So far, the Duchess of Sussex has only given us an Instagram account, a tiny little video and the name of her new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard. We have not seen any products, nor have we even gotten a confirmation that Meghan plans to launch a Netflix food/cooking show. As I’ve said before, Meghan’s trademark-binge isn’t indicative of ARO being some massive brand which sells everything from dog food to makeup. She’s just trademarking everything so that dumbf–k haters don’t snap up rival ARO trademarks/products. I actually believe that Meghan is probably going to start relatively small – jams, soaps, cookbooks, cookware, stuff like that. Obviously, we still haven’t gotten much information from Meghan, which is driving people crazy. Speaking of, Page Six had a long-winded piece about how Meghan’s ARO is the talk of California society.
Questions about ARO: There still remain vital questions surrounding the brand: Just who is investing in it, who is working on it — and who is manufacturing the goods, which will range from jams and jellies to candles, skincare and pet food? Well-placed sources at other lifestyle brands told Page Six that American Riviera Orchard is all the gossip on industry What’sApp groups around Los Angeles. Tellingly, however, they have not yet heard anything about Markle hiring buyers or a sourcing team. One insider who knows the Sussexes told Page Six that it’s looking like a typical Markle project: plenty of glamour, little substance. “They [Harry and Meghan] consistently make announcements and roll things out really early … to what point?” the insider said. Sources close to Markle point out that no timeframe for an actual product launch has been given yet.
Who is Meghan working with? However, Page Six can confirm that the finance types Markle and Prince Harry have been seen networking with — including Wall Street billionaire Ken Griffin and cosmetics mogul Victoria Jackson and her husband, marketing multi-millionaire guru Bill Guthy, both close pals of the Sussexes —are not investing. Neither is Ari Emanuel, head of WME, the talent mega agency which signed up Markle nearly a year ago. Markle is believed to have worked on the project with Hollywood money man Adam Lilling. The project will tie in with Markle’s new Netflix show, which she is said to be filming now, in a bid to follow in the footsteps of Martha Stewart and Joanna Gaines.
Lili Bunny Garden!! When she was interviewed for The Cut in 2022, Markle gifted the writer a basket of homegrown fruits and vegetables, as well as a jar of jam with a customized label from Etsy. It read Lili Bunny Garden + Larder, after her daughter Princess Lilibet — could that be a clue about her pantry products? Whatever the case, she’s already raising her neighbors’ hackles. Kerry Clasby, an organic farmer who runs the Malibu Fig Ranch and supplies to top chiefs including Tom Collichio and Jean George Vongirechten, said that Markle also needs to be diligent about using the name America Riviera — a nickname for the posh Santa Barbara region, which includes Montecito. “If you’re calling it American Riviera, you really ought to be [sourcing ingredients] grown in Santa Barbara,” Clasby told Page Six. “Otherwise, you’re going into the wholesale dump in downtown LA, where all the produce comes up from Mexico or Chile. The kitchen should be there also [in the Santa Barbara area], unless they are just putting their name on it and getting it made wherever, or getting it pre-made. And then it’s hype.”
Local farmers haven’t been contacted?? Although Markle has been spotted at the Montecito farmers market, Sam Edelman, general manager at The Santa Barbara Certified Farmers Market Association, told us that, to his knowledge, the duchess is not working with any of the farmers in the group. If Markle wants to sell anything at her local farmers market, though, she’ll need to get her hands dirty. “California is strict about us putting on our sign that we grow what we sell,” said Maureen Claffey, who owns Red Hen Cannery in Carpinteria, California, with her husband. “In order to sell strawberry jam at the farmer’s market, you have to have grown the strawberries.” Claffrey is a fan of Markle’s after meeting her: “My daughter had set up a little cotton-candy stand and [Markle and Prince Harry] bought cotton candy from her. Having met them and seen how they reacted to my daughter and how positive they were on a windy day, that speaks volumes. How people treat children with no one around says a lot.”
Meghan admires Gwyneth’s Goop: “Everyone is speculating about American Riviera Orchard,” said the lifestyle figure. “But someone like Gwyneth started out by sending out a newsletter once a week and it was very personal, kind of like Substack now. But it was a very novel idea at the time, but she didn’t monetize the business for about seven years. The goal was creating a community and something of value, rather than it being a business. She didn’t take any outside funding until 2015. With Goop, everything that happened all came from a very gradual, authentic place … Gwyneth did not set out to create what it is today.”
Re: Goop… I’ve been here since the start of Goop and it’s true that Gwyneth moved very slowly when it came to monetizing it. It really was just a weird rich-lady newsletter about dieting and juice cleansing back in the day. Now it’s a makeup line, a skincare line, fashion collabs, brick-and-mortar stores and more. It took Gwyneth a good seven-to-eight years before she really figured out how to monetize Goop. But… Meghan’s The Tig was the start of ARO as well. She ran a successful lifestyle blog too, so in a sense, ARO is just picking up where she left off. Besides, as I said in the intro, I actually believe that Meghan is going to start out with a relatively small product line and she’ll likely grow ARO from there. Also: now I’m curious about how she’s sourcing for a potential jam line as well.
Even if you believe that the Princess of Wales’s cancer-announcement video was above-board, surely you also believe that Kensington Palace and the BBC should be doing more to establish the video’s credibility? That was the whole point of KP bringing in BBC Studios to film the video – BBC Studios was clearly lending authenticity to a credibility-challenged palace, a palace which was deeply mired in controversy after several deeply questionable manipulated photos, not to mention the weirdness of all of those “Kate sightings.” Last week, the Washington Post finally got KP on the record about the deepfake allegations, specifically with regards to the cancer announcement video. KP’s response was that the accusations of AI tampering are “factually inaccurate.” The BBC remains squirrelly, refusing to say anything more than yes, they filmed it. One AI expert contacted by WaPo, Deep Media, said that they feel that there’s a “high likelihood” that Kate’s face and voice were AI-manipulated in the video, but other AI experts shrugged off the AI accusations. Well, now Getty Images has added an editor’s note to their screencaps from the video:
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images’ editorial policy.) In this handout provided by Kensington Palace, Catherine, The Princess of Wales is seen in a recorded, personal video message, providing an update on her health, recorded on March 20, 2024 in Windsor and aired on March 22, 2024 in London, England. The Princess of Wales had abdominal surgery earlier this year and has revealed that cancer has subsequently been found. She said she has been receiving chemotherapy and asked for privacy for her and her family. (Photo by BBC Studios/Kensington Palace via Getty Images)
I’ll admit that I didn’t think to check Getty Images before now, so I don’t know if the Editor’s Note has always been there (since Friday March 22) or whether it was added later. While it’s a straight acknowledgement that the pic is just a screencap from a palace-released video, this is the same kind of disclaimer Getty has added to other manipulated palace-released photos, like the KP-released photo of Queen Elizabeth II with her white grandchildren, allegedly “taken by Kate.”
Heavy.com did a deeper dive into Getty’s editorial policy and when and how they might add these kinds of disclaimers. I did a simple search on Getty Images for “This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images’ editorial policy” and the only other photos with that note are from NASA handouts. Again… KP wants to continue to behave as if they weren’t caught manipulating photos, and they’re doing next to nothing to re-establish credibility with a general public looking for conspiracies.
Getty Images have placed an editor’s note on the video of Kate Middleton where she reveals she has cancer.
The note states the footage ‘might not adhere to its editorial policy’ .
Why on earth have they done this? https://t.co/5RHZ1epVOr pic.twitter.com/Dhi95GL8EQ— Lorraine King (@lorrainemking) April 1, 2024
Buckingham Palace made a very big deal about this weekend as “Easter Lite,” meaning there were special arrangements made to limit King Charles’s exposure to crowds and to scale back the guest list to only a handful of family members. In Easters past, the whole Windsor clan – including royal cousins and royal-adjacents – were all invited to the Easter service in Windsor, and after church, there would be a lunch at Windsor Castle. Not so much this year – Charles kept the guest list right, just his siblings and their spouses, and there was no lunch, apparently. Since Prince William and Kate weren’t there, Charles didn’t want any of his nieces or nephews there either (only one nephew came). He apparently sat somewhat isolated from the rest of his family in church too.
You would think with this lean and mean guest list, it would have been the perfect opportunity to NOT invite Prince Andrew. You would be wrong. Prince Andrew was there, as was Sarah Ferguson. Their daughters were not there. I hope Eugenie and Beatrice spent Easter far away from their parents, honestly. Princess Anne was there with her husband Tim. Prince Edward and the Duchess of Edinburgh were also there and they brought their son James (the new Earl of Wessex). James is the youngest of all the king’s nieces and nephews – I guess they didn’t want the optics of purposefully excluding a 16-year-old.
Yeah, again… this would have been the perfect moment to say “Andrew is not welcome.” I’m sure Charles’s rationale is the same as always, which is that Andrew is welcome at family events but not state events (except the coronation, whoopsie). But when the family is making such a major, visible effort to include a credibly accused rapist and trafficker in their exclusive-guest-list events, it speaks volumes.
Also: the dress code for women seemed to be “dress in shades of green.” So it’s weird that Sophie was the only one in purple. She also looked like a 1970s stewardess.
As previewed endlessly last week, King Charles made a public appearance on Easter Sunday. He hath risen! He and Queen Camilla went to the Easter service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, and they were joined by some of the royal family, although not Prince William or Kate or their kids. You know what? I think Charles looks pretty good, all things considered. If you told me that his doctors gave him some kind of “vitamin shot” and the palace makeup artists were called in, I would believe you. But the man looks spry!
It was clear that Buckingham Palace was trying to tamp down expectations overall for this appearance, briefing that the plan was “Easter Lite.” As in, Charles was still trying to avoid crowds and that he would not host an Easter lunch for the family. So I was surprised that Charles actually went over to the well-wishers and shook hands and chatted with people – I thought this would be a much more conservatively stage-managed appearance, with Charles basically just waving at people as he went into the chapel. But no, he mingled with the crowd, and there really was a nice-sized crowd there. The palace is also telling everyone that they hope this will be the first event of a slowly increased public schedule for Charles, and that he might start doing investitures again as well.
I have a question: why are so many outlets – including British outlets – running stand-alone stories about how the Wales family didn’t go to church in Windsor? We knew they wouldn’t, they said it outright two Fridays ago and no one was expecting William and Kate to show up for Easter. Why are so many outlets underlining that??
Embed from Getty Images
About a month ago, I was driving my kids to school when my older son suddenly asked me, “Mommy, how do you feel about your little baby turning 10-years-old this year?” I was a little bit taken aback by the randomness of the question, so I gave some generic response about how he’s always going to be my little baby no matter how old he gets. It hadn’t really registered with me yet that he was entering that “double digits” era, so I hadn’t really thought to mourn that leaving behind those single digit years means he’d be embracing more of his autonomy and independence.
Edie Falco’s kids are a bit older than mine are. She has a 19-year-old son named Anderson and a 16-year-old daughter named Macy. Edie is the guest on this week’s episode of Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s podcast, MeSsy. During her appearance, they started talking about how quickly time really does fly once you become a parent, and Edie shared how much she misses when her kids were little.
“Nobody talks about when those little kids disappear – it’s like a death,” says Falco, 60, whose son, Anderson, is 19 and whose daughter, Macy, is 16.
Falco swaps parenting stories and more alongside her Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn Sigler, on the second episode of MeSsy, Sigler’s new podcast with Christina Applegate, PEOPLE has an exclusive preview of the podcast episode before it comes out March 26.
Sigler, 42, whose two boys Jack and Beau are 5 and 10, is still navigating the younger years, but she says on the podcast that she’s “holding on to all the little baby things” like the fact that her son Jack has just lost his first teeth and that his hand “still doesn’t have knuckles.”
Adds Applegate, whose daughter Sadie is 13, “To know we’re not going to get that back freaks me out.’”
Falco says she treasures memories of those early days. “Early parenting stuff is madness but it’s some of the most divine, precious hours of my life,” the Nurse Jackie star says on the podcast. “When they both fall asleep on you when you’re watching TV and it’s quiet and you realize, ‘Oh my God I didn’t know I could feel this love.’ And then they’re just gone forever and ever, and they’re just memories and are all over your iPhone!”
Applegate, who’s admitted that living with multiple sclerosis has changed how she can parent, jokes that she wants to keep her daughter as close as possible, as long as possible: “I told Sadie when she goes to college, wherever it is, I’ll be moving in with her. I highly encourage Los Angeles-based universities. I’m like, ‘Why would you live in a dorm when we have our nice house?’ I’m doing everything I can to make her stay here.”
I understand what Edie means. It is sad when you realize your kids have grown out of their previous stage and that era is over. I try not to let myself get into that headspace, though. I hadn’t thought about my kid turning 10 this year because that means we’re practically a year away from –ugh– middle school, which basically means he’s practically a high schooler and just about ready to leave for college, which means…you get the point, lol. You know the saying, “Getting old is a blessing?” Well, I try to look at my kids getting older and seeing them through new phases and stages of life as a blessing as well. I guess to use Edie’s own terminology, if the little kid stage ending is like a death, then seeing each new milestone as they grow into their own little people is like starting a new life.
Oh, and that conversation in which my older son asked me how I felt about him turning 10 this year? It finished with him saying this: “When I’m 10, that means I’m going to have to get my next rust [tetanus] shot. I don’t want to get a shot, but I know it’ll be best for my health, so I’ll do it without crying.” Being old enough to march into the pediatrician’s office while knowing about and being okay with having to get a shot? There are definitely some perks to the “little kid” phase disappearing.
2009:
Photos credit: Hector Vallenilla, PacificCoastNews.com / Avalon, Robin Platzer/Twin Images / Twin Images / Avalon and Getty
Kirsten Dunst covers the latest issue of Marie Claire, and this is a great interview. She’s promoting Civil War, her first role since The Power of the Dog, for which she received her first Oscar nomination. She didn’t work for two years after that. Apparently, she was offered some scripts in that two-year period, but they were all “sad mom roles.” Typecasting, ageism and sexism has come to Kirsten’s career now, at the age of 41. Kirsten chatted about all of that and more with Marie Claire, and there’s some really nice stuff about her husband Jesse Plemons and their two sons, James and Ennis. Some highlights:
Life as a mom: “I’m, like, a Volvo soccer mom right now. Selfishly, I was just like, I want to go shopping.”
Not working for two years: “I haven’t worked in two years…every role I was being offered was the sad mom… To be honest, that’s been hard for me…because I need to feed myself. The hardest thing is being a mom and…not feeling like, I have nothing for myself. That’s every mother—not just me. There’s definitely less good roles for women my age. That’s why I did Civil War.”
Working with writer/director Alex Garland: “When I read the script, I thought, I’ve never done anything like this. I just love that he’s someone who pushes boundaries.”
She was really affected by the film shoot: She “had PTSD for a good two weeks after. I remember coming home and eating lunch and I felt really empty.” It seemed to Garland that she “let herself live inside the film, and feel the reality of the moments.”
Garland wrote the script before January 6. It’s not clear which factions are “good” or “bad,” and that’s precisely the point. Landing this April in a hotly divided election year, “I think it’s a cautionary tale,” Dunst says, “a fable of what happens when people don’t communicate with each other and stop seeing each other as human beings.”
What if Donald Trump is reelected. “He can’t win. I honestly feel like…we just need a fresh start. We need a woman,” Dunst says, although speaking generally and not as an endorsement of any particular candidate. “All the countries that are led by women do so much better.”
Working with her husband again on ‘Civil War’. “Because we fell in love on a set, we fell in love creatively first. I think we’ll always come back to that, in a very not-involving-our-real-life way. And also, listen, we don’t talk to each other on set. I left him alone, he left me alone. I love working with him. What’s nice is that we trust each other so much. He sent me a scene last night of this miniseries he’s working on to get my opinion. If I’m having a hard time deciding on something, I’ll have him read it. I trust his opinion more than anyone, and he cares about me more than anyone.” Crucially, “we hate the same things.”
On the Oscars: Dunst agrees that Greta Gerwig should have been nominated for directing Barbie, but she isn’t swept up in the overall horse race. If anything, she lowers her voice again, “There are too many award shows.”
Maybe she doesn’t want to win an Oscar: “I think it’s good to be an underdog. If you [win] Academy Awards, sometimes it’s not always good for your career.” It seems characteristically, morbidly Hollywood that Oscars are given all-consuming weight for a season, but the shine quickly fades. For example, Dunst shrugs, “I don’t know who won last year.” For what she really wants to do—make interesting film with European directors—quality acting matters more than Oscars anyway.
She’s worked with a lot of female directors: “I saw the power in women very young. I think that’s helped with…not needing male attention in my career.” A younger Dunst told her manager, “I feel like I get hired because I’m someone that they might want to sleep with,” even if only in theory. “I think that’s probably why I migrated to so many female directors at a younger age, because I didn’t want to feel that way.” She grapples with different concerns for her career now. In her early 40s, “no one cares” about her looks, Dunst laughs.
Would she ever do another superhero movie? “Yes,because you get paid a lot of money, and I have two children, and I support my mother.”
There was something which reminded me of my evolving opinion of Chloe Sevigny – both Chloe and Kirsten were It Girls in the 1990s and early ‘00s, both were cool girls who worked with offbeat indie directors and both prioritized the art rather than the paycheck. And now both of them would love to book big studio films or a lucrative TV show because, frankly, they need the money. It’s just a reminder that these are really “working actresses” too, not necessarily rich movie stars. The one thing I won’t defend is that Kirsten doesn’t know who won Oscars last year… um, it’s your industry, and it was a historic year because Michelle Yeoh won, hello???
Covers courtesy of Marie Claire.
Happy Easter! We will be off this weekend unless something big breaks, but we’ll be back on Monday! Have a nice holiday weekend!
Louis Gossett Jr. has passed away at 87. RIP [Just Jared]
Christina Ricci talks about going through really “broke” periods as an adult. She once spoke about how she had to sell all of her Chanel jewelry during her divorce from her abusive ex. [OMG Blog]
Henry Cavill saved Alex Pettyfer from drowning! [Socialite Life]
The Kinds of Kindness trailer looks interesting! [LaineyGossip]
Edie Falco’s kids have zero interest in The Sopranos. [Pajiba]
Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s awards season fashion in review. [Go Fug Yourself]
This is not a great look on Lucy Boynton. [RCFA]
Hoda Kotb tried eating sea moss. [Seriously OMG]
90 Day: The Last Resort rumors & casting. [Starcasm]
Federal agents found firearms in Sean Combs’ home. And? [Hollywood Life]
Cecily Strong did not get a very romantic proposal. [Buzzfeed]
Sharon Stone covers the latest issue of InStyle, mostly to promote herself and let everyone know that she’d like to keep working. She looks great, honestly, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her in more movies and TV shows. Certainly, there should be a place for a 65-year-old Sharon Stone. Her InStyle profile leans heavily into the mythos of Sharon Stone, with vivid descriptions of just how famous she was in the 1990s following Basic Instinct. What sort of goes unsaid is how much fun she had during that time, how much she loved being famous. In retrospect for Stone, she makes it sound like a huge drag, but she really did love it back then. Some highlights from InStyle:
The LAPD came to her house & put her in lockdown during the OJ Simpson/white Bronco chase: “He’s dangerous,” Stone remembers an officer telling her. “And we don’t know how dangerous, and we don’t know what this is.” You—a non-famous person—would perhaps wonder what could compel officers to draw a connection between a manhunt and an unrelated celebrity. Stone didn’t question it. Her life had spun so wildly out of her own control. They said she needed to go. She went. At the hotel, one officer stood near reception and another kept watch at Stone’s door “while O.J. was driving up and down the f–king freeway,” Stone says. Returning to her old place was out of the question. “[The police] were like, ‘Find a secure house behind a gate.’” So she did. It was an unrenovated shell, and the lone home on the market she could afford.
It’s expensive to be famous: “It’s very expensive to be famous,” Stone tells me now. The house she closed on from the nondescript hotel, the staff she hired to keep her safe, the publicists, the makeup artists, the managers—it added up. “You go out to dinner, and there’s 15 people at the table, and who gets the check? You get the $3,000 dinner check every single time.”
She always kept her eye on the money: “I was living in a house that didn’t have floors,” Stone says. People wanted her to be grateful. She wanted to be smart. When critics ravaged her, “it was like, ‘Oh, welcome to fame. I’m pulling the pin on the grenade. Run, motherf–ker.’’”
What fame looks like now: “At least now [people] understand that Jennifer Lawrence can’t just skip onto an airplane. Nicole Kidman can’t jump onto Delta. Sharon Stone can’t do it either, whether or not she’s doing a lot of movies. [People] think, ‘What have you been in?’ And it’s like, Dude, they know me in the Amazon rainforest. It’s tampons, Q-tips, and Sharon Stone.”
She survived the tsunami of fame: “I think that I lived is more than many of my predecessors did, and that really pissed off a lot of people,” she says now. She means that insta-icons have not always fared so well (not just the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, but Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland), and the public and the media have never been particularly sympathetic to their struggles. “We’re supposed to go crazy or we’re supposed to be drug addicts, but surprise, motherf–kers.”
Moving on after her divorce: “I made an altar, and I sat at that altar, and I worked with many people to teach me forgiveness. You can’t bite into the seed of bitterness. Once you bite it, you can’t spit it out anymore. I found limits. There’s a limit to me. For so long, everybody wanted me to be all things to all people because I was the limitless Sharon Stone. F–k that bullsh-t.”
The end of Roe v. Wade: “Not to have bodily autonomy is just primitive. It’s caveman time, and I just find it laughable. It’s a lot of chest pounding over things that don’t belong to people pounding their chests.”
She pitched a Barbie movie, years ago: The pitch did not go over well. This was “back in the white hot days, back when Jesus lived. They took us out of the studio like we were on fire.” She was thrilled to see Gerwig and Robbie—whom she lovingly calls her “movie daughter” — triumph where she had been thwarted. “It makes me want to cry, actually,” Stone says, “because I think of all the times I sat at my kitchen table, thinking, This is f–king torture. I was banging my head against this supposedly glass ceiling, but it felt like it was made of f–king concrete.”
While I haven’t been around as long as Stone, I remember the fights she and Julia Roberts had about getting paid seven figures per movie, then eight figures. Demi Moore was in that mix too, fighting to get paid what she felt she was worth. It was a huge deal in the ‘90s, that actresses were standing on business and fighting the studios for bigger paychecks. This was also a time before every actress had a lucrative side gig – like, Sharon wasn’t feathering her nest with brand ambassadorships and beauty contracts during the ‘90s either. Anyway, I always enjoy when women talk about money because I do wonder who gets paid what. For all of the freebies given to celebrities, it’s worth remembering that they really do have to pay for their teams (and security).
Some of you claim that Sydney Sweeney is a charisma vacuum, but I kind of like her? She gives good interviews, she plays the game, she’s cute and sexy and she’s worked hard for everything she has. She’s not a nepo-baby, she’s a hustler (positive). Sydney is currently promoting the horror film Immaculate, where she plays a young nun who joins an Italian convent and sh-t gets wacky and probably sacreligious too. Sydney is the executive producer on Immaculate, just as she produced Anyone But You, the surprise sleeper rom-com hit. Shifting into producing while still just taking regular old acting gigs is such a smart play for her. She recently chatted with Variety about all of this and more:
Producing & acting in ‘Immaculate’: “There’s videos and pictures of me standing in video village, helping set up other shots, holding the script and switching some things around, all drenched in blood. I felt like a kid at a playground — endless imagination, and I felt so in control. Mike [Mohan], I’ve worked with him three times, and it’s just a dream, because he values my opinion and lets me take such charge.”
Doing a film about pregnancy/parthenogenesis in a moment when reproductive rights are being curtailed: “So the script has been around for 10 years — I auditioned for it when I was 16. And it was a very different draft. I called the writer, Andrew Lobel, and got the clean, original draft, then reworked it to fit who I am today, keeping a lot of the same themes and storylines. And one of the biggest ones that carried over was something innately in the project that, sadly, is still a topic of discussion today. What’s so cool is that there are so many different themes and points of conversation for people to draw their own conclusions or assumptions. That’s what I love — when a film doesn’t try to drive one message into an audience’s mind and tell them, This is what you need to believe. I love when a film has a variation of ideas and concepts and allows people to conclude their own opinion.”
She always want to do a straight horror film: “Being in the horror genre is fun, because in that genre, there’s no limitations or boundaries. I always find it so funny when people pick apart a horror film’s rules, or its storytelling. I’m like, It’s a horror film. You’re just having fun. It’s not a movie for the Oscars; you know that going into it. We want to create something good, but it’s fun having characters that can go to such extreme, absurd places, and people don’t question it.”
It’s important to her that her films get theatrical releases: “I love the entire experience of going to a theater. I love getting your popcorn and your candy, having your group of friends. And I also like that you have to put away your phone. You have to actually live in the moment and live in that world. We are all subjected to watching stuff on our computers or our TV, and we can do multiple things at the same time without really immersing ourselves into this world, letting the outside world shut off. That’s what I love about storytelling is being able to create a new world. Being able to bring people into a theater is to let them shut off the outside world for 90 minutes. It’s fun. It’s exciting. Get off the couch.
The box office success of Anyone But You: “I get chills just talking about it. We are all so beyond grateful and ecstatic that it has been loved to the degree that it has been loved. Seeing people shut off the outside world and feel all the emotions we wanted them to feel while we were making it, then leave the theater singing and dancing and wanting to fall in love — that is what the movie theatergoing experience is supposed to ignite inside you.
Whether a man with her CV would get more recognition: “There’s way more actresses in the pool in this industry than there are actors, so you have a higher rate of competition. But as a male, it’s much easier to do one movie that does really well, and then you can get offered any film that you want. And me, I’m still getting “Can she act?” accusations. Go watch “Reality,” “White Lotus,” “Euphoria,” “Sharp Objects,” “Handmaid’s Tale” — but, OK, I’ll keep trying to prove myself, and hope that one day I can get cast with an amazing director and have a film that people recognize.
Being an actress-for-hire on Madame Web: “I want to be as involved in the process for any project moving forward that I possibly can. I love being in the room to be able to problem-solve, and come up with ideas. It’s so important to have multiple people at the table instead of just one — everybody who can be collaborative and truly help build a project. It takes everybody. On “Madame Web,” it was so hard not being able to be as involved as I love being. And I felt very free with “Anyone But You” and “Immaculate” being able to have that.
I like that she’s putting her work front and center – Variety tried to get her to talk about her body and how (basically) her boobs are going viral every week, and she just kind of shimmied out of the conversation, saying that people don’t see her as real and that she’s still doesn’t know how to feel about it. But again, it’s about the work for her, and it’s so cool that this young woman (she’s only 26) is already executive producing hit movies and she’s so involved with the business side. She’s also right about her CV – a man would be handed a superhero franchise with half of her CV.
Since I can barely keep track of all of Prince Harry’s lawsuits and court appearances, it would make sense if he was due back in the UK in the next few months on legal business. While he settled with the Mirror in February, he still has pending cases against News UK (the Murdochs) and the Mail (ANL), in addition to his appeal on his royal protection issue. Plus, Harry will likely go to the UK in May for that ten-year-anniversary event for Invictus. I bring this up because that royal biographer Tom Quinn is trying to make it sound like Harry will be heading back to the UK soon, but solely to see his father.
Prince Harry has revealed his plans to return to the UK and one royal expert believes it could happen sooner than fans think. The Duke of Sussex made a brief return to London last month after his father King Charles was diagnosed with cancer. Harry then gave a rare interview during which he announced he will be returning to the UK again, but he didn’t provide any exact dates.
Royal author Tom Quinn suggested Harry’s return could be “fairly soon”. Speaking exclusively to The Mirror, Tom said Harry will want to show the world “he is a caring member of the Royal Family.”
“The fact that he lost his High Court challenge will definitely make him think twice about coming back to the UK, but on the other hand, he feels under enormous pressure to show the world that he is a caring member of the Royal Family and the only way he can show he cares is to visit his father, even if that is difficult because Meghan won’t want to come and he is still completely unable to make things up with his brother,” Tom said.
He added: “The key thing is that it will look terrible if Harry doesn’t visit his father again – and fairly soon – because Harry and Meghan have made being caring and sharing a central part of their mission, their brand. How will it look if Harry cares about injured soldiers but doesn’t seem to care much about his stricken father?”
Yeah, the fact that Harry immediately rushed to England when he was informed about his father’s cancer diagnosis did show that he cared. He cared more than his brother, who at that time had still not seen Charles in person (and waited a few more weeks to see Charles). Harry adores his dogsh-t father and absolutely wants to visit his dad, but I suspect Harry won’t make another dedicated trip to see Charles anytime soon. Maybe I’m wrong, Harry surprises me sometimes. My guess is that Harry will probably wait until he has other business, like a court appearance or something. As the royal-protection case showed everyone, the Windsors do the most to put the Sussexes in danger constantly, and I doubt Harry will step foot in the UK again without his father ensuring that he has police protection, and Charles probably plays fast and loose with all of that.