The Little Round Pill That’s Winning Awards Season
When EGOT winners step up to the mic, they usually thank Steven Spielberg, Bryan Lourd or whichever other deity delivered their career. Lately, though, a new name keeps sneaking into the acceptance-speech shout-outs: beta-blockers.
Over the past year, a slew of stars — from Rachel Sennott to Robert Downey Jr. — have been openly admitting that their preshow ritual involves more than Spanx and stylists. It now also includes a little pill to help to steady the hands and keep one’s pits dry.
At the 2024 Tonys, Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi quipped, “Oh, no. My agent gave me a beta-blocker, but it’s not working,” before collecting his best play award. Downey cracked a similar gag at the last Golden Globes: “I took a beta-blocker, so this will be a breeze.” Kristen Bell at the 2025 SAG Awards, Natasha Rothwell at the 2025 Spirit Awards and Sennott at the 2025 Oscars also jokingly — perhaps not entirely — confessed to popping blockers before staring down ballrooms filled with black ties and gowns.
Doctors say the pills don’t exactly cure stage fright — they just keep the body from betraying it. “Using beta-blockers for performance anxiety is off-label, but it’s not uncommon,” notes Dr. Andrew Leuchter, director of UCLA’s neuromodulation division. “This is a drug that prevents adrenaline from activating the fight-or-flight response.”
Still, like most Hollywood quick fixes, there’s a dark side. Harvard psychiatrist Helen Riess warns that overuse or a too-high dose can lead to “a risk of fainting.” And fainting, as any publicist will tell you, makes for a much worse viral moment than a sweaty brow. — ANDREW ZUCKER
Who Launched Armani in Hollywood? It Wasn’t Richard Gere
Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo gets all the credit, but it was a very different film — Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables — that really put the late, great Giorgio Armani on the map. Or at least so claims one legendary Hollywood heavyweight.
“Everything Giorgio designed after that got better and better,” says former über agent Mike Ovitz, 78, who, in a completely unrelated and not-at-all self-serving coincidence, happened to package De Palma’s 1987 star-studded drama about Eliot Ness and his gang of G-men. Yes, Untouchables came out seven years after Richard Gere made a huge splash swanning around Gigolo in Armani’s breezy, unstructured tailoring, but never mind. “All our clients were in it — Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, Bobby De Niro, Andy Garcia,” Ovitz goes on.
“I introduced Bobby and Sean to Giorgio, and he ended up getting the nod from Brian to do everybody’s wardrobe.”
History will judge which film was more responsible for making soft-shouldered, mini-malistic menswear a fashion hit, but Ovitz can rightfully grab credit for turning Armani — who died Sept. 4 at the age of 91 — into the go-to power-suit designer for Hollywood agents. “We told both the men and women in our office that they had to dress a step up — a suit and tie for the men, and the women had to dress accordingly,” Ovitz tells Rambling, recalling how, after co-founding CAA during the mid-1970s, he’d send his executives to the Armani outpost in Beverly Hills to get fitted with what quickly became the agency’s de facto uniform.
“We gave that store a lot of business, and in return, they gave us a bit of a discount,” he says. “Not that they were losing anything by doing so — they did very well with us, and they were smart to do so.”
What made Armani’s designs so appealing to Ovitz and his minions wasn’t just their confident power-suit cut. It was the comfort. Compared to the boxy old Brooks Brothers armor that had once dominated the agency biz, Armani felt downright breathable. “They had this loose fit, and that was novel for the time,” Ovitz says. “When you had to wear a suit from 8 in the morning until you’re getting home from a dinner at 10 p.m., comfort was important.” — LAURIE BROOKINS
How Emily Brontë Got Her New Bra Font
Monet took inspiration from the Seine. Van Gogh found his spark in a star-filled sky. Teddy Blanks? He discovered his muse in his wife’s underwear drawer.
“Warner Bros. contacted me about doing a custom logo for their Wuthering Heights marketing campaign,” explains the title designer behind the eye-catching fonts in the key art for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s bodice-ripping 19th century gothic novel. “I was working on a bunch of different designs, and my wife suggested something sultry and sexy that had lace inside of it. That’s when I came up with the idea to use one of her bras to get the texture right.”
Blanks’ wife, by the way, has highbrow literary credentials of her own — she’s former New York Times book critic Molly Young — but still seems delighted to have her unmentionables plastered on posters nationwide. “From a young age I always knew my Intimate Apparel would be 1 inch from Jacob Elordi’s head, I just didn’t know how,” she recently joked on Instagram.
Blanks started designing titles in the mid-2000s when he did the cards for Lena Dunham’s first short films, then her debut feature, 2010’s Tiny Furniture. Since then, he’s gone on to create title treatments for Barbie (designing a whole alphabet based on the 1980s doll packaging) as well as for Apple TV+’s trippy dystopian workplace dramedy Severance (for which he just picked up his second Creative Arts Emmy).
But the lacy logo for Wuthering Heights could mark a breakthrough for Blanks and his Brooklyn-based CHIPS Studio. “I’m hoping this will become my thing — anyone who’s looking for lingerie to be placed in their title cards will come to me,” he quips. “Underwear of any kind — boxer briefs, jock straps, I’m willing to go there.”
This story appeared in the Sept. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.