HBO’s hit drama is out in front with The White Lotus, Ted Lasso, Hacks and Only Murders in the Building running close behind
Succession is leading the way in this year’s Emmys race after today’s announcement that the acclaimed HBO drama picked up 25 nominations.
The hit show, which has previously won nine Emmys, was nominated for best drama series, with stars including Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin all receiving noms.
Continue reading...Marta Kauffman will fund professorship in African and African American studies at her alma mater
The co-creator of the TV sitcom Friends is planning to donate $4m to an African and African American studies project because she’s so “embarrassed” by – and feels such “guilt” at – the white homogeneity of the characters on the classic coming of age series.
Marta Kauffman told the Los Angeles Times that she intends for her planned gift to fund the Marta F Kauffman ’78 Professorship in African and African American Studies at her alma mater, Brandeis University, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts.
Continue reading...Louisiana college student found hidden audio recording device and told police she feared musician planted it there
Three years ago, Laine Hardy tasted superstardom by winning American Idol. Last week, the 21-year-old landed in the headlines for a different reason.
A college student in Hardy’s home state, Louisiana, looked under her dormitory bed, found a hidden audio recording device and told police she feared the musician planted it there.
Continue reading...Oscar-winning actor hits back at critics over negative reviews of her performance as Michelle Obama in drama series The First Lady
Viola Davis has responded to widespread criticism of her latest performance by stating that critics “serve no purpose”.
The Oscar-winning actor has received negative feedback from both critics and on social media for playing Michelle Obama in the Showtime series The First Lady. In an interview with the BBC, Davis called the response “incredibly hurtful”.
Continue reading...The standup comic, also known for voicing Iago in Disney’s animated Aladdin, has died after a long illness
Comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried has died at the age of 67.
His family announced his death after a long illness via his Twitter page. Gottfried was known for his standup comedy and for roles in films including Aladdin and Problem Child.
Continue reading...The specter of Oscars chaos loomed over the music awards – a mega-concert which included a message of hope from the Ukrainian president
Teenage pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo and R&B duo Silk Sonic dominated the major categories, and Jon Batiste won album of the year at the 64th annual Grammys – a three-and-a-half-hour mega concert that mostly steered clear of politics or the pandemic, save for a virtual message from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and an emotional tribute to victims of the Russian invasion.
A week after one of the most chaotic Oscars in recent memory – during which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage – the Grammys seemed to revel in its technical proficiency and lack of controversy. “We’re gonna be listening to some music, we’re gonna be dancing, we’re gonna be singing, we’re gonna be keeping people’s names out of our mouths,” said host Trevor Noah in his opening monologue, acknowledging the elephant in the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
Continue reading...Candidate for governor in Georgia and self-confessed superfan makes appearance in season four finale of Star Trek: Discovery
The Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams has been made president – of United Earth.
The honour was bestowed by the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, in its season four finale.
Continue reading...He found fame in The English Patient before becoming a huge TV star. Now he is tackling the Theranos fraud scandal. But addiction in the 90s nearly cost him everything
If your abiding image of Naveen Andrews is as Sayid from Lost – the soulful Iraqi officer whose sad eyes, powerful biceps and luxuriant hair set many mid-00s hearts a-flutter – you might be in for a shock seeing him in The Dropout. Paunchy, bespectacled, greying, with shockingly normal-length hair, he is less a strapping man of action and more a middle-aged man of business – and not a very good one at that. Andrews portrays Sunny Balwani, the partner and alleged co-conspirator of Elizabeth Holmes, who was once the world’s youngest female billionaire and is now a convicted corporate fraudster.
On a video call from his home in Santa Monica, California, Andrews, 53, looks more Sayid than Sunny. His black gym vest exposes reassuringly well-toned biceps; the hair is returning to its trademark resplendence. He gained 9kg (1st 6lb) for The Dropout, he explains, to make his face fuller and his belly paunchier. He also modified his movements to seem slower and older. “Well, I did at least want to resemble the character I was playing,” he says, a little sting of sarcasm in his inflection.
Continue reading...As he beams aboard another Star Trek adventure, the 81-year-old actor talks about playing Picard as an intergalactic Prospero, hitting the bottle during an exhausting Macbeth – and reaching page 310 of his memoir
Patrick Stewart is slightly surprised to be talking about the impending second series of Star Trek: Picard, during a break from shooting the third in California. The reason is that he so firmly turned down the first season. After playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard, 24th-century hero of Starfleet, in 176 TV episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and four spin-off movies, Stewart was convinced that “I’d done everything I could with Picard and Star Trek”.
But the producers – Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys), Kirsten Beyer (Star Trek: Discovery), Alex Kurtzman (The Mummy) – persisted. And Stewart “took a look at the names, and there were Academy award and Pulitzer prize winners. So I thought the most courteous thing to do would be to have a meeting to tell them face to face why I was going to turn them down.”
Continue reading...The HBO teen drama’s second season is either a glorious mess or an excessive fantasy of high school. Either way, it’s a record-breaking hit
If you were anywhere near social media this past Sunday night, you probably at least glimpsed the divisive mess that was the second season finale of Euphoria, HBO’s technicolor, gleefully excessive soap on the outsized trials and tribulations of suburban California teens. After a buzzy and acclaimed but modestly watched debut in 2019, the show’s second season has blown up: HBO announced Tuesday that Euphoria, with help from its new streaming home on HBO Max, is now its second most watched show since 2004. It averaged 16.3 million viewers an episode this season, behind only OG HBO juggernaut Game of Thrones, which drew an average of 44.2 million viewers during its final season in 2019.
But perhaps more impressive, and telling, than its 2022 viewing stats is Euphoria’s digital footprint. According to Twitter, the drama is the most tweeted-about show of the (still young) decade, with 34m tweets in the US alone. This is by design: Euphoria, adapted by Sam Levinson from the Israeli show of the same name, is audacious in style, almost pugnaciously provocative in substance, with imitable peacocking fashion and easily memeable cutaways. In other words, catnip for the online crowd.
Continue reading...Netflix phenomenon and Apple’s deaf family drama make history at this year’s SAG awards ceremony
The indie drama Coda has won big at this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards, picking up best ensemble in a movie and best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, who is the first ever deaf actor to win an individual SAG award.
The Apple drama about a deaf family was bought for $25m from last year’s Sundance film festival and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture.
Continue reading...‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment
The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.
“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.
Continue reading...The subject of the hit documentary, who conned women out of hundreds of thousands, is trying to launch a celebrity career, a depressing but inevitable next step
When I first watched The Tinder Swindler last month, in anticipation for an interview with director Felicity Morris, I was, like many viewers, completely absorbed by the story.
Several women meet a man on Tinder who claims to be the billionaire heir to an Israeli diamond fortune, lavishes them with attention, flies to them on actual private jets, then swindles them for hundreds of thousands of dollars? I’m a single woman in my late 20s in New York: of course I ate it up. The documentary was also much, much better than it could have been; I appreciated that Morris didn’t have much interest in probing the psychology of its swindler, Simon Leviev. Instead, she foregrounded three women’s first-person accounts of getting conned – why they believed him, why they cared for him, what such manipulation and confusion does to someone – as well as the journalists at the Norwegian paper VG who unspooled his lies for an initial exposé in 2019.
Continue reading...The much-hyped show about the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape offers a screwball meditation on consent – without the consent of one of its subjects
Pam & Tommy, the Hulu series on the story behind the most infamous sex tape of the 1990s, is disconcertingly fun. The eight-part series created by Robert Siegel, half of which has aired, is front-loaded with 90s iconography and zany gags designed to provoke online discussion. There’s the brain-scrambling transformations of actors Lily James and Sebastian Stan into mid-90s rock it-couple Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, and a mulleted Seth Rogen as Rand Gauthier, the stiffed carpenter who pulls off an impressive heist of the couple’s safe, played for suspense. There’s nostalgic needle drops from Nine Inch Nails to Fatboy Slim, a conversation between a high Tommy and his animatronic penis, and plenty of sex, drugs, videotapes and characters asking, with winking naivety, what the world wide web is.
It’s a confusing, often entertaining watch, one that wants to have its fun and interrogate it, too, at best a heady blend of screwball comedy, madcap romance, expensive nostalgia and serious retrospective of a public scandal in which a woman’s privacy was invaded, her intimate moments exploited and judged without her consent. But there’s one detail that, for me, turns this whole palate sour: the real Pamela Anderson did not want this story retold. While Stan has confirmed that he spoke with Lee, who has praised his portrayal, Anderson did not respond to producers’ overtures. She has not spoken publicly about the series, but sources have expressed her discontent and disappointment in multiple outlets.
Continue reading...While the game rages on, there are several major ads and movie trailers and a much-anticipated half-time show from some hip-hop and R&B legends
After the success of last month’s Scream, the legacy sequel – aka the one that brings back the old to mingle with the new – continues with force this year with our first real look at the inevitable greatest hits sequel Jurassic World: Dominion. The last film brought back BD Wong and a cameo-ing Jeff Goldblum to join Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard but this time they return with both Sam Neill and Laura Dern, an exciting prospect for hardcore fans. The trailer has some promising moments but there’s an awful lot here to be juggled – despite the familiar faces, it’ll be the lesser-known DeWanda Wise who leads – so whether all balls can be kept up in the air remains to be seen.
Continue reading...Larry Thomas, the actor behind the Seinfeld character, gives his take on the viral gaffe: ‘You can’t write this shit’
The extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously alerted the US to the dangers of space lasers, issued a new warning to the American people on Thursday: the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has unleashed “gazpacho police” to spy on Greene’s colleagues in Congress.
It is, of course, possible that a clandestine network bent on the regulation of cold soup operates deep under the Capitol cafeteria. But Greene was presumably confusing “gazpacho” with the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.
Continue reading...Trump’s lawyer was revealed to be a contestant on The Masked Singer – and when Robin Thicke storms off in protest, you know you’ve got problems
It’s like something from a Guillermo del Toro film: a grotesque fantasy creature disrobes, only to reveal an even more horrifying monster underneath. But that’s what viewers will see when the US version of The Masked Singer, Fox’s incognito singing competition, returns at the end of this month.
The show, in which a panel of judges and the audience try to guess the identity of celebrity vocalists dressed in furry theme-park costumes, is taped in advance of airing. But Deadline reports that at the first episode’s climax, when the eliminated singer reveals their true identity, it was Rudy Giuliani whose head popped out of the costume. Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the set in protest. Quite a good reflection of how bad a guy you have to be when rape-culture chanteur Thicke, the singer of Blurred Lines, decides you’re beyond the pale.
Continue reading...In its second season, the hit HBO drama on drugged-out and love-crazed teens has finally tipped into too much style over substance
Euphoria, the slick, explicit, high-budget teen drama halfway through its second season on HBO, has from the start been a soap layered in heady seriousness. The show, adapted by Sam Levinson from an Israeli series of the same name and co-produced by Drake, took on a near encyclopedia of Today’s Teen Issues – sex shaming, drug addiction, body insecurity, web personas, revenge porn, pregnancy and abortion, emotional abuse, toxic masculinity, self-harm and depression, and more – with a bracing, revelatory frankness and thick lacquer of gloss (and full-frontal nudity).
By its first season finale in 2019, in which main character Rue (Zendaya, who won an Emmy for the role) nearly dies in a graphic drug overdose, Euphoria had drawn a legion of fans (the finale drew 1.2 million night-of viewers and became HBO’s most second-most tweeted-about series ever, behind Game of Thrones) and managed to balance shock with sensitivity. It established beloved characters – in particular the fragile, alchemical bond between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans character – as well as a distinctive visual palette: saturated color, shimmery beats, high-voltage fantasy, meta narration, a zeitgeist-aiming show with a small hint of irony and a large dollop of excess.
Continue reading...Answering readers’ questions, the actor and musician talks about how he tried stealing a job off his father, his favourite item from Greggs and his Mickey Mouse tattoo
Hi, Keith … What’s your favourite English expression? ClassicMacGruber
I’m sure they meant to say Kief? Or maybe not? I get called Kief in England more than any other place. I met some young parents in about 2001 who had named their son Kiefer, but I’ve never met anyone called Kiefer that is my age. As for my favourite British expression, there’s “bit and bobs”, which is really sweet and reminds me of my grandma, and “Oi!” which is not technically British, but any time I go “Oi!” it stops the room.
Does your twin sister have as many middle names as you? emzsam
Continue reading...The actor has been diagnosed with dementia but campaigners believe the legal arrangement is not in her best interest
In the wake of Britney Spears’ emancipation from her long-term conservatorship, some of Britney’s fans have turned their attention to the Star Trek actor Nichelle Nichols. Last week a dozen protesters, a mixture of Free Britney activists and fans of Nichols, demonstrated outside the Stanley Mosk courthouse in Los Angeles, chanting “Free Nichelle!”
Nichols has been living under a conservatorship since 2018. Her son Kyle Johnson successfully petitioned to be his mother’s conservator after her former manager, Gilbert Bell, was accused of abusing Nichols financially. Protesters believe that Nichols is of sound mind and wants to be released from the arrangement.
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