Samuel Levinson is an actor and filmmaker. His father, Barry Levinson, won an Academy Award for directing.
In 2010, the actor got his first writing credit for his work on the action comedy movie Operation: Endgame. The next year, Levinson made his first film as a director. It was called “Another Happy Day,” and it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
Later, the director got a credit for writing his father’s HBO movie The Wizard of Lies (2017). Samuel kept writing and directing full-length movies like Assassination Nation (2018) and Malcolm & Marie (2021), which got mixed reviews.
Based on an Israeli show with the same name, he made the HBO teen drama Euphoria, which has been on air since 2019 and is still going.
What’s the deal with Sam Levinson and Ellen Barkin? Are they still together?
Sam Levinson and Ellen Barkin had a three-year relationship. They started seeing each other in 2008 and broke up in 2011.
Levinson is said to have met Barkin while writing Barkin’s 2010 movie Operation: Endgame, and Ellen went on to star in Levinson’s latest movie, Another Happy Day.
Neither Barkin nor Levinson has said why they broke up, so it’s still not clear why they did.
They lived together in New York when they were dating, and Levinson says Ellen is nothing like the tough characters she plays on TV.
Barkin is a producer and an actress. In 1998, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for her role in the TV movie Before Women Had Wings.
Barkin won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 2011 for her Broadway debut in The Normal Heart.
Euphoria’s director, Sam Levinson, is at the center of a debate about the show
Sam Levinson said that some parents will be “totally freaked out” by the show’s content, which is an admission of the show’s content controversy.
Augustine Frizzell, who directed the pilot episode of the show, said that the explicit content should help parents and teens talk to each other.
Sam hopes that the show “starts a conversation” between parents and teens because they don’t talk to each other enough.
Before the show and season 2 premieres, Zendaya warned about the “deeply emotional subject matter” of the show.
HBO didn’t like that some scenes were sexually explicit, but they said they wouldn’t get in the way of the show’s “creative process.” There are warnings about the show and a website with information about mental health and other support groups.
Some commentators and organizations have said that the explicit content of the Euphoria show, which includes self-harm, drug abuse, and sexual content, is too much.
Parents Television and Media Council called the show “dark, degenerate, depraved, and nihilistic” and asked HBO and AT&T to stop showing it.
Common Sense Media, a website that tells parents if a movie or TV show is good for their kids, also mentioned the strong adult themes and told teens not to watch it.
The Guardian says that writers and producers should come up with new and creative ways to shock their audiences. In 2022, Minka Kelly said that she didn’t like how many naked scenes were in the show.
Who is dating Sam Levinson? His Relationships
Sam Levinson is not only seeing Ashley Lent Levinson, but he is also married to her. Since their wedding in February 2022, the couple has been living a happy life together.
Ashley works in the entertainment business like her husband, but she is a TV and movie producer.
His wife has worked on a number of shows over the years, and she has also been an executive producer and co-producer on episodes of Euphoria.
The director is said to have one child, a son, but no information about him is available because the couple wants to keep their personal lives private. No one knows when the couple had their child or what he is called.
Sam and Ashley seem to get along well, and their scenes together are fun to watch. The couple hasn’t said when or how they met, but it’s clear that they dated for a long time before getting married.
Sam Levinson Bio/Wiki
His first movie was Toys, which he made with his brother Jack in 1992. He went on to play “Carl” in movies like Bandits and What Just Happened? In the 2009 movie Stoic, he played Peter Thompson. He also spent four years learning the method of acting.
In 2011, he made his first movie as a director. It was a black comedy/drama called Another Happy Day. It won the “Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award” at the Sundance Film Festival.
In 2017, he wrote with his father Barry Levinson the script for the TV movie The Wizard of Lies, which his father then directed.
Then, in 2018, he wrote and directed Assassination Nation, a black comedy thriller. It was first shown at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where critics gave it mixed reviews.
Based on an Israeli show with the same name, Euphoria, which aired on HBO in 2019, was made by Levinson. The writing, directing, and acting in the show have all been praised by critics.
In 2020, when the COVID pandemic was at its worst, Levinson wrote and directed the movie Malcolm & Marie, which starred John David Washington and Zendaya, who is also the star of his show “Euphoria.” On February 5, 2021, the movie came out on Netflix.
Levinson’s Early Life and Career: He Started in Front of the Camera
When you hear the name Sam Levinson, you might think of him as the mind behind the hit HBO drama “Euphoria,” which stars Zendaya and is executively produced by Drake, or as the director and writer of the new Netflix drama “Malcolm and Marie,” or you might not even know his name. I’m here to tell you that Sam Levinson is a director that everyone in the entertainment business needs to keep an eye on as he continues to rule the worlds of film and TV.
Between his beautiful writing, unique way of directing, and vivid images in his works, he creates a world that is perfect for audiences to step into. Fans can’t wait to get their teeth into his new work because he has won several awards and is working on some big projects.
A Night of Psychological Reckoning is about a personal and professional relationship between Malcolm and Marie.
But Levinson’s childhood is where he got his start and explains why he has been so successful. He was born into a family of artists, which is common for people who work in the entertainment business. Since his father Barry Levinson was a successful director, his mother was a production designer, and his brother was an actor, he was bound to find his way in Hollywood. At a young age, he had small roles in three of his father’s movies, which got him into the arts right away.
At age seven, he worked with his brother Jack Levinson on their dad’s fantasy comedy movie “Toys,” which starred Robin Williams, Jamie Foxx, LL Cool J, and Robin Wright. In the 2001 movie “Bandits,” with Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett, he had a slightly bigger part. He didn’t try his hand at directing until 2011, when he made his first movie, “Another Happy Day,” which he also wrote. The film was shown for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won two awards.
Seven years later, he went back to Sundance with a movie he wrote and directed called “Assassination Nation.” Levinson said in an interview that he wrote the pilot for “Euphoria” a week after finishing “Assassination Nation.” “Euphoria” is now a well-known HBO show about a group of teens going through their rough and promiscuous high school years. It’s a dark, crazy show with drugs, sex, and violence, and it’s led by a group of young, very talented actors. (Jacob Elordi, Maude Apatow, Hunter Schafer, and Sydney Sweeney)
When he was making the award-winning show “Euphoria,” he had personal ties to it
People love “Euphoria” a lot because it shows how hard it is to be a teenager. It is really different from any other teen drama on TV right now because it doesn’t shy away from the very raw and hard-hitting problems that many teens face. The show is very stylized and deals with finding out about one’s sexuality, being in an abusive relationship, keeping family secrets, and using drugs. Levinson wrote this serious book from the heart because he knows what it’s like to be an addict. In 2019, right before the LA premiere of “Euphoria,” he gave a heartbreaking speech to the audience in the auditorium about his addiction.
He said, “I was in and out of hospitals, rehabs, and halfway houses for most of my teenage years. I used to be a drug addict, and I would take anything until I couldn’t hear, breathe, or feel anything. Around the age of 16, I accepted that drugs could kill me and that there was no point in fighting it. I would just let it take over my life, and I was okay with that.
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He went on to say that he eventually wanted to change because he knew deep down that he was better than the drugs that were controlling his life. At age 19, he went to rehab and started his journey to getting clean. Since then, Levinson has been sober for 14 years. Euphoria has won a number of awards, including three primetime Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, Outstanding Contemporary Makeup (non-prosthetic), and Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics.
Sam Levinson knows how to make a crowd talk
Levinson’s many projects have won him a lot of fans, but they have also made him a lot of enemies. People were bothered by how much nakedness and sex there was in “Euphoria.” Some viewers say that the show glorifies and even promotes rather adult sexual content to young viewers. They also say that there is too much nudity that isn’t appropriate for the show’s target audience.
In the Netflix romantic drama “Malcolm and Marie,” a couple is just getting home from a movie premiere when they get into a big fight. Not only was this movie based on Levinson’s personal life, but it was also inspired by the fact that he forgot to thank his wife at the premiere of “Assassination Nation.” Now, people didn’t like this movie because Zendaya and John David Washington (Tenet), who played her co-star, are twelve years apart in age.
Related: A Hollywood insider pays tribute to “La Vie en Rose” and has an exclusive interview with the film’s director, Olivier Dahan.
Since then, Zendaya and Washington have defended their choices, making it clear that neither of them was bothered by the difference in age when they took on the project. Washington told Variety that the age difference didn’t bother him. He said, “People will see in this movie how much of a woman she is. She has a lot more experience in the business than I do.”
Even though he has only directed four movies so far, Sam Levinson has definitely made a name for himself. With season two of Euphoria coming up and the thriller “Deep Water” (Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas), which Levinson co-wrote, set to come out in 2022, he is sure to keep moving up in Hollywood, and people are eager to see what he does next.
By Alexis Sutherland
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