Category: 5. Entertainment

Vanessa Kirby, much to her surprise, had no trouble committing to the sprawling MCU as she was cast in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, where she portrays Sue Storm/Invisible Woman in Marvel Studios‘ official launch of Phase Six.

During a recent interview with Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, The Crown alumna talked about falling in love with the famed comic book character and what it’s been like reprising the role for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

“When this one came around, I was so genuinely moved by the fact that this was a woman who was pregnant and was a new mother, and also has these superpowers,” Kirby said. “It helped me ground it in something — to try and understand what it would be like to have both those things happening at the same time was a challenge, but I was grateful for that because it rooted it in this kind of domesticity, in this family and home, which made it easier.”

For the role, Kirby did not audition, first meeting with helmer Matt Shakman over lunch and later on top brass Kevin Feige. The actress said she was excited to mine the “counterculture and super meaningful” ’60s comic book era to bring the character to life, adding that because of Sue Storm’s expansive journey she didn’t have any trepidation agreeing to future MCU pipeline projects.

“With this, I actually didn’t have that, and I’m surprised to say that,” the Pieces of a Woman star explained. “I think it was because I really liked her so much and because I’d read so many of the comics and she goes through so many different iterations. She becomes Malice, this really dark version of herself for quite a long time, and then she renames herself Invisible Woman having been called Invisible Girl and she goes off with Psycho-Man, like her history is incredible, so I felt like there’s so much there to even [explore] psychologically. I mean, she has a stillborn, and people don’t know that. She’s gone through a lot.”

More importantly, Kirby said she felt confident continuing her collaboration with the superhero studio alongside her fellow First Steps co-stars Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach: “I knew I wouldn’t be without these three actors, and these three actors have genuinely become family, and I admired them so much, and I knew that we’re a four and the four in the comics are never separated, so I assumed that we’d be together, and that really helped ’cause then you’re not a lone ranger going to new, daunting environments.”

Speaking to the much-hyped Doomsday, Kirby said more shoots are on the way: “I’m loving it, absolutely loving it. It’s been a complete privilege,” she said of filming, which she is doing while pregnant, adding that it’s the “coolest” experience.

Shakman previously spoke to Deadline about how his MCU entry is able to “pass the baton” to the Joe and Anthony Russo-directed 2026 movie. Though plot details are currently tightly under wraps, audiences can expect the tentpole to center on supervillain and Fantastic Four arch nemesis Dr. Doom (Robert Downey Jr.).

“[The Russo Brothers] describe it like they’re making a recipe of different ingredients, and it’s unbelievable that these Avengers movies work in such a beautiful way,” Kirby said. “You look at Infinity War and you’ve got all these different energies but somehow they all fuse together, and I remember them saying the first one they had no idea if any of them would go together, and it just works. It’s quite exciting to be a part of something and go, ‘OK, this is my flavor, I don’t know.’ It’s in their hands to work out what flavors go with what and how and where and there’s a surrender in that.”

Lauding Downey Jr.’s leadership onscreen, Kirby said: “He’s the most incredible human being, soulful, deep, kind — he’s been an amazing leader to us considering we’re the newbies, and a lot of the others have known this world for a really long time, and he’s been a phenomenal leader, and also he’s just doing the most amazing work.”

In addition to the quartet from First Steps and Downey Jr., confirmed cast members include 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, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Channing Tatum, Tenoch Huerta Mejía and Lewis Pullman.

Watch the full Happy Sad Confused interview below:

George Lucas stepped into the San Diego Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H and stepped into history, as the legendary creator of Star Wars made his first ever appearance at Comic-Con, the popular arts convention that has partially been built off his stories and creations.

It was the largest ever Sunday panel for the convention, according to sources, which usually sees its marquee presentation headline on Friday or Saturday. But such is the power of Lucas.

Thousands waited hours just to get inside, chanted “Lu-cas, Lu-cas!” while they waited, and then gave a wild standing ovation as the filmmaker took to the stage, introduced by rapper-actress Queen Latifah, and sat down next to filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Star Wars production designer Doug Chiang.  

If the 6,500-strong crowd was disappointed he didn’t talk a whiff about Star Wars or Indiana Jones, it wasn’t shown, as cries of “I love you, George!” and waving lightsabers punctuated the air several times.

Lucas even received a standing ovation when he left the presentation, which was devoted entirely to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. He, along with museum board member and fellow art collector del Toro and Chiang, were there to not only give a first look at the museum but also make a case for the importance and validity of narrative art, which includes comic book art, as a vital form of expression.

“This is a temple to the people’s art,” Lucas said, speaking about the idea for his museum. His first words in Hall H were about how he began acquiring art while in college, but all he could afford was comic book art. With success, he expanded his art collection to now over 40,000 pieces.

“What is important to me, what is magical, is not a man and his collection, it’s a lineage of images,” explained del Toro. “We are in a critical moment in which one thing they like to disappear is the past.”

“And this is memorializing a popular, vociferous and eloquent moment in our visual past that belongs to all of us. And the museum celebrates this,” he added.

A video presentation showed interior looks at the museum — there are no right angles anywhere, Latifah underscored — as well as images that will be in the collection.

A cover of DC comic Mystery in Space, featuring the first appearance of Adam Strange; the first ever Flash Gordon comic strip; a cover of 1950s EC comic Tales from the Crypt; strips of Peanuts and Garfield; art ranging from Brian Bolland and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola to underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, Windsor McKay and Moebius; art of Astro Boy and Scrooge McDuck. But there were also images of art by Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth and Frieda Kahlo.

Also in the museum will be concept and storyboard art from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark by Ralph McQuarrie and Jim Steranko, as well as the props of starships and speeders from various Star Wars movies.

Chiang explained that comic art in particular had long been discounted. “It’s not taken seriously,” he said, and when he was younger was told, “You will outgrow it one day.”

“I’m so glad I didn’t,” he said, before driving home the point that one of the strengths of narrative art is that it’s driven by story. “Story comes first. Art comes second.”

The idea of narrative art being a driver of community and common belief systems was one to which Lucas, in sometimes elliptical ways, kept repeating and returning.

Del Toro also got into the heady and philosophical, denoting differences between art for myth-building purposes and art for propaganda purposes

“Myth belongs to all of us, propaganda belongs to a very small group,” he said. “Myth unites us, propaganda divides us.”

The museum, which has had its opening pushed back several times, is slated to open in 2026.  

British comic and podcast host Nish Kumar knows the value of Netflix specials for A-listers like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle.

But he sees emerging comedians like himself with slow-burn careers often getting their biggest boost globally from YouTube after years playing clubs big and small back home. “I’m primarily known in North America because of a British show called Taskmaster, which people outside the UK watch on YouTube,” Kumar told The Hollywood Reporter while performing at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.

Re-runs of Taskmaster, a British comedy panel game show that included Kumar, have been viewed on YouTube as creator-driven online platforms increasingly disrupt the traditional media landscape, and podcasts like Crooked Media’s Pod Save the UK, which Kumar co-hosts with cultural journalist Coco Khan, transform the audio space.

The podcast gig followed Kumar appearing on stage at a live London comedy show produced by Crooked Media, which was followed by that proverbial chance call from Hollywood. Soon after he walked off stage, he got a call from Los Angeles asking if he could be at a meeting in London in 20 minutes.

“And I was like, I’m already there. I’m literally in the audience. So I got pulled out of the crowd like Courteney Cox in the “Dancing in the Dark” video,” Kumar recalled. Later, Crooked Media asked if he’d be interested in launching and hosting a British show, which he did.

Kumar’s Pod Save the UK offers a weekly fix on U.K. politics. That means Kumar and co-host Khan got to cover the downfall of British prime minister Boris Johnson over his rule-breaking parties in No. 10 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In terms of historic failures of leadership, I think Johnson’s conduct in the pandemic is one of those things that people will study for years,” Kumar says. But while the U.K.’s Conservative Party sent Johnson packing, Kumar has a take on why Donald Trump, also judged by many as a political buffoon whose erratic style endears him to followers, was restored to the White House for a second term.

“Trump has killed the broad church in the Republican Party. It’s no longer a political party. It’s a delivery system for a single man and that’s a huge problem,” he insists.

As Nigel Farage, a protégé of Trump, challenges Britain’s current Labor government in the polls, Kumar doesn’t look forward to his Reform UK party coming to power to reinvigorate his political comedy.

“The thing with (Farage) and Trump is there is a shamelessness. It actually makes it harder to make fun of them. Politicians in theory are supposed to conduct themselves with a level of dignity that means there’s something to prick for principles. Farage and Trump are congenitally shameless men,” Kumar said.

The Just For Laughs comedy festival continues through Sunday.

Bob Odenkirk admitted he walked into Saturday Night Live with what he called “a lot of attitude.”

The 62 year old actor, who spent four years writing for the famous comedy show from 1987 to 1991, recalled, saying his feelings about the experience had changed as he grew older.

He told Entertainment Weekly: “I was too hard on the show.

“I had a lot of attitude when I got hired there, like, ‘This show could be better, this show could be Monty Python, this should be more cutting edge, this should be more dangerous.’ And I was frustrated by it not representing purely my point of view. I wanted it to be me, my show.”

Bob later realised that the goals he set for himself back then were far from realistic.

He said: “It’s not my show! It’s a show that is shared by everyone who’s in that cast, and everyone who’s in that writing staff, and it’s shared by generations, and not one generation.

“Everybody in America watches it, and it’s a reference point for everyone. I think the 50th just made me more aware [than] ever of the amazing work that’s been done there.”

As Bob got older, the way he saw Saturday Night Live changed and he understood better what could really happen and what couldn’t.

He said: “It’s a bigger challenge than I thought it was when I worked there.

“When I worked there I was 25, I was like, ‘C’mon, dammit! We can do better! This is easy!’ And it literally was the years since I’ve left that I went, ‘Wait a second, that show is almost impossible to do at all.’”

However, Bob then expressed his desire to host the TV show one day.

ALBANY, New York — Tree roots have long served as a useful metaphor for articulating connections between people, places, and ideas. And yet, it’s a limited structure. In the 1980s, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously offered the rhizome as an alternative, suggesting instead a vast organic network of connections that can wrap into or shoot outward from themselves at any point, refusing the linear and binary bifurcations that tree-like structures imply.

Exploring the exhibition Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms, currently on view at the New York State Museum and organized by Curator of Mycology Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, I was struck by the rich potential that fungi offer as another metaphor to describe the world and our relations within it: with their far-reaching and many-tendriled hyphae or filaments linking them with other organisms, their closely held interdependence on other species, and their extraordinary variety. They also provide a fertile framework for considering the subtle but determined ways that Mary Banning planted herself in the substrate of a field in which she was largely unacknowledged during her lifetime, but that we can better comprehend today, just as our understanding of mushrooms is beginning to expand.

Banning was born in Maryland in 1822, and lived there for the vast majority of her 80 years. As an adolescent, she lost her father, a military officer who served in the Maryland House of Delegates. Around a decade later, her mother and sister became chronically ill, and she took on their care. Despite her family obligations, Banning pursued a growing interest in mycology (the study of fungi), amassing a personal library and herbarium from which to learn. In the late 1860s, she began to observe, describe, and paint in detailed and idiosyncratic watercolors all the fungi of Maryland for a volume that was never published, save the single manuscript she produced herself.

The manuscript pages, with their watercolors and her hand-penned descriptions of each species, make up the primary material on display in Outcasts. These are not the finely wrought illustrations of famous botanical artists like Pierre-Joseph Redouté or Banning’s contemporary Marianne North. Instead, they are diligent and highly evocative studies by a self-taught scientist and artist who was largely kept out of the field because of her gender and lack of degrees. But make no mistake — Banning was engaged in the real work of a mycologist. Not only was she one of the first women to put a name to an entire group, or taxon, of fungus, but a full 23 of the 175 species she records in the manuscript were unknown in the field at the time, and thanks to her three-decade-long epistolary friendship with the eminent mycologist Charles H. Peck, who served for nearly 50 years as the New York State Botanist, some of her findings were published in his 1871 Annual Report.

Notably, the exhibit also reveals that specimens Banning gathered in her fieldwork are in the museum’s mycological collection. It’s an incredibly important repository, not just because it contains over 90,000 species, but also because it holds many historical specimens from the period when figures like Banning and Peck began their work. In other words, scientists today still make use of her research, holding and examining the very same mushrooms that she located, preserved, and packed away for posterity, and building on the taxon she defined.

For me, rather than the anarchic energy of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking, there’s something about the mutuality on which fungi rely, and their wildly divergent forms and mating types, that feels more apropos as a metaphor for the world today. And I can’t help but think that Banning’s life and work bear this idea out in telling ways, as she embedded herself in the fabric of the field, whether or not others could fully grasp her presence at the time.

Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms continues at the New York State Museum (222 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York) through January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.