Category: Entertainment

Sabrina Carpenter brought out Madonna as a surprise guest during her Coachella weekend two headlining set Friday night, with the two pop superstars performing “Vogue,” “Like A Prayer” and a new track together.

The Queen of Pop hit the stage while the Grammy winner was singing “Juno,” at the iconic moment where Carpenter sings her lyric, “Have you ever tried this one?” The track then cut to Madonna’s iconic “Vogue” medley, and the two sang the hit together.

Madonna and Carpenter went on to seemingly perform a new song from the former artist’s upcoming Confessions II. After, the “Material Girl” singer thanked Carpenter for inviting her to perform alongside her.

“Sabrina, thank you so much for inviting me on your show,” Madonna said. “No thanks needed, Madonna. You can have whatever you want,” the “Espresso” singer replied. Madonna shared that two decades ago, she performed at Coachella, noting that it was a “full circle moment” being back to take the stage with Carpenter.

“I have a few things I wanna get off my chest. 20 years ago today, I performed at Coachella. I was in the dance tent, and it was the first time I performed, Confessions on the Dance Floor Part One in America,” Madonna said. “And that was such a thrill for me, so you can imagine what a thrill it is for me to be back 20 years later in the same boots, the same corset, the jacket I had on earlier, the same Gucci jacket. So, it’s like a full circle moment, very meaningful for me.”

Madonna also gave a mini lesson in astrology, pointing out that there is currently new moon in Taurus, meaning that “we need to work on our communication skills” and “avoid confrontations.”

“So in all circumstances for the rest of the month, let’s try to get along, okay?” she said. “And to that point, the great thing about music is that it brings people together, am I right? It’s the one place that people have to put their differences aside, put their shit down, and just everybody have a good time together, right?”

She continued, “So I am thrilled to be a part of that healing experience, bringing people together,” before reciting the chorus from her song “Get Together.”

To add to the dazzling surprise performance, they sang a duet of “Like A Prayer.” But not before Madonna cracked a joke about Carpenter’s height.

“The other thrilling thing I need to point out to everybody right now is this probably the first time I’ve ever performed with someone who’s shorter than me,” she said. “So, thank you for giving me that experience.”

Carpenter replied, “Amen!”

Madonna’s performance on its own made for a more musically star-studded set than Carpenter had last week, where the guest appearances were limited to actors with Susan Sarandon, Will Ferrell and Sam Elliott.

During her Friday night set, Carpenter also brought out actress Geena Davis to perform a monologue, just as her Thelma and Louise co-star Sarandon did one week prior. Terry Crews also joined in mid-set, where he poked fun at his iconic role in White Chicks and briefly sang “A Thousand Miles.”

Madonna’s appearance comes just days after the pop icon had confirmed that Confessions II would drop this July. It comes seven years after she’d dropped Madame X back in 2019.

As for Carpenter, the rest of her set remained stunning, keeping the same old Hollywood glam feel we saw a week ago. With Carpenter’s week two set in the books, all eyes turn to Justin Bieber for Saturday night, before Karol G takes the stage as the Sunday night headliner.

Weekend two will also feature a surprise set from country superstar Kacey Musgraves at the Sahara Tent on Saturday afternoon, with Musgraves filling the slot fellow surprise act Jack White took last week.

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As someone who hadn’t been to Coachella since 2014, this year’s festival felt deeply familiar in many ways, and entirely unrecognizable in others. While 2014, of course, had its fair share of brand partners, sponsored parties and experiential marketing, they were a drop in the bucket compared to what has developed in just 12 years time.

Cut to 2026: Brand activations are popping up by the dozens, and Coachella is filled with — what have now been dubbed — “festivals within a festival,” or smaller curated experiences — often exclusive — within the larger event (think Revolve Fest or Kourtney Kardashian Barker‘s Camp Poosh). But other than the music (and the desert heat), there’s another major throughline between Coachella then and Coachella now: Heineken.

The Dutch brewing company, Coachella’s official beer sponsor for 23 consecutive years, is the festival’s longest-standing brand partner. Well before the introduction of Heineken House (the brand’s dedicated music stage and beer garden), which, funnily enough, made its Coachella debut in 2014 (I remember because I was 18 and couldn’t get in), the brewer has always held a prominent role at the festival. But how has Coachella’s most enduring partner stayed relevant in the age of activations? The short answer: community. The slightly longer answer? By innovating a piece of technology that brings people back to what OG Coachella felt like: connected.

“The Clinker,” first introduced at Weekend One of Coachella 2026, is a smart device festivalgoers place around their Heineken cans that lights up to signal music compatibility upon contact with another Clinker. By syncing with each user’s Spotify or YouTube Music data, the device allows two fans to, first, see their exact overlap in music taste, and then, share social media handles to stay connected throughout the festival and beyond.

“Heineken developed the Heineken House to bring fans together over music with a beer in hand,” Alison Payne, Heineken USA’s Chief Marketing Officer, exclusively tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This year, we went a step further by creating something that actively brings people together in real time. ‘The Clinker’ turns a simple ‘cheers’ into a conversation starter, leaving festival goers with a new connection or memory that will live on once the dust settles from the festival.”

Beyond the new tech, crowds were pulled to the Heineken House for its stacked lineup. Weekend One included Wale, Sean Paul, Coi Leray, Motion City Soundtrack and Less Than Jake, while Big Boi will replace Paul for Weekend Two. And since Heineken House is a closed off space with only one entry point, there’s an intentional effort to make a massive festival feel intimate.

This theme of fostering connection prevailed throughout the festival, with an overarching goal to bring Coachella back to its roots. (In fact, many fans noted that 2026 had a similar feeling to 2016.) Instead of dividing the festival, the standalone activations aimed to cultivate community. Right around the corner from Heineken House, Aperol opted for a lounge-style day club, while Soho House brought its same private, elevated feel to The Hideout. Meanwhile, just across the grass, Absolut’s Heat Haus was a star-studded affair with throwback DJ sets and Absolut Tabasco Vodka on the ready. Anyone over 21 could enter, but the space still managed to feel private and personal.

At a time when — even in the most crowded of spaces — it’s easier than ever to feel isolated, brands are actively choosing to fuel connection. We’ll “Clink” to that.

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Pedro Pascal didn’t know he’d be involved in Bad Bunny‘s 2026 Super Bowl halftime performance until right before he was being brought onto the field.

The Last of Us actor reflected on his cameo in the Grammy Award winner’s monumental Super Bowl performance in a profile with Fantastic Man. Pascal admitted that he reached out to Bad Bunny’s team about participating somehow, even if that meant he’d be volunteering or serving coffee.

“I wanted to participate in any way — literally a volunteer position, like serving coffee if needed — and I put the feelers out through people I work with,” he said. “When it comes to representation synchronized with celebration there’s no one better than Benito at the moment, and that fills me with inspiration outside of just being super into his music.”

The Emmy nominee explained he went into shooting Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! and hadn’t heard back from Bad Bunny’s team, so he “sent someone an email with a selfie of me sticking my tongue out, being, like, ‘It’s really me.’ Within 25 minutes, they called me back and they were, like, ‘We want you to come to the show.’”

Once he made it to Super Bowl LX, the actor explained he did not explicitly know he’d be taking the field to appear in Bad Bunny’s La Casita, a set piece he utilizes in his live performances. All he was told was to wear the color beige, but he quickly realized he was going to be featured in the performance.

“I was under the impression that I would be in a suite. There was a dress code – ‘wear beige’ – but I thought it was in case there’d be a photographer,” Pascal said. “So we’re up in the stands watching the game and somebody pulls me from my seat and takes me backstage and then there’s Cardi B and there’s Young Miko and Karol G and Jessica Alba. They do a wardrobe check and then they tell me, ‘Okay, so the vibe is: you’re dancing.’”

That’s when the Materialists star realized he’d be featured in the show, specifically in Bad Bunny’s La Casita. “I started to realize right before they started, and I was, like, ‘It’s the Casita. I’m such a fucking idiot. Oh my god, I’m going to be in the Casita,’ as I was being marched out into the field. So I think that’s why I seemed like a deer in headlights,” he added.

As Pascal outlined, he was not the only star featured in the singer’s performance. Alongside Cardi B, Young Miko, Karol G and Jessica Alba, the “Tití Me Preguntó” singer also tapped Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga to perform with him mid-set, while Alix Earle, Dave Grutman and Ronald Acuña Jr. also appeared in Bad Bunny’s La Casita.

Days removed from a 10-song Coachella DJ set that may have earned him a new audience, Moby revealed on April 16 that he was donating all profits from the festival gig to animal rights organizations, including non-profit Mercy For Animals. The move was in keeping with the artist’s longstanding advocacy, his vegan lifestyle may be the one thing that people know about him aside from singles like “Porcelain” and “Natural Blues.”

For Mercy for Animals it was another PR win as the organization, which has long had close ties to Hollywood through its star-studded galas, cultivates industry talent to marshal for its causes. That includes promoting undercover videos showing the perils of factory farming, sometimes with narrators or amplifiers like Joaquin Phoenix, Alicia Silverstone, Pamela Anderson and Woody Harrelson.

The manager who deals with stars, their publicists and activists at the group is Nik Tyler, who has spent nearly a decade with the org building ties between the entertainment industry and connecting artists to its campaigns. He spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about how that process works.

How did you get involved with this type of advocacy?

I started working as a child actor when I was six and went on to work on Broadway and in TV as a kid, and I grew up in New York. So I was around the entertainment industry and grew up on sets, and was very involved as an actor. Then I took a hiatus from acting, and went to NYU for film school, and I was studying to be a filmmaker and I decided to return to acting after college, and I moved out to Los Angeles for a pilot season.

It was at that time that I was introduced to someone out there who had just written a New York Times bestselling book about these issues of factory farming and plant-based living, and the impact on the environment and people and animals. I was really inspired by the concept of people being able to be artists in the entertainment industry, and then to also use their platform to shine a spotlight onto these issues that were important to them.

What sort of projects do you work on with talent at the non-profit?

I’m constantly looking for opportunities to engage and connect multiple people for the cause and the movement and unify public figures to raise awareness about the issues that we champion. Moby, Diane Warren, Tom Scholz, these are people that are deeply connected to our work and have been ambassadors for the organization, have been involved in our PSAs and our video work. A big part of our work is undercover investigations, it’s what put us onto the map, undercover investigations into factory farming.

The undercover investigators are not activists, but there are celebrity ambassadors that will be a part of an undercover investigation in terms of sharing the footage. So in the past, people like Pamela Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix, they’ve narrated videos. We’ve had a lot of celebrities that will lend their name and their voice and their time to sharing that critical footage, which is very intense footage to reveal, but there are some really incredible actors and public figures who are ardent activists, it’s so close to their heart. They are very happy to shine their spotlight onto the hidden atrocities within factory farming.

What are the areas the non-profit focuses on?

The core areas of work that we focus on is reducing suffering. So that’s work that we’ll do with governments and leaders in the food industry, to be more mindful to incorporate animal welfare policies and to diminish the suffering of farm animals. A big focus of ours is addressing cage confinement and inspiring and educating regarding plant-based food options, whether that’s in restaurants or in your shopping cart.

Do you see Hollywood support trend toward or away depending on the political environment?

I feel like the public figures that support us and have throughout the 26-year lifespan of the organization, they are so authentically passionate about it. They care so deeply about speaking up for animals, about speaking up for injustice against not just animals, but also factory farm workers. It’s so inherent to who they are, that I don’t think they’re ever deterred from sharing that information in an openhearted way.

You’re also producing short films for Mercy for Animals as a series.

The Voices of Hope series originated in 2024 when I reached out to partner with Jane Goodall’s Institute and to create Voices of Hope: Words of Wisdom by Jane Goodall, which is a short film crafted from decades of Jane Goodall’s public statements. I brought in 22 public figures to co-narrate as an ensemble her words of wisdom.

The second film, Voices of Hope: Words of Wisdom by Marlon Brando, which was in partnership with Marlon Brando’s trustees, was honoring his legacy of activism, his groundbreaking advocacy for social justice and environmentalism, and his affinity for animals. Similarly to Jane Goodall’s film, it also brought 22 public figures to co-narrate. Then this year for what would have been Ram Dass’ 95th birthday it completed the trilogy, with a short film honoring his legacy of spiritual wisdom and his compassionate heart.

When you’re looking to partner with a celebrity, what is the typical ask?

For me, talent involvement is about building relationships and inviting people into the community. Inviting public figures to the cause is something I do constantly — whether they’re attending a live or a virtual event as a guest or participating in a program like being a presenter at a gala or a music festival, or we’re honoring them at the gala with an award for their advocacy — I’m always looking for opportunities to invite everyone to participate at whatever stage of their advocacy journey they’re on.

They don’t need to be an ardent animal rights activist. They don’t need to be vegan or vegetarian. They just need to care about causes — whether it’s humanitarianism, environmental, children’s welfare, women’s welfare — when someone shows interest in advocacy and using their voice and platform for the greater good, I’m paying attention to that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“Sometimes you’ve got to be bold about it,” Sheryl Lee Ralph says. The Emmy winner is among the first to log onto a Zoom conversation about her new film Ricky, and before all have even arrived, nicely sums up their movie’s journey of defying expectations.

Coming from first-time feature director Rashad Frett with a producing team including Sterling Brim, also making his film debut, Ricky premiered 16 months ago at Sundance to wide acclaim and won the festival competition’s directing prize. The drama, intricately focused on a 30-year-old man’s reintegration into society after being incarcerated since his teens, featured powerhouse performances from Ralph and If Beale Street Could Talk alum Stephan James. But in a challenged and changing indie film landscape, distributors didn’t bite as hoped — and the opportunity to get creative presented itself.

Bold, indeed.

With facilitation by Blue Harbor Entertainment, Ricky is being self-distributed, with filmmakers still holding the rights as they gear up for an April 24 theatrical release. A Kickstarter campaign also helped drive its targeted focus. “We wanted to make sure that people who are actually affected by recidivism and the imprisonment system could see this film,” Brim says. “I wanted to make sure that people in Chicago, people in Detroit and any of the big cities that you think about that have Black and brown people and marginalized groups could see this film.”

Frett says he “grew up in the environment” of Ricky, absorbing many of the narratives and situations depicted in the film from when he was young. He’d been focused on documentaries before making an initial short of the same name. The film is marked by its verisimilitude: Frett maintains a rigorous focus on the realities of life after incarceration, the script hitting at times painfully realistic beats while the filmmaking embraces the chaos of life as it happens. 

“I wanted to make this film as visceral and as real as possible, so I was telling my cinematographer, ‘Find the shots, find the frame,’” Frett says. “We were on the headset and I’m constantly in his ear: ‘Just follow the movement.’” 

James, who plays the eponymous role, adds, “It felt like a film that was made with intention, with purpose. Every frame of that film was calculated…. You’re dealing with a 15-year-old boy entering adulthood for the first time [at 30]. As a character study, it was just so fascinating.” He spent extensive time with teenagers to observe the way they move through and process the world. “I had to get into the psychology of a 15-year-old boy,” he says. This is essentially where we meet Ricky no matter his literal age: “I took real pride in understanding the full picture.”

Ralph portrays Ricky’s parole officer Joanne, and was drawn to working with James as well as the story itself. “We don’t see a lot of stories about successful young Black men, marginalized young men coming out and having the life that they’ve dreamed of,” she says. “This script spoke so well about so many things that these young men face coming out of the system, and how they get involved in the system to begin with.” 

The film’s success at Sundance did not yield much commercial interest — a larger issue for last year’s competition among American narrative features, many of which took around a year to find distribution. (Grand Jury Prize winner Atropia was acquired in October, 10 months after the festival.) “We navigated it as best as possible with the type of film this is,” Frett says. 

“We’re trying to be creative with this industry changing and finding out new ways to get quality independent films out there — and being a young producer, you don’t want to watch anything that you make die,” Brim adds. “For these people involved, I just knew we had to make sure this lived and that it could live amongst the people that it needed to live amongst.”

So that’s exactly what the Ricky filmmakers started doing. Various screenings have taken place over the past year aimed at direct community engagement. Ralph attended one at the men’s prison San Quentin Rehabilitation Center that included a Q&A, and remains deeply moved by the memory of it. 

“We were in a room with men who were very much like the character in the movie — some of them had aged up, but they had still been that character; some of them were that character right at that moment,” Ralph says. “There were moments when the movie was screening, you could hear a pin drop…. Their response was so, ‘Whoa.’ And there were moments in the film where they started talking back to the film…. It was a moment to be a human being with other human beings trying to figure out what the next step would be, even if they were in their 20s and they wouldn’t be out for another 50 years. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

“People are going to see this film and say, ‘Wow, I’m seeing myself in a way I’ve never seen myself,’” James says. “‘People are looking at me, I’m being seen.’ That’s really the greatest testament in being able to make a film like this.”

There will be a learning curve as the theatrical launch looms for this group of artists, all embarking on this kind of independent release for the first time. Frett teaches directing at Brooklyn College and admits even the promotional aspects of Ricky have been a little daunting. Brim came into Ricky following his longtime stint as a cohost of the comedy clip show Ridiculousness, and with his fellow producers has not taken the easy — or safe — rollout path. But no one involved seems to be second-guessing the choice, no matter how new it all feels. In their eyes, this was the right, even obvious move; they barely feel the need to explain it.

Leave it to Ralph, though, to do just that.

“The offers didn’t come — or they were late to come, or slow to come — and people didn’t know if they wanted to touch this subject. That happens so often when it’s an independent film that has something to say about people who so often get marginalized — whether they’re in prison, out of prison — just because of who and what they are,” Ralph says. “So it is bold to say, ‘You know what? If you’re not going to open up the door for me here, I think enough about the work that I have created to go out and say we’re going to do it ourselves. We’re four-walling this thing ourselves because we refuse for you not to see it.’”