Nicholas Russell

Nicholas Russell covers entertainment for Defector with a focus on how genre, craft, and ethics shape contemporary culture. He moves between criticism, essays, and interviews, writing about films, television, books, and the people who make them. His work treats popular culture as a serious way of understanding storytelling, power, and the emotional lives of audiences.

Entertainment Criticism Across Film and Television

Russell writes regularly about film and television, including franchise action, prestige drama, and genre experiments.

His piece “The Gunplay Of ‘John Wick’ Is A Bit Too Real For Comfort” examines the way the series stages violence and gun use, using a widely known action property to think about realism and discomfort in screen violence. “Can Benny Safdie Just Make Himself Into A Character Actor?” asks whether a filmmaker can refashion his public identity as a performer, signaling Russell’s interest in how careers are constructed and perceived within the industry.

In “Backrooms Doesn’t Quite Capture The Weirdness Of The Originals,” he writes about a horror project born from internet lore, comparing an adaptation to its source and showing an eye for how online culture feeds mainstream entertainment. Other film coverage, such as his writing on “Nosferatu,” returns to horror history and pacing, reinforcing his habit of using specific titles to probe what makes genre work on screen.

Books, Horror, and Literary Culture

Books and horror are central to Russell’s beat, and he treats reading as part of the larger entertainment ecosystem. In “‘The Glassy, Burning Floor Of Hell’ Is A Horror Collection That Will Validate Your Misery,” he engages directly with a short-story collection marketed as horror, connecting its themes to the emotional states of readers and the appeal of the genre.

His interview with China Miéville about the novel “The Rouse” focuses on a long, defining writing project, showing his interest in the labor and time behind major works rather than only their plot or reception.

A feature on his own debut novel at Defector describes him as someone who has published a large number of reviews and essays, along with more than a dozen interviews with figures ranging from politics podcasters and film critics to musicians, foreign correspondents, crossword constructors, literary scholars, and professional athletes. That description matches the range of subjects in his books coverage and reinforces that he treats horror and literary culture as connected domains rather than separate niches.

Interviews and Conversations Across Culture

Interviews are a defining part of Russell’s work at Defector. His China Miéville conversation shows a method of letting writers talk through the stakes of their own projects while he presses on process and definition.

Other interviews, highlighted in his Defector profile and external professional bios, include discussions with a film critic, an indie musician, a veteran foreign correspondent, a cruciverbalist, an English professor and Toni Morrison scholar, and retired WNBA player Carolyn Swords, indicating that he seeks out subjects whose work sits at the intersection of culture, politics, and language. Pieces like “Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Michael Koresky On Hollywood’s Queer History” and “‘Rape Is Political’: Jamie Hood On Trauma Narratives, Writing The Self, And Ethical Obligation” extend this approach into conversations about representation, trauma, and ethical responsibility in storytelling.

His article on John Early, framed around the idea that the performer’s “secret is total commitment,” fits this pattern: he uses an entertainment figure to explore performance style, persona, and what it means to give oneself fully to a role.

Essays, Personal Voice, and Range Beyond the Beat

Alongside traditional reviews and interviews, Russell publishes essays that rely on a strong first-person voice to connect everyday experience to broader cultural themes.

“I Will Drive This Fucked-Up Car Until One Of Us Dies” is a piece built around a stubborn relationship to a failing vehicle, using a concrete, specific scenario to think about attachment, risk, and persistence. This essay sits comfortably within the same arts-and-culture channel as his criticism, suggesting that he treats his own life and habits as another way of approaching questions he also asks of films and books. Professional profiles describe him as a writer and editor whose work has appeared across multiple literary and culture publications, which is consistent with the range and volume of his output at Defector.

Taken together, his criticism, interviews, and essays mark him as an entertainment writer who is less interested in hype cycles than in how stories, genres, and performers shape the ways people think and feel.