Sharon Stone has revealed she is determined to bring the life story of her late friend and comedy icon Phyllis Diller to the big screen.
Nearly 13 years after Diller’s passing, the Oscar-nominated actress shared that she has been “trying” to make the biopic happen, and has even been personally coached by Diller herself for the role.
“I do want to play Phyllis Diller very, very badly,” Stone told Business Insider, recalling their close friendship.
“She and I were very close friends. Phyllis made little paintings for all my kids. She cooked me dinner a lot of times, that woman could cook.
I told her I wanted to play her, and she sat down and taught me her laugh. She made me practice her laugh!”
Stone reflected on Diller’s extraordinary journey, noting how the comedian didn’t achieve major success until the age of 49.
“She lived in a trailer park with five kids and her schizophrenic husband, and practiced her act on women at the laundromat. It’s unbelievable,” Stone said.
She also shared her thoughts on casting other legendary figures from Diller’s era, adding, “I think there are great actors who could play Bob Hope, Red Buttons, Johnny Carson. Sam Rockwell could play Johnny in his sleep. We were tight. Yes, I’m desperate to play her.”
Diller, who rose to fame in the late ’60s alongside Bob Hope, became a trailblazer in stand-up comedy, winning audiences over with her eccentric personality and sharp self-deprecating humour.
She inspired a generation of female comedians, including Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin and Margaret Cho.
Stone also hinted that she might take on directing duties for the project, pointing out that she once aspired to be a director earlier in her career but faced industry barriers.
“I wanted to be a director, but the pesky vagina has stood in my way. Because how could you possibly have a brain and a v*gina? It seems to have confounded so many,” she said with her signature wit.
If Stone’s passion project moves forward, it could bring to light the remarkable resilience and humour that defined Phyllis Diller’s life and career.
Sophie Turner is shutting down criticism about her parenting
Earlier this week, the Game of Thrones star took to her Instagram account and posted a video of herself enjoying the Oasis concert at London’s Wembley Stadium.
She wrote in the caption of the post, “Bucket hats & beers. That’ll do me. Thank you @levis.”
One follower wrote, questioning her night out, writing, “Lmfao I think she has forgotten that she has two kids.”
Sophie did not play coy and responded, writing, “Ah, I’m so sorry, sometimes, I forget some people can’t think for themselves.”
She sarcastically cleared that she is not the only parent of her kids and has shared custody with their father, “So, get this … There’s this crazy thing called shared custody.”
“Maybe, just maybe, they were with their dad that day,” she quipped.
For the unversed, Sophie is mom to two daughters, Willa and Delphine, whom she shares with ex-husband Joe Jonas.
The former couple parted ways after four years of marriage in 2023 and went through a public custody battle.
Moreover, Sophie has always been vocal about mom shaming and single parenthood, she shared insights into her motherhood journey with The Times of London in 2024, sharing, “There’s so much shame that comes with motherhood,” . “You go to work, you’re shamed. If you don’t go to work, you’re shamed.”
Back in 2024, Sophir briefly relocated to Spain for a project with ITV’s Joan and had to call in a friend to move in briefly for her kids.
“She ended up staying with me at mine because I didn’t want to be alone,” Turner told the publisher. “The crew really held me through it, and I didn’t ever come home alone at the end of the day.”
Timothée Chalamet intensifies split speculations on Kylie Jenner’s birthday
Kylie Jenner marked her 28th birthday with a sun-soaked art therapy session and an IV drip retreat.
The Kylie Cosmetics founder shared an insider look at the daytime celebration, with Timothee Chalamet, 29, nowhere to be seen.
While it is likely that the French-American actor might have been caught up in filming the upcoming Dune: Part Three and Marty Supreme, he still made no public mention of her birthday on social media. Instead, he only shared a cryptic post about dreaming big.
The apparent snub has intensified split speculation, especially as the pair haven’t been seen together in over a month. Adding to the rumours, Jenner recently admitted she has been listening to breakup songs on repeat.
Neither Chalamet nor Jenner has publicly addressed the rumours.
The couple have been romantically linked since early 2023 and made several PDA-packed public appearances at awards shows earlier this year, including the Golden Globe Awards, the BAFTA Film Awards, and the Oscars, following their red carpet debut together at the 70th David di Donatello Awards in Rome.
In a career that spanned close to 40 years, the late satirist and comedian John Clarke played thousands of people. In his native New Zealand he was Fred Dagg, sheep farmer and gumboot philosopher. In Australia he was best known as one half of Clarke and Dawe – the voice of an endless parade of risible politicians, shonky businessmen and overconfident idiots.
His magic trick was to play them all as himself. His eldest daughter, Lorin Clarke, explains it in her father’s own words. “He used to say to me, ‘If you ask some actors to play Hamlet, they will become a Danish prince, and they will research Danish princes. If you ask me to play Hamlet, Hamlet comes from Palmerston North.’”
In Lorin’s new documentary about her father, But Also John Clarke, his old friend and fellow New Zealander Sam Neill puts it this way: “John was a polymath. He could write, he could perform, he could knock up a poem for you, but there was always that John Clarke thing in the middle of it.”
Clarke died suddenly in 2017 aged 68, after suffering a heart attack on a bushwalk in the Grampians, Victoria. He had been birdwatching, a beloved pastime. The then Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Clarke’s satire – of which he was a frequent target – “served a noble purpose. It spoke truth to power. It made our democracy richer and stronger.”
Not all who felt the blade of Clarke’s wit were so generous. In the film the British comedian Ben Elton tells Lorin that “sometimes, when John skewered a target, they didn’t even know they were dead until the following day”. In the late 70s Clarke was all but run out of New Zealand, where Dagg had become a cultural phenomenon, and annoying gadfly.
Originally, the film’s title was Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke. At the last minute, it was shortened, with a compromise: in New Zealand, it screens as Not Only Fred Dagg (after Clarke’s death, Dagg’s uniform of bucket hat, shearer’s singlet, shorts and gumboots went on display at Te Papa Museum in Wellington).
The shortening of the title annoyed Lorin. “Don’t write that eye-roll into your piece!” she says laughing, immediately after rolling her eyes on our Zoom call. “I love the title, I think it’s funny and playful, and it’s a slight nod to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only … But Also. But, you know, shorter titles work better in things like listings and so on.”
The majority of the film is given over to the stultifying forces that created Dagg. In this guise Clarke was, in the actor and director Oscar Kightley’s words, “the godfather of New Zealand comedy” – the dustbowl-dry, ultra-deadpan wit that runs through the films of Taika Waititi and the work of Flight of the Conchords.
Rhys Darby, who played the Conchords’ hapless band manager, Murray, describes Dagg’s character as “a kick in the head with a gumboot we all kind of needed”. At the time of Dagg’s first appearance on NZBC in the early 70s (then New Zealand’s only television broadcaster, now known as TVNZ 1), broadcasters still spoke in perfectly rounded British accents.
Dagg punctured such pretensions. His was a comedy of the familiar: for the first time, a New Zealander was holding up a mirror to the country. Clarke picked a national archetype – a sheep farmer – and turned him into a fool with seven sons, all named Trevor, but also a relatable, laconic everyman. A newspaper headline described him as the thinking man’s Paul Hogan.
In a small country, Dagg’s success was overwhelming. Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits, a novelty album made in four hours, is claimed to have been the biggest-selling debut by a New Zealand artist until it was topped by Lorde’s Pure Heroine. But Dagg also made enemies – as Neill notes, New Zealanders lop tall poppies even quicker than Australians.
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Lorin Clarke interviews Australian comedian Shaun Micallef
Clarke moved to Australia in 1977. By then a new father, he laid low – waiting, watching and listening. He was learning a new vernacular. The Dagg character was becoming a prison: “To him [moving to Australia] felt like a chance for reinvention,” Lorin says. For a few years Clarke avoided performing, concentrating on writing.
He re-emerged on The Gillies Report, calling the fictitious sport of Farnarkeling, perhaps the most extreme showcase for Clarke’s love of language: the game was “engaged in by two teams whose purpose is to arkle, and to prevent the other team from arkeling, using a flukem to propel a gonad through sets of posts situated at random around the periphery of a grommet”.
Sports-mad Melbourne, especially, went into a frenzy. Letters poured in to the Age. Somewhere, Roy and HG were taking notes. Wendy Harmer, who starred alongside Clarke on The Gillies Report, tells Lorin that by the early 80s, “he had us nailed”; by 1987 Clarke and (Bryan) Dawe made their debut on ABC Radio.
It’s easiest to see Clarke’s influence, perhaps, on Working Dog productions: just as Dagg was a playful reflection of the New Zealand national character, The Castle poked gentle fun at Australia’s small suburban aspirations and law of the vibe. The TV series Utopia owes an obvious debt to the Olympic piss-take The Games, co-written with Ross Stevenson.
The debut of The Games was one occasion when Clarke expressed his frustration with his masters at the ABC. Today such a program would be given less time to find its feet. Clarke – who always regarded his audience as far smarter than his bosses – wanted to give viewers space to pick up what he called the grammar of the show so they could become fluent in it.
Ultimately, they came to love and trust Clarke because, no matter who he was playing, he somehow remained himself. Jana Wendt, who hosted Clarke and Dawe on A Current Affair from 1989 to 1996, notes that it was all in Clarke’s eyes – that inimitable, mischievous look to camera that invited the audience in on the joke.
“There was something watchful about him, even when he was pretending to be somebody else,” Lorin says. “There was a layer of awareness there, and he had really protective relationship with his audience. I wanted to honour that.”
Kourtney Kardashian is a mom of four, but there’s always more to learn in the parenting department.
Kardashian, whose children include sons Mason and Reign Disick, daughter Penelope Disick and son Rocky Barker, was criticized online after sharing a photo of herself and Rocky during a boating trip in an Aug. 8 Instagram post. The reality-TV star shares Rocky, 1, with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.
In the photo, Rocky, who was wearing a black sweater, could be seen cuddling Kardashian while seated in her lap on the moving boat. “Food for the soul ✨,” Kardashian captioned the post.
Some fans slammed Kardashian, 46, for traveling with the baby without using a life vest.
“Shouldn’t that kid be wearing a life jacket?” @the_real_jjcooll commented.
“Protects her son’s face from the internet but doesn’t protect him from possibly drowning….. priorities,” @lifeofrylee84 wrote.
“No life jacket??? And the Mother of the year award goes to……” @danielle_mamma_of_two wrote.
‘Please stop’: Kourtney Kardashian criticizes rumors about son Mason
Kourtney Kardashian thanks critics after life vest controversy
Kardashian reportedly responded to the parenting criticism in a follow-up post on her Instagram stories Aug. 9, revealing that she bought a life vest for Rocky “that fits.”
“Good looking out,” wrote Kardashian, according to People magazine and Fox News. “Honestly didn’t think about some of the dangers. Thank you for making me aware, and hopefully this helps make other mommies aware of the dangers of certain types of boating without a life vest.”
Kardashian and Barker welcomed Rocky, their first child together, in November 2023. The couple married in 2022.
Contributing: KiMi Robinson and Pamela Avila, USA TODAY
Seth MacFarlane is calling for more positivity in the TV industry.
During a recent appearance on the “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast, the “Family Guy” creator discussed the abundance of “negative” stories in Hollywood, and said audiences need more movies and TV shows that “give people hope.”
“That’s why I did ‘The Orville’… because when I was a kid, Hollywood was providing that voice in various forms,” MacFarlane said. “There was a lot of hope, and some of the blame lies right here in this town. The dishes that we are serving up are so dystopian and so pessimistic. And yeah, there’s a lot to be pessimistic about, but it’s so one-sided. There’s nothing we’re doing that’s providing anyone an image of hope.”
MacFarlane used “The Handmaid’s Tale” as an example. And while he admits it’s a “beautifully written, beautifully directed show,” he maintained there is “a lot more of that [than] what we used to get from Captain Picard” and the stories from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
He also mentioned “The Sopranos,” adding that ever since that show’s heyday, Hollywood is “all about the antihero.”
“[Telling hopeful stories is] the only thing really that Hollywood can do that’s worthwhile because as we all learned from this election, nobody gives a fuck what celebrities think,” he added. “We can tweet, we can talk. Like, people don’t care. They don’t care. What we do do well is tell stories. And we’re not doing the best job right now of telling those stories in a way that gives people hope.”
Finneas admits he reckons with ‘cringeworthy’ Taylor Swift birthday
Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas is reflecting on his ‘cringeworthy’ interaction with Taylor Swift.
During an exclusive interview with The Guardian, the Ocean Eyes hitmaker’s brother and music collaborator detailed his unpleasant experience at Taylor’s 32nd birthday party.
The 32-year-old songwriter admitted to the outlet, out of complete embarrassment: “I said ‘Thanks for coming’ to Taylor Swift. At her birthday party. She said, ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ and I said, ‘Thank you for coming!’”
This moment dates back to when the pop superstar celebrated her big day alongside the band Haim’s Alana Haim in 2021.
In addition, Finneas shared his unfiltered thoughts on the ordeal in a Q&A session with fans a year later in 2022.
He talked about it in detail on Instagram, sharing his most ‘embarrassing moment’ and the fact that he still reckons with it to this day.
The singer explained that he had “meant to say ‘thanks for inviting me’ or whatever, obviously” instead of what he said to Taylor.
On the professional front, Finneas cast Kate Hudson in his music video for the track 2001 back in May.
Singer-songwriter Chappell Roan used her platform at the Syd For Solen music festival in Copenhagen to acknowledge climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was in attendance during her set.
Midway through her performance, Roan paused to address the crowd and specifically thank Thunberg for her environmental advocacy. “Thank you for doing what no nation will do. Thank you, Greta. She’s a real giver,” Roan said, receiving cheers from the audience.
chappell roan thanked activist, greta thunberg on stage at syd for solen 2025 in copenhagen while greta watched her set!
Thunberg, known internationally for her school strike for climate movement and outspoken calls for urgent environmental policy change, has become a symbolic figure for climate activism worldwide. Her presence at the Danish festival added a notable political and cultural moment to the event.
Syd For Solen, held annually in Copenhagen, features a diverse lineup of international and local acts. Roan’s recognition of Thunberg underscored the intersection of music, activism, and public awareness.
The exchange reflects a growing trend of artists incorporating social and political commentary into their performances, particularly on climate issues. With music festivals attracting large, engaged audiences, such moments can amplify activist messages beyond traditional political spaces.
Chappell Roan, whose rising career has been marked by a bold stage presence and loyal fanbase, has previously spoken about the importance of using her platform to support causes she believes in. The shoutout to Thunberg further cements her image as an artist unafraid to engage with pressing global issues.
The moment has since circulated on social media, with fans sharing clips and praising the singer for acknowledging Thunberg’s work during a high-energy festival set.
Drake revealed during Adin Ross’ livestream on August 9 that he had been turned down by YouTuber SSSniperWolf, sparking a wave of online reactions.
While chatting with Ross, the Toronto rapper admitted he reached out but got a polite decline. “I told her I’d come to the hotel, but she said she was with her family,” Drake said with a laugh.
Ross suggested he may have been the one to initiate the contact, adding another layer to the light-hearted exchange. Clips from the stream quickly spread online, prompting mixed responses from fans.
Some poked fun at Drake, with one commenter joking, “Even Drake can’t pull SSSniperWolf,” while others defended him, noting that being with family was a valid reason.
SSSniperWolf, whose real name is Alia Shelesh, is one of YouTube’s most prominent gaming and lifestyle creators, boasting millions of subscribers and a massive social media following.
Known for her gaming videos, reaction content, and vlogs, she has built a brand that blends humour, relatability, and pop culture commentary – making her one of the most recognisable figures online.
The moment comes as Drake continues his “It’s All A Blur — Big As The What?” European tour with J Cole.
He was recently spotted walking the streets of Brussels during an off day and made headlines after postponing a Manchester show earlier this month due to unforeseen circumstances.
Neither Drake nor SSSniperWolf has publicly commented on the clip since it began circulating, leaving fans to speculate whether the exchange was just playful banter or a genuine missed connection.
Riisa Naka and Mayu Matsuoka will star as rival surgeons in Netflix‘s upcoming Japanese drama series “Plastic Beauty,” which takes viewers inside Japan’s cosmetic surgery industry.
The 2026 series marks the latest collaboration from the creative team that produced “Tokyo Swindlers” and “The Queen of Villains.”
Naka, known for her role in Netflix’s hit series “Alice in Borderland” and films including “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,” plays celebrity plastic surgeon Rin Tohyama, who believes beauty offers a path to salvation. She’ll clash with Matsuoka’s character Fumi Numata, a dedicated doctor who reluctantly transitions from life-saving general surgery to the aesthetic medicine world.
Matsuoka, whose film credits include the Palme d’Or winner “Shoplifters” and “Tremble All You Want,” portrays a physician whose medical ideals are tested when forced into cosmetic surgery practice.
The series explores themes of transformation and self-perception through the lens of Japan’s booming aesthetic medicine sector. Patients seeking physical perfection become caught between the conflicting philosophies of the two medical professionals, creating a backdrop for examining societal beauty standards and personal identity.
Yuki Saito will helm the project, bringing experience from the medical drama “Unmet: A Neurosurgeon’s Diary.” Junya Ikegami penned the original screenplay, continuing his collaboration with Netflix Japan following “The Queen of Villains.” His previous work includes “The Blood of Wolves.”
The production team features several veterans from recent Netflix Japan hits. Harue Miyake, who produced “Tokyo Swindlers,” returns alongside Katsuhito Motegi, director of “The Queen of Villains.” Shinichi Kudo serves as development producer, with K2 Pictures handling production duties.
“This story explores both the light and dark sides of the increasingly popular world of plastic surgery,” Saito said. “By depicting the inner conflicts behind the pursuit of beauty, I hope we can present a broader spectrum of values. Having two actors as distinct as Mayu Matsuoka and Riisa Naka face off, challenge each other, and ultimately find mutual understanding — if we can capture even the subtlest emotional shifts in their performances, I believe it will deeply resonate with our viewers.”
The creative team conducted extensive research into Japan’s contemporary cosmetic surgery landscape to develop authentic storylines that reflect current industry practices and patient experiences.
Producer Miyake said: “Today, plastic surgery is no longer a rare choice. The possibility of becoming more beautiful can be both empowering and imprisoning. Rather than glorifying cosmetic surgery, this series focuses on the emotional struggles that lie in the space between what can be changed and what cannot. It is told from both the doctor’s and the patient’s perspectives. The story also explores the unspoken pressures and difficulties of living in a society with rigid expectations. At its core, it is a tale of sisterhood — women coming together and finding strength in one another.”
Netflix’s investment in “Plastic Beauty” continues the streamer’s strategy of tackling controversial social topics through Japanese original content. Previous series have examined the adult entertainment industry in “The Naked Director” and real estate fraud in “Tokyo Swindlers.”
Shinichi Takahashi, Netflix’s director of live action creative for Japan, said: “What is beauty, really? That fundamental question became the starting point for ‘Plastic Beauty.’ Through rigorous research, this series explores the often untold realities of the glamorous plastic surgery industry, including the procedures many are curious about but hesitant to try. Together with Mayu Matsuoka, Riisa Naka, and director Yuki Saito, we delve into the complex, deeply personal, yet universally relatable pursuit of beauty.”
