Category: 5. Entertainment

A woman known as the “Ketamine Queen” will plead guilty to five federal charges after she was accused of providing the drugs that led to Matthew Perry’s overdose and death.

Jasveen Sangha, 42, is set to plead guilty to charges including three counts of distributing ketamine and one count of distributing the drug resulting in death or bodily injury, according to the Justice Department. Other charges against her have been dropped in exchange for the plea.

Sangha is one of five people charged in connection with the death of the Friends actor. Per her plea agreement, Sangha and 55-year-old Erik Fleming sold 51 vials of ketamine to Perry via his personal assistant.

According to federal prosecutors, records showed that Sangha deleted her Signal messages after learning of Perry’s death and told Fleming to do the same. She also left Fleming a voicemail and texted him to “please call.”

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She claimed in the message that she never directly dealt with Perry, “only his assistant.”

“I’m 90% sure everyone is protected,” she wrote. “Does K stay in your system or is it immediately flushed out[?]”

Fleming pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death and faces up to 25 years in federal prison at his sentencing on Nov. 12. Perry’s assistant and two doctors also pleaded guilty to ketamine-related charges.

Sangha could face up to 65 years total in federal prison, but prosecutors may recommend a lighter sentence. She’ll be sentenced in the upcoming months.

In Sangha’s plea agreement, obtained by Complex, the government agrees to a two- to three-level reduction in the level of her guideline sentence, “provided that defendant demonstrates an acceptance of responsibility for the offenses.” (Find out more about how federal sentencing guidelines work here).

Perry, whose struggles with alcohol and drugs were well documented, was found dead at the age of 54 in the hot tub of his California home on Oct. 28, 2023. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the cause of death as “acute effects of ketamine.”

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Zack Snyder is finally tackling his passion project, and there is not a single cape, zombie or rebellious moon in sight.

Starting later this month, Snyder will begin filming The Last Photograph, a drama that he originated and has been developing since the mid-2000s.

Stuart Martin and Fra Free, both of whom appeared in Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies, will star in the feature, an indie whose budget will be significantly lower than many of the epics Snyder has captained before.

Snyder is producing with creative partner and wife Deborah Snyder and Wesley Coller via their Stone Quarry banner. Also producing will be Gianni Nunnari and his Hollywood Gang Productions company.

The project, a war drama, will shoot in several locales around the globe, including Colombia, Iceland and Los Angeles.

Local companies will assist in producing in the film’s the far-flung locations. Executive producers include the Spanish company Mediaset España, through its film production arm Telecinco Cinema, as well as William Doyle and Columbia’s Jaguar Bite, which is run by Juan Pablo Solano and Simon Beltran. True North serves as the production service company in Iceland. 

Photograph is qualifying for Colombia’s CINA incentive (Audiovisual Investment Certificate), which is a tax discount equivalent to 35 percent of the expenditure on audiovisual services in the country. 

Snyder also has his composers lined up as well: Hans Zimmer, Steven Doar and Omer Benyamin. 

Longtime Snyder colleague Kurt Johnstad wrote the script after working with Snyder on 300 and Rebel Moon. It is based on a story from Snyder.

The story, according to the producers, is thus: “An ex-DEA operative must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomat parents. Enlisting the help of a washed-up junkie war photographer, the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth, but soon learns he must also face the ghosts of his past. Their journey into the unknown takes them further and further away from civilization, bringing into question everything they believe, while slowly eroding the distinction between real and surreal.”

The project has gone under some changes during its 20 years or so in development. For one, the setting used to be Afghanistan and centered on a war correspondent being the lone survivor of an attack on a group of Americans. In the early 2010s, Christian Bale and Sean Penn were attached to star, before Snyder took a detour into his DC movies.

“The idea of taking camera in hand and simply making a movie in an intimate way is very appealing to me,” Snyder said in a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter. “The Last Photograph is a meditation of life and death, embodying some of the trials that I have experienced in my own life and the exploration of those ideas through image making.”

Snyder has several movie projects in development, among them an MMA slugfest titled Brawler and an action thriller centered around the LAPD.

If there are no coincidences in Taylor Swift‘s world, then her ever-observant Swiftie fans are convinced that the pop superstar will headline the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.

What’s their evidence? Well, during Swift’s appearance last week on the New Heights podcast, hosted by boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason, fans picked up on a few hints — including an extended conversation about baking sourdough bread. Next year’s Super Bowl is at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, home of the San Francisco 49ers, whose mascot happens to be a miner character named Sourdough Sam. If that’s not enough, Swift said she now talks about sourdough “60% of the time” — and next year’s big game happens to be Super Bowl 60.

On the new Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Katie & Keith are laying out all the fan evidence pointing to Swift headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. If Swift does wind up with the gig, she would be the first halftime headliner to not come from the worlds of R&B or hip-hop since 2020, when Latin pop superstars Shakira and Jennifer Lopez shared the stage.

Also on the show, as Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” returns to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for a 10th total week, we’ve now got three KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack songs in the top 10. Plus, on the Billboard 200, Gunna, mgk, Jonas Brothers and BABYMETAL all make waves in the top 10, as Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem scores an 11th week at No. 1.

The Billboard Pop Shop Podcast is your one-stop shop for all things pop on Billboard‘s weekly charts. You can always count on a lively discussion about the latest pop news, fun chart stats and stories, new music, and guest interviews with music stars and folks from the world of pop. Casual pop fans and chart junkies can hear Billboard‘s executive digital director, West Coast, Katie Atkinson and Billboard’s managing director, charts and data operations, Keith Caulfield every week on the podcast, which can be streamed on Billboard.com or downloaded in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider. (Click here to listen to the previous edition of the show on Billboard.com.)

Kevin Costner has spoken out against a lawsuit filed by a stunt performer on his film Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, alleging that she was forced to perform a “violent” unscripted rape scene without required notice, consent or the mandatory presence of an intimacy coordinator.

In a legal declaration filed Monday in LA superior court, Costner called the breach of contract suit, filed in May by lead stunt double Devyn LaBella, a “bold-faced lie” that was “designed, through the use of false statements and sensationalistic language, to damage my reputation”. The Yellowstone star seeks to have LaBella’s suit dismissed or kneecapped under anti-Slapp laws, measures supposed to protect against intimidation lawsuits.

LaBella, the stunt double for lead actor Ella Hunt, alleges that on 2 May 2023, Costner improvised a scene in which their character Juliette is raped, one day after Hunt and LaBella filmed a scripted scene in which a different character rapes Juliette. Hunt declined to perform the scene, and LaBella was allegedly then summoned to set without knowledge that Hunt refused and left.

According to her complaint, LaBella was not warned that a new male actor would mount her, pin her down and “violently” rake up her skirt. LaBella claims that Costner told her to “lay down” before he directed the male actor “to repeatedly perform a violent simulated rape” on her while Costner “experimented with different takes of the rape action”.

LaBella argues that the scene violated contractual protocols negotiated by the performers’ union Sag-Aftra, which stipulates that performers be given 48 hours notice and consent to any scenes involving nudity of simulated sex. She also claims that the film’s intimacy coordinator was not present, as mandated under Hunt’s contract, which applied to LaBella as her stand-in.

In an amendment filed in June, Celeste Chaney, an intimacy coordinator for the film, supported LaBella’s account, and called the incident an “unscheduled, unplanned violent rape scene” that “was unexpectedly sprung on the actors and stunt professionals”. Chaney added that LaBella “did not consent to the action that was directed once she was in place”; and “she did not have the appropriate modesty garments to ensure adequate coverage, safety, or protection”.

Costner’s declaration tries to paint a different picture. The lengthy filing opens with an upbeat text from LaBella to her supervisor nine days after the alleged incident: “Thank you for these wonderful weeks! I so appreciate you! I learned so much and thank you again. I’m really happy it worked out the way it did too. Have a great rest of the shoot and yes talk soon!”

“There was no anger or resentment, only enthusiasm and gratitude,” reads the filing from Costner’s lawyer Marty Singer. “The reality, as supported by the sworn testimony of a dozen respected, veteran film crew members with personal knowledge of the facts at issue in this dispute, real-time photographs of the shot in question, and LaBella’s own words at the time, is that LaBella’s opportunistic and salacious lawsuit is just as fictional as the motion picture at the center of this dispute.”

The filing goes on to call LaBella’s claim of an unscripted rape scene “patently false”, describing the incident instead as “build-up and foretelling of two violent rapes that occur off-screen”.

LaBella’s lawsuit claims that she complained to colleagues about the experience but felt she “had to continue working and keep up a professional attitude” as production was still underway.

She seeks unspecified damages for career disruption and “permanent trauma that she will be required to address for years to come”. She also wants the court to order that an intimacy coordinator be on set for all of Costner’s future films and that the defendants attend anti-sexual harassment or anti-sexual violence training by a “reputable organization”.

Costner left a lucrative role on the hit show Yellowstone to film Horizon, a passion project intended to be a four-part series. He poured $38m of his own money into the estimated $100m budget for the first two films, period westerns set in the late 1800s that Costner directed and co-wrote with Jon Baird. Chapter 1 was released in June 2024, but flopped at the box office, making $38.7m globally. Chapter 2 premiered at the Venice film festival in September 2024, but a general release date is yet to be announced.

This weekend, the 2025 Santa Fe Indian Market kicked off in New Mexico—a one-of-a-kind event from SWAIA that remains one of the capital city’s main attractions. The annual market, which is now in its 103rd year, gathers Indigenous artists across North America, all of whom come to sell and display their authentic, handcrafted works.

Early Saturday morning, as over 1,000 vendors set up their outdoors booths surrounding the main plaza, you could already find an impressive roster of artists from different regions, tribes, and mediums (including jewelry, fine art, pottery, textiles, and more). As usual, gaggles of serious fashion and art collectors—many of whom traverse the globe to attend the market every year—were already lined up at their favorite artists’ booths well before the sun even rose, ready to score that special piece. (For those who have yet to attend, this is no quaint little farmer’s market: Some pieces from established artists can go for upwards of $50,000.)

Prime shopping opportunities, however, were not all that this year’s Indian Market had to offer. From the kick-off gala with a runway presentation from veteran Taos Pueblo designer Patricia Michaels to the annual Indigenous Fashion Show—featuring new couture collections from buzzy designers like Jamie Okuma and Jontay Kahm—there was plenty of style to take in. Uniting all of these events? A sense of excellence and cultural innovation that proved Indigenous design is not only well and alive, but thriving.

Below, read on for the highlights from this year’s Santa Fe Indian Market.

Best of Class

Kicking off the 2025 Santa Fe Indian Market on Friday was the annual Best of Classification Awards, where Indigenous artists submit new works displaying their masterful craftsmanship. The competition was held across categories such as beadwork and quillwork, jewelry, pottery, sculpture, textiles, and more. Highlights from this year’s entries included the Best of Show winner (the top award), the Chickasaw artist Regina Free, who created a mixed-media 3-D bison sculpture made of foam, felt, paper towels, plaster, and other materials. Blackfeet Nation artist Jackie Bread won the Best of Beadwork and Quillwork category for their intricate beaded bag, while San Felipe Pueblo artist Janalee Valencia also won the top jewelry award for a striking reversible mosaic inlay necklace.

Anyone who was personally traumatized as a child by the 1984 movie The NeverEnding Story will immediately recognize the furry, Falkor-like dragon head featured on the album cover of the debut album by the duo Disiniblud. In the photo, it sits aglow in the garage of a suburban house, experimental musicians and Disiniblud members Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith taking it in as if it were just another unearthed childhood memento gathering dust at a parents’ house.

Truthfully, I’ve had loose plans to rewatch The NeverEnding Story as an adult for years now, an ’80s fantasy film that follows a shy outcast who gets sucked into a magical storybook’s narrative. I suspect I keep putting it off because I don’t want to confront the scene where the central character’s horse, Artax, gets stuck in the Swamp of Sadness, which brought me to tears as a kid. But I also suspect I’ve been putting a rewatch off because the memory of the movie and what it meant to me as a child, how just out of reach its magic felt, could collapse in an adult viewing — that I’d just think it was corny, or worse.

Disiniblud’s self-titled album, released last month, is in many ways about evading that sort of collapse. It’s a stunning record that seeks to capture the imagination and vulnerability of being a kid, to reconnect with your childhood self and make music without adult self-consciousness. Glitchy, overpowering synths, delicate, skewered piano and howling vocals from a handful of talented collaborators collide in compositions that actually sound magical. Each song vibrates with a sense of playfulness and otherworldly possibility as Keith and Nayar build up songs from tinkering, music box melodies into epic soundscapes, as if to suggest reality can become fantasy at any moment. “It’s change!” a cartoonish voice exclaims on the song of the same name, with the excitement of a confident child sharing an earth-shattering discovery, but also extending an invitation — to pick up the magic book, to walk through the wardrobe, to let your guard down.

But for all of its beauty Disiniblud is also intense — songs like “Serpentine” and “My flickering gift to you” almost overwhelm their vocalists Cassandra Croft and Tujiko Noriko with layers of reverb and electronica, as if to suffocate or suppress them. For Keith and Nayar, both trans women, accessing their child selves isn’t a simple visit to a more innocent, rosier period of their lives, but a process that can be painful. “I think that your child self has so much to teach you about what parts of you you were told to injure and cut off and eject, but are always still there,” Nayar said at a listening event for the music publication Hearing Things. “The point of it is to open a door for both us and other people, to be able to walk through and be less numbed-out and more in tune with the parts of ourselves that we’re told to shut off.”

Disiniblud isn’t the only artist this year to rediscover the creative liberties of retreating into one’s child self. The Chicago trio Horsegirl went into recording the band’s delightful, minimalist sophomore album Phonetics On & On shaking off a bit of the influences of its noisy, shoegaze-indebted debut, focusing instead on making music that felt fun, intuitive and innocent. The Australian EDM artist Ninajirachi took a more direct approach on her recently released album I Love My Computer, an unusually autobiographical record for the festival-friendly genre, chronicling her first experiences falling in love with electronic music at 12 years old and beginning to make music on the songs like “Sing Good” and “iPod Touch,” which she says “sounds like something I would have loved at that pivotal time.” Each artist reaches back in time to revisit and retain the spirit of a younger self unburdened by creative overthinking or careerism. In doing so, they don’t just open a door to music-making as a space of revelation and limitless possibility, but also music-listening, inviting listeners to tune into the same sense of youthful wonder that still lurks inside all of us, if only we’d just open ourselves up to it.

Unlike the other albums, Forever Howlong, the surrealist, twee new LP by the English band Black Country, New Road, may not have been an intentional exploration of childhood whimsy, but it twists and turns with storybook images of knights and Salem witches, and earnest songs that use the language of adolescence to portray big — and sometimes dark — feelings. The album was made after a significant career shake-up: its lead singer leaving the band. “Do you wanna play forever?” member Georgia Ellery, who shares singing duties across the album with fellow bandmates, asks on “Besties,” a song that at first listen could be about the friendship of a couple of schoolgirls, but hints at a more adult yearning for something more. Does Ellery mean to play, as a child might, with her chosen “bestie?” Or does she mean to simply play as a musician, with her bandmates, forever? For BC, NR, and so many artists this year, making music can be one and the same.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have been dealt “a slap in the face” by Netflix after the streaming service signed a new first-look deal with the couple, a royal expert has claimed. Speaking on the Mail’s Palace Confidential, royal expert Richard Eden said: “Harry himself, in his interview with Oprah Winfrey, talked about how he needed money and he needed it quickly because of security and money being cut off from his father.”

The expert cited Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s deals with Spotify and Netflix, which were “worth a fortune.” However, the new deal with Netflix is believed to be a “first look” deal, meaning the streaming giant will only pay the couple once it commissions Meghan and Harry’s ideas. Richard Eden said: “It’s definitely a slap in the face. What Harry would want would be another deal he could boast to Oprah Winfrey about—how much it’s worth.”

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Over more than 30 years in the business, Tony Gilroy has amassed an enviable list of writing credits that includes Armageddon, Michael Clayton (which he also directed, garnering Oscar noms in both areas), the first four installments of the Bourne franchise (the fourth of which he also directed) and the 2016 Star Wars prequel Rogue One. But “the seminal creative experience” of his life, he says, has been Andor, the Disney+ Rogue One prequel series on which he’s worked for the past six years as creator, showrunner, head writer and EP. (Its second season just received 14 Emmy noms.) And yet he can’t see himself doing anything like it ever again.

How, a few years after Rogue One, did you wind up working on Andor?

I’ve known [Lucasfilm president] Kathy Kennedy for years. After Rogue, she had an appetite to do a prequel around the five years of Cassian Andor before the film. She knew that I knew the character really well, and asked me to look at two different versions that they had. One was cool and slick, but it seemed to me that it was going to run out of road quickly, so I wrote a long email to her, sort of a manic manifesto, about how I thought the show should be built. She was like, “This is pretty mad and undoable, but I see what you’re saying about what we’re doing now.” They tried it again, and then they came back to me and said, “We looked at this memo from a year and a half ago, and it makes a lot more sense to us now. Do you want to do that?”

Did you appreciate how big of an undertaking you were signing up for? At some point the plan shifted from devoting one season to each of the five years, to having the first season cover one year and the second cover four.

I had no clue what I was stepping into. I’d been on House of Cards for a couple of years as a consultant for Beau [Willimon]. I’ve made some big movies. But my naivete and idiocy about what this was going to take was staggering to me just six months later. I was going to try to direct, rewrite all the scripts, to do all this stuff — it was ridiculous. Then COVID came. The only thing I saw positively about COVID was that it would kill the show, I thought. But eventually they started to build back up. It was obvious I couldn’t go back to London [where the show was to shoot], so we were going to have to get British directors. I wouldn’t be able to direct, but I would be able to keep writing and run the show. I got into rewriting the scripts and figured out how to run the show from here. By the time dailies started to come in, I was getting very excited about what we were doing. When I got out of quarantine, I went over there [to the U.K.], trying to come up with what we were going to do going forward. By then we knew what the scope of the work was, and Diego Luna [Cassian Andor] and I sat down, and it wasn’t a “choice,” even; we simply would not be able to make a show like this in the way we initially planned. It would go on too long. He’d be too old. People would die. But the solve presented itself very elegantly: the structure that we ended up with the second season.

The appeal of doing Andor, for you, wasn’t anything to do with Star Wars as much as it was getting to delve into subjects like fascism and rebellion?

I love history and I’ve been consumed with it my whole life, not in any kind of organized way, just out of curiosity. I’d accumulated all this lumber down in the basement that I didn’t ever think I was going to get a chance to use, but then this show came along. When I started on the show, the parallels between what was happening in the world and what was happening in the galaxy and the Empire — those were already obvious. But over the six years we’ve been doing the show, that little monster got on its feet and learned how to run. When Senator Padilla was pulled out of the ICE meeting, like in the episode about the Ghorman senator being pulled out, there was a big text chain in our group like, “Oh my God. It looked like the show.” It’s very sad for us how much it rhymes.

What made Andor “the seminal creative experience” of your life? Would you ever do this kind of thing again?

I could see doing a limited series or something, but I can’t see doing anything like this again. For five and a half years, every single day of my life, I had a maximally imaginative involvement that was never complete — writing, designing, music, casting, all of it. Every demand on your imagination that could ever be asked was screaming for your attention. That’s a pretty heady place to live. I grew to love it. But I can’t imagine that I would ever be that fully engaged again.

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Guy Pearce, who is coming off his recent Oscar nomination, is circling a starring role as media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Pearce is in talks to lead director Danny Boyle‘s movie Ink, which is set to center on Murdoch’s path to power. The film from Studiocanal, Media Res and House Productions also has Jack O’Connell eyeing a role as Larry Lamb, the late editor of The Sun.

Boyle helms the film from a script by James Graham, who adapted his play of the same name that opened in London in 2017. In his 2019 review for The Hollywood Reporter of the Broadway run that earned two Tonys, critic David Rooney wrote that the play “has undeniable currency in the era of Brexit and Trump.”

Ink is set in 1969 and focuses on Murdoch acquiring struggling newspaper The Sun and hiring Lamb to run it. The film’s team is planning to begin shooting in October.

Boyle, Tessa Ross, Michael Ellenberg, Tracey Seaward and Tonia Davis serve as producers on the movie.

Pearce was nominated at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony for his supporting role in The Brutalist. His forthcoming features include The Woman in Cabin 10 and The Dog Stars.

O’Connell has had a big year, having played memorable roles in Sinners and the Boyle-directed 28 Years Later. His next projects include 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Godzilla x Kong: Supernova.

Boyle most recently directed 28 Years Later, the latest installment in the franchise that launched with his original 2002 film, 28 Days Later. Sony released 28 Years Later in June — starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes and O’Connell — and the film surpassed $150 million at the global box office.

Deadline was first to report on the movie adaptation of Ink.