Exactly four years ago Kaiser noted that Annette Bening was “One of the most famously Oscar-snubbed actors out there.” Still true! The situation has not been rectified. Will this be her year? I don’t think so. Not because she isn’t superb as Diana Nyad in Nyad, now on Netflix. She’s physically incapable of delivering anything less than flawless performances of brilliantly flawed women. It just feels like she hasn’t been part of the Best Actress conversation much, at least not compared to the younger actresses in contention. Then again, all bets are off this year, what with the strikes delaying the usual promo campaigns, and no one knowing exactly who the voting body is at the Golden Globes since the Hollywood Foreign Press Association disbanded. Speaking of, Annette did nab a Golden Globe nomination for Nyad, and she has a new interview out in This Guardian this week. I’m excerpting one section here, but the whole piece is worth a read.

She [Bening] took the role of Nyad because it was “such a great story”, but she hadn’t thought through what playing the swimmer would mean – the “oh, it’s me in the water; oh, I’m in a bathing suit; oh, I’ve got to really pull off the swimming”, she says. It took a year of training, with the Olympian Rada Owen. Bening reckons she is a better swimmer now than when she shot the film, because she has fallen in love with the sport. “What I’ve come to understand about Diana, what I admire, is not only the fact that she swam 54 hours; it was that she found the ability to think enough of herself to say: ‘I have the right to say I’m going to do this thing.’ I think that is what a lot of us struggle with.”

Nyad has written a number of books about her career, which the film picks through judiciously. “She had a coach who abused her when she was a kid,” says Bening. “We didn’t want to make the movie about that, but it is part of who she is. And what happened to her as a teenager, with this coach, did inform her swimming and it did inform her 20s. Just like all of us, right? All these things that we’ve gone through, they inform us in the present.”

Bening is keen to underline that the film amps up a spikiness in Nyad’s character. Nyad is delightful, says Bening. In her on-screen portrayal, however, she is often a pain in everyone’s neck, especially Jodie Foster’s (Foster plays her ex-girlfriend and best friend). “When women have complexity, when women are difficult, our metric for being able to accept them is so different,” she says. “It’s like politicians: there’s always this sense that they have to be likable. There’s a quality that a woman has to have that’s non-threatening and pleasing. Either that, or they have to be very conservative. Like Thatcher. We can accept a woman if she’s very conservative, but the idea of a liberal woman is much scarier.”

[From The Guardian]

“Spikiness” is a great way to describe Annette’s version of Diana Nyad, and she’s so good at playing that quality (remember her in 2009’s Mother and Child?). I mean really, the Diana of the film cannot stop talking about herself or her “destiny.” She’s the kind of person that you know you would find insufferable in real life but delight in watching as a movie character. (Again, we’re talking about the heightened film depiction, not Diana Nyad in real life.) And that gets at exactly what Annette talks about with the expectations on women. In Nyad, Annette is a woman out to please herself first and foremost, and is unabashedly unlikable, at times even to her dearest friends and supporters. But she has an ambition — to swim the open ocean from Cuba to Florida, 103 miles — and as the movie unfolds we see how a woman fulfilling her goal can be threatening to those around her. Why? Because it forces anyone watching her to reckon with their own dreams, and whether they’ve honestly done everything they could to fully realize them.

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Photos credit: Liz Parkinson/Netflix, Faye’s Vision/Cover Images and via Instagram

Sometimes I still think about Heather Graham claiming that she stayed so youthful because she tries to sleep eleven to twelve hours every night. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with 20-year-old tennis player Holger Rune talking about how he tries to get nine to thirteen hours of sleep every night. These people are bonkers! My body physically would not “let” me sleep that long every single night, plus I have no desire to spend half the day in bed, asleep. WTF? Well, I’m adding Dakota Johnson to the list of people who regularly sleep for a crazy amount of time.

Dakota Johnson loves her beauty sleep. The Fifty Shades of Grey alum told the Wall Street Journal that if she gets less than 10 hours of sleep a night she can’t function properly. She added that she can easily sleep for 14 hours straight.

“Sleep is my number one priority in life,” the actress, 34, said.

Johnson also explained that she doesn’t have a scheduled wake-up time every day. Instead, she plans her sleep routine on a day-by-day basis. “If I’m not working, if I have a day off on a Monday, then I will sleep as long as I can,” she said.

In addition to getting enough sleep, Johnson said she works out five days a week – a mix of hot yoga, pilates and body weight training. She also meditates twice every day.

“I do transcendental meditation,” she continued. “I’ve been really into breathwork recently and that’s been helping me a lot with anxiety.”

[From People]

Do these people really not wake up at 3 am and check the clock? Do they not wake up at 5 am and start thinking about all of the sh-t they have to do that day? That’s what I don’t understand – if I’m tired, I’ll sleep hard but I’ll still wake up a couple of times and look at the clock and at some point (usually after seven or eight hours of sleep), my body just refuses to go back to sleep. There’s probably a caffeine issue too – as in, these are people who are not hopelessly addicted to caffeine to the point that they’ll wake up just to get coffee. The last time I got more than eight hours of sleep a night was probably about a year ago, and I still remember it – I got like ten hours of sleep and my whole day was thrown off.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

The casting for James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy has been a whole ass event. Casting their Clark Kent and Lois Lane was so much a thing that there were even articles written about the finalists. There’s a lot of pressure on this movie, which stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, to help reinvigorate DC Studios’ struggling franchise. Written and directed by Gunn, it’s supposed to be the first film released under his new, rebooted DC Universe. It’s been called a “workplace origin story” that will explore Superman’s heritage by both his Kryptonian birth parents and his adoptive parents in Kansas. A few weeks ago, news leaked that Nicholas Hoult was cast as villain Lex Luthor. Earlier this week, Gunn finally confirmed the rumors via a post on Threads.

James Gunn took a moment to confirm that Nicholas Hoult will, in fact, be playing Lex Luthor in Superman: Legacy and gave a bit of insight into what fans can expect from his take on the villain. The co-chair and co-CEO of DC Studios posted a photo of him and Hoult on Threads and shared that the two had dinner to celebrate the official casting.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Gunn wrote. “We went out to dinner last night to celebrate & discuss how we can create a Lex that will be different from anything you’ve seen before and will never forget. ‘But, James, we heard this weeks ago, why didn’t you tell us it was true?’ Because, although we were discussing it, it wasn’t final until a couple days ago and I don’t want to tell you all something that isn’t certain.”

News broke in November that Hoult was in talks to portray the classic villain in Gunn’s upcoming Superman movie, which will follow the Man of Steel as he balances his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing.

Superman: Legacy is expected to hit theaters July 11, 2025.

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Look, I’m a giant nerd and although I may grumble, I generally can’t resist anything superhero-related. But even I’m like, “Do we really need another Superman movie?” He’s like the most overdone superhero outside of Batman at this point. However, I also said that about the Robert Pattinson Batman movie and ended up really enjoying it, despite it being 75 hours long. (Seriously, if it’s not a Lord of the Rings, it does not need to be more than 120 minutes, TOPS. You can tell good stories in under two hours!)

Anyway, I am very intrigued by this Nicholas Hoult casting. I mean, it’s less random than when Jesse Eisenberg played Lex, so there’s that. I grew up with two different Lex Luthors: John Shea in Lois and Clark and Michael Rosenbaum in Smallville. They’re always the ones I see in my mind. When I picture Hoult and ‘superhero,’ I can’t help but picture him as Beast from X-Men. I like Hoult, though, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and see what he can do with the role. Honestly, I don’t know whether or not I even want to invest more hours of my life on another DCU movie. They’ve been hit or miss for me, but mostly miss.

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Photos credit: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon, Robin Platzer / Twin Images / Avalon, Getty and via Threads

Hilary Duff is pregnant with her fourth, and she’s already got a lil’ bump. [Just Jared]
Does Taylor Swift read LaineyGossip? [LaineyGossip]
Review of Netflix’s A Nearly Normal Family. [Pajiba]
Jessica Chastain goes “mildly Mrs. Roper.” [Go Fug Yourself]
Sydney Sweeney wore Balmain on the Tonight Show. [RCFA]
David Tennant returned to Doctor Who & he was hot. [Jezebel]
Baby Josh Groban looked like Channing Tatum. [Seriously OMG]
Erdem’s pre-fall collection is gorgeous. [Tom & Lorenzo]
Travis Kelce’s friends could see Trav marrying Taylor Swift. [Hollywood Life]
Pop culture moments which absolutely happened in 2023. [Buzzfeed]
Andy Cohen said that Anderson Cooper is open to threesomes. [Socialite Life]

A lot of publications are already running their “best and worst of the year” listicles, which I think is too early. The year-end listicles should go up around Christmas, and no, I will not explain. The Hollywood Reporter released their “Biggest Hollywood Winners and Losers of 2023” list several days ago, but it’s only getting picked up now by the British media. Guess why? The listicle reporter, James Hibberd, included the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as one of his “losers” of the year. You can see the piece here – the winners are Taylor Swift, Greta Gerwig, the Vegas Sphere, Fran Drescher, Margot Robbie, horror films, Jenna Ortega and silver foxes. Losers included: Bob Iger/Disney, AI, Yellowstone, the Scream franchise, Marvel, Twitter and the Sussexes. Here’s THR’s blurb about the Sussexes:

Lost — Harry and Meghan
In 2020, the royal duo fled a life of ceremonial public service to cash in their celebrity status in the States. But after a whiny Netflix documentary, a whiny biography (Spare — even the title is a pouty gripe) and an inert podcast, the Harry and Meghan brand swelled into a sanctimonious bubble just begging to be popped — and South Park was the pin. The show’s 20-minute “World-Wide Privacy Tour” takedown in March was savage, and was followed by Spotify dropping Archetypes, with a top executive labeling the duo “grifters.” Still, all the scorn and mockery beats otherwise having to attend 200-plus official royal family engagements a year, which sounds hellish.

[From THR]

… The Netflix docuseries came out in 2022, as did Archetypes, and both were very successful (last year). The one big thing on the Sussexes’ plate this year was Harry’s memoir, which was a bestseller and one of the biggest publishing success stories of the year. I actually agree that the Spotify/Bill Simmons thing was awful – and the Sussexes completely mishandled it from a PR/communications perspective, and this is further evidence of that, that it’s being included in the “worst of the year” lists. What should have been a larger story about Spotify’s business model changing became solely about the Sussexes. The fact that the Sussexes didn’t push back and let Bill Simmons’ “grifter” remark sit out there, unchallenged, is the biggest mistake they made this year. As for South Park… my god, how much are Trey Parker and Matt Stone paying these people?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

The way Omid Scobie has now explained the “royal racist” names being included in the Dutch translation of Endgame, the names DID appear in a very early draft, a draft which was likely sent to translators and never updated by the publisher. Which means that at some point – early in the process, before the lawyers got involved – Scobie did say that the Princess of Wales and King Charles were the two people named in Charles and Meghan’s 2021 correspondence. Which is a big f–king deal, as is the fact that apparently those names were widely known on Fleet Street and never reported, because they’ve all been waiting for Meghan, Harry or Omid to say it outright. When Endgame first came out, the Windsors furiously briefed everyone that all options were on the table and that they were thinking of suing. Then there were crisis talks last week, and suddenly the “we’re suing” narrative changed dramatically. Here’s how the Windsors feel now:

Friends of senior royals say the family is expected to “quietly forget” veiled threats to take legal action after a book by reporter Omid Scobie named King Charles and Kate Middleton as the so-called “royal racists” whom Meghan Markle—in a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021—alleged raised “concerns” over the skin color of her son Archie before he was born.

Despite the palace initially saying they would keep “all options open” in regard to the book, Endgame, an early Dutch version of which named Kate and Charles in error, almost three weeks after publication, there is no evidence of legal action against either Scobie, his agents, the Dutch publishers or news outlets which repeated the claims.

“The king has bigger fish to fry,” a friend told The Daily Beast. “It’s only a book. It’s a classic case of ‘Don’t explain or complain’ and let it blow over. They will just quietly forget it now. I don’t think there are going to be any lawsuits being filed.”

Asked if the claims in the book about Charles and Kate were accurate, the friend said: “I think anyone who knows Charles knows he is not a racist.”

When it was pointed out that Meghan and Prince Harry have been careful not use the word ‘racist,’ with Harry saying in a TV interview, for example, that the alleged remarks were instead an example of “unconscious bias,” the friend said: “Good, because he is not. But if there are these nuances, then you just wonder whether the appropriate place to raise the issue was with Oprah.”

A former courtier told The Daily Beast they would be “astonished” if Charles pursued legal action, adding, “This is over. The book has been pulped. Nobody cares.”

A friend of William and Kate similarly said they understood there will be no formal legal action against the claims made in the book. “Every day of the week people write acres of nonsense about them, and the reaction is always the same; don’t dignify it with a response, just keep on doing the job and let actions speak louder than words.”

[From The Daily Beast]

Notice that not even Tom Sykes’ unnamed royalist sources can rise to Kate’s defense and declare that she’s also not a racist. Please, the lack of institutional support for Kate’s racist ass is turning into one of the biggest follow-up stories. As for the Windsors suddenly pulling the “never complain, never explain” card… they literally spent weeks screaming, crying and throwing up about the book. They threatened lawsuits, they organized unhinged “Meghan HATES Kate” stories, they complained and explained all over the place. Part of me also believes that Charles backed away from all of this lawsuit talk because his lawyers asked him “who would you sue and why?” Piers Morgan? Omid? Meghan? If Meghan really did name those people in her letter to Charles, then Omid surely can’t be sued for factual reporting (in a mistranslated Dutch edition).

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

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I’m sorry but Claire Foy’s outfit at the All of Us Strangers premiere is completely unhinged. The fringe shirt, the skirt, all of it. Bonkers. CB pointed out that Wayfair has a lamp with a very similar vibe. [GFY]
After being purchased by Paste, Jezebel is back!! [Jezebel]
Wait, how are the Golden Globes nominations decided?? [LaineyGossip]
The Frasier reboot actually sounds like it has a good premise. [Pajiba]
Who are Donald Trump & Joe Biden’s celebrity contemporaries? [Buzzfeed]
Bridgerton season three premiere date and casting news [Just Jared]
I hope Amanda Bynes is okay. [Hollywood Life]
This guy looks like a Duggar except for his giant neck tattoo. [Starcasm]
Terrifying vintage Santas. [OMG Blog]
Oprah went on Drew Barrymore’s talk show. [Seriously OMG]
Andrew Scott looks beautiful and ‘70s. [RCFA]

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Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell have been in New York this week to promote their rom-com Anyone But You. There are too many movies with similar-sounding names out right now, or is it just me? Anyway, this film seems utterly forgettable but Sydney’s still trying her best to sell it, bless her heart. Her fiance didn’t come to the premiere, from what I saw. Glen hasn’t been in a relationship since Gigi Paris dumped him for how close he seemed to Sydney. At this point, I’m not sure that Glen and Sydney are happening, but I would absolutely believe that they slept together at some point.

As for Sydney’s premiere look, she wore a Miu Miu dress with a million crystals, plus earrings from Fred Leighton. Sydney is a brand ambassador for Miu Miu and she’s talked about how grateful she is for the extra money and attachment to a major label. All in all, it’s a pretty good fit between actress and brand. While this dress isn’t my favorite thing ever, it suits her and it suits the film promotion. As a fellow big-chested girl, I will say that I admire the fact that Sydney manages to walk that fine line between “being too covered up” versus “being too boobs-forward.”

The thing is, when you actually see Glen and Sydney together, their attractiveness sort of cancels out and they just come across as bland, right? Also: I’m adding a bonus photo of Sydney wearing a bonkers ensemble of wide-leg jeans and a matching vest-and-coat look. That was right before the premiere!

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.

Two weeks ago, Piers Morgan “revealed” the names of the royal racists which were named in a “mistranslation” of Omid Scobie’s Endgame (which were originally named by the Duchess of Sussex in a letter to King Charles). The names are: King Charles and the Princess of Wales. After a lot of performative pearl-clutching and “demands” that Prince Harry and Meghan speak up in defense of the Windsors (lmao), nothing much happened. There was a crisis meeting between Charles, William and Kate, and they apparently decided to say nothing and just keep doing photo-ops with diversity props. It’s also clear that Kate was in a panic and she reached out to dumbasses like Camilla Tominey to defend her honor (Tominey made Kate sound even more unhinged though). So, what is Kate’s larger plan? Just keep style-stalking Meghan and lean into her “simpering white supremacist Karen” vibe? Pretty much.

Kate Middleton is yet to publicly comment on allegations in Omid Scobie’s new book that she was one of two royals who questioned Prince Archie’s skin colour. But according to one expert, that doesn’t mean she is going to take the “absurd accusations” lying down – and will “punish” Prince Harry and Meghan Markle “in her own classy way”.

Brand expert Denise Palmer-Davies exclusively told Fabulous: “The accusations made in the book are utterly absurd, but they will still ultimately have hurt Kate. She won’t let that show though – she is a strong, powerful woman and she will keep calm and carry on. Responding to the claims only gives them attention, so Kate is carrying on with her life as normal. She is much like the Queen in that respect, stoic, she won’t show how upset she really is. She put on a brave face at the Royal Variety show and at her Together at Christmas carol concert.

“I don’t doubt that those close to Harry and Meghan would want all this to take off her shine – but far from it. In fact, Kate remains popular, she has the public’s support and while she is on the front pages of all the newspapers, it is all positive press, like her Strictly visit. It’s like she is unintentionally punishing them in her own classy way.”

Kate’s name being dragged into the racism row will only further deepen the rift between her, Harry and Meghan.

“I didn’t think there would be a way back for Kate and William and Harry and Meghan, but there absolutely won’t be now,” Denise said. “I can imagine William is furious. It is attack after attack – it’s just relentless. I can’t see Kate – or William – ever forgiving them for this. Even though Meghan and Harry haven’t directly named her themselves, someone associated with them apparently has, and the fact they haven’t come out and defended her speaks volumes. It’s a huge betrayal and totally unforgivable.”

[From The Sun]

“The fact they haven’t come out and defended her speaks volumes” – so you agree that it speaks volumes when royals don’t step up and defend someone who is being unfairly maligned and denigrated? You agree that it’s an unforgivable betrayal when a royal briefs racist lies to a royal reporter? Gee, I wonder why Meghan was suicidal in the first place? Could it be that Kate, William and their people were openly targeting her maliciously and that’s the whole reason why the Sussexes left? Besides, it’s now clear that Kate *was* one of the many royals openly discussing her “concerns” about how dark Meghan’s children would be. Why the f–k would Meghan and Harry defend her? As for Kate’s “classy” punishment… I mean, creepily style-stalking the Black woman she hates is certainly a lot of things, but “classy” isn’t one of them.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

What little we know of Prince William and then-Kate Middleton’s courtship is that Kate was desperate to throw herself into his path for much of her teens, and then she made sure to hang around William’s group of friends while they were at St. Andrews. The story was that William and Kate were generally in the same circle of friends, then things changed when a scantily-clad Kate walked a runway at a student fashion show. By their third year, they were living together with some other friends. Reportedly, they had some breakups even during those university years too, and William openly cheated on her. No one expects Netflix’s The Crown to tell that version of the story, but according to the actor playing William, their romance will not be some big fairytale.

The Crown will portray the Prince and Princess of Wales’s early relationship as “stagnated and weird”, the actor playing William has revealed. Ed McVey, 24, said he wanted to avoid depicting the beginning stages of the Royal couple’s romance on the hit Netflix show as “smooth sailing”.

He said: “We didn’t want to make it a smooth journey, meeting and falling in love and then getting together. We wanted it to be stagnated and weird, as relationships are, because there’s never smooth sailing, nothing is ever one thing.”

“We know that they get together in the end and we know that they’re perfect for each other, and we know how much they love each other … but we wanted to put as much in the way of that as possible,” he explained. “Put so many bollards and so many emotional brick walls, essentially, in terms of them getting together. And really what we wanted is for the audience to be like, how are they going to get together? We want the audience to be like, ‘oh just say the right thing or just stop being so awkward with each other and just get together’ and then luckily you see that in the end,” he added.

Meanwhile, Meg Bellamy said she faced challenges depicting a young Kate as there was “no footage” of her talking or walking in the university years era that she portrays her. The actress said that she tried to pitch her voice higher, for example, to “remove the royal protocol side of it”, adding: “I tried to make that more youthful, more like myself.”

[From The Telegraph]

“Put so many bollards and so many emotional brick walls” – they’ve turned it into a romantic comedy? Interesting. I mean, there’s part of me that’s happy that The Crown isn’t rewriting the narrative to make it sound like it was love at first sight. Kate really had to work hard to get his attention, she and her mother put so much time, energy, money and effort into baiting the honey trap, only for William to not take the bait for a while. Once Kate got him, she wasn’t letting him go, no matter how he treated her.

Photos courtesy of Netflix.