Tag: HollywoodReporter

Perez Hilton remains in a residential treatment facility where he’s receiving care following an August suicide attempt, but the veteran celebrity media personality has reunited with his mother and three children for brief meetings at the facility.

“We’re very happy to share that over the past few weeks, Perez has been able to reconnect with his children and his mom. They were first able to spend time together through a few video calls, and since then, Perez has also been able to see his children and his mom a few times for short, supervised visits at the facility,” per a status update posted on Hilton’s blog Tuesday afternoon, credited to his team and family. “Seeing his children in person has meant an enormous amount to Perez. There have definitely been a lot of emotions for everyone, but being able to spend that time together has been incredibly meaningful and healing.”

The update goes on to say that while communication is limited as he receives mental health treatment, the focus is on his care and continued progress as Hilton and professionals assess “what led to his mental health crisis” so they can recognize warning signs, learn better ways to cope and parse “everything that brought him to this point.” There is no timeline for his release as those closest to him don’t want to rush anything: “For now, we’re all taking things one day at a time.”

On Aug. 4, Hilton took to TikTok Live to live-stream a horrific self-harm and suicide attempt from his home in the Miami area. His children were home at the start of the event, though his sister removed them from the home and called authorities, which later transported him via ambulance to a local hospital where he was treated for mental health issues, a drug overdose, blood loss, lacerations and broken bones sustained during the nightmarish scene. Days later, his mother, Teresita Lavandeira, filed for temporary custody of Mario, 13; Mia, 11; and Mayte, 8. The single father welcomed his children via surrogacy.

See the full update below.

It’s been about two weeks since our last update on Perez, and we wanted to share a little bit about where things stand.

First, we want to thank Perez’s longtime friend Tom D’Angora again for setting up the GoFundMe to help Perez’s mom continue to care for his three children during this time. We also want to thank everyone who has donated, sent messages, and continued to send well wishes. Perez’s mom has been incredibly touched and honestly overwhelmed by everyone’s generosity. It’s meant so much to her and to the kids.

As for Perez, he remains in residential treatment, where the focus continues to be on his mental health and recovery.

We’re very happy to share that over the past few weeks, Perez has been able to reconnect with his children and his mom.

They were first able to spend time together through a few video calls, and since then, Perez has also been able to see his children and his mom a few times for short, supervised visits at the facility.

Seeing his children in person has meant an enormous amount to Perez. There have definitely been a lot of emotions for everyone, but being able to spend that time together has been incredibly meaningful and healing.

Communication with Perez is still limited, and we’re not able to talk to him daily. While that’s hard for us and for him, we understand that right now the priority isn’t constant communication with family, but rather giving him the time and space to focus on his care and continue making progress.

He’s continuing to work with his care team on understanding what led to his mental health crisis, recognizing warning signs, learning better ways to cope, and working through everything that brought him to this point.

At the moment, we still don’t have a timeline for when Perez will leave residential treatment or when he’ll be able to return home.

This is all still very new to us. We’re listening to the doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, and everyone involved in his care, and trusting their guidance on what Perez needs and when he’s ready for each next step. Nobody wants to rush anything. For now, we’re all taking things one day at a time.

We’re grateful for the progress Perez has made so far, and especially grateful that he and his children have been able to spend some time together again.

Thank you to everyone who’s continued to check in, send kind messages, and keep Perez and his kids in your thoughts and prayers.

The Perez Hilton Team & Family

For resources on mental health, visit here.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, help is available. Consider contacting the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or visit here.

My daughters have an amazing elementary school principal named Mr. G. He’s warm and fuzzy, silly and friendly and sincerely attentive to the needs of both his students and their parents. That was not how principals rolled in the 1980s and 1990s — with one prominent exception.

Richard Belding (Dennis Haskins) ruled Good Morning, Miss Bliss‘ John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Indianapolis with more of a warm high five than an iron fist. The principal then applied the same principle to Saved by the Bell‘s Bayside High School in Los Angeles when he, Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies) and Samuel “Screech” Powers (Dustin Diamond) all inexplicably relocated from Indy to L.A. for the (classic) continuation series.

Now, I recognize that K-5 school administrators (Mr. G) have fewer serious problems to deal with than junior high (Good Morning Miss Bliss) and high school (Saved by the Bell and Saved by the Bell: The New Class) authority figures. That is not to say the job is easier, but there are more costumes involved. My own elementary school principal and vice principal did not receive the message about not terrifying the kids, and, if you are old enough to bother reading this, I’m willing to bet that yours did not either. While Mr. Belding often wanted to know “Hey, hey, hey, hey! What is going on here?,” half the time it was just because he felt left out. And every time he had a life lesson to impart.

Dennis Haskins, who played Mr. Belding on Good Morning Miss Bliss (the Disney Channel show with Hayley Mills playing Miss Bliss that aired in the late ’80s), its NBC continuation series Saved by the Bell (1989-1993) and its spinoff Saved by the Bell: The New Class (1993-2000), died Saturday at 75. Haskins was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018, though he tried to keep that private.

“It’s a tragic loss. Everyone loved Mr. Belding, and those of us who got to know Dennis loved him even more,” Haskins’ longtime agent Jay Schachter said in a statement. “He was a great person, and he loved, I mean absolutely LOVED, his fans. He always had time for them, no matter what. He was my client and dear friend for over 20 years, and I will miss him terribly.”

At some point in time, he would take on other roles — including Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), Mad Men, Hot in Cleveland, New Girl, I’m Dying Up Here, Robot Chicken and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But the line between Belding and Haskins completely blurred in the eyes of fans (and, it seems, in the eyes of Haskins and his agent). In this Saved by the Bell superfan’s mind, that was not a sad thing.

For years following their smash-hit Saturday morning show, most of the (other) stars of Saved by the Bell desperately tried to shed their characters from their public personas. Elizabeth Berkley, who played the brainiac do-gooder Jessie Spano (just keep her away from those caffeine pills!), would almost immediately strip down for Showgirls. Diamond, who played Screech in every iteration of the franchise, literally did with homemade, amateur porn and attempted to become a fighter. Tiffani Thiessen cut her hair a bit and joined the much more grown-up Beverly Hills, 90210. (She’s next starring in Disney+ series Coven Academy.)

As for Gosselaar, who was undeniably Saved by the Bell‘s breakout star, he just pretty much didn’t want to talk about it. (Gosselaar later came around on his iconic role a bit, donning a blonde wig and acid-washed jeans on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show.) But Haskins never really ditched Belding like that. Perhaps it was because he was the show’s oldest primary castmember, or maybe Dennis just loved being loved, which is not so different than Belding himself.

Mr. Belding just wanted to hang out with the Bayside gang, and he often did — even outside of school. Belding was a regular at The Max diner — which appeared to serve zero other adults — and he took the Tigers on elaborate class trips like skiing and white-water rafting. In one episode, when Belding’s wife kicks him out of the house, did he go crash on the couch of a fellow middle-aged pal? Nope, he bros out with Zack and AC Slater (Mario Lopez) instead. Yes, by today’s lens it’s all pretty inappropriate, but that is not how it played in the late ’80s and ’90s. Belding was a cool principal who the cool kids didn’t realize was cool.

None of that, by the way, was even Belding’s strangest storyline. In one episode, it is revealed that childhood friends Belding and (real-life NBC president at the time) Brandon Tartikoff once battled over a woman who would become the aforementioned Mrs. Belding. Tartikoff’s bizarre consolation prize was the NBC presidency (and that marijuana-smoking phony Johnny Dakota would never work again). Belding’s eventual exit from the Saved by the Bell franchise was meta as well. The character left Bayside High to become dean of the University of Chattanooga in Tennessee: Haskins was born in Chattanooga and played basketball for that same school. In 2000, he was named its “Distinguished Alumni.”

Belding was a good guy and, by all accounts, so way Haskins. How chill was the Big Bopper? Belding used to tell Morris, his frenemy (before that term was coined) who spent years antagonizing the man, that the student was like “the son I never had.” When the Belding character had a son, he named him Zack. (Haskins’ own son was possibly named after Dustin Diamond: Dustin Haskins was born in 1990, about two years after dad and Diamond began working together.)

Though Haskins left the Saved by the Bell universe, Belding never, ever left Haskins. Also a musician, Haskins released an album of cover songs in 2009 titled Karaoke With Your Favorite Principal Dennis. If that sentence was not weird enough for you, this one will be: Karaoke With Your Favorite Principal Dennis included a “Mustang Sally” duet with Hulk Hogan’s daughter, Brooke Hogan.

Rest in peace, Big Bopper.

The Digger reviews do not hold back.

The positive reviews contain strong superlatives praising Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s bold new film starring Tom Cruise, and the negative reviews are utterly scathing.

Is Digger a 5-out-of-5 “audacious, risky, terrific fun” — like The London Evening Standard says?

Or is Digger a one-half-of-a-point out of 5, “a film full of mostly talented people doing the worst work of their careers” — as Slant says?

Right out of the gate on Rotten Tomatoes, the Warner Bros. film is hovering around a dead even 50 percent split.

In Digger, a nearly unrecognizable Tom Cruise plays an oblivious oil tycoon whose drilling in Greenland dislodges an ice shelf from a glacier that’s going to cause a global disaster. He must race to prove that he’s humanity’s savior before the ecological accident wreaks havoc on the planet. The film also stars Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons.

Here are some of the official reviews of Digger from top critics:

The Hollywood Reporter: “A climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous. Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check … so meta that you watch in excruciating weariness as [the film] disappears up its own ass and then realize to your dismay that there’s another eardrum-shattering hour left to endure …It’s difficult to imagine mainstream audiences ever wanting to be a part of this bludgeoning ordeal.”

IndieWire: “Digger is a mega-budget Dr. Strangelove riff so detached from human truth that its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie — a VistaVision satire so high-concept that it would be more accurate to measure its running time in altitude than minutes …Digger is a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat, with Iñárritu frantically hoping to pile them tall enough that they stand on their own without tipping over … If Digger bombs as hard as I fear it will, it may prove to be a more damning portrait of self-delusion than Iñárritu ever intended.”

New York Post: “[Cruise’] first real stinker in nearly 10 years … Audiences will urgently want to leave after the first five minutes … this is not simply a case of poor Tom being trapped in a lousy movie. He’s just not very good, even as a cartoony caricature with no depth. Cruise did this kind of thing vastly better when he played Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. I would’ve rather seen Nicholas Cage or Woody Harrelson as Digger.”

Empire: “This is the film’s chief problem — that it appears more concerned with itself than with the audience. Its apparent message — that the planet’s dying and we’re complicit, as much as we crave villains to blame — is delivered in almost hectoring terms, often in loud monologues …If the whole isn’t successful, elements are. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography and Dennis Gassner’s production design achieve the Kubrickian grandeur Iñárritu clearly intends. Cruise emerges with a win, reminding us how riveting he can be as an actor, not just as a movie star.”

Deadline: “For me it is like a return to the kind of adventurous films in cinema’s groundbreaking era of the 70’s, but it isn’t easily defined … [Cruise’s] range is undeniable but here it is off the charts, especially in a stunning 10 minute monologue Digger delivers that admits guilt but seeks to place the blame collectively on all of us… Iñárritu again proves he is one of the most original and fascinating filmmakers working today. Digger is the kind of movie we don’t see often on this scale, an ambitious satire that entertains, takes chances, sparks arguments, but is thrillingly alive as cinema designed to make us look at ourselves, hopefully wake up before it is too late, and ask the question: ‘what the hell are we doing?”

BBC: “Most people won’t go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through. But that doesn’t mean that Digger is a failure …Personally, I loved it. Some of its excesses are, well, a bit too excessive, and most viewers will wish it was shorter. After about 90 minutes, you get tired of close-ups of Goodman yelling while snake-sized veins bulge out of his forehead. But when Cruise is clambering all over the set, delivering thunderous lectures on the oil industry, I couldn’t help grinning at the gargantuan scale of his performance, the conviction of the script’s grim environmental message, and Iñárritu’s antic style.”

The Wrap: “Digger is what happens when you give the week’s worst Saturday Night Live sketch an inexplicably large budget and delusions of grandeur … In Digger, Tom Cruise also plays a villainous Foghorn Leghorn, but his version is a seductive, intriguing enigma that takes center stage. It’s the kind of movie about evil billionaires that evil billionaires would enjoy, which makes it the worst kind of movie about evil billionaires.”

The Los Angeles Times: “Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger is a bizarre stunt made on a big studio budget, a climate change satire that’s a self-conscious hybrid of Stanley Kubrick and Bertolt Brecht … But the horrible hijinks in Digger are so close to reality that, exiting the film, I was less sure than ever that humanity will still be around. There’s no hope in Digger, only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits… while I don’t entirely love this strange comedy, I’m giddy that it’s lurched into existence.”

USA Today: “Digger crafts an unorthodox, complicated narrative with colorful archetypes that reflect the power players in our own world, so their goofy semi-villainy leans amusing and a little depressing. It might also prove divisive for audiences, which could keep a deserving Cruise out of an ultra-competitive Oscar race … Iñárritu does give the movie heart, however, and with his star really going for it in a fashion he hasn’t in quite a while, one can at least appreciate its earnest aims.”

The Guardian: “As with Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, there may be a tacit consensus, understandable at some level, that at least we have a big mainstream movie which is talking about the biggest issue of our time, and we have a duty to suspend critical objection. Digger certainly resonates with Donald Trump’s greedy urge to despoil the Arctic and everywhere else. Yet there is something glib and overblown here. This film finds itself in a postmodern hole. And what do you do when you’re in a hole?”

The London Evening Standard: “Tom Cruise is back with a bang in the Oscars ring in his best performance since 1999’s Magnolia … There are beautiful aftershocks to Iñárritu’s cinematic coup as this gallops towards a heartbreaking warning about where the real world is right now with fossil fuels and climate change … Audacious, risky, terrific fun and — for at least half the planet — the wildest ride you’ll get this year.”

The Austin Chronicle: “Ever heard that old saying, this meeting could have been an email? Similarly, rather than being a film, Digger could have been a burning bag of dog poop delivered to Adam McKay’s doorstep … A seeming broadside at heavy-handed Hollywood advocacy flops like Don’t Look Up, it’s a scathing pastiche of everything that makes such movies insufferably sanctimonious. Yet Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s obvious technical genius as a filmmaker cannot overcome the plain fact that Digger is both insufferable and sanctimonious.”

The Globe and Mail: “All these preening, obnoxiously self-satisfied moments, and so many more, add up to a movie so convinced of its own brilliance that it cannot see it is in fact the most banal variety of idiot: loud, ugly and forever oblivious to its own shortcomings …There is no overarching strategy to Digger, just endless scheming from a cinematic charlatan who should have been buried by Hollywood two or three movies ago.”

Slant: “…a film of ideas, a rambunctious gathering of mostly talented people doing the worst work of their careers … Digger is González Iñárritu’s purported cri de coeur against our wealth-and-resources-hoovering overlords, but somehow it still manages to be a shameless Tom Cruise ego stroke. The actor shrieks, preens, and postures. He spits bilious remarks at anyone in his line of sight, particularly during a gaseous monologue about mankind’s reliance on fossil fuels. And, of course, true to both Digger and the man playing him, everyone but himself is the problem … Digger’s teeth are about as sharp as a decades-old pair of dentures.”

Digger opens in theaters Oct. 2.

Charlie Sheen is heading back to TV, and he’s bringing his dad along for the ride.

Charlie and Martin Sheen will star together in a comedy series called Happy Jack that has scored a green light from AMC Global Media. The multi-camera show is slated to premiere on AMC and AMC+ in 2027, with production starting early next year on the Warner Bros. lot.

“I’ve always heard the moments that truly matter happen when they’re supposed to,” Charlie Sheen said in a statement. “The good folks at AMC have played a huge hand in deciding that moment is now. It’s no secret that it’s been a minute, and I’m thrilled to be going back on television in such a meaningful way in an equally wonderful show. The crew has reassembled — suffice it to say, it’s time to give the people what they want.”

The Sheens will play father and son in Happy Jack. The show centers on Jack (Charlie Sheen), a “bit of a lifelong ne’er-do-well” with two adult daughters whom his dad (Martin Sheen) had a big hand in raising. One of them, Kate, keeps Jack’s company running and Jack functioning, while the other, Sam, is a “wild child” who returns home with a new boyfriend … who is her dad’s age.

Jim Patterson and Matt Ross are writers and co-showrunners on Happy Jack, which comes from AMC Studios. They worked together on Two and a Half Men (though Ross joined the series after Sheen’s 2011 departure) and Netflix’s The Ranch. Patterson and Ross executive produce with Charlie Sheen, Todd Christopher, The Tannenbaum Company’s Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum and Jason Wang, and 20th Television. Eric and Kim Tannenbaum were also EPs of Two and a Half Men.

“What a thrill to welcome Charlie Sheen and Martin Sheen to AMC and AMC+,” said Dan McDermott, chief content officer of AMC Global Media and president of AMC Studios. “I worked with Charlie years ago on Spin City, and he is a singular talent who has owned the screen in some of the most unforgettable films and television series ever made. We love this show from a great creative team, led by Jim Patterson and Matt Ross and the Tannenbaums. This is definitely something new for AMC, and we can’t wait to bring it to viewers next year.”

The show will be AMC’s first multi-camera comedy and one of only a handful of comedies/dramedies it has ever aired. The most recent was Lucky Hank, starring Bob Odenkirk, in 2023.

Martin and Charlie Sheen have appeared together a few times in the past, in the feature films Wall Street and Cadence (which Martin Sheen also directed) and on the mid-2010s FX/syndicated comedy Anger Management. Martin also guest-starred on Two and a Half Men and Spin City when Charlie starred on the two shows.

Directing a microdrama and directing a feature-length film are very different tasks, typically diverging in budgets, schedules and expectations for a viewer’s attention span.

But in an era when more up-and-comers and film school grads are going straight into the verticals business, it’s possible that some of Hollywood’s next big feature directors could emerge from the world of bite-sized entertainment. What exactly would that transition look like? Kristen Brancaccio, who The Hollywood Reporter has learned was just tapped by Graviteur Studios to helm its first feature film Crush Party, has a pretty good idea.

Brancaccio has an impressive resume in the microdrama world. She’s directed 21 verticals, including one bona fide hit in Screen Time, the first microdrama from Issa Rae’s company Hoorae Media, which earned nearly 75 million views in its first week on TikTok and PineDrama. She also directed one of aTwist’s first projects, Hollywood Starlet, produced by The Bold and the Beautiful producer Bradley Bell, and the Audible vertical Southern Belle Insults starring Keke Palmer.

That’s not to mention her work on YouTube, which is how Brancaccio broke into the business, working on the comedy channel The Key of Awesome and then as an independent contractor directly for the platform. Crush Party, beginning principal photography in 2027, will be her first-ever feature.

For Graviteur Studios development and production head Emerson Davis, Brancaccio’s non-traditional background was a big draw. The indie studio, which launched earlier this year as a joint venture between Dolphin Entertainment and KYNETIC Media Ventures, is focused on creator-driven storytelling at a moment when next-gen directors like Curry Parker and Kane Parsons are burning up the box office. The Graviteur team found Brancaccio through Screen Time, which they enjoyed, later to be impressed by her range as a director.

“With Kristen, she’s shown how exceptional of a storyteller she is across formats and genres,” Davis said in an interview. “Some of our early conversations were both about story but a lot about connecting with an audience and what audience are we trying to reach. She brings that natural ability to think like that.”

As her journey may — or may not — be a bellwether for promising verticals directors in the future, Brancaccio was game to discuss how it happened. In an interview, she talked about the evolution of the microdrama industry, transferable skills and staying audience-focused in traditional moviemaking.

Let’s start with how you got into microdramas in the first place. What led you to the verticals industry?

I have a background in the digital space. I started my career on YouTube and over the years have worked on a ton of projects that met where digital and traditional industry converged. And one of the projects that I did was I wrote and directed a pilot for SyFy that was meant to be a digital show. SyFy never ended up going that route, but that pilot ended up with some producers at ReelShort in very early 2024. And it had a very strong romance element and that’s what they were looking for. I got a phone call and they just sort of explained, “Hey, there’s a new format in town. We’re shooting this movie vertically. Are you interested in directing it?” And the rest is history.

Do you have any idea how they got their hands on the SyFy pilot?

Yes. The production designer from that pilot is friends with a producer from a microdrama production company that was working with ReelShort. So it was just one of those projects that I had written off as a bummer that it never went further than it did, but then ended up totally changing the trajectory of my career path. And I think there were a few reasons they resonated with it. Obviously, the fact that there was romance in this pilot. The budget level was, I would say, comparable to what a lot of microdrama budgets are. And again, it was made for digital, so it moved pretty quickly.

I very quickly understood this [microdrama] format. I was like, “Oh, this is for the people. This is what the audience loves. The audience that is reading Wattpad, the audience that is consuming romance, people that just want certain plot points to be hit at a certain speed, people that are addicted to TikTok, they’re expecting a certain cadence and that’s what these shows deliver.”

How have you noticed the microdrama industry changing or evolving in particular ways over the last few years?

We’re starting to see different lanes emerge. At first, these apps were interchangeable. Now they’re starting to realize the value in building their brand. That’s something that traditional Hollywood players understand very well. And so the people coming into the space like Issa Rae, she knows her audience inside and out, so she’s going to deliver a really compelling, well-told story, perfectly suited for digital, that is going to be high production value. She’s not going to follow the same cadence or rules that ReelShort follows. It’s just a totally different approach, but it’s very, very successful. The one I did for her has at least 250 million views, if not more.

And then we’re also seeing a lot of very talented people [that] really understand the audience they’re going for. They’re not ignoring the work that has been done so far in the microdrama space. I think they’re doing a very good job actually of analyzing that, what has worked so far? Why has it worked? What can we do differently?

As you’ve been working on all these microdramas, how did the chance to direct this feature come up for you?

This is what I was hoping and praying that this corner of the industry would lead to. For a long time, verticals were in this… almost a silo. It was just shoved to the corner. I don’t know if “stigma” is maybe too strong a word, but there wasn’t an understanding that there was value in what we were doing and in the skills that we were developing. I have a background in producing and I was just consistently blown away by frankly what I could accomplish myself, but also what everyone in this corner of the industry is doing. We’re doing so much in such a fast timeline. We’re doing it consistently. We’re turning out a movie a month, essentially. I was like, man, I hope other industry players notice this.

It all starts with a phone call coming out of the blue and [I] found out that David and Bill at Graviteur were…. I think it was Screen Time that had caught their eye. They had this movie script that they developed in-house, they were looking for a director and they really saw the value in somebody with vertical experience, somebody that had all those skills that I mentioned, both the technical and the creative, that comes from just working in digital and specifically working in verticals. I was so excited to get that call because I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is everything. This is what I hoped would happen. People are recognizing the value in these skills.”

What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned in the microdrama industry that you’re planning on bringing to your work on Crush Party?

I’ve met some very, very talented, skilled people who can accomplish a lot on a limited budget, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, [and I’m] actually wanting to bring some people with me.

Aside from that, I think the aspect that I’m going to bring with me to Crush Party and other projects is I feel like I keep the audience in mind in a different way and meet the audience where they are. And what’s nice about this script in particular is it’s targeting an audience that is thriller and horror. Those are emerging genres in the microdrama space and fans are starting to really respond to them. When you’re thinking about the audience, it causes you to think about the whole project in a different way. So many filmmakers forget that you’re making your movie for an audience and you can make the best movie in the world, but if it doesn’t reach the audience, no one’s going to see it and that’s such a shame. So who is your audience? What is it they’re looking for? What matters to them? That needs to matter to you too.

On the flip side, are there any elements when it comes to working on a feature that you feel will really stretch you as a director?

When you make a lot of microdramas, you understand the time you have and the decisions you make are usually to meet those demands on time and budget. Unfortunately, time, budget, creative is the order in which you have to think about things. It’s a necessity; thinking the opposite way will make you crazy in the microdrama space. But I think it’s going to be a little bit of a brain rearrangement, a very lovely one, to maybe be able to say, okay, obviously this is not a massive budget studio feature, right? So I’m aware of what this budget is and what it can get me, but it does allow me to think creatively first, and then assess, okay, does this work with the time and budget that we have?

In general, what kind of preparation do you think microdramas offer early-career directors for working in other formats like features?

I think the value in directing microdramas is learning the skill of shooting for the edit. You don’t have time to find the movie in post. So even if you have time on set, which you never do, at the end of the day, these post timelines are so tight, you don’t have time to try and shape it into anything else. And obviously your scripty [script supervisor] is hopefully there to help you, but as a director, you also need to learn that skill.

Working with actors, you don’t have time for a ton of takes. So learning very quickly how to communicate to an actor, how to quickly understand maybe why isn’t a scene working or what could we adjust in this scene to make it better or to change the energy of the scene. You get very quick. So I think overall it’s getting your reps in all these different areas. You’re shooting multi-cam, you have to be able to hold in your head what multiple cameras are doing. I think there’s just so much value in the technical, practical skills of directing when you’re directing microdramas.

What are your ultimate aspirations as a director and where do you want to go from here?

I’m going to sound like a cliché, but I love telling stories. And so I think I’m very interested in telling stories in lots of different mediums, lots of different ways. I don’t know what the future of my career looks like, but I’m pretty confident that it will involve somehow combining my digital experience with narrative experience. And whether that’s in more digitally focused projects or more films or streaming projects, I don’t know. But that seems to be what my career has flirted [with] consistently, at that meeting point.

And I think Graviteur has the right idea in that they’re creating a movie that is a very traditional format, but just the fact that they even hired me, they’re thinking about it also with the eye towards what matters in digital, what skills do people coming from digital bring to the table, which is very cool. I think they’re a little ahead of the curve on that. I mean, we’ve obviously also seen many examples of YouTube creators doing this very successfully, but I think that will stop being an outlier and that will start being a more established pipeline.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The story of Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen will continue in a book sequel.

Author Ali Hazelwood announced Tuesday that she will release a sequel, The Two-Body Problem next February. The sequel is in early development and comes amid the recent release of Prime Video‘s adaptation of Hazelwood‘s bestseller The Love Hypothesis, starring Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman.

Sharing the cover on her social media Hazelwood wrote, “‘I wrote a sequel to The Love Hypothesis‘ is not a sentence I thought I’d say a year or so ago, but now I weirdly can’t imagine a world in which The Two-Body Problem doesn’t exist. I’m really eager to talk more about this book and how it came about in the next few months. For now let me just say that the TLH movie and its cast made me fall for Adam and Olive all over again, that revisiting them was an absolute pleasure.“

She continued, “As someone who gets VERY attached to stories and characters, I know that unannounced sequels can be blindsiding, so feel free to skip this book and overwrite it with whatever headcanon you prefer, and I’ll see you on the next one! But if you want to read more about Adam and Olive, The Two-Body Problem spans a couple of years, and it’s a mix of slice of life, postdoctoral turmoil, and unflinching exploration of the hardest challenge one will face in a long-term relationship: deciding what to have for dinner. If you pick it up, I really hope you enjoy.“

Though she prefaced that “nothing is guaranteed,“ Hazelwood also announced, “MRC is developing a film based on the The Two-Body Problem for Amazon MGM Studios.“ Further details were not shared.

Since its publication in 2021, The Love Hypothesis has since become a full-blown phenomenon — a New York Times bestseller, a BookTok obsession and a career launchpad, turning Hazelwood into a household name. Her books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, several already in the book-to-screen pipeline.

The film adaptation, which premiered on Sept. 23 on Prime Video, was directed by Claire Scanlon and produced by Elizabeth Cantillon.

The romance, which began as Star Wars’ Reylo fan fiction (featuring Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren), follows Olive Smith (Reinhart), a graduate student and Stanford Ph.D. candidate who embarks on a fake romance with the notoriously stern Adam Carlsen (Bateman), known as “Dr. Evil” to his students. The move is solely to reassure her friend Anh (Rachel Marsh) that Olive’s feelings for her bestie’s current love interest are entirely behind her.

The Two-Body Problem book will be published on Feb. 2, 2027.

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Ahead of a two-night season 39 premiere, The Amazing Race is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an Entertainment Tonight special filled with new interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and never-before-seen content from the Emmy-winning competition show.

Titled The Amazing Race: 25 Years Around the World, the hour-long TV event airs Sept. 29 at 8 p.m. PT/ET on CBS, available to stream live via DirecTV (with a five-day free trial), Fubo (with a one-day free trial) or Hulu + Live TV.

Alternatively, the anniversary special will be available to watch live with a Paramount+ Premium subscription or the following day with Paramount+ Essential, and while the service no longer offers a free trial of its own, Paramount+ Premium is currently complimentary for three months with DirecTV’s Entertainment, Choice or Ultimate Signature packages. Alternatively, the Premier package, DirecTV’s top-tier Signature package, includes Paramount+ Premium at no extra cost as part of its premium channel lineup. These are both on top of DirecTV’s standard five-day free trial.

At a Glance: How to Watch The Amazing Race: 25 Years Around the World

Where to Watch Amazing Race 25th Anniversary Special: Date, Time, Channel

The TV special airs on Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 8 p.m. PT/ET on CBS.

Where to Stream Amazing Race 25th Anniversary Special Online

Since the Entertainment Tonight special airs on CBS, it will also be available to watch live on any streaming service that carries said network, namely DirecTV (with a five-day free trial), Fubo (with a one-day free trial) and Hulu + Live TV.

The Amazing Race: 25 Years Around the World will also be available to stream both live and on demand with a Paramount+ Premium subscription or the following day with Paramount+ Essential. While the service no longer offers a free trial of its own, customers can claim three complimentary months of Paramount+ Premium (and a host of other add-ons) with DirecTV’s Entertainment, Choice or Ultimate packages, which also offer the aforementioned five-day free trial period. Alternatively, the Premier package, DirecTV’s top-tier package, includes Paramount+ indefinitely as part of its standard streaming lineup.

More on each live TV streaming option below.

Learn more about each plan option, including how to build your own channel lineup (starting at just $19.99 per month), at directv.com.

Chihuahua, Mexico
Spring 1983

Filming out in the Chihuahuan Desert is actually chilly in the morning, but when the sun comes up, the heat is unreal. Just biblical. With the camera crew setting up in the distance and the wind not cooperating, Patrick Stewart and I sweat in our “stillsuits” and wait. In the world of Dune, the suit transforms the sweat into drinking water; but in the Mexican desert, the sweat just pools, sticks to my skin and runs down my arms. The custom-fit suit is a near-torture device of costuming that severely limits my ability to move. It’s like fighting against a giant rubber band wrapped around my body. When the suit is zipped all the way up, I can’t even raise my arms. Not ideal. The key, I’m learning, is to limit unnecessary movement. Or, really, any.

Wondering how much longer before we roll, I turn to see David Lynch, the film’s director, up on a desert dune in a yellow hat, white collared shirt, the shortest shorts on earth, and brown loafers with white socks pulled up to his knees. (He has a particular distaste for sand in his shoes.) He’s talking to cinematographer Freddie Francis, shirtless in a boater hat, and to the assistant director, José “Kuki” López Rodero, in a white panama hat. They are huddled together around the camera, looking like a bizarre collection of bandits.

Freddie’s crew is setting up big silver reflectors to light the actors’ faces, which bounce the sunlight right into our eyeballs. Brutal. (Now I understand why Clint Eastwood characters are always squinting.)

In the distance, across the Samalayuca Dune Fields, men are burn­ing old tires to get the right color and intensity of black smoke. As a key point of the plot, the planet Arrakis, aka Dune, doesn’t have water; thus, it has no blue sky. But of course, Mexico does. Can’t get around that. So, our intrepid director, the 37-year-old for­mer Eagle Scout from Montana, the Oscar-nominated visionary be­hind Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, Lynch has taken on the not-inconsiderable task of blotting out the sky.

Those tires are still burning in the distance, but now the black smoke is moving in the wrong direction, away from us. So, we wait. We can blot out the sky, rip up the desert, but we can’t control which way the wind blows.

Assuming it’ll be some time, I unzip my stillsuit to down around my torso and tie the arms around my waist, my black T-shirt comically drenched: I’m now half Paul, half Kyle. Both of us carrying a lot on our minds — and shoulders.

Dune is populated by an impressive list of international talent on and off camera: acclaimed actors like Max von Sydow, Francesca Annis, Jürgen Prochnow; up-and-comers like Blade Runner’s Sean Young and gigantic stars like Sting; top craftsmen like Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis, Tony Masters (Stanley Kubrick’s production designer), effects wizard Kit West (Raiders of the Lost Ark), creature creator Carlo Rambaldi (who also designed E.T.), and famed costume designer Bob Ringwood, whose Batman suit five years later will be modeled on the “fetish industrial” look of Dune’s rubber stillsuits.

In Mexico for budgetary reasons, the day-to-day production has customs issues, technology issues, communication issues, construction issues, electricity issues, on top of the typical challenges that come with a movie of this size and complexity. The power goes out regularly — our home base, Mexico City, has brownouts — and the crew on the soundstages often have to switch to generators. It’s a real roll-with-the-punches situation, an adventure in the grandest sense of the word. When I first arrive, I am wide-eyed, viewing the project as a throwback to the “sword and sandal” movies of the 1950s and early ’60s that I used to watch on TV. Go off somewhere impossible and exotic and come back and hope you have a movie.

During the scene Patrick Stewart and I are shooting that day, Paul Atreides, the character I play, has been in the desert for a couple of years. I had petitioned for my hair to go past my shoulders, Jesus style — a sexier and messiah-like Paul — but was overruled. The final decision is a compromise that serves neither side: hair extensions glued to my scalp with a latex adhesive. Taking them off at the end of each day is a painful process that involves rubbing alcohol and a light scalping that leaves behind stubborn balls of latex in my hair. Currently, I am wearing a white hairnet over my perm, to keep it in place before we shoot. Patrick, mostly bald on top, has longer hair extensions, too, given that his character, Paul’s adviser and friend Gurney Halleck, has been in exile as well. We stare off into the distance, catching our breath, saving our energy.

The first thing I noticed when I met Patrick was his voice. I went to school for three years to learn how to speak onstage, but I’ll never sound like him. Coming from the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, Patrick has the most mellifluous tones, regal and elegant. No one can make the line “Behold, as a wild ass in the desert go I forth to my work” sound correct except for him. He is Gurney Halleck, master swordsman and troubadour. And because he’s also Patrick Stewart, he’s suave and debonair about it. When he puts on the Atreides battle jacket or the Fremen stillsuit, it’s like he’s lived in it all his life. He also has the most marvelously shaped head of any human I’ve ever seen, and I tell him so. He gives me a “thank you, I think” kind of look.

Patrick is in his early 40s at the time, but this is only his third film, and he’s a neophyte when it comes to the complicated world of Dune. Because he’s a last-minute replacement — for Aldo Ray, whose struggles with alcoholism have rendered him out of commission — I try to offer assistance. Patrick simply hasn’t had time to soak up the extensive Dune lore I have spent a lifetime accumulating. Still, we are both newcomers to film, so we share a certain awe about the hectic and bizarre world spinning around us.

Patrick is a mix of stately confidence and thoughtful inquiry. He regularly leans over and, sotto voce, asks me questions about what’s going on. Though he presents a very cool and collected mien, he is just trying to figure shit out like me. We connect on our theater background — I did Shakespeare the previous summer — and laugh at the exponential difference between simple theater productions and … whatever this is. The size and scope of the film often leave us speechless, and I feel less alone with him beside me.

On his first day of shooting, he and I took our seats in a half-built “ornithopter,” which is like a giant, multifaceted bee that flies over the desert. We were seated in front of a gigantic blue screen, where the landscape would be matted in later. I could feel Patrick’s nervousness as we prepared to “fly” over the shield wall and the Great Desert of Arrakis. He leaned forward and quietly asked, “Kyle, what are we looking at here?”

I leaned back and spoke in an undertone: “There’s a sandworm down there bigger than a tractor trailer.”

“Aha. And there?” he asked, pointing lower down. “It’s swallowing one of the harvesters.”

“Harvester?” he asked.

“It’s like a large metal factory on wheels.”

“Seems like a risky mission,” he said, a trace of somber gravitas. “Tremendous risk,” I said quietly.

Patrick’s key line in the scene is “The worm is eight minutes away, sire.” After the first take, he had a question. “Pardon, David?”

“YES, PATRICK,” David said in his distinctive honk.

“How exactly would I know how far out the worm is?” I’m impressed that Patrick exists deeply enough within his character to ask such a thing.

David stopped, re-calculating in his mind. “EXCELLENT QUESTION, PATRICK,” he said, like a supportive teacher. “THANK YOU.” He then dispatched a propman to construct a gauge, with analog hands to be inserted later.

Having carried the world of Dune in my head for years, I, too, arrived on set with such inquiries. Carefully and diplomatically, I at first pushed back on some production details. I know the book inside and out — I am likely the only one on set who does — so I feel I carry a responsibility to the story.

When I was fitted for the stillsuit, I felt some things were missing: “How come these suits don’t have hoods?” “Where are the capes?” “Will there be a headpiece?” “Wait, where’s the mouthpiece so you don’t lose moisture when you breathe?”

I wasn’t trying to be difficult; it’s just that I had absorbed the reality of Frank Herbert’s story so completely. If Paul had to survive in that desert climate, in those bleak conditions, with only this protection, he would die. And if being stranded on Dune wasn’t a life-or-death situation, then that would change a whole series of things that affected the characters’ decisions. There was an internal logic that needed to remain intact. My concerns were never about my ego or vanity, but about the truth of that world.

“Kale,” said producer Dino De Laurentiis, still struggling to pronounce my name. “We don’t hire famous actors to cover their faces where no one can see them.”

This did have an unavoidable logic to it. He had plenty to worry about already, and often he and his daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis, also a producer on the film, and David were managing a hundred things at once on a scale I couldn’t even conceive.

After my third degree about the costume, I made a point to choose my battles more carefully.

Still standing around in the broiling desert with Patrick, waiting for the smoke to change direction, we walk over to where Everett McGill is sitting on a chair beneath umbrellas, out of the sun. Everett, who plays Stilgar, a tribal leader of the indigenous “Fremen,” has the calm but commanding presence of an Old West sheriff. He’s got classic movie-star features, a strong jaw and penetrating eyes, but he remains offbeat enough to stay interesting.

“Hey, young buck,” Everett says, his nickname for me. “Surviving?”

I part my hands, like Take a look, making a dramatic flourish of my current state — hairnet, half-removed stillsuit, sweat-drenched T-shirt.

Everett is a different breed of actor, and I’m instantly drawn to him. He’s a taciturn guy who grew up in Kansas, and he has that cowboy feel about him, even down to his badass boots, which I make sure to find a pair of for myself. To protect his vocal cords, he carries a converted soda bottle from which he regularly inhales. It is lined with damp cotton, to hold moisture. He wants Stilgar’s voice to have the deep timbre of a respected elder. Everett is meticulous and thorough, if eccentric, carefully considering all kinds of little details for his character.

Patrick, Everett, and I stare at the thick black smoke coming off the burning tires, the most toxic cloud I’ve ever seen. “You think that’s why we couldn’t shoot this in the States?” I ask, and Patrick and Everett laugh.

Everett seems more sanguine about our current conditions. He’s been around. “This is child’s play,” he says, “compared to what we went through on Quest.”

He has been entertaining us with tales from Quest for Fire, the historical fantasy film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud that he recently made with Ron Perlman and Rae Dawn Chong. The film had a legendary shoot, nearly a year long: actors sitting for five hours of makeup a day, learning a completely invented language, dealing with the elements in freezing Scotland and blistering Kenya.

“It was grueling,” Everett says, carefully inhaling from his bottle and regaling us like a chieftain before a campfire. He starts enumerating on his fingers. “Ron and I both got frostbite, they had real bears and elephants on set, a volcano eruption we had to plan around, and a set designer got anthrax from animal skins.” He says it all matter-of-factly, a little pride in his resonant voice.

“Jesus,” I say. I glance over at Patrick, and he looks mystified. But as a Hollywood veteran, Everett takes things in stride.

Assuming the Dune pictures will keep me in the space-fantasy business for a while — after all, I had signed an enormous book of a contract for five Dune (and three non-Dune) films for Dino’s company — I listen to his stories in a little bit of awe. I’m excited, even gung ho about clawing my way through those kinds of challenges. The exuberance and stupidity of youth have me embracing the idea of testing myself on a film set. I can’t wait to come back with stories.

“Yeah, we kept it light, though,” Everett says. “You gotta. Or you’d go insane. Ron and I were always pulling shit on each other. One time, I had to traverse this sandhill barefoot where the ground temperature was nearly a hundred fifty degrees. When it was Ron’s turn, I waved him up without saying a word, and boy he nearly killed me. The bottoms of his feet were bright red! Nearly scorched them off!” Everett laughs aloud in his rich tenor. Between him and Patrick, I’m surrounded by the most melodious sounds.

The three of us are becoming fast friends, and though I’m over a decade younger, I feel comfortable with the relaxed camaraderie in the midst of the madness. I’m discovering that friends on a shoot can become a type of family. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. Everett is playfully envious of my youth — that’s what the whole “young buck” thing is about. “You gotta get out there and graze,” he tells me. “Everything is out there for you. You can go all night, come to set without sleeping.”

I find his words equally inspiring and demoralizing. I’m not great at embracing the moment and a little gun-shy about real-life adventure. But I have always wanted to traverse the country on a motorcycle; for some reason, after time with Everett, I will make a plan to do exactly that when the shoot ends. It goes against all my natural caution, so it is perfect.

Suddenly, the wind shifts. Now the black smoke is blowing right across our faces; it is pure poison, lethal in our throats and lungs, a shock to breathe in. It’s like a neck punch, freezing my vocal cords, stopping me from speaking. Again, not ideal. Everett puts his head down and inhales from his bottle. The rest of us just have to breathe as little as possible.

“OKAY, EVERYONE.” David’s distinctive honk comes through nearby walkie-talkies. “GET IN POSITION, PLEASE.”

Extras spread out across the dunes. Crew members scurry over to the actors with a gardening-type tool, opening the nozzle and blowing a cloud of yellow and red dust onto us. I close my eyes as it covers my hair and face, hold my breath as it gets up my nose and the grit lodges in my teeth.

“BOBBY,” David says over the walkie. “WILL YOU HIT KYLE ONE MORE TIME?”

Someone from wardrobe runs over and shoots me with the dirt gun again for good measure. Now I’m completely covered in it. When I turn around and face the camera, I notice that every single crew member is wearing a nose mask, face covering, and giant black-framed goggles. I have to keep from laughing.

The “dirt” is actually a calcium-based clay called fuller’s earth, a powder that gives images texture and a sense of depth. The effects team has set giant airplane propeller–type fans right off camera. During the shot, they feed fuller’s earth into the fan blades to be blown onto the actors. When I get home that night, I’ll have to rinse out my teeth, spitting red-dirt saliva into the sink. The epitome of Hollywood glamour, just like Cary Grant.

I get into position, the fans blowing dirt and smoke across my face. We spent hours waiting for the wind and then create our own. This is madness. This is Dune.

Paul’s costume includes a “weirding module” attached to his throat; it sticks out like a giant door hinge. In the scene, he and Gurney recognize each other in the desert after years apart, a heartwarming moment. But as he hugs me, Patrick accidentally jabs the module back into my Adam’s apple. I am stunned as my breath and voice stop sharply. My eyes fill with tears from the pain, and I make a slight grunting sound. I don’t speak because I can’t.

The wind shifts again right as we finish, so that’s the take that goes into the film.

Moving on.

Excerpted from FICTIONAL SELVES: A Memoir by Kyle MacLachlan. Copyright © 2026 by Kyle MacLachlan. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Think the full cast is already known for Avengers: Doomsday?

Think again.

Despite containing 31 announced Marvel characters (full list below), Doomsday directors Joe and Anthony Russo say even more characters are appearing in the team-up superhero film — including, quite possibly, the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

Speaking to Empire Online, Russo said, “[Bruce Banner] is certainly involved in the story that revolves around Doom. We will not confirm nor deny his appearance in Doomsday.” (So that sounds like a yes).

Anthony Russo then added, “The farthest we can go is to say, there are characters and actors who have not been announced, who are a part of Doomsday.”

Anthony recently told The AP: “The MCU is this massive experiment in how vast, how much scope can an ensemble really have?” The duo also confirmed they started shooting Doomsday without a completed script: “We always view the script as a living organism,” Joe said. “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or a few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.”

The duo are currently promoting the re-release of Avengers: Endgame, which has racked up another $86 million over the weekend. The film grossed $2.8 billion back in 2019 and now includes four new end-credits scenes to help set up Doomsday. Joe Russo has previously called Endgame “required viewing for following the story in Doomsday.”

Here’s the full list of confirmed characters appearing in Doomsday:

MCU veterans: Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Sam Wilson/Captain America (Anthony Mackie), Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Ant-Man/Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), Shuri/Black Panther (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), Falcon/Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez).

The Fantastic Four: Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Joseph Quinn), Ben Grimm/The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

Thunderbolts/New Avengers: Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian/Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), U.S. Agent/John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost/Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), Sentry/Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman).

X-Men/Fox-Era Characters: Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Magneto/Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen), Cyclops/Scott Summers (James Marsden), Beast/Hank McCoy (Kelsey Grammer), Nightcrawler/Kurt Wagner (Alan Cumming), Mystique/Raven (Rebecca Romijn), Gambit/Remy LeBeau (Channing Tatum).

Plus: Doctor Doom/Victor von Doom (Robert Downey Jr.), Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Namora (Mabel Cadena).

Doomsday opens in theaters Dec. 18.