the episode where the parents of Bart’s and The Onion, took big risks and went for big funny again. One of the most famous examples best friend, Milhouse, get divorced, after having laughs rather than ‘smilers.’ How could we do less, with the freedom we had at Fox?” I see two strands of Simpsons humour. One is a parody of the saccharine humourlessness and principled punchlines of other ’90s shows. Cloyingly obvi- ous soft-shoed moralism and the gaslighting of parental fears were as prominent a framework for the television of that era as hard-core nudity would become for a contemporary HBO drama. And so, in moment after tender moment, Homer takes a knee beside one of his children and, adopting the gentlest delivery he can muster, as syrupy muzak swells in the background, offers the worst possible advice for the given situation: “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miser- ably. The lesson is: never try,” or “People die all the time. Just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow.… well, goodnight.” My favourite of these moments comes in sea- son three, which to my mind might be the high point in the history of TV. Marge and Homer buy Bart a guitar, which he ends up not playing: Homer: Hey, how come you never play your guitar any more? 128 GQ MAY 2022

a public argument at a dinner party hosted by deterred from potentially violating the Geneva This was in The Simpsons’ eighth season, Marge. As Marge and Homer sit in bed discuss- Convention by choking on a pretzel. usually the point when even the most beloved ing it later that night, Marge, blaming herself sitcoms begin winding down; as cartoon char- (“Just blame yourself once and move on,” Homer Another way to put it is that the ’90s were acters, the cast had the benefit of not ageing, says), wonders what went wrong. “I shouldn’t finally over. How could the great send-up of but a burnout was inevitable; its creators have served those North Korean fortune cook- the decade possibly remain relevant? The show seemed to be suggesting the likelihood of a ies,” she says. “They were so insulting. ‘You didn’t really change, but the world around it slip in standards. They had still to produce are a coward.’ No one likes to hear that after did. It’s tempting to say the 21st century – which a single lacklustre episode, but they knew it a nice meal.” The Simpsons was so good at predicting – also was coming.   caused its downfall. “Trust me, I’m aware of the This joke has been making me laugh for popular sentiment of which seasons are clas- As is often the case in sitcoms, the problem a quarter of a century. I asked Meyer exactly sic and which aren’t,” Selman tells me. “We’re with Itchy & Scratchy indelicately resolves itself why it’s so funny. “That’s a sterling example of writing something that, as much as any piece of by the end of the episode, and Bart and Lisa are Simpsons humour,” he says, “and I think what intellectual property, most people have a rela- back to thinking the show is funny again. “We really puts it over the top is the last sentence. tionship with. The Simpsons is like a highway, should thank our lucky stars they’re still putting The punchline is really ‘You are a coward.’ But and everyone has ridden it, or actively chosen on a programme of this calibre after so many Marge’s response to the insult is perfectly in not to, at some point in their lives.” years,” Lisa says, then stares directly out at the character, as she tries to deflect a preposterous audience. The Simpsons, in this moment, comes curveball with logic.” Of course, The Simpsons foretold this back- as close as it ever has to a real moral. Then, after lash as well. It was in an episode called “The a short pause, Bart asks, “What else is on?,” and Lisa turns to a different channel. From the 1993 episode “Selma’s Choice,” Silverman’s “Ralph Steadman-esque” sketch of Marge’s older sister Selma – as hallucinated by Lisa after she drinks the water at a theme park ride. But in our era of endlessly repurposed intellectual property, we never really change O N T H A T N O T E , it’s time to address the elephant Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show,” about Bart the channel. Death is not the end. New on US in the room, which is that many commentators and Lisa’s beloved cartoon, a kind of ultraviolent streamer Peacock: Bel-Air, a dramatic reinter- would argue – and have – that The Simpsons update of Tom and Jerry that was also a meta pretation of Will Smith’s ’90s sitcom. Space Jam: hasn’t been a good show in about two decades. stand-in for The Simpsons itself. As Itchy & A New Legacy feels like a title you’d see on the Exactly when or if this happened is debatable, Scratchy begins slipping in the ratings, the chil- marquee of the cinema in downtown Springfield though even the most generous assessments dren end up in a focus group, where executives in a Simpsons sight gag from the ’90s. In 2019, pinpoint the end of the classic era at season 12, try to diagnose the problem. Lisa, always the Disney, the company that owns Marvel, Pixar, beginning in 2000 – The Simpsons’ first during smartest person in the room, offers an explana- and the Star Wars franchise, acquired 21st the administration of George W. Bush. In other tion that still suffices to explain the trajectory Century Fox, meaning The Simpsons has been words, a time when the most powerful elected of The Simpsons itself: “The thing is,” she says, absorbed into the biggest behemoth in the officials in the country soon began invading “there’s not really anything wrong with The Itchy entertainment-industrial complex. That illus- other countries with the “Aw, shucks, did I & Scratchy Show; it’s as good as ever. But after trates better than anything else how the basic do that?” attitude of a TV character from the so many years the characters just can’t have the method by which we consume entertainment worst sitcom imaginable. The antics of a love- same impact they once had.” (Or, as Tom Sachs has changed. The very idea of picking a show able idiot like Homer just didn’t land the same says, “The avant-garde is always assimilated by from one of a handful of networks each week- way when the American president was briefly the mainstream, so, after a decade, it lost its fizz.”) night has now become a late-’90s anachronism. Back then, you had to wait until the next epi- sode, or talk your parents out of watching the news to catch an early-evening repeat on week- nights. Today, the very image of the family gath- ered nightly around the television – the sort of primal text The Simpsons was toying with – has gone the way of wallet chains and trucker caps. But unlike other relics from decades past, The Simpsons has only grown more accessible, its repeats easier to find. And now that the series is a major component of streaming media’s cosmic soup, it’s an even greater point of reference – the observational sitcom that will outlast us all. It might not be necessary, but Jean does tell me his idea of an ending for the series, if it comes to that. It would be a throwback to the very first episode, which opens with the family attending a Christmas pageant at Springfield Elementary School. “It’s always been my idea that in the last episode,” he says, “we should return to the original Christmas pageant that they go to – so that the whole series is a continuous loop, so the cartoon has no beginning, no end, nobody ages, nobody learns anything. That’s what I would do.” “But,” he concludes, “I don’t think it’s going to end.”  m.h. miller is a features director at t: the new york times style magazine. ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID SILVERMAN MAY 2022 GQ 129

He became a star feeding the fortunate – and a saint feeding the unfortunate. Now chef is working to balance his epic calling to respond to the world’s emergencies via World Central Kitchen with growing the restaurant empire he’s built along the way. We follow Andrés from his operations on the Ukraine border to his kitchens in the U.S. and everywhere in between – and find something much more complex and interesting than a mere saint. By Brett Martin Photograph by Melanie Metz

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M A C I E J M R O C Z K A I S 42 years old and oper- “However, the gratitude and smiles of the peo- C H E F S A R E L I T E R A L creatures. They deal in ates a food truck called Syty Wół, or “Satisfied ple we helped gave extra strength and enthu- the concrete, the elemental. Inputs and outputs; Ox,” in Łan´cut, Poland, about 50 miles from the siasm.” After 11 days, his one truck alone had matter plus energy. Scratch the surface of the western border of Ukraine. Mroczka serves served 18,100 meals. most lyrical dish – the one evoking the feel of burgers and sandwiches, like the Syty – beef, sunshine on your face, or your grandmother’s bacon, rocket, and his own special sauce. In “The people were amazing: random people warm embrace – and you will find portion sizes, 2021 he was nominated for the European who believed they had to do something, which food-cost analyses, overhead figures and waste Street Food Awards. He is busiest from April to was beautiful to see,” Andrés told me, a few calculations, all of them expressed in plastic October, when he takes the truck on the road to weeks later. He was calling from another bor- containers marked with blue tape. You can’t eat festivals and other outdoor events. der crossing, Przemy´sl, where WCK continued a metaphor. to feed a steady flow of displaced Ukrainians “We are not afraid of mass events,” Syty Wół’s as they boarded buses bound for processing So when José Andrés says that he wants to website boasts. “We are able to feed hundreds elsewhere in Poland and across Europe. Unlike feed the world, it is not a figure of speech. He of people throughout the evening.” a hurricane, he said, after which things get means it. He became famous feeding the fortu- at least incrementally better each day, war nate, a hero feeding the unfortunate, and, in the In late February, Mroczka would get his was a steady drip of disaster. “Sometimes it meantime, has done his best to feed everybody in chance to prove it. Soon after Russia invaded can be very quiet here and then, all of a sud- between. Andrés often invokes Tom Joad in The Ukraine, word reached Łan´cut of refugees den, chaos.” He hummed a snatch of “Ride of Grapes of Wrath: “Wherever there’s a fight so coming across the border in nearby Korczowa. the Valkyries.” hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” Steinbeck, “People exhausted by the journey, people who a writer, employed a metaphor; Andrés, a chef, were hungry and cold and who needed help,” By then, Andrés had spent nearly four weeks buys plane tickets. His omnipresence can almost Mroczka told me. “I decided that I would like to sending out messages from the Ukraine bor- be comic: one moment you hear about a disaster help, due to my experience. However, I did not der and inside the war-torn country itself. somewhere in the world and the next, there he is know where exactly to go.” Many were the signature selfie videos that on your social media feed. have become a vital part of WCK’s storytell- As it happened, the phone rang. It was World ing and identity, and are often among the first “It’s like he’s everywhere, all at the same Central Kitchen, the relief organisation founded images on the ground that the world sees after time,” says golfer Sergio García, Andrés’ friend by Spanish-American chef José Andrés for the a disaster. and fellow Spaniard. “You know it can’t be true, express purpose of marshalling the energy and but it feels that way.” There are operations you expertise of chefs and cooks in emergencies. We saw a bakery in Lviv turning out thou- may have forgotten or have only been dimly Over the past decade, WCK has gone from the sands of loaves for refugees sheltering at aware of: the crews and passengers stranded earnest sideline of a celebrity chef to a relief the train station; chefs in Kyiv making cab- on docked cruise ships in Japan and in Oakland juggernaut, responding to some of the biggest bage-and-potato-stuffed pyrizhky to send to at the very outset of COVID; fires in New York crises of our time – the 2010 earthquake in orphanages; the food hall in Odesa, turned and Colorado; typhoons and tsunamis in the Haiti, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the pan- into a food donation and distribution centre; Philippines and Indonesia; the volcanic erup- demic – and countless smaller ones, in the pro- WCK’s signature giant paella pans repurposed tion in La Palma, Spain; the Beirut munitions cess turning Andrés into a humanitarian star. for massive batches of borscht and apple explosion. In the summer, it’s fires; hurricanes Though much smaller than behemoth relief sauce; HGVs filled with flour and other staples, in winter. Andrés and his team are so conver- organisations such as the Red Cross, WCK has headed to areas of fighting too intense to set sant in storms gone by they can sound like established an outsize footprint, in part because up cooking operations. “Everywhere we go in school teachers taking the register: Sally, of its outsize leader, and in part because of its Ukraine… food is at the centre of resistance!” Michael, Laura, Ida, Sandy. If emergency has strategy of using local resources such as restau- Andrés tweeted. become the permanent condition of our globe, rants, kitchens, cooks, and food trucks. it’s hard to think of a single face more associated In the months before, Andrés and I had spent with addressing it than Andrés’. “We are very much the Airbnb or Uber of time together in Chicago, where he was open- relief,” Andrés told me a few months ago. ing two new restaurants, and at his home base A few years ago, a journalist asked Andrés: in Washington. It seemed then that COVID-19 if he could invent anything, what would it be? Mroczka and his food truck found them- – during which WCK had offered a lifeline to “The pot that feeds the world,” he said. That selves parked on the border in Korczowa, serv- some 2,500 restaurants in 400 cities across the story came up recently as Andrés sat with some ing 1,700 burgers per night, paid for by WCK, U.S., paying them to provide meals for those in staff in his office at the headquarters of his to a stream of refugees that soon became a need – had been the calamity for which Andrés ThinkFoodGroup, in Washington. While every- river. They were on the overnight shift, end- and WCK had been unwittingly preparing all body chuckled, Andrés paused and considered ing at 7am, and the work was freezing and along. Now, it was this new, man-made disaster the magic pot anew, once again the fanciful slid- exhausting. “It was mentally difficult because that seemed to be drawing on and testing the full ing into the pragmatic. “I think probably it could most of the refugees are women with children,” range of its strategies and resources. happen,” he said. “Maybe.” said Mroczka, who has two kids of his own. I thought of a conversation we had on a cold You could feel the staffers make a mental afternoon in December, standing on the patio note that this might be something that would of his new restaurant, overlooking a bend in the have to be looked into. To say Andrés wants to Chicago River. Andrés had lit a cigar.  feed everyone on earth is itself not quite pre- cise, regarding either people or earth: not long “The way I see it, right now with World before the conversation about the magic pot, Central Kitchen I have the biggest, most pow- one of the R&D chefs working in the kitchen erful network of hardware in the history of outside his office had opened a vacuum pouch mankind,” he said. “Because, in my eyes, every to let me taste a pisto with Ibérico pork due to kitchen is already ours. And every car. And every be served during Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission to boat. And every helicopter. Every cook is part the International Space Station; not long after, of our army, even if they don’t know it yet.” He Andrés mused aloud about yet another potential took a puff and reflected. “I don’t say that openly, new front in the mission: pet food. because people will think I’m crazy. It’s just the way I see it: we are the biggest organisation in It’s absurd. Almost childlike. But the numbers the history of mankind. Even if we only have 75 don’t lie: since 2010, World Central Kitchen has people on the payroll.”   132 GQ MAY 2022

COURTESY OF WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN. served nearly 70 million meals in practically José Andrés at people tasked with carrying out his visions and every corner of the globe. What was once a non- a World Central oblivious to the ripples his constantly chang- profit with two employees offering ad hoc aid, Kitchen operation ing impulses and plans can send through their often on Andrés’ own credit card, raised nearly in Lviv, Ukraine, ranks. Sometimes you feel in the company of the £200 million in 2020. Jeff Bezos stepped off his March 2022. consummate host, sometimes as though you’ve spaceship, cowboy hat on his head, to announce been lashed to Ahab. a £75 million award for Andrés to spend as he stamina, planning, and, yes, charisma and celeb- wished, a portion of which he has committed rity – are uniquely suited to feeding them in an I did go to the opening party for Andrés’ to work in Ukraine. And even all that is but a emergency. And that both spring from the same restaurants in Chicago, which are stacked one small piece of Andrés’ ultimate vision. World single-minded, elemental, almost too-simple on top of the other in the new Bank of America Central Kitchen recently established a £750 impulse: to feed. skyscraper. Beneath, at the seafood-centric Bar million Climate Disaster Fund, to address the Mar, guests mingled beneath an enormous glow- root cause of so much of what they are called on T H E R E ’ S A W O M A N in Honduras who thinks ing octopus sculpture and snacked on Spanish to respond to. Andrés imagines a full-time Food José Andrés may have cured her cancer. Once, tuna sashimi. Upstairs, at Bazaar Meat, stations First Responders Corps akin to the army. at a basketball game, he saved a man from offered Andrés classics: the spherified olives that choking on a piece of bratwurst, delivering the are still a small, briny pop of joy; the foie gras Andrés also runs a restaurant empire. Heimlich manoeuvre and then melting into candy floss that is still mildly nauseating. There ThinkFoodGroup (TFG) occupies three floors the crowd, leaving no clue as to his identity but was also, of course, Ibérico ham, the Spanish of a building in Washington’s coolest nightlife the panache with which he poured the victim treasure that Andrés is responsible not only for quarter, where Andrés also has six of the 28 a glass of water: “You could tell he worked in popularizing in the U.S. but for getting there in restaurants he operates in seven cities across hospitality,” the man told The Washington Post. the first place, jumping over a battlefield of reg- America, plus the Bahamas (with new proj- And while neither man exactly says so, it seems ulatory hurdles in the ’90s. “Now chefs just pick ects in L.A. and New York on the way). These that Andrés was not not responsible for Sergio up the phone,” he told me, gesturing at a counter include Jaleo, the restaurant that brought him García’s Masters win; Andrés only agreed to covered with the stuff. “I’m just saying: nothing to Washington aged 23 and ushered in America’s cook for the golfer if he promised to finally win came easy to me.” tapas era, and minibar, the 12-seat tasting-menu his first major. (“Of course I promised,” García spot that was among the first in the U.S. to says. “I wanted the food!”) As he moved through the restaurants, Andrés employ the molecular gastronomy Andrés stopped for a selfie every few feet. He posed for encountered as a young cook at the legendary There are whole islands in the Caribbean a photo holding a leg of Ibérico over his shoul- El Bulli in Spain. On one of the afternoons I was where it is all but impossible for Andrés to der. Once weighing 21 stones, he lost 4.5 stones there, the office bustled with designers, market- buy himself a drink. The youngest of his three during the pandemic, aided by a 21-day fast at a ing people, R&D cooks, a chef from Barcelona daughters finally demanded that the WCK logo facility in Spain. The trimmer build, white beard, trying out for a job, and staff from the newly be removed from the family Jeep, as it attracted and peaked caps have given him the old-world formed José Andrés Media. There was also a so many people wanting to say thanks; Andrés aspect of Hemingway. He looks older than his 52 certified master ham carver from Spain who I grumbles that he gets more parking tickets years but somehow more powerful than when got the feeling simply hung around, like an itin- now. He has turned half of his social media he was younger. He chatted to Ertharin Cousin, erant samurai, should any ham appear in need following into a Nobel Prize–nominating com- onetime director of the United Nations World of masterful carving – which, to be fair, did not mittee, while his most ardent followers are Food Programme, who had been lobbying for feel unlikely. aiming for straight beatification. (He was, in Andrés’ support for a White House conference fact, nominated for the 2019 prize for his work on food issues, the first of its kind since 1969. World Central Kitchen, meanwhile, operates in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.) In every Never far from hand was Andrés’ chief of staff, mostly remotely, using a suite of WeWork offices spare corner and surface of his offices and his a 30-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer as its Washington HQ. Both organisations have home, in Bethesda, 20 miles from Washington, named Satchel Kaplan-Allen whose portfolio learned to operate without their leader’s physi- there are small heaps of awards, plaques, and includes everything from strategy to scheduling cal presence, each making room for him to re-en- other trophies, jumbles of etched perspex. to making photocopies. Tonight, he joked, one of ter with a nudge, or a shove, when he returns “You should see what’s in storage,” Andrés says. his duties was making sure that in the conversa- from his business with the other. Some might see tions his boss was having he was “not promising certain contradictions inherent in the two sides Andrés gets such relentlessly good press cov- to do anything that would then have to be done.” of Andrés’ life. If you believe that capitalism is erage that, truth be told, you can almost lose at the root of all or most disasters, natural and sight of the fact that it’s PR for such relentless As the evening wore on, Andrés seemed to man-made, then Andrés may not be your man. good. How do you write about a saint? It helps find more places to wall himself off. At one point, “I have to make a living,” he says with a shrug, that Andrés does not hide his more mortal char- he jumped behind the raw bar, to the obvious when I ask if he thinks about giving up that part acteristics. To spend time with him is to get the of his life. As for every restaurateur in America, sense of a roiling, unfiltered man in full. He is by it’s been a hard few years. Andrés says he lost turns excitable and contemplative, irritable (or, between 20 and 30 per cent of his own equity as he prefers it, “grumpy”) and inspired, hum- in TFG during the pandemic, just keeping the ble and vainglorious, generous to the teams of doors open. I’ll admit to a touch of cynicism when Andrés’ team invited me to meet him for the first time at the opening of his new restaurants in Chicago, rather than a WCK operation. (“Everybody wants to come to the emergencies now,” he would later tell me, with a sigh.) In the end, I would come to see the two halves of Andrés’ life as an extension of the central insight that fuels WCK: that the temperament and skill set it takes to feed people in a restaurant – entre- preneurialism, pragmatism, improvisation, MAY 2022 GQ 133

terror of the shuckers working there, and began home, he said, he often worried he was failing. Andrés,’ I get very upset. When I went to the preparing oysters topped with sea urchin. In the field, it was very simple: “Are we feeding prime minister of the Bahamas and said I need Eventually, he materialised outside, jacketless everybody or are we not? If we’re not, then we a fucking helipad, do you think he knew who he in the 17-degree wind chill, smoking a cigar and need to be doing better.” was talking to? If he knew I was a chef, probably looking back through the giant, glowing window he would have taken me less seriously. He only at the party within. Andrés has cultivated a persona that is part saw a guy who was very determined and almost Charles Grodin’s accountant in the 1993 movie a little upset. So we can all be José Andrés!” T H E N E X T M O R N I N G , Andrés and I sat at the Dave, who solves the country’s budget woes bar at Topolobampo, Rick Bayless’ Mexican using the plain common sense that politicians Who talks this way in 2022? It’s what made restaurant, having 11am margaritas and gua- forget, and part rogue cop with no taste for Andrés such a natural and effective Trump foil: camole. I asked what would have happened rules or regulations, the one the boss would he actually believes everything about America if, during that party, a hurricane had hit the fire if he wasn’t so damned good. He tells his that Trump thinks is for suckers. It’s the arche- Gulf or an explosion had rocked Venezuela. people never to spend more than half an hour typal fervour of an immigrant. Even as he continued taking selfies, he said, in any meeting. There is nothing he likes bet- an entire series of events would have gone into ter than commandeering a helicopter, or fail- When I ask what made him decide, in 2013, effect. WCK WhatsApp channels would spring ing that, a helipad, as he says he did in the to become a naturalised American citizen, he to life; weather specialists would be consulted Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, telling the thinks for almost 30 seconds. and maps downloaded in case of interrupted prime minister, “You want to feed your people connectivity. Equipment would begin to move or not? Because I’m trying to do it!” “Because in life, are you 100 per cent in or from one of WCK’s Relief Operations Centres not?” he finally says. “You’re getting wet, or you in Maryland, California, and New Orleans: Most of the world got its first taste of Andrés’ are not. And I had to. If I wanted to have a bigger amphibious vehicles; water purifiers; solar swagger in June 2015, when Donald Trump voice, I could not just be outside.” ovens; the deployable kitchen unit, or DKU, kicked off his presidential campaign by char- a 30-by-30-foot geodesic-dome field kitchen acterising Mexican immigrants as drug dealers Andrés sailed into the New World like stored in modular containers ready to be and rapists. Andrés cancelled plans to open a Columbus himself, in the rigging of the Juan stacked on a plane or truck. restaurant in Trump’s new Washington hotel, Sebastián de Elcano, a four-masted Spanish navy establishing himself as one of the president’s ship. He had left home early, first finding work Meanwhile, if the situation warranted most prominent public critics and one of the in Barcelona kitchens and then alongside Ferran Andrés himself going to the affected area, res- few with an intuitive sense of how to troll a Adrià at El Bulli. That pedigree got him a plush ervations would be made, one of several ready- troll. On Twitter, Andrés taunted that his depo- assignment as private chef to a Spanish admiral and-waiting backpacks would be retrieved, sition in the ensuing lawsuit was longer than when it was time for his compulsory military and, by the time he walked out of the restau- the famously size-obsessed president’s. service, but Andrés talked his way aboard the rant, it would be to a waiting car with a plan in Juan Sebastián de Elcano as a cook instead. He place. By the next day, he’d be on your Twitter But the harsher rebuke to the Trump admin- had seen the ship in port with his father as a feed, broadcasting from the place in question. istration would come after Hurricane Maria, boy, and now it brought him to the wide world: which pulverized Puerto Rico in September the Canary Islands, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, On his phone was a list of WhatsApp chan- 2017, leaving 3,000 people dead and the country and then…Pensacola! “The City of Five Flags,” nels dedicated to various WCK operations. He paralysed. Andrés went to Puerto Rico with two as Andrés invariably refers to it, as though the pulled up a map of Haiti, covered in digital chefs and a wallet full of credit cards, planning Floridian town remains as exotic a port as any pins. “We visit every one of these points every to stay just a few days. He stayed three months in the world. He tasted his first crab cake and day,” he said. Clicking further on each site, he and served over 3.7 million meals, essentially first soft-shell crab and was hooked. Andrés has could see a detailed report of meals served, and standing in for a failed government response. never entirely stopped being a military man. In to whom – exactly the kind of report he might It was, says Nate Mook, a former documentary the earliest days of COVID, he took his senior get on how many croquetas or chicory salads filmmaker who joined Andrés in Puerto Rico team to get buzz cuts. “I was like, ‘Now we are were sold at Jaleo the night before. and would soon become WCK’s first CEO, a Marines,” he says. And what is the vision of spectacular proof of concept. “We were profes- WCK if not an idealistic view of what good old That morning had begun with a meeting with sionalising the work that we do. We were show- American imperialism can accomplish? Richard Wolffe, managing director of Andrés’ ing a new model, a new way to do this,” Mook newly established media company, about a says. “And it was something that we could do In January, Washington’s Smithsonian new TV series in Spain. Before the day was over, all around the world, deploying at a moment’s announced that Andrés’ portrait would be Andrés would review the opening menu at Bar notice and being on the front lines.” placed in its portrait gallery; the chef didn’t Mar; tape a segment for The Daily Show With have to imagine what that might look like. For Trevor Noah, discussing food insecurity; head W H E N Y O U W A L K alongside Andrés and he starts years Andrés used the gallery’s halls and inte- to the top of the Willis Tower to address the to get passionate about what he’s saying, he’ll rior courtyard as the most direct route between Executive Club of Chicago, where he lectured veer into you, emphasising each point with a two of his restaurants. There can be no over- business leaders on the need to eliminate pyra- short, assertive smack to your forearm. Mine stating the importance of Andrés ending up midal management structures; and revise the was growing sore as we walked through Chicago, in Washington, to the path of his activism and amount of foie gras in a starter at Pigtail, a new Andrés bulling through the wind with short work. “Nothing would have happened if I was cocktail bar beneath Jaleo. Is it any surprise that strides, bag tight on his back. But now we were not here,” he says. In New York or San Francisco, his WCK deployments come as a kind of relief? stopped dead on a street corner. I had made the gears of power would have been abstract; “Everything else falls away,” he said. Andrés grumpy. in Washington they were within reach. Former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lived One of his rituals upon hitting the ground “What the fuck are you talking about?” he close to one of his restaurants and was both a is to divide up a map of the affected area and said. What I had said was that most Americans regular and a friend. Andrés learned the ways of jump in a Jeep, often alone, to go looking for didn’t feel free to knock on their representa- US government, lobbying for legislation, sitting people who need food and water. He usually tives’ doors to express their opinions, even if, as on boards. Former Republican senator Lamar brings wads of cash, should he stumble upon, Andrés had just said, it was a unique feature of Alexander went to the restaurant to show off say, a fisherman with whom he can contract American democracy. some Tennessee tomatoes and Andrés could tell to buy the next day’s entire catch of spiny lob- him, “I love that you love these tomatoes. I hope ster, as happened on the Colombian island of “You can! It’s one of your duties as a citizen!” you will pass legislation to protect them!” Providencia after Hurricane Iota, in 2020. At he continued. “Fuck. When people tell me, ‘Oh, you made this happen because you’re José Andrés’ biggest impact in future may in fact be as a savvy, practical, and high-profile policy 134 GQ MAY 2022

wonk. Even during his Trump feud, he and WCK Andrés the businessman. The social media and the confidence of a woman who wears a staff were in regular contact with the adminis- feeds that project his dispatches from Lviv and white coat to a crab house. The two are teasingly tration. Senators of both parties have lined up to other disaster areas bring the same million-plus affectionate. visit, and be photographed at, WCK’s operations followers news of his restaurant openings and on the Ukraine border. President Biden paid a business partnerships, like one with Capital “I always thought he was a funny guy,” Patricia visit when in Warsaw in March. One, sometimes in jarring proximity. says, when I ask her for her first impression of her husband. “Why can’t you say I was the hot Andrés is a vocal member of the Bipartisan Andrés points out that his relief work also guy?” Andrés complains. Policy Center’s Food and Nutrition Security distracts from his main business. “When I dis- Task Force, which, among other things, has appear to Puerto Rico for 90 days, it’s not only The indefatigable chef is weary. “Sometimes, been advocating legislation to improve child those 90 days. It’s the time it takes me to come I only want to be like my mother and my father nutrition. He is circumspect about exactly who back, mentally,” he says. “Believe me, if I put 100 when they were feeding me and my brothers. might be in his contacts book, though the sec- per cent of my energy into my company, it would When my father was feeding his friends. No ondary interviews his team offers me suggests be far more successful. When people say, ‘José, more, no less. No drama. More people come? it is a deep and influential roster indeed. Vice you’re benefiting from all this…’ Really? Really? Send more rice,” he says. “I became a hus- President Kamala Harris sent a statement I’d rather have my life from before.” band before I even became a grown-up boy. noting her and Andrés’ work together on the You become a dad before you become a good FEED Act, the 2020 legislation that allowed Does he mean that? husband. You need to be a big-boy business- the government to pay restaurants to provide “No,” he says, shaking his head. “I like to help. man before you even know how to cook in the relief meals. “His work is a reminder to all of But at the same time, you know, I could be play- kitchen. And nothing comes with instructions.” us that our tables are always big enough to ing in the Ryder Cup celebrity game, and I’m in welcome those in need, and one person – like the mountains of Haiti. What do you want me He opens a bottle of wine. “I want to end hun- José Andrés – can have a monumental impact to tell you? I had a good life before all this too.” ger in India. I want to end hunger in Africa. And on people’s lives,” Harris said. South Carolina’s This is at the end of a long day in Washington. I’m bold enough and crazy enough to think I can Republican senator Tim Scott weighed in, too, It is one of those evenings when Andrés changes do it,” he says. “But then you say: I still have a noting that the legislation had been inspired his mind about what to do every few minutes: daughter who needs me near her. And I need by WCK’s model. “I never had anything against her too. And my wife needs me and my partners Republicans,” Andrés says. “I have something At home, he said, need me. And everything’s on here.” He pats his against one Republican.” he often worried he shoulders. “Everything’s on here.” E V E N S A I N T S G E T criticised. “Our whole model was failing. In the Maybe it’s just a mood, this ambivalence. of disaster response is one where outsiders fly field, it was very simple: Maybe, as COVID dissipates and WCK operates to a place to ‘save’ that place, and I don’t think increasingly like a well-oiled machine with or that’s a good model,” says Devin De Wulf, the “Are we feeding without him, Andrés is feeling adrift, unsure founder of a creative nonprofit called the Krewe everybody or are we not? of the next thing. In any event, 28 days from of Red Beans. In 2020, as New Orleans experi- now, Vladimir Putin will provide an answer, at enced an especially harsh first wave of COVID- If we’re not, then we least temporarily. 19, his organisation raised £750,000 in six weeks need to be doing better.” to pay 45 local restaurants to provide meals for But now, Andrés visibly brightens as a steam- frontline health care workers, only to see WCK the restaurant critic of The Washington Post is ing tray of crab lands at the table. “OK, pay atten- arrive and essentially take over. “I think all disas- at a bar, so he should stop by; a group of vis- tion,” he barks. He picks up a crab and quickly ters should be locally run, because locals care iting Spanish chefs are coming to his house to removes all of its legs, placing them to one side. about their community. Locals understand the watch Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final, “Boom. Now we are in a good moment. Are you cultural and political landscape in a way that so maybe they’ll all cook. Finally, he decides to with me?” somebody who’s parachuting into town will not.” do neither, opting instead to deliver a trunkful of food from his Peruvian-Chinese-Japanese With his thumb, he pries off the hinged Andrés and Mook say that WCK’s entire restaurant China Chilcano to his daughter Inés, mouth of the crustacean, then lifts the top of its model is connecting with local resources, with a student of foreign policy at Georgetown, and carapace. He removes a layer of spongy gills and, an increasing emphasis on leaving infrastruc- go out for crab. There’s a guy named Yen Lee, at using a plastic knife, traces the lines of the softer ture in place when it departs. But, Andrés adds, the Bethesda Crab House, he says, who knows shell beneath. “Now, this is very important. I “What I’ve learned is that in those events, local more about crab than anybody else in America. have the perfect opening into the body. Why? people are highly overwhelmed. You don’t have Because I am listening to the crab. The crab is the cash to start from zero. Fundraising takes Andrés ignores the advice of Siri as we drive telling me where to cut,” he says, as he pulls out forever. People donate things you don’t need. out of Washington and through the sleepy a perfect, intact finger of white flesh. He hands That’s why an organisation like ours comes in streets of Bethesda to the lone glowing light this to Patricia. “Are you with me?” He turns to with a clear sense of the best response, and then of the restaurant. Andrés has called ahead to the other half of the body and the legs, briskly on top of that works with locals.” Lee, for the crab, and to his wife, Patricia, for a filling the upturned top shell into a bowl filled cooler bag filled with champagne and Armenian with snow-white meat. Andrés characteristically oscillates between wines. He keeps glassware at the restaurant acceptance and frustration at this and other for just such a purpose. We sit outside, under “Crabs are good people. They want me to suc- criticism. “It’s funny, because right now you just heat lamps. Patricia, who is from Cádiz, was ceed. Even when they are dead,” he says. need one person to say something accusational, working at the Spanish Embassy when she and you need one journalist to write that one met Andrés. They married 26 years ago. She He splashes drawn butter on the pile of meat, accusation, maybe two so it becomes plural, and has the warm and tolerant poise of a first lady adds a squirt of white vinegar and a dusting of then it’s: ‘People are saying.…’ It’s not people say- spice powder. “Life is about knowing how to ing anything! It’s one person.” He catches him- eat,” he says, seriously. “Everybody thinks it’s self mid-rant. “I start to feel like Trump with his about knowing how to cook, but it’s much more ‘fake news,’ ” he grumbles. important to know how to eat.” It seems indisputable that José Andrés the He takes a spoonful from the shell, extends humanitarian has a positive effect on José it across the table, inches from my mouth. My hands are filled with notebook and pen. So, I look both ways, lean forward, and before I know it, José Andrés has fed me too. brett martin is a gq correspondent. MAY 2022 GQ 135

Few artists are as prolific. As widely imitated. As consistently excellent. Which is why it’s BY ELLIOTT WILSON finally time to PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREGORY HARRIS declare what’s been true for a while now: STYLED BYMOBOLAJI DAWODU FUTURE is the best rapper alive.



E S T R A P P E R A L I V E . It’s a lofty goal. A phrase Jay-Z famously uttered ←← he’s been streamed over 30 billion times and has, in 2003 on “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” that declared Shawn Carter the in the process, inspired an entire generation of new standard while still paying respect to the late greats Tupac “2Pac” PREVIOUS PAGE rappers. Few artists are as prolific. Shakur and Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. A few years later, the other Mr. Carter, Lil Wayne, laid claim to the throne by out- sweater (price When you survey the hip-hop landscape, working any and all competition with a canon of indisputable music. upon request) no other artist has been as consistently excel- lent, or as influential, for as long as he has. But in 2022, who wears the crown (at least now that Jay has grad- Stòffa He invented his own sound, which has since uated to full-on GOAT)? Is it perennial hitmaker Drake? Is it the become the dominant style in rap. He has brilliant J. Cole? Or maybe it’s the enigmatic Kendrick Lamar who trousers £510 delivered hit after hit after hit. And he’s done would garner the most votes. But in hip-hop’s always-on culture, can Ralph Lauren it all on his own terms. you really be the best rapper alive if you haven’t given us an album in Purple Label five years? I’ll say it one more time: Future is the best shoes £995 rapper alive. And doesn’t the South got somethin’ to say? Last year, when Edward Green Spotify’s RapCaviar asked Twitter which rappers would be on the In the beginning, few believed that he Mount Rushmore of the 2010s, fans decreed it would be Drake, Cole, glasses £835 would be at the forefront of hip-hop music. Kendrick…and who? LeBron James quickly led the charge for Future Cartier In the aughts he was known as Meathead, the as the fourth, with James Caan (yes, that James Caan) among the Dungeon Family outcast more committed to chorus of supporters. (Eventually, the great Nicki Minaj received the bandana £340 hustling than music, before he flooded the RapCaviar nod.) Later in the year, in an interview with N.O.R.E. and DJ Dior Men Atlanta underground with a series of undeni- EFN on the Drink Champs podcast, Kanye West made what at the time able mixtapes. (DJ Drama once told me that sounded like a bold declaration: Future is the most influential artist of necklace every club DJ had to have a 30-minute Future the past decade. £186,300 set to keep the party going.) Bucherer Fine “I got here through music,” Future tells me. “I didn’t get here for Jewellery Today, Future is the King of Atlanta – and having the best interviews. Other dudes in the world can have the best he earned it. Consider his contemporaries. It speech. They can do this in one take and it’d be perfect. I just found earrings, saddens me every time Jeezy stirs up come- a way to make art with words. And through that, that’s just how I live.” nose rings, back talk and then falls short. T.I. is more com- and bracelets mitted to becoming a comedian these days. But was Kanye’s declaration really so bold? Consider Future’s style, (throughout), Ludacris is a bona fide movie star. And the which, while widely imitated, is today still singular. Not only does youth all still check for Future. He’s the O.G. Future use his voice to contort words and syllables into shapes we’ve his own who’s still considered a peer (and a rival) to the never encountered before – his own innovative take on the concept younger artists he collaborates with musically. of “bars” – but his verses are uniquely versatile. He can traipse the rings (on left ring full spectrum of human emotion, from lovingly tender to cruelly finger, from top) One of my favourite Future songs is 2019’s toxic to heart-wrenching to turned up to 11, all within the space of “Krazy but True,” a rare, clear declaration of his an eight count. £19,435 desire to be hip-hop’s top dawg: £4,510 Artistically, his impact can’t be denied. Especially not after eight solo and (on right ring I’m God to you n-ggas, I worked too hard just to albums, 19 solo mixtapes, one collaborative album, four collaborative finger) spoil you n-ggas mixtapes, two EPs, and one soundtrack (for 2018’s Superfly). Worldwide, £19,610 Chrome Hearts You need to pay me my respect Your socks, rings, and your lean ring (on left pinkie) The way you drop your mixtapes, your ad-libs, £9,800 and everything Boucheron Damn, that’s crazy, but it’s true… I was the ghost behind the page his own watch I freestyle every day Eliantte & Co I never depend on none of these rappers, they bite → me anyway coat (price Damn, that’s crazy, but it’s true. upon request) Adrienne Landau by I N C A S U A L C O N V E R S A T I O N , Future is funny, Saulo Villela often playful. But once the tape recorder light turns red for an interview, something in him shirt £755 changes and talking to him becomes a chess Saint Laurent by match. He’s 38, yet still a bit of a smart-arse Anthony Vaccarello kid, shrewdly deflecting questions by asking me about myself, like my time working at The sunglasses £379 Source and XXL magazines. I’m used to it with Ahlem Future, though. He’s a cranky creative with a platinum touch. He’s hard to pin down. But his own we have history. necklaces Eliantte & Co When Future’s smash hit “Racks” hit in 2011, I couldn’t tell the difference between Future ring (on right pinkie) and the song’s lead artist YC. At my hip-hop (price blog, Rap Radar, the slander aimed at Future was immediate. What is this mumble rap? We upon request) called Future “the Autotune crooner.” We felt Tiffany & Co. he was stepping in the lane of T-Pain. watch £26,400 “Tony Montana,” Future’s own first big sin- Cartier gle, did little to change my opinion. But it did 138 GQ MAY 2022



feature Drake, whom I had already developed a close enough relation- ↓ a lot of guns. Young Nayvadius was brought ship with to hit up personally, BlackBerry to BlackBerry. jacket £1,855 up by his mother, with help from aunts and uncles, but sometimes even a village isn’t quite Why are you on this song? I remember messaging him. I don’t get it. Dior Men enough. He says he used to have junkies drive You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Drake replied. him to class. Most fondly, a “junkie named Future is dope. sunglasses £345 Fred,” Future told me onstage in Los Angeles Future’s dizzying run of early hits was undeniable. “Same Damn Ahlem at another CRWN event, in 2019. “Shout- Time” knocked so hard that Sean “Diddy” Combs felt compelled to hop out, Fred, too! He used to take me to school.” on the remix and deliver his hardest verse in years. I became a believer. Nayvadius dropped out of Decatur’s Columbia Future’s 2012 debut, Pluto, was promising, and I was all the way High School during his senior year. locked in for his second album, Honest. For my CRWN live-interview series in 2014, we rented out Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre and I got to share At a family member’s funeral around that the stage with him. “I laid the foundation for any artist to come behind time, Future ran into his cousin Rico Wade, me,” Future said that night. And they did. Artists from that era, like whom he had always considered a kind Desiigner and Lil Durk. And artists still to come, like Lil Baby, Gunna, of father figure. The funeral meeting led and Lil Uzi Vert. They all borrow inspiration from his style, and Future Nayvadius, with one foot still in the streets, had thoughts for all of his disciples: “I wrote the dictionary for what to hang out in the studio with the legendary you use, words for designing…All their ad-libs, from the way you do Dungeon Family. (One of Future’s favourite your verses to your melodies, it comes from Future. It’s hard to get away moments in the studio was witnessing André from it, because I did the blueprint.” 3000 freestyle his guest verse for Sleepy Brown’s 2004 song “I Can’t Wait.”) He was N A Y V A D I U S D E M U N W I L B U R N grew up in Kirkwood, an area of Atlanta there not just with Dungeon Family mem- roiled by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. A lot of drugs and bers like the Goodie Mob, Killer Mike, and Bubba Sparxxx but with outside artists like Trey Songz, Talib Kweli, and Daz Dillinger. Nayvadius began learning and making music. It was a different kind of education from school but a learning experience all the same. “I’m like, ‘They’re living like street dudes where I’m from, but living better. It’s legit,’” he recalled back in 2019. “That’s when I started thinking, I can take this serious.” In 2011, Epic Records’ then-chairman Antonio “L.A.” Reid signed Future to his label, a move that felt preordained. Reid had worked with Rico Wade’s production crew, Organized Noize, when Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds signed OutKast to their LaFace Records in the 1990s. “I think Future’s consis- tency is a big part of his wave,” says OutKast’s Big Boi. “He always comes through with a clutch jam. Dungeon Family genetics.” Future had an incredible mixtape run in the underground Atlanta circuit with efforts like Dirty Sprite, and his debut studio album, Pluto, spawning several hits. By the time Honest was being teased, Future’s projects were feverishly anticipated on a mainstream scale. (While Honest went gold, its reception from the blogs and hardcore rap fans was luke- warm, and it was the last Future solo album that didn’t go to the top of the Billboard 200 chart. As Future told me in Los Angeles in 2019: “Honest, I wasn’t quite honest.”) Faced with a potential slump, Future was also dealing with rumours of a split with his former fiancée, R&B star Ciara. This, after Future, Ciara, and Mike Will Made It, one of Future’s most prolific producer-collaborators, created a massive hit in “Body Party” for her 2013 self-titled album. The song seemed to mark the beginning of a creative partnership, but it was not to be. “Body Party” went double platinum and was Ciara’s biggest sales success since 2004’s “1, 2 Step.” Their son, Future Zahir Wilburn, was born in 2014, but Future Sr. and Ciara broke off their engagement, and Ciara later started

coat (price upon request) Michael Kors Collection jacket £2,250 trousers £900 Gucci turtleneck £675 Dolce & Gabbana shoes £863 Giuseppe Zanotti sunglasses £409 Ahlem necklace £56,400 ring (price upon request) David Yurman watch £19,000 Jaeger- LeCoultre MAY 2022 GQ 141

jacket £1,935 tank top £265 trousers £830 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello boots £945 Christian Louboutin necklace £122,552 Jacob & Co. 142 GQ MAY 2022



dating her now-husband, Russell Wilson. Unfairly or not, the tabloids → two albums, 2019’s The Wizrd and 2020’s High – and Twitter – had a field day. jacket £2,050 Off Life, weren’t my favorites, despite going gold and platinum, respectively. I’d argue they Future, meanwhile, retreated from the public spotlight and went back shirt £850 fall prey to formula, filler, and moments of to the Georgia underground. He put his head down and got to work, trousers £850 creative indecisiveness. Taken together, they reemerging with a triumvirate of classic mixtapes: Monster, Beast Mode, suggested gravity might have finally come for and 56 Nights, that last one featuring “March Madness” which at the Valentino Future’s dominance, the kind of decline that time, was one of the biggest hits of his career. “Future dropped hit after often hits a rapper after a decade at the top. hit for over 10 years without any major breaks between releases and eye mask £145 And it was noticeable that after his disappoint- evolving with each project while always remaining rooted in the streets,” Derek Rose ing 2020 collaborative project with one of his Epic Records chair and CEO Sylvia Rhone tells me. “He is so prolific and disciples, Lil Uzi Vert – the album was called so dedicated to his craft that he lives in the studio. He’s understated in ring (on left Pluto x Baby Pluto – 2021 was the first year many ways.” ring finger) of his entire career that Future didn’t release a full-length project of his own. Future reclaimed his swagger and never looked back. £20,999 Jacob & Co. But Future was far from ready to be writ- I N M A R C H , I M E T up with Future at Jungle City, the iconic recording ten off. Especially when you consider his studio on Manhattan’s West Side. Clad in a navy-and-orange tracksuit, ring (on left pinkie) more recent run of features. There’s Rick with his trademark dreads falling over his eyes, Future is stone-faced. £7,450 Ross’s “Warm Words in a Cold World,” which He’s ready to let the music do the talking. plucked Future from his typical trap sonics David Yurman and had him sounding geeked and confident Jungle City boasts wide, inspiring views of the Hudson. Everyone (Emblematic lyric: “Let her ride foreign just from Pusha T to Justin Bieber has recorded here. Elements of classic ring (on right pinkie) so she won’t be tacky”). Future shows up albums like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Rihanna’s Anti, J. Cole’s 2014 Forest price upon request and shows out at the beginning and end of Hills Drive, and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., were all crafted in this upstart Nardo Wick’s “Me or Sum,” rapping, facility. An appropriate spot then for Future to unveil the new music Chrome Hearts “All bad bitch eat seafood.” And on 42 Dugg’s he’s been working on for his next album during his longest sabbatical “Maybach,” Future addresses one of his famous to date. watch £15,300 exes: “Tell Steve Harvey I don’t want her.” Piaget Bucherer Blue (Future dated Harvey’s daughter, entrepreneur “That’s because I’m happy,” he says of the hiatus now. “I’m genuinely and model Lori Harvey, for two years, begin- happy with life. And there was a time where I was only happy when ning in 2019.) I was on the stage, and in the studio. Like it was my escape.” Still, I’m hoping for a full studio album At Jungle City he’s surrounded by his core crew, including his pho- that reasserts his status. His approach may tographer, Dwight “Shootrr” Elder, and his boisterous blood brother, be unconventional, but at his core, Future is Casino, who is the CEO of their record label, Freebandz. Weed smoke is a spirited storyteller. For his next album to thick, but there’s no alcohol consumption. Instead, the studio console triumph, I just want that authenticity, that is overflowing with candy, snacks, and sodas. It’s sweet-tooth heaven. realness, that smidgen of exaggerated and Future, with no preamble, presses “play.” ruthless masculinity (with a wink) mixed up with his signature vulnerability that pulls us Jungle City is, like, surround sound. In these situations I’m usu- in. The unique combination of elements that ally able to keep my cool. But the music Future’s playing is making make Future who he is. “Putting this project it hard for me to maintain my poker face. Truth be told, Future’s last together is just people understanding that I love hard,” he admits. “Probably love the “He’s an absolutely hardest. I wanted to showcase my skills as far relentless, spontaneous as melodies and topics and being vulnerable.” workhorse.And me, I’m a calculated, The new music relies less on hooks and purpose-driven, militant more on aggression. Future attacks the open- indıvidual. We can pretty ing tracks with the type of lyrical ferocity he much create anything displayed on his signature classic, “March together.” —DRAKE Madness.” A full version of a viral snippet labeled “Hermès Astronaut” booms through the speakers. Future flows over tranquil wood flutes, and it sounds even better than the tease suggested. Another song includes the lyrics: “After I fuck you, let me cry on your shoulder.” A little of his trademark toxicity with a memo- rable turn of phrase. Future sounds reignited, unstoppable. “I’m putting myself out there,” says Future. “Sharing my lifestyle with the world. Sharing my pain with the world. Sharing my ups, sharing my downs with the entire universe. I believe in the energy of the universe and manifestation. That’s why I’m giving myself, because I’m willing to correct myself. I don’t want to just…be wrong. I’m willing to give you all of me, so you can tell me how to build on me, and make me a better me.” 144 GQ MAY 2022



A F T E R A B A R R A G E of solo bangers, Future shares the spotlight with allow a person to be in your space. And not be other artists on songs featuring Kanye West, Drake, and Gunna (a fresh afraid to be like: I want to align and build with follow-up to their pulsating smash “Pushin P”). Future has always got this…You’re never weak when you understand by with a little help from his friends. Most notably Drake on 2015’s What another man’s strengths. I’m never weak now. a Time to Be Alive, an impromptu collaborative mixtape, the result of I know what I need to be unstoppable. I know a six-day studio cram session. what I need to feel like, Okay, I’m never lack- ing, or, I’m never down.” “He’s an absolutely relentless, spontaneous workhorse,” Drake tells me. “And me, I’m a calculated, purpose-driven, militant individual. You Their number-one record is Drake’s “Way take his free-flowing genius and you mix it with my level of understand- 2 Sexy,” with Young Thug. And, Drake adds, ing and planning and – records, albums, singles – we can pretty much they have “no plans of stopping.” Remarkably, create anything together.” it was Future’s first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100. “To have a number-one The Drake and Future partnership has been particularly fruitful. record after 10 years, I still had to prove Creatively, Future says that the pair just really connect. “Anytime we myself,” he says. work in the studio, the level, the energy – we’re trying to perfect this shit but still stay raw, still stay gritty, and still be moving at the speed I ask why he thinks that is. Why he still has of the universe,” says Future. “It’s something that you have to work at, to show and prove himself. but it’s something that you have to find too.” “I don’t even give a fuck,” he responds. Future feels blessed that he met Drake so early on in his career: “We He estimates that his ability to evolve is made the most out of it. You’re in a place where your self-esteem and ego what has given him longevity. “I grew in the business and I made adjustments and I con- 146 GQ MAY 2022 tinued to build, continued to overcome any doubt,” he says. “If there was doubt, there’s no more doubt. I’m here to stay. I already proved that. Had a hundred hits in one year, they still like, ‘Hey, what are you going to do next?’ I had to prove it again that I can do it again. Came back and dropped one album [2017’s Future] and dropped another album the fol- lowing week [Hndrxx].” He literally replaced himself at the top of the charts. He made his- tory. “I proved that I can have two number-one albums in two weeks. I had to prove so many times in my career that I was here to stay.” F U T U R E A N D D R A K E have both, in their own way, changed the course of rap history. But the person we see kicking it with Future at Balenciaga stores and in Miami Heat court- side seats right now is Kanye West. “Me and Kanye always had a relationship,” Future reveals to me now. “But it’s hard for people to understand, because I don’t put everything on Instagram. Kanye flew me to Paris in 2011 or 2012 to work on music. [Discussing] his clothing line before it came, his shoe business before it came. People don’t know I’ve been able to go to his house, and pull up right into the crib. We just never talked about it.” It seems like a random pairing until you recall Future’s 2014 “I Won,” a saccharine ded- ication to their paramours at the time, Ciara and Kim Kardashian. Years later, West isn’t just openly sharing that he asked Future for help on new music, he fully enlisted Future as an executive producer of Donda 2, which tack- les his divorce drama and the deterioration of his relationship with Kim. I ask him what his reaction was when he heard Kanye call him “the most influential artist of the past 10 years” on the Drink Champs podcast. “When he said that, I understood why he called me to Paris, even though I didn’t under- stand it at that time,” says Future. “I understood why we had certain conversations. I under- stood him being a part of ‘I Won.’ Even him having me write on certain [Kanye] albums that people don’t even understand I wrote on.”

THESE PAGES tuxedo £4,740 shirt £380 cummerbund £230 Ralph Lauren Purple Label bow tie £130 Drake’s shoes £596 Giuseppe Zanotti umbrella £218 Fox Umbrellas ring (on right pinkie) £2,325 Tiffany & Co.