Ace Greene has been making waves on Love Island USA Season 7. Not only did one of his fellow Islanders jokingly call him out for acting like the “president of the villa,” his hot-and-cold love connections and budding new friendships have been keeping viewers on their toes as each new episode drops.
If you spend time scrolling on social media, you’ll likely seen Ace before. The Los Angeles-based content creator and influencer currently has millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok, and has gone viral many times with his dance class videos. As he continues to keep viewers intrigued with his journey on Love Island USA, read on to learn all about the Islander, his age, connections, and more.
RELATED: The Love Island USA Season 7 Cast: Every Islander That’s Entered the Villa
How old is Ace Greene from Love Island USA?
Ace is 22 years old and his zodiac sign is Leo. He shared on Love Island USA that he owns his own dance company.
On his website, Ace also notes that he’s a DJ, comedian, model, choreographer, YouTuber, and professional party host.
Love Island USA’s Ace Greene calls himself a “short king”
Ace introduced himself on Love Island USA as a “short king” who’s 5’10” tall.
“The benefits to being a short king — dudes who are 6 foot plus hide behind their height. I’m not that type of dude, you gonna get this personality off the rip, baby,” Ace says in his Love Island USA intro. “Now I might be 5’10, but I ain’t got no problem talking to taller ladies. If you’re 6’2, 6’3, I’ll chop that tree.”
RELATED: How to Vote for Love Island USA Season 7: An Easy Guide (DETAILS)
Ace Greene and Chelley Bissainthe met each other before Love Island USA
During the Season 7 premiere episode, it was quickly revealed that Ace and Chelley Bissainthe had met before Love Island USA.“Wait, wait, wait. This can’t be real life,” Chelley said as Ace walked into the villa. Ace then explained that they met in New York “outside of the club.”
Chelley later told the girls she and Ace “were talking on Instagram and stuff” after they first met, but their conversations didn’t progress into anything because they live far from each other. Since then, however, the two Islanders have quickly formed a connection in the villa and have been on a rollercoaster together as new bombshells have shaken things up.
Ace, who’s formed friendships with Nic Vansteenberghe and Taylor Williams, has also been outspoken about what’s happening in the villa. During the early days of Season 7, when Huda Mustafa and Jeremiah Brown quickly locked in on each other and lots of drama immediately followed, Ace did not hesitate to tell them he thought their connection was a “scam.”
RELATED: What We Know So Far About Love Island’s Mailbox Twist: “The Islanders Speak Up…”
Are Ace and Chelley coupled up on Love Island USA?
Yes. After a very, very quick attempt at coupling up during the Season 7 premiere of Love Island USA, Ace and Chelley officially became a couple during Episode 14.
“I really like Chelley because she’s challenged me and, you know, helped me let down my walls, be vulnerable, and she’s helped me be a better person here in this villa,” Ace said as he chose to recouple with Chelley after a rocky pairing with Amaya Espinal that had him sleeping solo in Soul Ties for several nights. “I’m just excited to get to know her every day.”
The two remained together until Casa Amor week, which made every Islander single and in a new couple with a bombshell. Ace had been with Vanna Einerson and Chelley coupled up with Chris Seeley. Ace and Chelley, however, quickly found their way back to each other when everyone returned to the villa and they both chose to be in a couple again.
“I know Ace and I have a very strong connection,” Chelley said during Episode 22. “Going to Casa Amor only made me feel stronger about it and I know I missed him a lot when I was over there.”
As their connection has grown stronger in the villa, Ace and Chelley aren’t closed off and they’ve been faced with a few challenges. Not only has Chelley’s former bombshell connection, Chris, remained in the villa, Love Island USA’s infamously steamy heart rate challenge also led to some heated tension between the two. Ace and Chelley were both upset by what happened during the challenge and their fellow Islanders couldn’t help but notice.
“I love you and I love Ace, so when there’s trouble in paradise it’s heavy on my mind,” Chelley’s friend Cierra Ortega told her during Episode 25. Fortunately for Ace, Chris said in the same episode that he was “going to take a step back” from pursuing Chelley, so only time will tell what will ultimately happen between the OG islanders.
RELATED: Is Love Island USA Filmed in Real-Time? The Schedule Is Wild (DETAILS)
How to watch new episodes of Love Island USA Season 7
Find out what happens with Ace when new episodes of Love Island USA Season 7 air daily, except on Wednesday, at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET exclusively on Peacock.
It’s hard to think of any celebrity who has done more to advance the concept of aging gracefully than Pamela Anderson. The actress, who turns 58 today, has recently taken to going makeup-free on the red carpet, telling Glamour: “Anti-aging is a lie. We’re getting older no matter what. Things change, and if you can find a sense of humor in it, it’s better. It’s good to have a sense of self and to be able to be your own best friend.”
Anderson’s road to self-acceptance as a Hollywood star has been a long and winding one—arguably beginning with her appearance as a Playboy cover girl, which quickly led to her breakthrough role as C.J. Parker on Baywatch. Anderson also had a long and notable reality-TV era; enjoyed a stint on Broadway; and released a memoir, a cookbook, and a moving documentary—all before wowing audiences as middle-aged Las Vegas showgirl Shelly in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl last year. (I’m still so mad that movie was shut out of the Oscars race, but that’s a rant for another day!)
These days, Anderson seems closer than ever to writing her own ticket, which makes this the perfect opportunity to look back at just how far she’s come. In honor of her 58th birthday, here are 17 vintage photos of Anderson over the years:
Photo: Jonathan Bailey recalls what ‘Wicked’ co-star Jeff Goldblum him ahead of ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’
Jonathan Bailey recently shared that Jeff Goldblum contacted him when he landed the Jurassic World: Rebirth gig.
Speaking with PEOPLE Magazine, the actor, who found fame by starring in Bridgerton as Anthony, recalled the time when his Wicked co-star Jeff Goldblum reached out to him
Jonathan recounted him saying that “just have a great time.”
He even gushed over the actors who starred in the previous three Jurassic Park movies by saying, “They’re all just incredible, iconic actors.”
It is pertinent to mention here that Jeff played the character of The Wizard of Oz in the musical Wicked whereas in Jurassic Parke he starred as Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and chaos theorist.
Moreover, the Bridgerton star admitted in a former chat the pressure of leading his upcoming role as Dr Loomis in Jurassic World: Rebirth, releasing on 2nd July 2025.
The insider mentioned, “There are moments where, yes, you feel like you have to be excellent just to prove you can do it.”
He went on to add, “There’s the weight of history, and the many brilliant people who came before who’ve changed how we talk about sexuality. Being an out gay actor, historically, meant you wouldn’t be able to play straight—and there weren’t many gay parts to play, either.”
“That’s changed massively. But there’s still work to do,” the actor noted in this chat with The Hollywood Reporter.
Russell glacier, at the edge of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, sounds as if it’s crying: moans emanate from deep within the slowly but inexorably melting ice. Andy Ferguson, one half of dance duo Bicep, walks around in its towering shadow recording these eerie sounds. “Everyone comes back changed,” he says of Greenland. “Seeing first-hand climate change happening like this.”
It’s April 2023 and, in the wake of Bicep’s second album Isles cementing them as one of the leading electronic acts globally, Ferguson has travelled to Greenland as part of a project to collaborate with Indigenous musicians and bring the momentous struggle of this region – and even the planet – into focus.
The project will take two years to come to fruition but next month sees the release of Bicep’s first soundtrack and accompanying film Takkuuk, pronounced tuck-kook. It’s an Inuktitut word that came from throat singing duo Silla, one of the Indigenous collaborators: “It translates to literally ‘look’ but has the connotation that you’re urging someone to look at something closely,” says Silla’s Charlotte Qamaniq. “The Arctic climate is changing rapidly so in the context of the project it’s: ‘look, the adverse effects of climate change are obvious.’ But it’s also: ‘hey, look how cool Inuit culture is!’”
A member of the expedition team dwarfed by an Arctic glacier. Photograph: Charlie Miller
I join Ferguson on this first trip along with representatives from EarthSonic, a non-profit organisation dedicated to raising awareness about the climate crisis through art projects. Ferguson’s Bicep partner Matt McBriar stays home ahead of the birth of his first child.
When we land at Kangerlussuaq airport, first opened as a US airbase in the second world war, it’s -10C, bright and crisp. Ferguson is staying with our driver Evald who, on learning that Ferguson and I are Man United fans, exclaims: “Manchester United is my religion! Old Trafford is my church!” His home has a huge Lego model of the stadium. Across the next week we see the northern lights – in Inuit myth, it’s dead souls playing ball with a walrus’s head – and ride dogsleds and snowmobiles, but there’s a sobering tone to the beauty and adventure.
Russell glacier is a 20km journey by four-wheel drive on a rough dirt road. The ice sheet covers 80% of the country, but loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 90s due to climate change, and is the principal driver of rising sea levels. Scientists predict if the world continues on a course towards 2.5C heating it will take us beyond a tipping point for both ice sheets, resulting in a catastrophic sea level rise of 12 metres. Standing under a vast glacier that is hundreds of thousands of years old, but which could disappear within my daughters’ lifetime, is discombobulating.
Bicep performing at Sonar festival in June. Photograph: Alejandro García/EPA
Next morning it’s on to Sisimiut for Arctic Sounds, a showcase for music from across the Arctic region and beyond. Sisimiut is Greenland’s second city, home to 5,000, and a thriving metropolis compared with Kangerlussuaq. Rock and metal are the most popular music, alongside rap and other Indigenous music and the standout acts include an incendiary performance by Greenlandic rapper Tarrak. “Seeing Tarrak perform was so powerful,” Ferguson says, with “everyone chanting in this language I’d never heard before. It felt punk. It’s rare to see that nowadays when everything is so homogenised.”
The project is allowing Bicep to flex different musical muscles. Playing a simultaneously melancholic and euphoric style of tech-house and electronica, Bicep broke through in the mid-2010s. Their track Glue became a ubiquitous rave anthem among gen Z, and led to the success of Isles, which reached No 2 in the UK charts and earned them two Brit award nominations. Everything was rosy, but it was, in Ferguson’s words, “all sugar, no sour”, so they created alter egos Chroma and Dove to show their harder, headier side. The Arctic was an opportunity to challenge themselves again.
After Ferguson returned from Greenland, the first thing Bicep did was construct a drum kit from ice samples and other field recordings of local sounds including husky chains, then created demos, “really just chord structures we know we can write around” and sent them to the Indigenous artists. They didn’t expect to get almost full songs in return, but on hearing what came back, the duo realised “we needed to step back and not be the focal point”. A gig on a glacier had been one initial mooted idea, but the Greenland trip made it obvious such a gig would be “tone deaf”, says Ferguson. Through conversations with Indigenous artists, “it became clear this needed to be us shining a light on them”.
At times, progress seemed suitably glacial, but eventually a collection of Indigenous artists from Greenland and the wider Arctic region recorded their contributions at Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavík in November 2023, where many of them were in town performing, including Tarrak, Silla, vocalist Katarina Barruk and more.
A still from the Takkuuk film and installation project. Photograph: EarthSonic / BICEP
When I catch up with Ferguson and meet his Bicep-mate McBriar in late 2024, they’re buzzing about the results, and by late May, I’m finally able to hear the full thing in their Shoreditch studio. From the first bars of opener Sikorsuit, featuring Greenlandic indie band Nuija, it’s clear the duo have managed to pull myriad styles and dialect into a cohesive whole. “It doesn’t sound anything like us – and it doesn’t sound like them,” McBriar says. “That’s what you hope to achieve from a collaboration.”
Tarrak collaboration Taarsitillugu opens with a sparse breakbeat and becomes a full-on rave banger, while on her track Dárbbuo, Barruk sings in Ume Sámi, an endangered Uralic language spoken by fewer than 20 people. “I went in to the studio and just poured my heart out because of the tragic state the world is in,” she says, “then Matt and Andy worked their magic.”
There was synchronicity, despite different languages. “It shows a strong connection between us Indigenous sister and brothers,” explains Barruk, who is Swedish. “Without me knowing takkuuk means look, I created lyrics which ask the other person to vuöjnniet, to see, so one doesn’t need to feel so alone. Alone in the fight for our lands, our ways of living, our language, culture and taking care of the Earth.”
As the project developed it was clear it needed context, so Bicep asked Zak Norman, who designs their brilliant on-stage visuals, to create an immersive installation. Norman worked with Charlie Miller, a documentary film-maker who went on the original Greenland trip, on a film that introduces the artists and explores the displacement and marginalisation of their communities, cultures and language. Norman used adapted infrared cameras to give the footage otherworldly pink and purple hues, reminiscent of Richard Mosse’s 2013 video artwork The Enclave. The film is a series of vignettes for each track, and it certainly deepens the music, with eerie landscapes layered with interviews. The work will premiere on the giant wraparound screens at London’s Outernet next month, before touring venues and festivals across the world.
‘We have to be aware of people trying to divide us’ … Tarrak. Photograph: Charlie Miller
The project has taken on yet another hue in the wake of Donald Trump’s recent expansionist proclamations. “It’s a circus,” says Tarrak. “The first time Trump asked to buy Greenland [during his first. term as president] we took it as a joke. Now I can see there’s some seriousness – but it’s still just weird, in 2025, to try and buy a country. I know they’re more interested in what’s under the ground than the people, but we have to be smart about it as Greenlanders, stick together and be aware of people trying to divide us.”
Bicep experienced their own existential crisis when McBriar had to have surgery for a large tumour on his brain’s pituitary gland last year, from which he’s thankfully made a good recovery. They’re now deep into their third album proper, though it won’t see daylight from their basement studio for at least another year. “We wrote [Isles] pre-pandemic so it’s a complete different world now. With Chroma we wanted to get that aggression out and cleanse ourselves of what we wanted to do, just straight club tracks. Now I think we’re coming full circle.”
How will you judge the success of Takkuuk, I ask. “You can’t quantify awareness,” says Ferguson. “If it starts people on a journey to learn more about Greenland then it’s achieved something.
“It’s easy to switch off with climate change, I switch off myself sometimes,” he continues. “But if you start telling the story in different ways, different narratives, ways people can visualise it, at least it’s a start. Because for the next generation it’s going to be the focal part of their life.”
Hello and welcome to part 86,747,398,464 of the continuing cataloguing via television documentary of the apparently infinite series Ways in Which Largely Men Terrorise Largely Women and Prevent Countless Millions of Them from Living Their Lives in Freedom and Contentment. This one comprises two episodes and is entitled To Catch a Stalker.
It comes from the corporation’s most youth-oriented arm, BBC Three, which mandates a telegenic presenter better versed in sympathy with the programme’s interviewees than interrogation of wider issues, and who has usually come up through the ranks of reality TV rather than journalism. Here, it’s Zara McDermott (Love Island, Made in Chelsea, The X Factor: Celebrity), who previously fronted entries in the infinite series on “revenge porn”, rape culture and eating disorders.
We meet survivors (although this suggests their ordeals are at an end, which for none of them is the case – but to call them victims would be to diminish what McDermott rightly emphasises as their extraordinary strength and endurance) of different forms of stalking.
Jen has endured the obsessive attentions of a man with whom she briefly crossed professional paths during her work for a recruitment company. It began with a few friendly texts and rapidly escalated to bombardment at all hours with insistent messages about their imminent relationship (“I am the guy you’re looking for. You just don’t recognise it”), naked pictures of himself and – as Jen continued not to respond to this stranger – fury. He repeatedly parked in places she was likely to pass and when the police eventually became involved – which has led to four convictions and three prison sentences for the man – they found multiple searches on his computer for pornographic lookalikes of Jen. She is now counting down the days until he is released from his latest stint in jail with dread. As McDermott says: “I don’t know how she sleeps at night.” It’s likely that she doesn’t. Jen shakes with nerves and has a terrible hunted look about her – because that is exactly what is happening to her. She is the prey of a predator who apparently cannot be stopped.
No more, it seems, than any of them can with the current paltry tools at the law’s disposal – presuming you can find someone willing to wield them in the first place. All the women interviewed speak of police reluctance to take their experiences seriously.
Twenty-year-old Isabel, who has moved five times to try to escape the terrifying attentions of her ex-boyfriend, no longer bothers to call the police when she sees a man, whom she assumes to be him, watching her from the alleyway behind her latest home, because they dropped her case when the original investigating officer left. “If you don’t help me, he’s going to kill me,” she told them. Apparently it fell on closed ears. Maybe they thought she was hysterical. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe you can think of a good enough reason for ignoring a young woman and her toddler trapped in their home because a man has decided he will not let her go. “He knows what he’s done,” she says. “And he knows he’s got away with it. So what is he going to do next?” The best safety plan a charity has been able to give her if he forces his way into her home is to drop from her balcony to the car park roof below and from there to the ground – she will not be able to take her son with her – then contact a neighbour or flag down a passing car.
Victims’ (sufferers’, survivors’) family members attest to the fear and anxiety that stalkers induce in them all. Next week, the remit expands to consider the effects of cyberstalking (“Just ignore it” seems to be the most popular recommendation), and continues to document more women’s experiences with the flesh-and-blood kind of stalker, who message their targets 500 times a day and draw their fingers across throats from afar (far enough that they do not get returned to prison for breaching non-molestation orders), and so on and appallingly on.
It is a documentary designed to raise awareness rather than provide answers, but you do long for a little examination of context; for someone to ask whether this would be so prevalent without, say, an existing culture of male entitlement, or within a society that valued women’s lives and freedom as highly as anyone else’s. If we didn’t have a police force known to be as riddled with bad apples and systemic sexism as it is. If, if, if.
Maigret is the first contemporary television adaptation of Georges Simenon’s beloved novels about the streetwise Parisian Chief Inspector Jules Maigret.
Benjamin Wainwright (Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim) stars as Jules Maigret, who heads the elite police unit known as La Crim, responsible for investigating all serious crime in and around Paris. Maigret is an unconventional young detective with something to prove, relentless in his investigations, chasing and a matchless knowledge of Paris and its inhabitants.
Stefanie Martini (The Gold, Last Kingdom, Emerald City) stars as Madame Louise Maigret. Blake Harrison (World on Fire, I Hate Suzie Too), Reda Elazouar (Sex Education, Pirates), Kerrie Hayes (The Responder, Criminal Record), Shaniqua Okwok (The Flatshare, It’s a Sin) and Rob Kazinsky (Star Trek: Section 31, Eastenders) make up the “Les Maigrets,” Maigret’s loyal team of detectives, with Nathalie Armin (Showtrial, Juice) as Prosecutor Mathilde Kernavel.
Maigret premieres on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 9/8c on MASTERPIECE on PBS.
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An enormous shadow hovers over the characters in “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and it’s the same one that has been dogging composer Alexandre Desplat ever since he was a teenager in Paris.
That shadow? The music of John Williams.
“He’s such a legend for all of us,” says Desplat, 63, on a Zoom call from London, where he’s been burning the midnight oil on the score for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming “Frankenstein.” “He’s just the only one to follow.”
Like Williams, Desplat is now a grizzled (though painterly handsome) veteran himself, with hundreds of films to his name. He’s already completed three scores this year alone — for the French-Swedish Palme d’Or nominee “Eagles of the Republic,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and this week’s “Jurassic” heavyweight.
He’s also making his North American conducting debut on July 15 in a grand survey of his film career at the Hollywood Bowl, a fitting, if overdue, coronation of his two-decade reign as an A-list composer in America.
When Desplat began scoring Hollywood films in the early 2000s, his music swept in like a breath of fresh French air — elegant, restrained, melodic, idiosyncratic — and the list of filmmakers who sought him out reads like a sizable section of the Criterion Closet: Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.
“He’s the last tycoon of American movie music,” Desplat said in 2010 of his idol John Williams. “He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
His ride-or-die partner is Anderson, who first employed him on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and who teed up Desplat’s first Oscar win with “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (He’s been nominated eleven times.) May’s “The Phoenician Scheme” marked their seventh collaboration.
“As I started being a film composer, I had my idols in sight — of course Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue,” Desplat told me in 2014. “All these duets were strong and they showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer would be for both of them. It’s not only good for the film, it’s good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style by doing several movies with the same director.”
In a town too often filled with generic, factory-farmed scores, his were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up on the same diet of American movies and their iconic scores. The young Desplat was obsessed with U.S. culture — listening to jazz, watching baseball and the Oscars — and he decided he wanted to score movies after he heard “Star Wars” in 1977. Emblazoned on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “Composed and Conducted by John Williams.”
“That,” Desplat told his friend at the time, “is what I want to do.”
It’s fitting and kind of funny that two decades after charming audiences with a delicate, waltzing score for the 2003 Scarlett Johansson prestige picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the composer is now promoting a stomping monster score for a blockbuster behemoth starring Johanssson and a bunch of CGI dinosaurs — and tampering with John Williams’ sacred musical DNA.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” isn’t the first time he’s had to brave the T-rex-sized footprints of his hero: Desplat scored the final two films in the “Harry Potter” series, and he was also the first composer on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project from original director Gareth Edwards, and before composing any notes.
“I went as far as the change of directors and change of plans,” Desplat explains, “and the weeks passing by, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (on 2017’s “Star Wars”-esque “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Much like his work on “Harry Potter,” Desplat’s odes to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whispers than shouts — though there are a handful of overt declarations of both the iconic anthem and hymn for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-masterpiece. More subtle homages arrive in his use of solo piano and ghostly choir, and in the opening three notes of his motif for the team led by Johansson’s character — a tune that almost begins like Williams’ “Jurassic” hymn.
“So there’s a connection,” Desplat says. “I take the baton and I move away from it.”
He composed new leitmotifs for wonder, for adventure, for danger. His score, much like the original, is an amusement park ride full of sudden drops, humor and family-friendly terror, with a few moments of cathartic, introspective relief.
Mostly, Edwards kept pushing him for more hummable motifs.
“When I was tempted to go back to something more abstract — you know, French movie,” Desplat says, winking — “he would just ask me to go back towards John Williams’ inspiration of writing great motifs that you can remember and are catchy.”
Desplat worries this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don’t hear much of that in many movies that I watch,” he says. “It’s kind of an ambient texture — which is the easiest thing to create.”
In college, he would listen to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score on a loop, and as his own scoring career developed, he was paying keen attention to John Williams’ more intimate chamber scores like “The Accidental Tourist” and “Presumed Innocent” — as well as juggernauts like “Jurassic Park.” Besides the music itself seeping in, he learned that it was important to score every kind of film, no matter how big or small. Williams’ work also taught him “that I could have something elegant, classical, but with some seeds of jazz in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”
Whenever he hears someone talking dismissively about Williams, Desplat gets defensive. “I want to punch them,” he says, only half kidding.
“He’s the master, what can I say?” Desplat told me in 2010. “He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
(Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures )
When Desplat received his first Academy Award nomination, for “The Queen” in 2007, the one person who called from Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”
Desplat had met the French legend a few times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “After Dark, My Sweet.” Desplat was aghast when he saw director James Foley taking away Jarre’s melody and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, save for a simple electronic thump.
The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre calmly said: “It’s his film. I have to accept that.”
“That’s a lesson that I learned very early on,” Desplat says. “I’ve never forgotten that, because it’s still the same,” he laughs.
He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serenader of the French New Wave in films like “Jules and Jim” and “Contempt.” “They were so kind,” Desplat says, “such sweet men, both of them.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Desplat says: “He said awful things about me in books.”)
What they all have in common — besides a penchant for composing beautiful music — is the defiant, transatlantic leap from the French film industry where they started to the highest perch in Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging meaningful partnerships with directors like Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Delerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood Hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored a few hits including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches.”
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy,” says Desplat, who has already completed three scores this year. “That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Desplat started professionally in France in 1985 and wrote roughly 50 scores before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the English-language film that put him on Hollywood’s radar. He continues to do French films amid the summer blockbusters and American art house pictures.
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
He enjoys the freedom of a big-budget project. “To be able to have a studio say, ‘Go, write what you need to write.’ The director, he wants an orchestra, he wants 95 musicians. Great! They don’t even say anything. You just go and you record. They book the studio. They book the musicians.”
Still, the limitations he trained under gave Desplat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, resourcefulness, speed. He had to orchestrate everything himself, which means his music bears a distinctive fingerprint. And composing for small, sometimes unorthodox ensembles gave his music a clean, transparent signature as opposed to the all-too-typical wall of mud.
He can’t say much about his 100-minute score for “Frankenstein,” which he just finished recording with a giant orchestra and choir at both Abbey Road and AIR Studios, and which comes out on Netflix in November. The reason he does so many films, Desplat proposes, is because he’s lazy.
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy. That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
The sequel to the beloved film The Devil Wears Prada is advancing, but one of the characters from the 2006 original movie won’t be in the follow-up.
Monday, it was announced on social media that the movie begins production this week. Filming takes place in New York and Italy. Stars returning from the first film include Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh has joined the cast for the sequel. However, Adrian Grenier, who played Hathaway’s character’s boyfriend, Nate, in the first movie, will not be in the second film, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The 2006 movie is based on the book of the same name and follows Andy Sachs (Hathaway) a recent college graduate, working as an assistant for Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of fashion magazine, Runway. Nate (Grenier), complains about her demanding schedule and is often critical of her working in fashion. That leads them to break up.
At the end of the movie, Andy leaves fashion journalism behind to work at a newspaper as viewers see Andy and Nate reconciling and on good terms, again. So, when it came to casting, fans were wondering if the Entourage star was coming back, too.
However, what’s previously been reported is that the upcoming film will see Priestly deal with print magazines struggling. Her other former assistant, Emily (Blunt) is now a powerful advertising executive that works with Runway. Branagh will portray Priestly’s husband, while Tucci will reprise his role of Nigel, Runway‘s art director.
The Devil Wears Prada2 will hit theaters May 1, 2026. Below, see the announcement about production beginning.
The third and final season of hit Korean series Squid Game has broken records to achieve the biggest ever TV launch for Netflix.
Over its first three days, there have been over 60.1m views, a new high for the streamer with over 368.4m hours viewed. The second season launched with 68m views but over a four-day period last December.
It has already become the ninth biggest non-English language season ever with the first and second seasons occupying the top two slots.
Reviews have been mixed to positive with the Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson calling it “nowhere near as pointed as it was” in previous seasons.
While this has been called the final season, David Fincher has been rumoured to be developing an English language remake for the streamer. The director has worked with Netflix before on political drama series House of Cards, film industry biopic Mank and Michael Fassbender action thriller The Killer. Earlier this year, it was announced that he would work with them once again to direct a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood based on a script by Quentin Tarantino.
The streamer has already found success with competition spin-off Squid Game: The Challenge with a second season on the way.
When asked about future Squid Game projects, series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Variety that he hadn’t heard anything official yet about a remake.
“If they wanted to do a following season, then I think it’s obvious I would have to participate and lead,” he said. “But if it’s the US version that they’re making, I think sharing of ideas would be enough. I have no intention of being completely hands-on in a project like that. Having said that, if Netflix asks and if I feel like my contribution is needed, then as long as it’s not something that would interfere with whatever I’m working on at that time, I would be happy to provide what they need from me.”
