Category: 5. Entertainment

Sydney Sweeney trained for months, muscled up, and put on 30lb (13.6kg) to play Christy Martin, a real-life champion boxer with a dramatic personal story. She wears a dark wig and brown contact lenses. And yet it is impossible to forget that she is Sydney Sweeney in the cliché-ridden biopic Christy, as our hyperawareness of her off-screen image distracts us from what’s going on in the film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

A contradiction at the heart of Christy is that Sweeney is the main reason anyone is paying attention to the project, but her own high-profile celebrity makes it difficult to believe her as the character. Can she ever escape the real-life chatter around her?

The actress has been the centre of often unpleasant publicity, especially in recent months. There was a notable kerfuffle about her American Eagle ads, with the tag line “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, which some took as a reference to Aryan genes. Then Donald Trump praised her for being a registered Republican. And The Hollywood Reporter wondered where her career would go “after being in the centre of the storm”. That’s not the kind of baggage any actor wants to be carrying on screen, but with Sweeney it’s impossible to put aside right now. 

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It doesn’t help that for almost all of its running time, David Michôd’s film is just one more underdog sports story. It charts Christy Martin’s rise to the top as a pioneer of women’s boxing in the 1990s, prioritising the predictable sports story over her much more fascinating personal drama. Christy trains with and soon marries Jim Martin, a controlling bully 25 years her senior, with a laughable comb-over. He is played by Ben Foster, who successfully disappears into his role as a thoroughly despicable person. Martin is condescending, telling Christy, “Maybe there is something to this lady boxing business.” He realises she is gay but forces her into the closet, saying, “Nobody wants to see a butch girl fight.”

In the hierarchy of fictional homes, few have cast a spell quite like the Owens family home from the 1998 film Practical Magic. The film, which stars Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, was released 27 years ago, but fans still search real estate listings for Victorian mansions with wraparound porches and conservatories in hopes of finding something that captures even a fraction of the house’s Gothic romance. It has arguably became the film’s most memorable character—and creating it required quite a bit of magic, too.

Based on Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel about the Owens’, a family of women cursed in love but blessed with supernatural abilities, the film needed a house that could serve as a sanctuary, laboratory, and storytelling device all at once. Director Griffin Dunne understood that the Owens family home was a character that had to embody centuries of accumulated magic, wisdom, and secrets. According to Dunne, he was enchanted by the script when he first read it. “It was literally like a cauldron. Every emotion, theme and ingredient you could imagine was swirling around in it,” he told Hooked on Houses.

When it came time to materialize the Owens family home, Dunne called upon Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, the design duo who would later become ELLE Decor A-List design firm Roman and Williams. At this point, however, they were primarily known for their work in film production. Their friendship with Dunne began on earlier film sets, like that of Search and Destroy.

Working with only Hoffman’s novel as their blueprint, the designers’ challenge was to translate literary descriptions into three-dimensional reality. The house described in the book was both Gothic and welcoming, mysterious yet functional—a home where midnight margaritas could be mixed alongside morning coffee and where love spells and family dinners happened in the same spaces. Standefer and Alesch drew inspiration from Victorian architecture’s most romantic elements, incorporating nineteenth-century scrollwork, East Coast lighthouse features, and wraparound porches.

An original sketch of the Practical Magic home.

The designers’ approach was methodical yet intuitive. They envisioned a house where every object would suggest stories about the women who lived there. The kitchen became their masterpiece, inspired by grand English country spaces but designed to function as both a cook space and family heart. “The Aga is almost like a shrine,” Standefer told Hooked on Houses of the range in the kitchen. “This is the place where they do their work; it’s where they place the cauldron.” The adjacent conservatory served as the mystical centerpiece where the film’s most memorable scenes would unfold and a space that suggested both greenhouse and temple, practical and magical in equal measure.

Construction began in 1997 on San Juan Island, Washington, where production rented land for $80,000 and spent six months building the exterior from scratch. It was built entirely on a platform to preserve the sacred Native land below. Every board, shingle, and piece of gingerbread trim was crafted specifically for the cameras and to create a structure that looked as though it had weathered decades of New England winters.

The kitchen of the Practical Magic house, designed by ELLE Decor A-List firm Roman and Williams.

The logistics were complex. While the exterior rose on San Juan Island, the interiors were simultaneously being constructed on Los Angeles soundstages. The famous conservatory was built in California, disassembled, shipped north, and rebuilt on location.

Creating the illusion of a lived-in magical home required meticulous staging. According to HistoryLink, set designers scoured antique stores all around Puget Sound to find local treasures to fill the home. The gardens were constructed using a mixture of real and artificial greenery, and the props department had to fill hundreds of mysterious bottles for the glass-fronted cabinets in what became known as the potions room.

The interiors of the Practical Magic home.

But the house that captured audiences’ hearts existed only during filming. Nothing existed inside of the structure, and the Victorian shell that took half a year to construct was dismantled within days of wrapping, as production had agreed to restore the tribal land to its original condition after use.

With news that Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman will return for Practical Magic 2, fans are already speculating about what the new Owens family home will look like. But how do you follow up on a house that has achieved mythical status in popular culture? The original Victorian mansion set an impossibly high bar, creating not just a movie set but an architectural dream that refuses to fade from our collective imagination.

Julia Cancilla is the engagement editor (and resident witch) at ELLE Decor, where she oversees the brand’s social media platforms and writes the monthly ELLE Decoroscope column. She covers design trends, pop culture, and lifestyle through storytelling to explore how our homes reflect who we are. Her work has also appeared in Inked magazine, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, and more. 

Clement Virgo’s erotic, eerie thriller Steal Away tells the story of two young women — one Black, one white — who form a bond while trying to unravel the secret history of a stately manor house. Virgo, after films like Rude (1995) and Brother (2022), returns to the familiar terrain of examining the impact of racism and inequality. 

In an echo of The Book of Negroes, Virgo’s 2015 historical TV miniseries, which dealt with the transatlantic slave trade, Steal Away centers on Cécile, a young woman played by Mallori Johnson, who arrives as a young African refugee to the privileged home of Fanny (Angourie Rice), a young and sheltered woman whose world barely extends beyond life with her beautiful and benevolent mother, Florence, played by Lauren Lee Smith.

Virgo has Steal Away begin as a feminist drama that eventually breaks conventions by morphing into something of a horror film, with even a pinch of the supernatural.

“It’s partly coming-of-age, but it’s also partly psychological thriller and I hopefully play a little bit with horror elements, and ultimately with an allegory about the past and somewhat about the present and what we may see in the future,” the director explains.

Virgo and script co-writer Tamara Faith Berger never lay out Cécile’s backstory, even if their movie is inspired by Karolyn Smardz Frost’s historical nonfiction book Steal Away Home, in which fugitive slave Cecelia Reynolds escapes to Canada via the Underground Railroad, only to eventually return to Kentucky as a freed woman and renew her complex relationship with her former mistress.

“I wanted to really just use that [book] as a jumping off point and make it about these two young women without trying to be overt with the politics. I wanted to speak about the history, without being obvious,” Virgo explains.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where the lead female characters have dual roles, Virgo in Steal Away plunges Cécile and Fanny into a sexual tug-of-war for Rufus, the gardener’s son, played by Idrissa Sanogo Bamba. And that foregrounds the erotically charged theme of female empowerment as Cécile falls in love with Rufus, only to ignite Fanny’s jealousy and her own sexual awakening.

Virgo adds that he didn’t give leads Rice and Johnson much direction and exposition on set, but, as is his style, he instead set his actors loose to discover their own emotions and emotional truth about their characters. “As a director, I try not to be prescriptive in terms of how I approach the work and how I relate to the actors,” he says.

Steal Away, as with Virgo’s first five feature films, will get a premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s something he says he will never take for granted. “Look, it’s always a miracle when I make a film and it’s always special when I show it in my hometown,” says the filmmaker, who was born in Jamaica and grew up in Toronto. “I made my first short film in 1991 in my early 20s, and TIFF showed that film. And they’ve showed all my feature films. It never gets old.” 

Dua Lipa brought out Chaka Khan for a duet of ‘Ain’t Nobody’ at her show in Chicago last night – watch below.

The North American leg of her huge Radical Optimism World Tour kicked off in Toronto on Monday (September1), and on Friday, she rolled into Chicago’s United Center for the first of two nights.

During the show, she introduced Chicago music legend Chaka Khan onto the stage and they launched into a version of the Grammy-winning 1983 single ‘Ain’t Nobody’, which Khan originally recorded with the funk band Rufus.

Watch fan-captured footage here:

Lipa has been playing songs by local artists throughout the Radical Optimism tour, often with high-profile guests, which most recently included Jamiroquai in London’s Wembley Stadium for ‘Virtual Insanity’. She also played with Crowded House’s Neil Finn in Auckland, and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker in Sydney.

Her two Wembley shows in June later became the subject of a mini-documentary titled Dua Lipa – The Beat Before (Wembley Stadium), which chronicled behind-the-scenes footage and fan vox-pops from the gigs.

In other Dua Lipa-related news, she officially confirmed her engagement to actor Callum Turner in June after months of fan speculation.

Speaking to British Vogue for a new cover story, she said: “Yeah, we’re engaged. It’s very exciting. This decision to grow old together, to see a life and just, I don’t know, be best friends forever—it’s a really special feeling.”

She was also granted Kosovan citizenship in August, being hailed by the country’s president as “one of the most iconic cultural figures in our country’s history”.

Lipa was also one of the celebrities to hit out at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s response to their open letter that called for the end of “UK complicity” in Gaza.

“Prime Minister, you’ve built your career as a human rights lawyer, defending the powerless and challenging injustice,” the response read. “In years to come, when you are asked whether you have done enough, what will you say?”

Reneé Rapp has responded after Australian singer Betty Who speculated about Rapp’s sexuality.

Dua Lipa treated fans to a surprise during the opening U.S. date of her Radical Optimism World Tour.

On Friday (Sept. 5), the 30-year-old British pop star launched a two-night stint at Chicago’s United Center, dazzling the sold-out crowd with striking costumes and a 22-song setlist that featured tracks from her latest album, Radical Optimism.

Midway through her performance, Lipa — dressed in a sparkly black coat with feathered sleeves — stunned fans by welcoming music legend Chaka Khan to the stage. Together, the duo performed a powerful rendition of Khan’s 1983 classic “Ain’t Nobody.” Watch fan-captured footage of the moment here.

This isn’t the first time Lipa has shared the stage with iconic artists during her global tour. Earlier this year, she was joined by Crowded House’s Neil Finn during a stop in New Zealand, and later brought out Jamiroquai in London.

After a brief break in August following a two-month run across Europe, Lipa returned to North America with back-to-back shows in Toronto on Sept. 1–2. Check out Billboard’s recap of the six best moments from her opening night at Scotiabank Arena here.

The U.S. leg of the Radical Optimism tour continues Saturday (Sept. 6) with a second show in Chicago, before heading to cities including Boston, Atlanta, New York, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Released last year, Radical Optimism is Lipa’s third studio album and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The project delivered several chart hits, including lead single “Houdini,” which spent 17 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart. In support of the album, Lipa launched the Radical Optimism tour in November 2024, performing in arenas across Asia, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.