Author: rb809rb

Alex Cooper is leaving talent agency UTA, amid a busy week for the Call Her Daddy creator, according to sources familiar with the matter. 

A source says Cooper is in conversations with other agencies, but nothing is yet signed. 

The news comes after Cooper announced an investment on Aug. 12 from WTSL, the Silver Lake-backed firm led by Patrick Whitesell, that valued her Unwell media company at $500 million. The plan is to use the investment to grow the company, which includes a slate of podcasts, as well as live events and a film and TV production arm including through acquisition. 

However, amid the planned expansion, a report in Bloomberg last week also said that Cooper’s branded beverage line, Unwell Beverage Co, is shutting down later this year. Cooper has also faced a number of negative headlines after Bloomberg and Vanity Fair both reported claims about staff turnover and uneasiness among the staff, particularly due to the behavior of Matt Kaplan, Cooper’s husband and the company’s co-founder, who is said to have yelled at and berated staff members.

Cooper remains one of the most popular podcast hosts thanks to the success of Call Her Daddy, but is now looking to leverage that into more with an expansion of her empire outside of podcasting, which may have prompted the move. A source familiar with the matter says Cooper’s team has spent the past several months planning out its future growth strategy, including representation, related to the funding.

UTA declined to comment on reports of Cooper departing. UTA’s Oren Rosenbaum negotiated a $125 million deal with SiriusXM in 2024 for Cooper and the agency also repped Cooper as she launched the Unwell podcast network in 2023.

The talent agency represents a number of top creators, including MrBeast, Charli D’Amelio and Alix Earle, who formerly worked with Cooper but left her network, causing speculation about a rift or possible feud between the two creators. That has been raised as a possible reason for the departure, but Earle and Cooper have both been at UTA for more than a year.

Coming off of her history-making Coachella headlining set, Karol G had an opportunity to bring the Latin love to the global stage with her Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour, and she did just that.

She delivered an extended version of her festival set during the first of three shows at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium on Friday night, as the 35-year-old Colombian singer-songwriter had the sold-out crowd on their feet, dancing from the second she appeared on the tropical-inspired stage to the final moment when she said her goodbyes.

After emerging from a three-story stone cave structure at the top of the stage, which is a nod to the landscape and prehistoric caves of her native Colombia, she kicked off the show with electrifying vibes, first performing her fan-favorite song “Latina Foreva.” Wearing a gold sequin look, surrounded by backup dancers, she set the tone for what’s to come.

“We are going to sing very hard; we are going to do it with enthusiasm; we are going to have an incredible time; we are going to do it for Colombia,” she told the audience, speaking in Spanish, at the beginning of the concert.

Throughout the show, it was clear Karol G wanted to highlight her home country’s beauty and culture, notably with the colorful stage designs and tropical landscapes. It’s also fitting as the tour‘s supporting album, 2025’s Tropicoqueta, translates to tropical, flirty girl.

The night’s vibes were also set when veteran actor Edward James Olmos — who starred in the 1997 film Selena, based on the life of the late Tejano icon, whom Karol G has called her lifelong idol — told the audience in a video message, “Nights like this don’t happen by chance. They’re born from passion, from talent, from hard work and from that unmistakable spirit we call Latino excellence.”

Karol G further spotlighted that excellence in the show’s second act, when she performed several songs from her Tropicoqueta album that paid homage to traditional regional Mexican music, including “Tropicoqueta” and “Ese Hombre Es Malo.” She also brought out a mariachi band at one point as well as climbed on top of a massive, brightly colored macaw, a parrot native to the tropical regions of Central and South America.

Karol G then slowed things down a bit with tracks from her newly released sixth studio album, No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto, which is an emotional and moody shift from the high-energy Tropicoqueta vibes. During night one, she brought out Cigarettes After Sex frontman Greg Gonzalez to perform their new song, “Después de Ti.” Act three continued to be a standout moment during night two on Saturday, when Bruno Mars also made a surprise cameo to perform his and Karol G’s new song “Still,” as well as record the music video.

The energy was later brought back up, getting fans back on their feet, when Karol G and her dancers started making their way to the illuminated stone pool on the B-stage. While passing by fans, she performed a slew of her hit songs from “Amargura” to “Tu Perfume” to “Dile Luna.” However, “Bandida entrenada” was one of the night’s most lively and sensual moments, when a drenched Karol G transformed into a water goddess and began dancing, rolling and splashing around on the stage, alongside her talented dancers.

The love and appreciation that Karol G has for her fans was on full display ahead of the show’s final act, as she took several moments to interact with them. From taking photos to sharing embraces to singing together, the singer made sure to express her gratitude for those who have been supporting her. In one heartfelt moment that evoked cheers from the packed crowd, Karol G made a hand heart with a teary-eyed young fan while snapping a selfie.

The singer closed out the unforgettable show with some of her fan-favorite bangers, including “Coleccionando Heridas,” “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido,” and lastly, the Tiësto remix of “Provenza,” turning the tropical cave into a rave-like party, while also waving the national flag of Colombia.

Karol G next heads to San Francisco for her Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour, before making several more stops across North America. After that, she’ll head out on her Latin America and European legs before wrapping up the tour in July 2027 in Milan, Italy.

Catalog the ways in which Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette could have gone wrong, and the tally might rival a Thanksgiving grocery list. Pressure on capturing the tragic couple and their time period was high enough before early test photos sent devotees of Bessette’s style into a tizzy and a legion of paparazzi to the FX limited series’ Manhattan shoot. But Love Story ultimately prevailed, commandeering online discourse for its nine-episode run and fetching seven Emmy nominations — including top limited series, one for lead actress Sarah Pidgeon and, shutting down any sartorial naysayers, outstanding period costumes. Power producing duo Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson know they could make things easier on themselves, but, like with their previous historic collaborations with Ryan Murphy, the fun is in trying to capture a feeling on camera that’s no longer found in real life.

Each true story brings a different minefield to navigate in terms of what’s verifiable information, what’s unknown and the varying public sentiments. Which needle was the most difficult to thread on Love Story?

NINA JACOBSON It’s about understanding both what was known about them and what was not known for so many people. Because, when we were growing up, they were like American royalty. They were icons. But with the subsequent generations, what we found is that people knew her so much better than they knew him. She had become a posthumous influencer. Yet, as much as people knew of her, it was only visual. It didn’t really have anything to do with who she was as a person.

BRAD SIMPSON There were lots of recordings of him. He’d get tons of interviews. He was very public. We had to find her voice based on descriptions. And we just knew from all the research that, even though she presented as this WASP ideal and a sort of distant figure, she was incredibly warm and funny. Bringing that to life was one of our biggest challenges.

Were you aware of how substantial the Carolyn fan accounts on Instagram and TikTok were?

SIMPSON No, but we did know that she’d become this avatar for quiet luxury. Often, when we would get costume designers presenting us styles for actresses in our movies and TV shows, she would appear again and again on wardrobe boards. And we did know that there was a lot on TikTok about her, but we didn’t know how fevered it was when those early photos leaked and the world rained down saying it was going to be a disaster. It showed us the depth of the reach to people who weren’t even alive when she was around.

I think you’ve been vindicated by a lot of the aesthetics. How did you capture ’90s New York without going wildly over budget?

SIMPSON New York has changed so much more than we’d realized since the 1990s. It’s much easier to shoot period in L.A. New York has huge glass skyscrapers everywhere. There are bike lanes in the streets. It was a city that always stayed the same, and now it looks very different. Luckily, the places that were our main locations, Tribeca and the Upper East Side, had really stayed the same.

I recognized quite a few restaurants, too.

SIMPSON We were lucky that some of the iconic restaurants that they visited — Indochine, The Odeon, Bubby’s — are still there. We managed to shoot the last surviving restaurant of Sixth Street’s India row [Panna II], which has now been swarmed with people. We were lucky in that some of those places just have that same great aesthetic, but [our production designer] Alex DiGerlando worked really hard with our locations department to find places that looked right and gave us a sense of New York during that time. On a show like The Shards, we’re doing an interpretation of 1981. People wanted Love Story to evoke a well-photographed time.

From what I’ve seen of The Shards, it looks very 1980s. Do you two ever do anything that’s just contemporary and easy?

SIMPSON Back on [The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story], we didn’t understand. When we got into TV, we were naive. Our first script of O.J. had 110 scenes in it, and I remember the first visual production executive was like, “This is unshootable. There are no standing sets.” You’d think we would’ve learned that lesson by now, which is to write to standing sets and not have so many scenes, but we tend to gravitate toward stories that are a little bit historical and feel cinematic.

JACOBSON We came to television as feature producers. So, on the one hand, we’ve learned along the way that a TV show is not just a long movie. There are some tricks to the trade. But at the same time, partly because we tend to alternate between books and historic stories, there’s an ambition to try to capture a feeling. You can never make a book adaptation feel just like the book, but evoking the feeling you had when you read the book or the feeling you had about real people or time, that is our north star. We like having something to try to honor, preserve, capture, embody and get right as an organizing principle in a way that feels honest, even when you take the liberties you have to take in order to tell any story.

Looking at each of the eight episodes of Love Story, which was the hardest one to pull off — either logistically or tonally? SIMPSON Everything’s difficult. Even a show that doesn’t work is difficult to pull off. (Laughs.) But one challenging one was episode eight, “Exit Strategy,” which is just the two of them in a loft as their marriage is falling apart. Ryan had always had an idea to do a bottle episode to show the tensions in the marriage. But that episode proved to be a real challenge — in a great way because we were stripped of all the clothes and other characters. It had to move us through their relationship. The writers, Connor Hines and Juli Weiner, treated it as if it was a play. We rehearsed the actors on weekends and constantly rewrote. Logistically, the hardest episode to pull off was “The Wedding.” We had to live up to the romance and re-create Georgia. And then, of course, the finale. There was the question of how much to show the plane crash, of how to be respectful while giving people the information they need and honoring what the characters went through.

It’s been a few months now since the series aired. Has any feedback trickled to you from anyone surrounding the Kennedy camp?

JACOBSON No, the Kennedys have not called recently. (Laughs.)

SIMPSON So much has been written about them. They’ve been documented in so many ways. We fell in love with all these characters and wanted to be respectful and make something that was a tribute. As a family, it must be hard to live in a public life. It’s part of what our show is about. But no, nothing has trickled back to us.

Looking at a lot of your collaborations with Ryan — Crime Story, Sports Story and Love Story — how do you approach them at this point? How actively are you trying to identify stories that would fit in those franchises?

JACOBSON We’re always looking. We’re like truffle pigs, constantly sniffing to find the next thing. What we tend to do is identify a few, put them into the works and wait for something to be good enough to be worth making. That doesn’t always happen at the rate at which we would like.

SIMPSON I look at the way we produce as if we’re curating our own magazine. I grew up with Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair. I can imagine Crazy Rich Asians as an article about the rise of Chinese money and the culture of Singapore. You can imagine Pose as a feature about the trans ballroom scene. Every American Crime Story would obviously would fit in. I almost think of ourselves as editors, hoping stories come in well as journalists try to crack them.

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.