“In classic form, he was watching England vs. Argentina,” Fineman told Variety at Monday night’s premiere of Apple TV’s “The Dink” in Los Angeles. “He was like, ‘I’ll call you back. I’m a the game.’ And I was like, ‘The soccer game?’ Then I made a joke, I was like, ‘I assume you’re rooting for England because you’re energetically very British.’ Then he called me back, and we had a really lovely chat.”
Chloe Fineman says Lorne Michaels was at the World Cup when she called to tell him she was leaving #SNL:
“He was like, ‘I’ll call you back. I’m at the soccer game.’ And I was like, ‘The soccer game? I assume you’re rooting for England because you’re energetically very British.’” pic.twitter.com/yXMV0zUP7r
Fineman also shared that when the news of her “SNL” exit went live, she was very emotional.
“I cried when it was announced,” she said. “You really become a family [with the cast]… I wept when Colin Jost called me today, like, they really are my family. I’m happy that after seven years, I leave on a high note.”
Fineman announced on July 16 that she was exiting the show. “After 7 wonderful seasons at ‘SNL’ I have decided it’s time for my next chapter,” Fineman wrote in an Instagram post. She concluded, “It’s really hard to leave ‘SNL’ but it does feel like the right time. I’m going to miss it a lot. But the people who work there are my family and that place is my home, and I know I’ll never be too far away.”
Chloe Fineman says she cried after announcing she was leaving #SNL:
“They really are like my best friends. So many people there. But it’s good to leave on a positive. You don’t want to stay past your expiration date.” pic.twitter.com/0W7uAJHVLW
The actor-comedian joined “SNL” in 2019. She quickly became known for her range of impressions, which included Jennifer Coolidge, Timothée Chalamet, Drew Barrymore, Britney Spears and JoJo Siwa.
Chloe Fineman says “we just scratched the surface” of her Melania Trump impression on #SNL.
After announcing this week that she’s leaving the sketch comedy series following seven seasons, Fineman says “you never know” when asked if she could return to play the First Lady during… pic.twitter.com/hniYeeG109
Fineman’s first post-“SNL” gig will be as a series regular role in the “Myron Bolitar” series currently in the works at Netflix. Series regulars will also include Jabari Banks (“Bel Air”) and Jamie McShane (“Task,” “Wednesday”). Ben McKenzie (“Everyone is Lying to You for Money,” “Gotham”) will appear in a recurring guest star role.
Series leads include Colin Woodell, KJ Apa, and Diane Guerrero. Netflix originally announced the series pickup in May as part of their upfront presentation to advertisers. The show is inspired by Harlan Coben’s popular Myron Bolitar books, of which 12 have been published. The logline for the show states, “After an injury ends his NBA dreams, Myron Bolitar (Woodell) reinvents himself as a sports agent — using charm, smarts, and a ruthless partner to navigate the high-stakes and dirty world of sports, where saving his clients often means risking himself.”
In addition to Fineman, the cast of “The Dink,” a sports comedy about pickleball, includes Jake Johnson, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Patton Oswalt, Martin Kove, Mary Steenburgen and Ed Harris, as well as tennis legends Andy Roddick and John McEnroe.
As Josh Horowitz points out, Matt Damon had quite an impressive physique in The Odyssey, specifically in the bicep region. However, the actor confessed he can’t take full credit for all the times you see his muscular limbs in the film.
After thanking Horowitz for the “high praise,” The Rip actor explained, “When we did the forced perspective stuff of the Laestrygonians — I don’t know if there’s been a thing about how we did it — there were these stunt men who were all seven feet,” he said, referring to the giant warriors in The Odyssey.
“And then they got stuntmen who were under five feet, and so my double was a woman, a female stunt performer, who had the greatest arms I’ve ever seen,” he added.
Damon recalled first meeting the stunt double in the catering tent while filming and going up to hug her and thank her “for all the work she put in.”
“So there are those shots in the movie where you see these giants looming over me, and so it was almost 100 percent my arms in the movie, but you gotta give it up where it’s due,” he said.
The Odyssey, based on Homer’s ancient Greek poem, follows King Odysseus’ (Damon) dangerous voyage back to Ithaca after the Trojan War, including battles with mythical creatures, as he attempts to reunite with his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). The film also stars Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Mia Goth, Corey Hawkins, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton, Travis Scott and Benny Safdie.
Following its July 17 release, the film scored a major box office victory, collecting more than $264 million globally in its debut weekend.
Hamish Hamilton has directed over a dozen Super Bowls, the opening ceremony to the 2012 Summer Olympics, six Emmy Awards ceremonies, four Oscars and three Grammy nights, among many more marquee events. None of those, he says, were quite as challenging as the first-ever FIFA World Cup Finals Halftime Show he directed on Sunday.
“A lot of that is because it was the first,” Hamilton, co-founder of the production company Done + Dusted, tells The Hollywood Reporter over Zoom from his New Jersey hotel room the morning after the World Cup, calling the show “challenging beyond challenging.”
“Along with the Olympics, this was right up there,” he says. “I’m sure the first Super Bowl Halftime show was incredibly difficult, but when I came in they’d already done over 40 of them. By the time you get to Super Bowl 47, the NFL’s got everything super well drilled. But in this kind of scenario, there are so many unanswered questions. There’s all the people who haven’t done it before, a huge amount of nervousness, we’re doing this in daylight, you’ve got the grass, you’ve got a huge collection of superstars. It’s absolutely terrifying because there are so many things can go wrong.”
Luckily for Hamilton and FIFA, they didn’t have any technical snags Sunday, and months of prep came and went in a quick-fleeting moment as Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, a Gustavo Dudamel-led orchestra, Shakira, Burna Boy, the PS22 Choir and the Muppets all hit the stage in an 11-minute time span.
“It’s a mixture of exhaustion, relief and happiness,” Hamilton says of the show’s conclusion. “I’m very proud of what we did to help bring Chris [Martin, of Coldplay, who served as curator] and Global Citizens’ vision to life. They had this dream four years ago. It’s an enormous undertaking and they should be applauded for what they did.”
Figuring out how to format the show to fit so many acts in such a short time frame was its own challenge, but as Hamilton says, the bigger question was the “gargantuan kind of logistical undertaking” involved with the broader production. There was the “very strong daylight that just kept coming,” which influenced how they shot the whole show. And whereas the NFL games MetLife Stadium usually hosts are played on artificial turf, the FIFA final was played on grass. The more delicate surface impacts everything for halftime, from what stage sets are possible to what sorts of cameras they could use.
Plenty of the pressure was coming from outside as well. The halftime show was the subject of skepticism from soccer fans around the globe, who questioned the need for the show and worried about how adding a concert to a game where halftime is normally just 15 minutes would impact the competition itself. The Cure’s Robert Smith made headlines last week ahead of the finals in his critique of the show, writing “pleasejustfuckoff.” The Guardian, meanwhile, referred to the concert as “the half-time show nobody asked for.”
Hamilton, himself British and a lifelong fan of the Premier League’s Arsenal F.C., acknowledged those sentiments and noted they’re more prevalent in markets outside of the U.S., which is historically much more acclimated to melding music and sport thanks to events like the Super Bowl.
“I’m a football fan, and have been my entire life,” he says. “Around the world, certainly around Europe and in the U.K., I saw some people who were like, ‘We don’t want your halftime show. We don’t want the Americanization of the beautiful game.’ I was, of course, very aware of that resistance. It’s not so much in America, because sports, entertainment and music sit a lot closer together here than they do probably anywhere else in the world. But I was very aware of that, and also about disrupting the second half if there were any issues with the grass. It’s hard, it’s pressure.”
Will any skeptics be converted now that the first show has come and gone with the rest of the tournament?
“It’s a very good question, I was so absorbed and immersed in creating the show within the game,” Hamilton says. “If someone else was directing and I was just watching from London [as a fan], maybe I could comment. But listen, it’s the World Cup Final, it’s the greatest, most-watched sporting event in the world. Having been part of it as a live director, I would say on balance definitely, and I hope that they do another one.”
Anticipation for Nolan’s follow-up to 2023’s “Oppenheimer” was so strong that there was little doubt that the $250 million production would open big. But the final figures demonstrates just how solidly “The Odyssey” was able to mobilize audiences across the world.
“What’s most impressive is the fact that this movie had such a big opening weekend for an R-rated sword and sandal epic. Christopher Nolan is really the only director who could pull something like this off at the budget that he did and justify the spend from the studio,” Rubin says. “He has really solidified himself as a brand at the box office, and he’s one of the very, very rare directors today who can get people to go out to the movies just because he is putting out a new film. It doesn’t even matter what the genre is, what type of film it is. People just want to see whatever he is making next.”
Rubin notes that the opening weekend audience was about 55% men, and a big chunk of the crowd was on the younger side for this genre of film.
“People have been joking that it’s the quintessential dad movie,” Rubin says. “But what was pretty significant to me is that 50% of audiences were between the ages of 18 and 34, which means he really got the younger crowds in there. If this was in the hands of a different director, I think it could be a movie that skewed much older. Love Matt Damon — he is more of a Gen X star. A lot of the cast is millennials, and so they might not have gotten that younger crowd. But [Nolan] really did incentivize all audiences to go. That is the difference between having a decent opening weekend and a phenomenal opening weekend — he was able to get all ages. I think is going to really help the film in the coming weeks.”
“It’s no secret we’d like to [work with Driver],” Feige said. “But it’s a tradition to Zoom with him and then he passes. That’s a long-lived tradition. He couldn’t be more cordial. He is usually upfront about how he is feeling.”
The Marvel boss didn’t reveal which roles he’s pitched to Driver; however, rumors have been circulating on social media about the actor potentially boarding the big-screen reboot of the X-Men that’s currently in development. Marvel has yet to confirm any casting for the film, but The Hollywood Reporter reported last year that Jake Schreier was in talks to direct.
Though Driver has never shared why he keeps turning down opportunities to join the MCU, it likely wouldn’t be because they’re blockbuster films, as he’s had his fair share in those. Most notably, he played Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, including The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
In addition to other high-profile pics such as House of Gucci (2021), Ferrari (2023) and Megalopolis (2024), Driver likes to have a nice balance when it comes to his filmography, starring in plenty of indie films as well, including Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Paterson (2016), Marriage Story (2019) and the upcoming Paper Tiger.
Her journey to cut ties with cannabis began when she was put on several medications after she suffered a near-fatal stroke in 2001.
“I got off one of my medications that I was on for my stroke last September, and they said I couldn’t go off of it,” Stone tells me. “They said, ‘You can’t go off of it. You can never go off of it.’ I’m like, ‘I’m going off it,’ and it was like going off of fucking heroin. I was sick as a frigging dog for four and a half months. I just thought, ‘I want my life back.’ I had gotten off the majority of the drugs over the years that they had put me on. But I was like, ‘I want a drug-free life.’”
She continues, “Once I got off that, I decided I’m going to quit smoking pot. And because I think they put so much stuff in it now — they really do — when I stopped smoking pot, I also got sick. It’s not like you’re pulling it out of the ground anymore. It’s not like when we were kids. I got pretty sick for a month. I went to my neurologist, and he said, ‘Sharon, I’ve had people dying in the emergency room from marijuana.’”
Stone is sitting poolside at her Beverly Hills estate on a Monday afternoon. Just minutes before, I watched her paint on a large canvas in a guest house she’s turned into an art studio. At the same time, photographer Tyler Chick is shooting her for digital magazine Nineteen92. The day is also being chronicled by a group of young people from Social Network Studios, a social media management and branding company founded by her eldest son, Roan, that runs Stone’s social media.
“I had four or five million followers [on Instagram], but not that much engagement,” Stone says. Roan overhauled her feed. “Now, I have millions in engagement.”
But that also meant Roan had to modify who she was following. “People wrote me nasty letters. Why am I not following them anymore?” Stone says. “People got outraged that they were not being followed anymore, as if like this was a real relationship. As if I had a personal relationship with someone I was following on Instagram, someone I had never met.”
While Stone’s painting career has taken off over the last few years, the art form isn’t new to her. The Pennsylvania native studied fine arts in college before she dropped out to pursue a modeling career. “I went to New York with 50 bucks and a suitcase,” she says.
The creative spark was reignited during the COVID lockdown. What began as a few canvases and some paints in her bedroom turned into a sometimes around-the-clock obsession. Before she knew it, Stone transformed her bedroom into a makeshift art studio. “I moved all the furniture out of my bedroom. Before very long, I gave away my bedroom furniture and gotten a small bed,” Stone recalls. “I was living in like this French artist loft with this bed in front of the fireplace. I had this beautiful bedroom, but I put nails in the wall like I wasn’t living in this gorgeous house. I just put nails in this beautiful wall. Started buying bigger canvases. Brought a big table up there. Threw sheets on the floor. Months went by, months and months.”
Stone paints in her studio.
Alexander Moura
Her sons – Roan and his brothers, Laird and Quinn – became worried and intervened. “They come in and they say to me, ‘Mom, we just think that you should wear a bra.’” Stone says. “I’m like, ‘This is the same conversation my dad had with me in the 70s.’ Didn’t work then. Not going to work now. Thanks for your concern. Have a lovely day.”
They were able to persuade Stone to move her painting to the guest house. “I’m selling my work in galleries all around the world now,” she says.
Stone poses for photographer Tyler Chick and creative director Andrew Matarazzo.
Alexander Moura
She also returned to modeling in June by walking a runway for the first time in 33 years as the closing model of the Vetements menswear show in Paris. “I really liked meeting the designer [Guram Gvasalia] because he’s very talented, and I think very clever, and he’s doing something which is to me quite punk,” Stone says. “And you know, I was actually around for punk, so I like punk a lot. I truly identify with punk.”
She also couldn’t help but think of her early days modeling in Europe. “When I was 19, I had a 38-year-old boyfriend who was a designer, a silk designer, and I knew all of the designers because of him,” Stone recalls. “We traveled all over the world together. We dated on and off for 30 years. We’re still best friends.”
Was marriage ever considered? “He would have married me, but I did not want to live in Europe,” Stone explains. “I knew I was going to be an actress. I knew what my destiny was. I really knew when I was little that this is what was going to happen to me. It wasn’t just all about the acting. I knew that I was going to be super famous, and that I had many things I was meant to do. I just knew it.”
In the last year or so, Stone’s time in front of the camera includes appearances in “Euphoria,” the action comedy “Nobody 2” and the indie dramedy “In Memoriam.”
Stone hopes a Broadway debut is in her future. She tells me she tried to secure the rights for a stage production of “All About Eve.” “I could be a good Margo Channing,” she says of the role of the aging Broadway star originated by Bette Davis in the 1950 film. “I mean, in my sleep. Let’s go. Come on. When she goes, ‘I hate men.’”
An outtake from Stone’s Nineteen92 shoot by Alexander Moura.
Stone says she’s been offered Broadway roles, but nothing ever felt right. She also revealed to me that she recently pitched an idea to her agent. “I was like, ‘Can we get ‘Mame’ and reset it in the punk era?” she says. “I could work at a department store in New York and get a biracial kid and be Mame in the punk era. The kid could have a mohawk. I would have bleached blonde Blondie hair. I could get Debbie Harry to do the music and Billy Idol.”
Another idea brewing is a gender swap adaptation of “La Cage Aux Folles,” the Tony-winning musical about a gay couple operating a drag club who try to go back into the closet for just one night when the son of one of the men brings his conservative future in-laws to dinner. “’La Cage’ with two lesbians,” Stone says. “I play the lipstick lesbian and you find a big butch lesbian who has to fem it up.”
But then she adds laughing, “I tell people these ideas and they just look at me and are like, ‘What the fuck are you taking?’”
But as we now know, Stone is hardly taking anything these days. In fact, she says, “This has been a period for me in this last year of really reclaiming my life.”
Peter Lassally, the dean of late night producers who worked with Johnny Carson on the “Tonight Show,” David Letterman on “Late Show” and Craig Ferguson on “The Late Late Show,” has died. He was 93.
Lassally was long dubbed the “host whisperer” for helping steer some of the biggest franchises of all time in late night. He worked with Carson until that host retired in 1992; after that, he joined forces with Letterman, who had hoped to take the “Tonight” mantle but was famously passed over for the gig. That’s when Lassally, joining Letterman’s Worldwide Pants shingle, was instrumental in helping Letterman decide to leave NBC and create an entirely new “Late Show” franchise at CBS.
Under Letterman’s deal with CBS, Worldwide Pants also programmed the 12:37 a.m. slot with “The Late Late Show” — which Lassally executive produced in its first incarnation with Tom Snyder. When it later went to Craig Kilborn, Lassally semi-retired, but when Craig Ferguson took over in 2005, Lassally served as the show’s executive producer.
“Peter had two loves in his life that lasted more than a half-century, the first with his lovely wife, Alice, and the second with the world of talk television,” said Michael Naidus, who worked with Lassally on Ferguson’s “Late Late Show” as showrunner. “Each of those love affairs was a two-way street. Quite literally, hundreds of millions of people owe their late-night smiles and laughs to this beautiful soul, whose gift for finding extraordinary talent and honing it is unmatched and unrivaled.
“And all the while, Peter took such joy from the moments he helped create, that his grin was as ubiquitous as his daily sliced apple,” he added. “Whatever little I gave to the format is because he was kind and patient enough to teach it to me. It’s traditional to say ‘he will be missed’ in these circumstances, but the truth is Peter was and is irreplaceable.”
Lassally retired in 2015, as Ferguson departed “The Late Late Show,” overseeing guest hosts before James Corden took over.
In a 2015 Variety profile, then-CBS Entertainment chairman Nina Tassler referred to Lassally as “the strong, silent type,” with an unerring ability to “diagnose problems with surgical precision” and a nurturing attitude that elicited the best from the big personalities with whom he’s dealt, as well as with the show’s staffs. “He’s kind of ego-less,” Tassler noted. “There’s a comfort he derives from not wanting or needing to be in the spotlight.”
An NBC spokesperson shared, “When Johnny Carson and David Letterman needed counsel and an honest opinion, they immediately went to Peter Lassally, the professor of late night. His relationship to each of these giants was immeasurable and both of them would undoubtedly say his contribution to their success was so impactful that it would be difficult to put in words. A quiet man whose influence and stature spoke volumes, Peter’s brilliance was in shaping what we watch, how we watch and why late night was, and remains, vitally significant.”
Lassally was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1932 to a Jewish family that later had to flee to the Netherlands with the rise of Nazi Germany. While there, Lassally’s sister went to school with Anne Frank, and he, his mother and sister were imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp and later in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. After surviving the Holocaust, Lassally and his family moved to New York in 1947.
Lassally was a part of TV from the very beginning, joining the NBC page program at age 19 and serving as a Radio City Music Hall usher alongside his pal Regis Philbin. He worked in radio, then moved to Arthur Godfrey’s popular program.
He joined “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in the 1970s, rising to executive producer until Carson’s retirement. From there, he moved to “Late Night with David Letterman,” and then helped establish “Late Show” with Letterman. (That franchise, which later continued under Stephen Colbert, recently wrapped following CBS’ surprise cancellation.)
Lassally’s final act in late night was identifying comedian Craig Ferguson (then known mostly for his role on “Drew Carey”) and transforming him into a talk show host — which ultimately, as Ferguson grew into the role, became a critically acclaimed, unique late night outpost.
Lassally won two Emmy awards over the years, while discovering and nurturing multiple generations of talent.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Alice Lassally, and is survived by his daughter, Andrea Gibbin (Chris Gibbin); his son, 3 Arts’ Tom Lassally (Romi Lassally); and his four grandchildren, Walker Gibbin, Eloise Gibbin, Annabel Lassally, and Owen Lassally.
The performer, who announced on Thursday that she is leaving the iconic NBC sketch comedy show after seven seasons, has been slated to join the upcoming Netflix show Myron Bolitar as a series regular, the streamer announced on Monday. The upcoming series, an adaptation of a Harlan Coben’s thriller series about an NBA star-turned-sports agent that started with 1995’s Deal Breaker, will be co-showrun, written and executive produced by TV legend David E. Kelley and Kyle Long.
Fineman is set to play Parker Quinn, a sports reporter for a top publication who’s known as a dogged reporter with a passion for her beat.
Netflix announced Fineman’s casting on the show alongside that of Jabari Banks (Bel-Air) and Jamie McShane (Task, 1923), who will also be series regulars. Ben McKenzie, the star of The O.C. and Gotham, was also announced as a recurring guest star.
They’ll be joining a cast including Colin Woodell (The Flight Attendant), who will star as Bolitar himself, KJ Apa (Riverdale) and Diane Guerrero (Doom Patrol). Matthew Tinker is executive producing for David E. Kelley Prods, Coben is executive producing for Final Twist Productions and Rick Muirragui is also executive producing.
Veteran TV helmer Greg Yaitanes (Lucky, Dutton Ranch) will executive produce as well as direct several episodes.
In an Instagram post announcing her departure from SNL, Fineman said, “It’s really hard to leave SNL but it does feel like the right time. I’m going to miss it a lot. But the people who work there are my family and that place is my home, and I know I’ll never be too far away.”
After joining the long-running comedy show in 2019, Fineman has also racked up an acting resumé in other projects, as a character in Freakier Friday, Babylon, Despicable Me 4 and Search Party, among other roles.
The fact that the top echelon of Netflix series and movies account for an outsized share of total viewing on the streamer is not a new phenomenon. The company’s data release, however, puts the trend in pretty stark terms.
The top 500 series and films on Netflix’s semiannual list of view counts for the entire service accounted for 47 percent of series views and more than 51 percent of movie views, based on a Hollywood Reporter analysis of the data. And while 500 shows or movies may seem like a lot, that’s only about 6 percent of the total titles Netflix streamed somewhere in the world between January and June. The streamer listed 17,370 titles — 8,193 shows and 9,177 movies — which is somewhat less than what actually was available. The series and movie categories also have an “other” line item for titles that didn’t clear 50,000 views (total viewing hours divided by running time) in the first half of the year.
Among series, just the top 20 shows — about 0.24 percent of the total — accounted for 889.5 million views, 8.5 percent of Netflix’s total in the first half of the year. By the 500th line in the spreadsheet — a German show called Murder Mindfully (Achtsam Morden) with 4.4 million views over six months — those shows totaled 4.94 billion views, 47.4 percent of the 10.44 billion for all 8,193. That means the other 7,693 shows, almost 94 percent of everything users could choose, had just 52.6 percent of the total.
The breakdown among movies is similar, though the top 500 have a majority of views while being a little under 5.5 percent of the total of 9,177 listed films.
This pattern likely holds true for other streaming platforms as well, but Netflix is the only one that releases this much data (though it will switch to just an annual report starting next year). The wildest stat from Netflix may be this one: The top two shows (His & Hers and Bridgerton season four) and top two movies (War Machine and The Rip) accounted for 2.1 percent of all views on Netflix for the first half of the year. Those four titles represent just 0.02 percent of what was available.
Langley’s song, which first topped the Hot 100 chart in February, ties Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” for the most weeks at No. 1, apart from holiday singles by female performers with no male-billed acts. That caveat is of course for Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which has totaled some 22 weeks across seven years.
Along the way, Langley — pictured above winning the Academy of Country Music’s award for female artist of the year in May — has passed Brandy & Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” with 13 weeks, Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women Part I” and Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart,” both with 11.
“Choosin’ Texas” racked up 24 million official streams (down 4% week over week) and 51 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 1%), with 7,000 copies sold in the U.S. for the week of July 10-16.
Elsewhere on the chart, fast-rising country star Stella Lefty scored her first Hot 100 top 10, with “Boston” climbing to No. 6, and Olivia Dean topped the Radio Songs chart with “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” climbing from No. 12 to 9 on the Hot 100. It passes Dean’s other smash, “Man I Need,” which slips from No. 5 to 10. It continues a remarkable run for the British singer, as both songs have peaked at No. 5 on the Hot 100 and have been on the charts for 41 and 46 weeks, respectively.
