When Toni Collette read the script for “Mafia Mama,” her reaction was swift and enthusiastic: “Oh yeah! I gotta do this one!”

It’s no big surprise as to why the Oscar-nominated actress thought that. The story follows an Italian woman with low self-esteem, who is overlooked and mistreated by misogynistic men in her life – from her cheating husband to the cavalcade of chauvinists at work – but gets her life on track when she becomes a mafia “godmother.” The movie has it all — it’s fast-paced action, it’s laugh-out-loud funny and it’s brutally violent in places. The gruesome moments are such an antithesis to the funny ones that those extremes become that much more powerful.

“Oh my God. It’s such an uplifting, feel-good, empowering, unusual, very unique, hilarious romp,” Collette told TheWrap, adding that the film is “wet your pants funny.”

“When this came to me, it was during COVID, and it was just like holding a beacon of light. I was like, ‘I have got to dive into this light and then spread the light.’ It is that, it is light,” she said of the “Mafia Mamma” script. “And the feeling of making it was the same. I’ve never had so much fun in my life. It is literally the best job of my life. And not just the best job of my life — one of the best experiences of my personal life. It was huge for me.”

But at the root of it, “Mafia Mamma” really is a female empowerment movie. “She starts out as someone who I don’t think knows herself very well. She lives for other people and always puts everybody else first,” Collette said. “She’s kind of in a bit of a bereft moment where the window is open and she could change her life, but she is so full of fear. So many people stay in the comfort of their own discomfort without even realizing they actually have the opportunity to change their lives. And she wouldn’t, but she gets this call from out of the blue. The grandfather she didn’t know existed, has died.”

And the adventure of a lifetime begins when she is summoned to Italy to take over the family business – the “mafia family,” that is.

“She won’t go, but she has this unbelievably strong best friend who pushes her out the door. And it’s for her own good, because she doesn’t even know what’s good for her,” Collette said. “She finds out so much about herself, and I think when you are challenged, that’s where the good growth happens. So she finds all kinds of strength and joy and a sense of freedom and autonomy and strength and power. It’s a non-dogmatic, empowerment story. And so by the end, she is a total badass.”

Hardwicke and the producers wanted to keep the reality of the mob world, violence and all. In fact, Kristin literally at one point has to fight for her life. And that, Collette said, was the turning point for her character, where she decides to just live her life. “And it’s such a brilliant moment,” Collette smiled.

You can watch the entire interview in the video at the top, where Collette also talks about being directed by Catherine Hardwicke, shooting the film’s most shocking scene and how “Mafia Mamma” is like Collette’s breakout film, “Muriel’s Wedding” in 1994.

Something was just a bit off in the Wall Street Journal’s profile of Dara Khosrowshahi last week. The Uber CEO had been driving and delivering for the first time in his tenure and wanted to make the point on record. The Journal portrayed Khosrowshahi as a hands-on CEO learning the product with a splashy image of him in the driver’s seat. The largely positive framing was undermined, however, by the details in the story.

Khosrowshahi, the leader of a $63 billion company, admitted in the article he’d never used Uber as a driver until recently. And that, once he did, he found significant flaws. Fixing these issues was admirable, but waiting until nearly six years into his tenure to tackle them was unmissable. Attempting to convey progress, the profile left some analysts, investors and people close to the company wondering about its trajectory. 

“The WSJ article was a preposterous PR stunt,” Leonard Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, told me via email. “Dara is clearly on a driver charm offensive, trying to put lipstick on a pig.” 

While driving, Khosrowshahi found the driver signup experience frustrating and “clunky.” He learned that Uber wouldn’t clearly tell him when he was picking up two orders in one restaurant. He discovered that when he accepted a new delivery job, the app sent him to the new location even though he hadn’t completed his current order. And, as he drove, Khosrowshahi experienced a still-unsolved practice called tip-baiting, where customers write in big tips to expedite delivery and then reduce them once they have their food. 

An Uber spokesperson told me that the company had dedicated more resources to its driver app, and Khosrowshahi’s driving was part of an effort to improve. “As a company we were unfortunately more focused on the rider app than the driver app, until the post-pandemic driver shortage led to a reckoning and company-wide shift, which included increased on-the-ground attention from folks who didn’t already work on the driver app everyday,” the spokesperson said. “To illustrate that further, there are now four times as many Uber employees driving or delivering than there were before the pandemic.” 

Like every tech company, Uber is adjusting to the end of the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, and its focus on drivers is partially a result. When interest rates were near zero — and growth mattered more than profit margin — Uber could fix a subpar driving experience by luring drivers in with bonuses. In 2021, for instance, Uber announced a $250 million “stimulus” to get more drivers on the road. But now, due to market conditions, the company has less cash to throw around. So it has to focus on whether drivers actually enjoy working with it. 

Khosrowshahi’s appearance in the Wall Street Journal therefore seemed to address two audiences: One, Wall Street investors who worry Uber can’t attract drivers without cash bonuses, and two, drivers who might drive more via a better product experience. 

For some investors, the article landed with a thud. More than one pointed me to Khosrowshahi’s compensation, approximately $24 million last year, and wondered why Uber investors were 94% in favor of that package when the stock dropped approximately 40% last year. “There’s not strong alignment of interests with shareholders, which may cause their say-on-pay approval rate to come under pressure,” one Uber investor told me.

Khosrowshahi made 146.9% of his $2 million bonus for better-than-baseline company performance last year. After Salesforce and other tech firms felt pressure from activist investors, Uber might be another candidate.

As for the driver experience, many are fed up after years using a frustrating product. Some ex-employees suggested to me that Uber might’ve already churned through a good percentage of the population that would drive for the company. That Khosrowshahi himself had to drive to find some obvious flaws isn’t great either.

“What is going on in the product management part of this company?” Emil Michael, Uber’s former chief business officer, and no fan of Khosrowshahi, told me on the Big Technology Podcast this week. “If I were him, I’d go right to the product management team and some heads would probably roll.”

Uber has more to say on this, and I’ll print its response below. It also stands to benefit from Lyft’s struggles, where the share price is down 87% since its stock market debut and is moving forward without its founders. For now, I’ll end with this chart from Uber’s 10-K annual report, which plots the company’s performance since its 2019 IPO against the S&P 500. 

Uber’s response:

Since Uber was founded, we’ve encouraged everyone at the company to use as many of our products as possible to identify ways we can improve the user experience. That’s a key part of our culture that we’re proud of. Our Product and Ops teams — whose contributions are also discussed in that same WSJ story — lead that work day in and day out. But we think it should be part of everyone’s job, including the CEO, which is why we also have multiple company-wide Slack channels and employee beta testing dedicated to surfacing exactly this type of feedback.

Unlike most apps, our technology operates in the real world, which means product designs that can seem great when you’re at home or in an office can feel very different when you’re in traffic on a bike or behind the wheel with a passenger in the backseat. Our teams do thorough user testing with drivers to get their feedback during the design process. We also do validation testing of our products before we release them to make sure they are working as intended. But “dogfooding” our driver-facing products after they’re released is not as simple as debugging from a desk — you have to take the time to get a car, sign up, and get approved to drive or deliver. These real-world experiences can lead to additional discoveries, which then lead to additional improvements, and we think that is a key part of building the world’s best products in our category.

This isn’t some radically new process for us. But it’s something that we think has made a big impact more recently on the driver app, as discussed by the WSJ and this blog post from 2021. Even though things may be working as designed, we find many areas that can, indeed, be designed better. For example, as the article mentioned, we realized we could improve the interaction model when a courier receives a multiple-pickup order, or when they receive a new trip while they are still on a previous trip. We know there will always be things we can improve, and we’re committed to doing whatever it takes to deliver a great experience for everyone who uses our platform. 

“With most pilots… by the end of the pilot, [Clare] has to unequivocally decide she is taking on this advice column… that’s ingrained in me from a storytelling perspective,” showrunner Liz Tigelaar told TheWrap. “It was really important to me to honor the feeling of the book, and to challenge myself to break out of those known TV formulas and molds.”

With a full series order at Hulu for the limited drama series, Tigelaar broke the mold of the typical premise pilot by extending Clare’s decision to become Sugar beyond just the first episode — a move that likely wouldn’t have been accepted had only a pilot been ordered.

The team behind the series, who previously collaborated on “Little Fires Everywhere,” also played with genre. “Is it funny or serious?” Tigelaar recalled about landing the show’s genre. “It’s gonna be all the things.” So, the series switches between comedy and drama for the eight half-hour episodes.

Tigelaar, Hello Sunshine’s President of Film and TV Lauren Neustadter, Head of Drama at Hulu Originals Sasha Silver and EVP of Creative Affairs at ABC Signature Tracey Underwood sat down with TheWrap do discuss the unique process of adapting the book into the Hulu series.

When you read a book, what are some elements that you identify would make it a successful adaptation? What was it about “Tiny Beautiful Things” that you knew would make a compelling series?
Sasha Silver: From the Hulu perspective, whether intentionally or not, we go back to the well constantly to mother-daughter stories — “Little Fires” was one, obviously “Tiny Beautiful” even going back to “The Act” and “Handmaid’s Tale” are demented mother-daughter stories.

Lauren Neustadter: “A different flavor of mother-daughter…”

Silver: It felt like it shared that DNA that a lot of our previous shows had had, and it told that story in a really different way. I don’t think we’ve quite seen a woman like Clare or Rae on TV, and then being sandwiched between the dual mother-daughter stories —  I think that everyone can relate to that on a certain level, depending on you know, how traumatic their relationships with their parents are.

Tracey Underwood: It wasn’t an obvious adaptation at all… I think all of us read it and just were like, “OK, how do we do it?” It felt like it took a lot of time for us all — Liz in particular was super smart — she did this on “Little Fires” also — about making sure we had the template of the first episode; making sure that was cracked and written before we actually started the (writers’) room, so everybody knew exactly what the roadmap was. Figuring out the start, what is the starting point? and then where do we go? I love that challenge in this particular book.

Most consumers are totally unaware how the process of getting rights works and how competitive it gets. How far in your planning or imagination do you get before you even have the rights to an adaptation?
Neustadter: Hello Sunshine actually had the option for it, obviously because of “Wild,” Reese and Laura and Cheryl had this relationship. We knew that this was going to be the most intricate adaptation [that] must be placed in the right hands because it’s this gorgeous collection of letters, but the entire thing is invention. So we knew that we really needed to find the right writer, so I asked Liz — I got down on one knee in the Hulu parking garage. Amazingly and poetically, it was on the day that we did our season pitch out for “Little Fires Everywhere.” Liz said, “I do.” Then we made “Little Fires Everywhere,” and we were focused on that, and we went through post on that, and then COVID happened. Then Liz really unlocked the whole thing, and we came to Hulu and ABC [Signature] and said, this is our vision for this, and they were so in straightaway.

How have you seen author involvement enrich the adaptation process?
Tigelaar: Where Cheryl enriched the series the most, aside from being the entire foundation that created the series, is in the writers’ room. In the beginning, I went off and wrote the pilot, I came back with it, I would give it to her, we would go through it, talk about it, [and] she would give me really wonderful notes on it. From that process, we started to talk about what this was going to look like in a series. I basically said to her, you can be in the writers’ room as much or as little as you want… she came into the writers room and never left.

Underwood: It’s only made the work better, to be that open to the authors stepping in. It’s not easy to do, and it’s not easy to shift from one medium to another. So when you have the guidance of somebody super generous and sensitive, like Liz, I think it’s a totally different experience.

Neustadter: This was so personal to Cheryl, so I think it was very important for her to be in conversation… it’s about finding the formula that works best for everyone that allows everyone to do their very best work in the way that makes them feel safest and most supportive. One of the things that we always do is just facilitate those conversations at the outset, and say, “What’s the best way?” We’re always talking about what is the very best way to tell this story? And part of that is, is it a movie? Is it a limited? Is it ongoing? And part of it also is, what’s the best path toward adaptation?

What are the challenges of adapting a book? How do you balance the production limits of adapting a book versus what the readers expect?
Tigelaar: I just tackle it from the perspective of being a fan. I don’t put too much pressure on like, what are the readers gonna think? I go with my gut, which is, I’m the audience. I’m the reader. If I like this, chances are, they will like it. I think having the authors involved is helpful. We changed the ending of “Little Fires,” not in such a fundamental way, but from a plot perspective, it was different, and Celeste [Ng] was on board with that. I think Celeste being on board that allows the audience to be on board with it. I think that that gives readers a safety to love it too.

Silver: You also have so many timelines, time periods too, that you’re servicing — I feel like that can also be such a production challenge and development challenge.

Underwood: We knew, going in, when we were selling the show that they trusted us and would give us the leeway to make the show we needed to make and support it financially and support it with time and with launch.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.