Category: 5. Entertainment

Andor creator Tony Gilroy is a firm believer that rules can be liberating, at least when it comes to framing a packed two-season series that serves as a prequel for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

“One of the reasons that the show is as precise and resonant and whole and thematic as it is, is that we know exactly where we’re going. We knew exactly where we were gonna end up from the very beginning,” Gilroy said during a panel at the Television Academy’s inaugural Televerse Festival in Los Angeles on Saturday. “I find that liberating.”

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Gilroy was joined onstage by his brothers, Dan Gilroy and John Gilroy, who served as writer and editor on the series, respectively.

As the Disney+ series has come to a close, landing 14 Emmy nominations this season — despite controversial snubs for stars Diego Luna and Genevieve O’Reilly — the Gilroy brothers dove deeply into pivotal moments from Season 2, including the tragic Ghorman Massacre, the backstory of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), and the sacrifice Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) makes for the resistance while hiding a secret from Cassian Andor (Luna), the father of her unborn child.

Tony said that it was a “legit impulse” to have the final moments of the show reveal that Bix is pregnant, because he didn’t want the series “just going off into the bummer of [Andor] dying” in Rogue One.

“Let’s be really honest, it doesn’t hurt me when I can tell [Walt Disney CEO] Bob Iger there’s a baby,” Gilroy explained. “And he can name it, and he can sex it, and they can do whatever they want with it.”

However, Gilroy admitted that convincing the Andor team that Bix’s choice to leave Cassian was necessary proved especially difficult.

“Her willingness to leave him for the greater good was an issue that a lot of people had questions about all the way through,” Tony said. “‘Would it work?’ and ‘will it be delivered?’ and ‘are you going to be able to get us there?’ All this stuff. It really helps for anybody who has any doubts. You get to the end, you go, ‘Oh my God, she was pregnant.’”

That moment of hope is preceded by several tragedies throughout the season, which was narratively divided into three-episode arcs, allowing the show to jump ahead in time. Perhaps the most notable was the Ghorman Massacre, in which the Empire unleashes extreme violence on peaceful protestors who live on the planet Ghorman — an incident that catalyzes the Rebellion.

Giving editing credit to his brother John, Dan added that earlier episodes were leading up to the Ghorman Massacre.

“There’s so many swirling plot lines,” Dan said. “This is just a constant building of suspense and tension and energy.”

While the Ghorman sequence was “always on the calendar,” according to Tony, he and his team ultimately had to condense five seasons of storytelling into two.

“We were deep in shooting the first season, and I was trying to come up with a second season, and Diego and I, literally, we’re sitting in the backyard of a little hotel in Scotland having a drink and we’re like, ‘What are we f–king going to do? We can’t do five years of this show. I mean, it’s just impossible,” Tony explained. “[Diego would] be ancient.”

Not only did it take 22 months to produce a single season, but Tony was also concerned about the potential cost and how Disney would respond. So when they landed on the timeskips, he said they felt “lucky.”

“We were like, ‘Wow,’ and Disney was like, ‘OK, yeah, because we don’t want to pay for like 90 seasons of this,’” Tony added.

However, working on the story as a series versus a film gave the team more breathing room, with both storytelling and edits.

“Editing is kind of like finding the truth,” John said, “and it just gave you that couple extra seconds per scene that you’re allowed to find the truth.”

That truth extended to the audience eventually finding out Luthen’s backstory and his connection to Rebellion partner Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulao).

“My original reason for wanting a standalone was because I didn’t want anybody, after the show was over, to be defining that relationship,” Tony said, also noting his intention to hold out on the explanation for as long as possible.

What the Andor team didn’t intend was for the show to end up eerily similar to real-world events.

“Mon [Mothma]’s speech was so inordinately, powerfully important to the show. And to me personally,” Dan said about writing her speech, which followed the Ghorman massacre.

“Throughout Andor, the first two seasons covering the five years, what you’re really watching is the Senate’s descent into total Emperor control,” Dan said. “So to sit down and go, that’s the assignment. I’m going to write an assignment where I’m talking to these two audiences while events in the world are mirroring what this is.”

“I was getting choked up writing it because these are massively important elements in our lives, particularly right now,” he added.

As the series continued, the resemblance to reality, Tony said, became uncanny.

“Things were fomenting as we’re going, but the detail with which the world has just grafted onto our show and started replicating what we were doing is incredibly sad and shocking to us,” he said, recalling how U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla from California was forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security press conference the week Andor was showing the Ghorman senator being arrested in the Galactic Senate.

“Our internal chat group is like, ‘What the f–k?’” he said.

While Tony was well prepared to write a series about authoritarianism and rebellion, what he said he’s especially proud of was the ability for the show to resonate even beyond the screen.

​​”I don’t think I’ve ever convinced anybody in my family or at a dinner table to change their opinion about anything, ever,” he said. “I feel happy or I feel affirmed that there are people out there that the show seems to have affected in some way that makes them think about courage.”

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Alan Cumming was happy to get a do-over playing Nightcrawler in “Avengers: Doomsday“.

In a recent interview with People, “The Traitors” host said it was “really healing” to return to the role of the teleporting mutant after having a “terrible” time during his first pass at the character in 2003’s “X2.”

“I just came back,” Cumming said. “It was amazing. It was actually really… in a sort of ooey, gooey way, it was really healing and really nice to go back to something that was a terrible experience when I did it the first time. A great film, great film. I love the film.”

Cumming added that filming “X2” with defamed director Bryan Singer was “miserable” and “awful for a variety of reasons that I have talked about at length.” However, filming “Doomsday” has been the complete opposite experience for the Emmy winner.

“It was actually really great to go back,” he added. “I’m 60 years old. I did not think I would be doing stunts, playing a superhero in my 60s. So that was great. And everyone was really nice. And I got it done really quickly because I couldn’t go, because of The Traitors, when most of my scenes were being shot.”

Cumming is not the only X-Man returning for “Doomsday.” Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden and Rebecca Romijn will also appear in the major Marvel team-up.

Several core MCU-favorites have also returned for the film, including Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, Sebastian Stan, Paul Rudd, Tom Hiddleston, Letitia Wright and Winston Duke.

“Avengers: Doomsday” comes to theaters Dec. 18, 2026. Its sequel, “Avengers: Secret Wars,” debuts Dec. 17, 2027.

July 15, the day Owen Cooper became the youngest-ever Emmy nominee for outstanding supporting actor in a limited series/movie, was just a regular school day for the Adolescence star, who had a grueling 90-minute wait after the final bell rang for the nominations to be announced at 8:30 a.m. on the West Coast in the U.S.

“I was just in my living room and then everyone rung me and said that I’d been nominated,” the 15-year-old British actor told The Hollywood Reporter the morning of, having not yet had a chance to watch the news for himself. “It got spoiled for me. … which is a bit annoying.”

Cooper’s Emmy nomination came for his portrayal of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, a schoolboy who develops an extreme aggression toward women that leads to heartbreaking consequences for him and his family, in the Jack Thorne- and Stephen Graham-created Netflix series. Jamie, viewers later learn in episode three’s tense standoff between the teen and child psychologist Briony Ariston (portrayed by Erin Doherty), was rejected by the young girl, and because of that interaction and the influence of red-pill podcasts and other misogynistic digital media, develops a strong aggression toward women.

Cooper chatted with THR about his schoolmates’ reaction to the series, its takeaways for parents — particularly in the final scene of episode four — and the A-listers he’s looking forward to meeting on the Emmys campaign trail.

What’s it been like going back to school while promoting the series?

Well, my friends haven’t changed, but the first day back [after it premiered] was just madness, really. It’s perfectly fine now, but there’s still a few idiots in year eight … the kids who are like three years below me, they’re just annoying.

What have you heard from your peers about the series and its commentary on young boys and how they’re influenced by online culture?

I obviously knew about young lads going out and stabbing people, but I didn’t know it to that extent — and the bullying online. I’m very lucky to never have been bullied online and I don’t bully anyone online. I’ve never come across that at my school, not in my year group. … Everyone is aware of knife crime in the U.K., and when Adolescence came out, it hit a lot of homes.

What did preparation look like with this being your first big role?

When [Philip Barantini, the director] said that it was all shot in one shot, I thought he was just talking about one scene or one episode, but he meant all four episodes would be shot in one shot, and I just felt really weird about it. I was so excited about doing [the series], and then when he said that, I was so nervous. As soon as I got the script, I went up in my room, highlighted it all, and then stayed up until about 1 in the morning [rehearsing] it. I didn’t want to be that person that messed it up and made us start over from the beginning, which I’m so very lucky never happened. I didn’t prepare mentally for the role; I prepared the script.

I was nervous about not being able to pull it off because we filmed episode three first, and I was going through the script, and I was waiting for my lines to end because they were just going on and on and on. I almost cried that I had that many lines. (Laughs.) Mentally, I struggled with it a lot because, obviously, I’m nowhere near Jamie at all. And the bit where I’m standing over Erin saying, “What was that, what was that?” in rehearsals, I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. I hated every second of it. It just wasn’t in my comfort zone whatsoever, but I got used to it by the end.

When filming ended, did you feel like you were able to let this role go or did Jamie stay with you for a little while?

No, Jamie didn’t. I’m glad that he didn’t stay with me because he’s not the best person. Before “action” and after “cut,” I was back to myself. Stephen was telling me that it takes him about five minutes to get back to his normal self, but with me, in episode three when I’m banging on the window and then I leave, as soon as I got out that door, my chaperone was standing there with a bottle of water. In episode one, it was a little bit different because when I’m in the cell and the camera’s not on me, I stay in the character all the way from action to cut, but after cut, I’m perfectly fine.

What do you make of the ending of Adolescence and how things turn out for Jamie and his family?

I was only in a small bit of that, but that’s my favorite episode. If I was to watch the show, I would just watch episode four because I love everything about it. The very last scene [when Jamie’s dad tucks his teddy bear in to his bed], it’s so sad, but that’s my favorite scene in the whole show. I think Stephen and Christine [Tremarco] and Amélie [Pease] were just amazing. The ending was brilliant and everything that led up to it. I think [the series] was formatted really well, where the first episode was about the arrest, and then the second episode was the impact it had on the school. The third episode was the impact it had on Jamie, and then the fourth episode was the impact it had on the family. I think the fourth episode was most important because it shows parents that they need to talk to their kids; don’t make them lonely.

What has your team told you to prepare for during the Emmy campaign?

Well, we only spoke very shortly before this [interview], so I don’t really know what to prepare for. I just know that I go in there, meet loads of people, eat loads of food and have a good night, really. I genuinely can’t wait to go meet all those people.

Anyone in particular you’re hoping to meet?

Jake Gyllenhaal — he’s my favorite actor of all time — Pedro Pascal, Gary Oldman. There’s loads of names.

What sorts of roles are you interested in taking on after this?

I don’t really focus on certain roles that I’d like to do. I just want to work with brilliant actors and directors. People like Tom Holland and the big, famous actors, like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Jake Gyllenhaal — obviously — Hugh Jackman, those sorts of people.

This story appeared in the Aug. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Joe Caroff, the unheralded graphic designer whose iconic creations included James Bond’s 007 gun logo, posters for West Side Story and A Hard Day’s Night and typography for Last Tango in Paris, Manhattan and Rollerball, died Sunday. He was 103.

Caroff died one day short of birthday No. 104 in hospice care at his home in Manhattan, his sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, told The New York Times.

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Caroff also cooked up the opening title sequences for such films as Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), Volker Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman (1985), Gene Saks’ Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which pulled back to reveal a crown of thorns.

His portfolio of posters included those for a dozen or so Woody Allen films plus Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1963), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), Too Late the Hero (1970), Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), Cabaret (1972), An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Gandhi (1982).

Plus, Caroff designed the logo and title signature for Orion Pictures, several album covers for Decca Records and the logos for ABC’s Olympic coverage (with the network’s circular letters and five Olympic rings intertwined), ABC News and 20/20 (styled to resemble a pair of eyeglasses).

The one quality he wanted his work to have was “effervescence,” he said in the 2022 TCM documentary By Design: The Joe Caroff Story. “I want it to have a life, it doesn’t want to lie there flat.”

For his first movie job — he would work on more than 300 campaigns during his career — United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961), then asked him to come up with the letterhead for a publicity release tied to the first Bond film, Dr. No. (Chasman had designed the poster for the 1962 movie.)

“He said, ‘I need a little decorative thing on top,’” Caroff recalled in 2021. “I knew [Bond’s] designation was 007, and when I wrote the stem of the seven, I thought, ‘That looks like the handle of a gun to me.’ It was very spontaneous, no effort, it was an instant piece of creativity.”

Inspired by Ian Fleming’s favorite gun, a Walther PPK, Caroff attached a barrel and trigger to the 007 and for his work received $300, the going rate for such an assignment, he said. Even though the logo, though altered in subtle ways, has been featured on every Bond film and on millions of pieces of merchandise, he received no credit, no residuals, no royalties.

The logo did, however, bring him “a lot of business,” he said. “It was like a little publicity piece for me.”

Joseph Caroff was born on Aug. 18, 1921, in Linden, New Jersey. He had four older sisters and a younger brother. His father, Julius, was a painter who “could make a plaster wall look like a wood wall … it wasn’t as if he just painted it, he rendered it,” he said.

While attending Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, he assisted French graphic designer Jean Carlu on the making of the 1942 propaganda poster “America’s Answer! Production” for the U.S. Office of War Information. It featured a large, gloved hand on a wrench. (Carlu, whose right arm had been severed in a Paris trolley accident, had designed the poster for the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid).

“At Carlu there were no set times,” he told Thilo von Debschitz in a 2021 interview for Eye magazine. “Sometimes he asked me to come at eight in the morning, sometimes not before 10 in the evening. I was able to take part in large design projects and learn a lot of different techniques from him.”

Caroff graduated in 1942 after majoring in advertising design, being elected class president for three straight years and serving as art editor on the school yearbook, Prattonia.

Five days after getting married, Caroff in 1943 headed overseas to serve in the U.S. Army, and he would load propaganda leaflets that he had worked on with Carlu months earlier into planes that would drop them all over Europe.

Back home after 36 months away, Caroff landed a job at Alan Berni & Associates, then opened his own business designing book jackets. The first one he got paid for was for the cover of Norman Mailer’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, first published in 1948.

“I loved doing that work,” he said in the TCM documentary, “primarily because it was an opportunity to read a book, to interpret it and then come up with a cover design that I felt best expressed what was in that book.”

Caroff got the idea for the West Side Story poster — it famously features textured letters that resemble bricks and the ballet-like outlines of lovers Maria and Tony on fire escapes — after seeing clips of the film. (He said it helped that he was a West Sider in real life.)

One of his fun touches on the poster for The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night was putting a knot in a guitar handle. “It frankly was just a whim,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything except to create a quirky note, nothing more.”

After 18 years going it alone, he founded the agency J. Caroff Associates in 1965, and he and his 22-person staff, working out of offices on East 57th Street in Manhattan, often handled 10 film projects at a time.

As von Debschitz related in an interview for Print, “His poster for Tattoo — a [1981] erotic thriller produced by [frequent client] Joseph E. Levine — caused a scandal because it depicted a naked woman with bound feet. Feminists (and probably pubescent men) tore the posters down in the subway, which led to even more publicity. Levine told Caroff, ‘You made out with your fucking poster better than I made out with my fucking movie.’”

He invented an undulating typeface for Last Tango in Paris (1972) and came up with treatments that used roller skates and high rises to spell out Rollerball and Manhattan for those 1975 and ’79 movies, respectively. He also fashioned a train out of the title for the poster for The Great Train Robbery (1978).

He retired in 2006 at age 86 to concentrate on painting.

In addition to his sons, survivors include his daughters-in-law, Ruth and Cynthia, and his granddaughter, Jennifer. His wife of 81 years, Phyllis, a longtime professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work whom he met at a New Year’s Eve party, died in February, four days shy of 101.

After decades of being ignored by Bond producers, Caroff received an Omega watch with an 007 engraving from Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson and EON Productions as a 100th birthday gift.

Caroff was asked if he had saved any of his original renderings over the years. Think how much those would be worth! Alas, he had tossed pretty much everything.

“Probably not a smart thing to do, but I never attached what I was doing to any greatness,” he said. “I was just working, period. I was just being an artist.”

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Joe Caroff, the unheralded graphic designer whose iconic creations included James Bond‘s 007 gun logo, posters for West Side Story and A Hard Day’s Night and typography for Last Tango in Paris, Manhattan and Rollerball, died Sunday. He was 103.

Caroff died one day short of birthday No. 104 in hospice care at his home in Manhattan, his sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, told The New York Times.

Caroff also cooked up the opening title sequences for such films as Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), Volker Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman (1985), Gene Saks’ Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) and Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which pulled back to reveal a crown of thorns.

His portfolio of posters included those for a dozen or so Woody Allen films plus Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1963), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), Too Late the Hero (1970), Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), Cabaret (1972), An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Gandhi (1982).

Plus, Caroff designed the logo and title signature for Orion Pictures, several album covers for Decca Records and the logos for ABC’s Olympic coverage (with the network’s circular letters and five Olympic rings intertwined), ABC News and 20/20 (styled to resemble a pair of eyeglasses).

The one quality he wanted his work to have was “effervescence,” he said in the 2022 TCM documentary By Design: The Joe Caroff Story. “I want it to have a life, it doesn’t want to lie there flat.”

For his first movie job — he would work on more than 300 campaigns during his career — United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961), then asked him to come up with the letterhead for a publicity release tied to the first Bond film, Dr. No. (Chasman had designed the poster for the 1962 movie.)

“He said, ‘I need a little decorative thing on top,’” Caroff recalled in 2021. “I knew [Bond’s] designation was 007, and when I wrote the stem of the seven, I thought, ‘That looks like the handle of a gun to me.’ It was very spontaneous, no effort, it was an instant piece of creativity.”

Inspired by Ian Fleming’s favorite gun, a Walther PPK, Caroff attached a barrel and trigger to the 007 and for his work received $300, the going rate for such an assignment, he said. Even though the logo, though altered in subtle ways, has been featured on every Bond film and on millions of pieces of merchandise, he received no credit, no residuals, no royalties.

The logo did, however, bring him “a lot of business,” he said. “It was like a little publicity piece for me.”

Joseph Caroff was born on Aug. 18, 1921, in Linden, New Jersey. He had four older sisters and a younger brother. His father, Julius, was a painter who “could make a plaster wall look like a wood wall … it wasn’t as if he just painted it, he rendered it,” he said.

While attending Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, he assisted French graphic designer Jean Carlu on the making of the 1942 propaganda poster “America’s Answer! Production” for the U.S. Office of War Information. It featured a large, gloved hand on a wrench. (Carlu, whose right arm had been severed in a Paris trolley accident, had designed the poster for the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid).

“At Carlu there were no set times,” he told Thilo von Debschitz in a 2021 interview for Eye magazine. “Sometimes he asked me to come at eight in the morning, sometimes not before 10 in the evening. I was able to take part in large design projects and learn a lot of different techniques from him.”

Caroff graduated in 1942 after majoring in advertising design, being elected class president for three straight years and serving as art editor on the school yearbook, Prattonia.

Five days after getting married, Caroff in 1943 headed overseas to serve in the U.S. Army, and he would load propaganda leaflets that he had worked on with Carlu months earlier into planes that would drop them all over Europe. 

Back home after 36 months away, Caroff landed a job at Alan Berni & Associates, then opened his own business designing book jackets. The first one he got paid for was for the cover of Norman Mailer’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, first published in 1948.

“I loved doing that work,” he said in the TCM documentary, “primarily because it was an opportunity to read a book, to interpret it and then come up with a cover design that I felt best expressed what was in that book.”  

Caroff got the idea for the West Side Story poster — it famously features textured letters that resemble bricks and the ballet-like outlines of lovers Maria and Tony on fire escapes — after seeing clips of the film. (He said it helped that he was a West Sider in real life.)

One of his fun touches on the poster for The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night was putting a knot in a guitar handle. “It frankly was just a whim,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything except to create a quirky note, nothing more.”

After 18 years going it alone, he founded the agency J. Caroff Associates in 1965, and he and his 22-person staff, working out of offices on East 57th Street in Manhattan, often handled 10 film projects at a time. 

As von Debschitz related in an interview for Print, “His poster for Tattoo — a [1981] erotic thriller produced by [frequent client] Joseph E. Levine — caused a scandal because it depicted a naked woman with bound feet. Feminists (and probably pubescent men) tore the posters down in the subway, which led to even more publicity. Levine told Caroff, ‘You made out with your fucking poster better than I made out with my fucking movie.’”

He invented an undulating typeface for Last Tango in Paris (1972) and came up with treatments that used roller skates and high rises to spell out Rollerball and Manhattan for those 1975 and ’79 movies, respectively. He also fashioned a train out of the title for the poster for The Great Train Robbery (1978).

He retired in 2006 at age 86 to concentrate on painting.

In addition to his sons, survivors include his daughters-in-law, Ruth and Cynthia, and granddaughter Jennifer. His wife of 81 years, Phyllis, a longtime professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work whom he met at a New Year’s Eve party, died in February, four days shy of 101.

After decades of being ignored by Bond producers, Caroff received an Omega watch with an 007 engraving from Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson and EON Productions as a 100th birthday gift.

Caroff was asked if he had saved any of his original renderings over the years. Think how much those would be worth! Alas, he tossed pretty much everything.

“Probably not a smart thing to do, but I never attached what I was doing to any greatness,” he said. “I was just working, period. I was just being an artist.”

Jeff Hiller‘s first Emmy nomination for his three-season run as Joel on the HBO comedy Somebody Somewhere is still sinking in. “My husband, he’ll be like, ‘I’m getting a wave again,’ ” Hiller says. “It feels that way for me, too, where I’m like, ‘Wait, I get to go to L.A., I’m going to get to wear something fun.’ Somebody just told me they have swag suites. I was like, ‘What?!’ “

The semi-autobiographical series is inspired by the life of its star and executive producer, Bridget Everett, who portrays Sam Miller, a 40-something who returns to her conservative hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, to care for her dying sister. At a dead-end job, Sam befriends a former high school classmate she can barely remember— Joel — and the duo navigate aging parents and midlife breakups, with Joel encouraging a closed-off Sam to open up to the possibility of chosen family as he searches for a church where he feels at home as a gay Christian man. “I’m usually playing someone who’s sniffy and rude, and the best thing about Joel was that he smiled, that he was a happy and warm person,” says Hiller, who received the sole acting nod for the series.

“It would have been nice to recognize the incredible contribution that [Everett] made,” he says. “In addition to her writing skills, her fingerprints are all over that show.”

On Emmy night, Hiller’s looking forward to celebrating other first-time nominees. “Katherine LaNasa on The Pitt also got nominated, and she’s this person who’s been trying to be an actor for a zillion years, and now she’s on this crazy [successful] show, and she plays that role so beautifully,” he says. “She reached out to me over Instagram, and I was so touched by that.”

Hiller’s also excited by the chance to meet RuPaul Charles “so that I can become a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race,” he confesses.

Although Somebody Somewhere aired its final episode on Dec. 8, 2024, Hiller is still keeping Joel’s spirit with him. “It’s always so embarrassing when actors talk about their characters in the third person, but I do feel like Joel makes you want to be a better person,” he says. “He makes you want to have connection and community, and I’m taking that with me — not like I was anti-­connection before.”

Hiller, whose memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success, was published in June, is also open to what’s next. “I’m not quite at the point where I get to choose my role,” he admits. “But … I do really hope that I get to play another character where you see multiple levels of their personality instead of just, ‘You don’t have a reservation.’ ” 

This story appeared in the Aug. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

“How do you replace Robert De Niro’s voice?” veteran film editor Thelma Schoonmaker remarked this evening during a lengthy Q&A session at the Edinburgh Film Festival. 

The three-time Oscar-winner, who appeared at Edinburgh to discuss the work of her late husband, Michael Powell, used the rhetorical question to illustrate what she described as her frustration with the practice of sound dubbing on international film releases. 

“It’s just impossible,” she said, answering her question. 

“One of my problems as an editor is the dubbing that goes on when you send a film to Germany or France,” she continued, describing the practice as “painful” for her as an editor. 

Schoonmaker’s remarks were part of a wider story she was telling the audience in Edinburgh about Michael Powell’s impassioned belief in fostering a global cinema community that made films for an international audience. 

“Somebody once asked him, What do you think about the British film industry now? And he said, Why should there be a British film industry? We should make films for the world,” Schoonmaker said of Powell. 

She continued: “He felt that in the silent era, you could send a film to Japan, because silent films had a card in between shots telling you what had just happened. The Japanese could just translate that card, and the film remained exactly the same. Whereas when sound came in, Michael felt we lost something.”

Schoonmaker described Powell as a consummate optimist who never grew weary despite the difficulties he faced trying to raise cash for projects from 1960 onward, following the disastrous reception to his now-seminal feature Peeping Tom. 

“He never became bitter, which I think is amazing. I think it’s one of the great victories of his life that he never became bitter,” Schoonmaker said of her late husband. “He kept on writing ideas for films and tried to sell them. He had almost 100 projects that he drove all over Europe trying to get made.”

Powell died in 1990 in England after living in the U.S. for many years with Schoonmaker, whom he married in 1984. The pair was initially introduced by Martin Scorsese, who was largely responsible for igniting contemporary interest in the work Powell created with his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger. 

Powell and Pressburger collaborated on more than a dozen features, many of which are considered to be some of the best films ever produced on British shores. The list includes The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and Black Narcissus. 

“Not one British director came to his funeral,” Schoonmaker said of the time after Powell’s death. “Bernardo Bertolucci came, and Martin Scorsese flew across the Atlantic to be there and threw the first club of dirt on Michael’s grave.”

She added: “Their friendship was remarkable.”

The Edinburgh Film Festival runs until August 20.

Alan Cumming called the experience of reprising his role as mutant hero Nightcrawler in Avengers: Doomsday “really healing” after the “miserable” filming of X2: X-Men United.

Speaking to People in a new interview, The Traitors host detailed how he had “just finished” shooting the much-hyped Russo Brothers pic earlier this month. The two-time Emmy winner first originated the role in Bryan Singer’s X2 (2003), and will now once again portray the blue-skinned teleporting Kurt Wagner in the Dec. 18, 2026 Marvel Studios entry.

“I just came back. It was amazing. It was actually really— in a sort of ooey, gooey way, it was really healing and really nice to go back to something that it was a terrible experience when I did it the first time,” the actor said. “A great film, great film. I love the film.”

Cumming noted he was “miserable” amid filming X2, which he added was “awful for a variety of reasons that I have talked about at length.” Cumming has previously spoken about the “dangerous” and “abusive” set under Singer, an embattled director who has since been ousted from Hollywood following numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior.

However, the producer noted that Doomsday has been an enjoyable experience: “It was actually really great to go back. And especially, I’m 60 years old. I did not think I would be doing stunts, playing a superhero in my 60s. So that was great. And everyone was really nice. And I got it done really quickly because I couldn’t go, because of The Traitors, when most of my scenes were being shot. So I squashed them all together, and got a green screen and various things and little scenes of people here and there.”

Cumming confirmed news of his casting in the who’s who MCU project back in late March. Though plot details are still sparse, it’s known that mainstay Robert Downey Jr. will return as supervillain Dr. Doom, and the cast will be rounded out by James Marsden (also reprising his X-Men role), Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Paul Rudd, Letitia Wright, Florence Pugh, Simu Liu, Tom Hiddleston, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Winston Duke, Danny Ramirez, Hannah John-Kamen, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn, Kelsey Grammer, Channing Tatum, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Lewis Pullman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps actors Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

Bella Ramsey has an idea of what they’d like to do next with Pedro Pascal following the death of his character, Joel, on the second season of “The Last of Us.”

“I think maybe like a heist movie where we’re robbing a bank together,” Ramsey told me Sunday at the HBO Emmys nominees event in Hollywood.

Ramsey said they are — no surprise! — most frequently asked about Pascal. “It’s, ‘How is Pedro Pascal? Is he as nice as he seems?’” Ramsey said. “That’s mostly what people ask me, and the answer is, ‘Yes.’…He’s here and I have not seen him in so long. I’m looking around, trying to find him.”

They added, “Most of our texts consist of, ‘Where in the world are you? I’m here, are you there? Oh, we just missed each other.’”

Talk also turned to superheroes because of Pascal’s recent work in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”

“You didn’t call [Pascal] and say you wanted to be in the next MCU movie?” I asked.

“I don’t know about that,” Ramsey said, adding, “I could be Spider-Man. Tom Holland did a great job though. So maybe they do need to make a new [superhero] for me.”

Ramsey is actually a newbie to superhero movies. They’ve only watched one, an Andrew Garfield “Spider-Man” film: “It was the first time I watched a Marvel film, and that was two months, three months ago.”

What did they think? “Incredible,” Ramsey said. “I loved it.”

Ramsey is nominated for an Emmy for the second time in as many years for their work as Ellie on “The Last of Us.” The series goes into Emmys night on Sept. 14 with 17 nominations.

Ramsey said they have no scripts for nor do they know when filming begins for Season 3.

For more from Ramsey, check out the video above.

With the return of her Sex and the City heroine she originated nearly three decades ago, Sarah Jessica Parker might not have been prepared for the meme-ification of Carrie Bradshaw and friends.

As the 6x Golden Globe winner’s apparent final performance as Carrie comes to an end with last week’s And Just Like That… finale on HBO Max, she recently addressed the show’s “hate watchers,” who have been vocal on social media.

“I don’t think I have the constitution to have spent a lot of time thinking about that,” Parker to The New York Times. “We always worked incredibly hard to tell stories that were interesting or real. I guess I don’t really care. And the reason I don’t care is because it has been so enormously successful, and the connections it has made with audiences have been very meaningful.”

With Big’s (Chris Noth) death by Peloton, Sara Ramirez’s divisive nonbinary comedian character Che Diaz and the finale’s un-flushed turd, it’s not difficult to see where fans found fodder for a very pop culture-driven social media.

Previously, showrunner Michael Patrick King shared his perspective on the hate-watching phenomenon. “Beyond everything that people have printed, there are people who have been watching it for many years,” he told Deadline.

“So there’s this great back and forth between all the noise of how they would do it differently or what they like or don’t like,” King continued. “And then there’s just appreciation for the fact that they’re seeing characters who went from 35 to 59. Trust me, you don’t write for nothing, for no reaction. I mean, if you did that, you’d be a poet. I want a reaction to the work we all do. It’s a double-edged sword. Yes, they’re watching. And guess what? Yes, they’re watching.”

Last month, King notified cast before announcing the two-part series finale of the three-season revival that launched in 2021.

“And just like that… the ongoing storytelling of the Sex and the City universe is coming to an end,” said King. “While I was writing the last episode of And Just Like That… Season 3, it became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop.”

Parker, who has played the fashionable sex columnist since the original HBO show’s 1998-2004 run and two subsequent movies, offered “the most sentimental and profound gratitude and lifetime of debt” to fans as she bid farewell to the character.