Category: Entertainment

Gianni Infantino, the embattled president of soccer’s governing body FIFA, has abandoned his controversial plan to create a $20 billion company, FIFA Forward Enterprise, that would control the commercial rights to its events, principally the World Cup.

In a statement released late Friday, Infantino said it had “become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place.”

The survival of Infantino, who is up for re-election for a fourth term as president at the FIFA Congress in March, is now in doubt.

Infantino said, “Our purpose has always been – and will always be – to unite and improve. Moving forward, my intent is to bring all interested parties back together in the coming days and weeks in the spirit of shared interest in our game.”

The climbdown by Infantino follows a threat by European countries, represented by the continent’s soccer governing body UEFA, to boycott all FIFA events, including the World Cup, if the plan moved forward.

Opposition to Infantino’s plan had also come from Concacaf, which governs soccer in North, Central America and the Caribbean, and the sport’s governing body in Asia, the Asian Football Confederation.

Resistance to the plan had also come from within FIFA. Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino’s senior adviser on global strategy and governance, resigned over the issue, saying the proposal was “a bad deal” for soccer and would “mortgage” its future.

Then on Friday, the organization’s chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said its own administration had been “deceived” about the project. Lamour described the plan as “the project of one person,” and said, “the time has now come for [soccer’s] political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions.”

Lamour added that he had a duty of loyalty to “certain values” and supporting his colleagues. “If that means I lose my job, then so be it. I will understand and respect that decision. At least I’ll sleep well tonight.”

Under Infantino’s proposal, each FIFA member country would have received an initial payment of $20 million and a doubling of their annual stipend to $5 million. This would have been partially funded by the sale of a roughly 20% stake in FIFA Forward Enterprise to an investor group led by Thrive Eternal. Thrive Eternal is run by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared Kushner is married to President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

In 2007, Javier Bardem delivered one of the century’s most chilling performances as Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men.” Nearly two decades later, he’s proved once again he could convincingly play a sociopath, reimagining the vengeful murderer Max Cady on Apple TV+’s hit summer series “Cape Fear.”

Cady was previously played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991, but the brilliance of Bardem’s performance lies in the long stretches of perceived stillness, heightening the tension of the cat-and-mouse game he plays with the Bowden family, which star Lily Collias described as “a lot of fun” but “sometimes very jarring.”

“We’re playing cat and mouse, and then the cameras turn off, and I still feel like a mouse,” Collias told Variety at the “Cape Fear” finale screening in New York. “And he still feels like Tom from ‘Tom and Jerry.’”

Collias plays Natalie Bowden, the daughter of Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom (Patrick Wilson), two lawyers who Bardem’s Cady blames for his incarceration. After 10 episodes of buildup, the series finale depicts an epic battle in which Cady invades the Bowden’s home, placing Anna and Tom on “trial” for colluding against him and threatening their children.

“[Episode] 10 felt almost like a play,” Collias said. “It was just the family and him in the house, and we were doing the most insane things and laughing so hard off camera. It felt like such a joy that it was actually a beautiful time.”

Before filming one violent sequence in which Cady grabs Natalie by the hair, Collias says Bardem politely apologized in advance and made sure she felt comfortable with the physicality.

“We would go through such weird circumstances, it’s little things that make me still giggle to this day,” Collias said. “In Episode 10, there’s one point where he has to grab me by my hair, and before the scene, he’s like, ‘I’m so sorry, my love. Is it OK if I just — I’m going to grab you like that?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’ Then we start rolling and I see this thing coming up to me and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?! Well, OK, that’s your job!’”

When asked about filming the intense finale scenes, Bardem smirked, explaining how he’s learned to lean into the “play” involved with acting as he’s gotten older.

“For me, it’s more about a game,” Bardem said. “You use your imagination to jump in and step out of it. I respect everybody’s process, as long as those processes respect other people’s processes. For me, the fun part is to really be part of a group of people that imagine things that don’t exist, and they create it together based on the fact that it’s all a big lie.”

Cooper Hoffman had never filmed a sex scene before signing on to Gregg Araki’s erotic thriller “I Want Your Sex.” So when he arrived on set for the first time and found himself surrounded by ball gags, stilettos, whips, chains, dildos and strap-ons, a few first-day jitters were understandable.

“Even if you’re nervous to do it, you’re gonna do it,” Hoffman told Variety at the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday night. “Because there’s no reason to not do anything in this life just because you’re scared.”

Still, how does an actor prepare to strip naked, slip into a maid’s outfit and get spanked with a leather whip? This is just one of many, many kinky situations Hoffman encounters as Elliot, a meek, wide-eyed college graduate who enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with gallery owner Erika Tracey (Olivia Wilde).

Increasingly, the answer comes in the form of an intimacy coordinator — a role that Araki, long known for embracing provocative themes, employed for the first time on this project. The profession, which officially unionized with SAG-AFTRA in 2024, has become an increasingly standard presence on film and television sets.

Intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas likens the job to that of a choreographer or stunt coordinator. “If someone is going to get their head blown off, people are like, ‘Go grab the goo gun, get the exploding head with the squibs in it, press the button and boom.’ No one really bats an eye about violence,” he says. “But when it comes to intimacy, everyone gets kind of squishy and weird.”

“There are so many things to look after with intimacy scenes that no one really sees,” he continues. “It’s the same way that, with a stunt, you’re not seeing the padding or the fake hits. It just looks real, but you know there’s a lot of movie magic happening behind the scenes.”

That movie magic is put to work throughout the film, which uses high-intensity montages to establish the pair’s dom-sub dynamic: Elliot crawling across the floor in pink silk lingerie, taking a spanking in a maid’s outfit, standing fully nude as a hot-pink dildo is lubed up overhead and, during a threesome-gone-wrong, getting handcuffed to a St. Andrew’s cross with a towel stuffed in his mouth.

“He might have been terrified, but it wasn’t, ‘I’m terrified, I don’t want to do this.’ It was, ‘I’m terrified, and I do want to do this,’” Duenyas says of Hoffman. “He was more like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do it.’”

Below, Duenyas talks about how he prepared Wilde and Hoffman for their most intense on-screen moments, the most challenging scenes to shoot and the film’s overall messaging on sex and experimentation:

There are multiple high-intensity montages that establish the nature of Olivia and Cooper’s dom-sub sexual relationship. What would surprise people about what goes into shooting scenes like that?

With those montages specifically, we had moments where we would say, “Okay, I’m hitting you this hard. What is that on a scale of one to 10?” Cooper would say, “That’s a zero.” She’d say, “Really?” Then she would go harder, and he’d say, “Okay, that’s a two. That’s a three. That’s a five.”

Olivia realized, “I can hit you really hard, and it’s only registering as a seven or an eight.” We had a bunch of little things like that so they could, number one, have a language for communicating about the physicality and, number two, feel like they could talk about what was happening while also making it look good.

Gregg told Variety that Olivia came onto the set with much more experience doing nude scenes, while Cooper was “terrified.” What was your process for making him more comfortable from the beginning? 

If you’ve ever gone skydiving, you might be terrified, but you really want to go skydiving. You’re there to do it. Or, if you’ve ever jumped off a cliff into water or stood on a high diving board, you’re on top of that thing to do it, even though you’re scared. So, yeah, he might have been terrified, but it wasn’t, “I’m terrified, I don’t want to do this.” It was, “I’m terrified, and I do want to do this.”

Is someone terrified because they’re thinking, “This is a no for me. This is a hard boundary, but I’m involved in this thing and I already said yes, so what am I going to do?” Are they biting their nails or is it, “I’m fucking terrified. Let’s do this really well. How are we going to do this?”

That was Cooper’s stance. I wouldn’t say he was terrified. If you’ve ever talked to him, he’s super cool and very together. He was more like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do it.” It was very matter-of-fact. He approaches almost everything he does by diving headfirst into it in this really beautiful way. He’s an incredible performer.

How did the dom-sub type of sex scenes differ from the more traditional sex scenes you’re used to working on? 

Sure, there are differences, but in terms of the way we approach intimacy coordination as a craft, it’s not that different. Olivia had also done a lot of research. Everyone brought what they knew and the type of story they wanted to tell. Gregg obviously did as well.

In this particular film, we’re dealing with these very specific, blurry and complicated power dynamics. That’s the story. The story shows up in their relationship, their work lives and their sexual lives together. What was so fun was finding the character of their intimacy together.

Every intimate scene we work on has a different type of character, and that was the character for this one. Is it different? Yes. BDSM and these kinds of lifestyle scenes, if you want to call them that, are different from something like a “Heated Rivalry” scene. It’s a different type of intimacy, but we approach it the way we would approach anything else.

I’m guessing one of the main differences is how many props are involved. What was the most challenging scene to work on? 

The threesome scene, from a blocking and camera-angle perspective, took a minute to figure out. When I say “a minute,” we had a really compressed shooting schedule. We shot all the intimacy within the first five days. We did all of that stuff upfront.

Also from an intensity perspective, that scene required a lot. There was a lot to work out. It wasn’t, “Oh my God, this is so hard.” It was a puzzle to put together in terms of the traffic patterns, the handcuffing and how to get out of the handcuffs quickly. Are we fiddling with keys, or are we just getting out of them? There are a lot of little details. Which details are you going to skip for the sake of the story, and which details are you going to keep in to maintain the flavor and the vibe of the story?

All of the restraint scenes needed a little more care. Getting an actor into restraints on the St. Andrew’s cross wasn’t that complicated of a scene. But when you have to shoot it from three angles in three different ways, and an actor is strapped to a St. Andrew’s cross, can they get out easily if they need to pee?

Gregg recently talked to Variety about Gen Z’s attitude towards sex and what he hoped to accomplish with this film. What are your thoughts on this mission statement?

Gregg wants people to go out and argue. He really wants people to argue about it and say, “Well, I thought it was this,” or, “I thought it was that,” or, “I think that’s bullshit,” or, “I think that’s true.” He wants those conversations. 

I love Gregg, and I’ve loved his work over the years. He has contributed so much. I learned about intimacy through watching Gregg Araki films as a young person. I feel like we owe him for his contribution to intimacy in cinema. He has contributed so much to the film canon. Where would we be without those pieces he has made and the work he has put in?

I can’t speak for Gen Z, and I don’t know whether Gen Z is having less or more sex. But I hope people see this film and want to take a chance on love, take a chance on experimentation, take a chance on feeling something and allow themselves to be taken to a place they haven’t been before.