Category: 5. Entertainment

Sami Sheen, daughter of actors Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen, recently shared a troubling experience on TikTok, claiming she narrowly avoided a possible sex trafficking attempt while out with friends.

In the video, posted earlier this week, the 21-year-old model and influencer said the incident occurred late Monday night after she and her friends left a restaurant around midnight. While taking photos in the parking lot, Sheen said a man approached them asking for money. Despite telling him she didn’t have cash, she claimed the man became increasingly insistent, even suggesting payment through apps like Zelle or Venmo.

Shortly after that encounter, Sheen said a second man appeared, triggering an intense sense of fear. “The second I saw this man, I had the worst feeling in my stomach,” she recalled, adding that he began asking if she spoke Spanish and saying other things she couldn’t understand.

As the man reached into his back pocket, Sheen said she pulled out her pepper spray, prompting him to instead pull out a card. At that moment, she and her friend ran to their car and locked the doors.

Once safely inside the vehicle, Sheen said they reviewed photos taken earlier and noticed the first man had been watching them the entire time. She included an image of him in her TikTok and used the moment to urge her followers to stay alert and trust their instincts.

“I’m usually very aware of my surroundings, and I did not notice this man,” she said. “Even if it was harmless, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

The incident comes amid a turbulent time for Sheen’s mother, Denise Richards, who is currently involved in a high-profile divorce and legal dispute with estranged husband Aaron Phypers.

Blake Lively‘s deposition in her sexual harassment and retaliation suit against Justin Baldoni has been cut from the court record today under the order of a federal judge.

Already fighting this week with his insurance companies over legal fees in the It Ends with Us sexual harassment and retaliation battle with Lively, Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios execs and lawyers also just got their knuckles very publicly rapped for overplaying their hand.

“The Wayfarer Parties’ attachment of the entire, nearly 300-page deposition—after citing only two pages of it in the Letter—served no proper litigation purpose and instead appears to have been intended to burden Lively (and as a result, the Court) and to invite public speculation and scandal,” admonished Judge Lewis Liman on Friday in a stinging order agreeing with Lively’s motion to strike to keep her July 31 deposition sealed, out of the court docket and out of the headlines and posts.

Liman has offered nothing yet on the recent request by the Another Simple Favor star’s attorneys for sanctions against Baldoni lawyer Bryan Freedman for allegedly “publicly slandering” Lively. The judge today was responding to the actress’ August 4 filing to strike after her IEWU director/co-star’s team sent a letter with a small portion of her well-publicized depo in it and an accompanying sealed and uncertified transcript. On August 6, after also taking the slings and arrows of accusations of leaks to tabloids and others about the actual deposition and who was there — Ryan Reynolds and on the other side of the table, most of Baldoni’s inner circle and fellow defendants — attorney Kevin Fritz essentially countered that the lady doth protest too much.

“The deposition transcript records Ms. Lively’s own words,” the Meister, Seelig & Finn partner pointed out in a filed letter of his own to Judge Liman, mocking the use of the term “rough draft” in the initial filing, among other things. “Ms. Lively contends that the transcript must be stricken based on her speculation that it was filed for the ‘purpose of the transcript into the public domain as fodder for [their] media campaign.’ The transcript, however, was filed under seal and Ms. Lively has the option of moving to keep the document sealed; although it is puzzling why she seeks to conceal her own testimony in an action in which she is the plaintiff.”

Less than eight months before the high-wire trial kicks off in New York City in federal court, Judge Liman today really wasn’t picking up what Fritz and Team Baldoni were trying to put down.

“Even if the cited deposition portions were relevant or provided support for the Wayfarer Parties’ arguments—both of which are far from clear—the Wayfarer Parties have not even attempted to argue that the entire deposition was relevant,” he wrote in Friday’s four-page order to strike the attachment. “Nor could they. The conclusion is inescapable that the Wayfarer Parties filed gratuitous amounts of irrelevant pages so that, if Lively moved for continued sealing of the irrelevant pages, the Wayfarer Parties could then use Lively’s response for their own public-relations purposes,”

Then there’s the subtext kicker: “The Court has not only the power but also the responsibility to step in.”

Perhaps out in the August sun, neither reps for Lively or Baldoni responded to Deadline’s request for comment on today’s order. Then again, with nothing from the court yet on the sanctions move by Lively’s side against Baldoni’s top lawyer, maybe everyone being circumspect in anticipation of what’s next in a case that since December last year always seems to provided more gristle at every turn — with more likely to come.

Essie Davis didn’t watch much horror growing up in Tasmania; the 55-year-old actor can still bitterly recall the moment when, aged four, she was left at home while her older siblings went to see Jaws at the local cinema in Hobart.

“I stood by the back door going, ‘I will remember this day for the rest of my life!’” Davis recalls, speaking from her current family home, also in Tasmania.

She finally saw the film on VHS years later, while dating a production designer she had met while performing at Belvoir St theatre. That designer was Justin Kurzel, now one of Australia’s most celebrated directors – and also her husband. Back in the mid-90s, Kurzel’s courtship rituals included a crash course in horror classics – Jaws was high on the list, followed closely by Ridley Scott’s 1979 space slasher Alien.

“I love that first Alien film so much, I wish I’d seen it in a cinema,” Davis says. “They’re definitely a huge part of my film psyche.”

It would take another few decades before Davis entered the Alien universe herself, in a new prequel series set shortly before the original film. Alien: Earth focuses on Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a “forever girl” whose consciousness is transferred from her terminally ill human body to a synthetic one, making her a world-first “hybrid”. Davis plays Dame Sylvia, one of the scientists responsible for Wendy’s second life. In one of many allusions to Peter Pan, Hawley named the character after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the real-life mother of the boys who inspired JM Barrie to write his Neverland saga.

The show’s themes – and Sylvia’s attempts to balance Wendy’s humanity with her new, artificial immortality – felt particularly timely to Davis.

“AI was a thing that was coming, but it wasn’t suddenly upon us,” she says. “And then we had the writers’ strike and the actors’ strike, and then ChatGPT suddenly was in the schools in Tasmania, and I was just going, ‘hang on a minute’.

“There’s a tightrope of ethics and morality, and everyone has a different version of it. I really hope that people will enjoy this and get hooked into that quandary of genetic engineering and ethics and that strange quest to own everything and beat everyone and be younger than anyone.”

Davis is a horror icon herself, thanks to a breakout role in Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film The Babadook. The low-budget Australian production became a global hit, with fans including The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who placed the film alongside Alien as one of the scariest films he had ever seen. It remains a modern cult classic 10 years later.

“I remember watching a screening way before it was released, and just went, ‘Oh, this is great, but it’s not scary’,” she says. “And then we went to the Sundance film festival, and I sat up the back as people swore and leapt out of their seats.”

Davis credits the film’s enduring appeal – its top-hatted spook has even been embraced as an unlikely Queer icon – to something deeper than jump scares. “It’s not just a horror film,” she says. “It’s in fact a kind of psychological thriller about mental health and grief and parenting and love.”

It remains a defining role for Davis, alongside her star turn in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – the 1920s detective franchise that ran for three series and a film, based on the novels of Kerry Greenwood, who died in April. “A terrible loss, but she’s forever in us now,” says Davis.

“I was crying, working out whether I should do it or not,” she adds, of donning Phryne Fisher’s signature black bob. “I’m really glad I did, because that character was such a positive force, and it’s just so fun to play someone so clever and positive and naughty and irreverent – and someone who really cares about social justice, and is not going to bow for anyone, and stands up for the underdog.”

Along with roles in Game of Thrones, Baby Teeth and Netflix’s One Day, Davis has also collaborated with her film-maker husband, responsible for films including Snowtown, Nitram, and television adaptations of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang and most recently Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Davis appeared in the latter three.

Their kids were old enough to be watching Alien for a high school English class when the script for Alien: Earth hit Davis’s inbox; the series is led by Noah Hawley, the showrunner behind the award-winning small-screen adaptation of Fargo. She was intrigued; the show’s depiction of a future Earth carved up and controlled by mega-corporations – Dame Sylvia is employed by Prodigy, a rival to the franchise’s longstanding faceless villains, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation – particularly resonated with her.

“It’s terribly prescient – the richest of corporations and the richest people taking over the world, essentially running the world,” she says.

For Davis, the perils of corporate profits have been plain to see from her home in Tasmania, where she and Kurzel returned to raise their family.

“It is terrifying what is happening to our beautiful place here in Tassie, and the total corporate capture of our government by big industry,” she says of the controversy around the state’s fish farming industry, of which she has become one of many high-profile critics, alongside Richard Flanagan and former ABC journalist turned political candidate Peter George.

These days, Davis doesn’t have to go to the cinema to witness coastal dread. “When you look out over the water from Bruny Island, everywhere you look you see rows and rows of fish pens, and huge, industrial factory ships,” she says. “We had mass fish mortalities, rotting salmon washing up on our beaches. And 53 cormorants got shot because they were fishing out of the pens.”

Davis says the public opposition to such practices “began as lots of individuals around Tasmania making constructive criticism, and asking for a bit of negotiation on pollution”. It was being ignored by salmon companies and successive governments, she says, that connected and galvanised the far-flung island community.

What began as a movement, Davis says, has now become an “insurrection”, evident in the rise of Peter George, who was elected to Tasmania’s state parliament as an independent days after our interview.

“But we’re not going to stop,” she says. “We’re just going to keep on until we have people representing the people of Tasmania and not just corporations and party politics.

“I guess Alien is a warning, isn’t it?” she adds. “A warning of what greed and money and this kind of pursuit of immortality can do to a planet.”

Machine Gun Kelly has finally broken the silence on his and Megan Fox shocking split.

On Friday, August 8, the 35-year-old rapper released his new album Lost, titled Lost Americana, taking full responsibility for “breaking his home.”

It is pertinent to mention that the Emo Girl rapper and the Jennifer’s Body alum announced their split in November 2024 while Fox was pregnant with their baby girl, Saga Blade.

Fans were left shocked at the time, and rumors were spiraling that Fox had discovered Kelly was talking to other women.

Now, MGK, whose real name is Colson Baker, has confessed in his new track that the former couple ended their relationship because of him.

The lyrics of the song Treading Water read, “This’ll be the last time you hear me say sorry / That’ll be the last tear you waste on me crying / I broke this home, and just like my father, I’ll die all alonе.

“This’ll be the last time you hear me say sorry / That’ll be the last tear you waste on me crying / I broke this home,” Kelly sings.

Elsewhere in the song, MGK confessed his love for the actress and made a promise to change for his and Fox’s daughter, Saga, whom they welcomed in March.

“The beast killed the beauty; the last petal fell from the rose / And I loved you truly, that’s why it’s hard to let it go,” the dad of two continued, adding, “I broke this home, but I’ll change for our daughter, so she’s not alone.” 

Jennifer Lopez had some time to kill in Istanbul earlier this week before her headline performance in the city’s Yenikapi Festival Park on Tuesday (Aug. 5). So, according to Turkish media reports, she took a few hours on Monday to go shopping in the upscale Istinye Park mall, with a stop at the Chanel shop.

However, as reported in Patronlar Dünyasi, when Lopez attempted to enter the store, a security guard who seemingly didn’t recognize the singer-actress told her that she couldn’t enter because the store was at capacity, which Billboard can confirm. The report, which appeared to have photos of the incident described, said that Lopez appeared unbothered and said, “OK, no problem.”

The store security reportedly approached Lopez later during her shopping trip and welcomed her to visit the Chanel location, though the publication said she declined the invite.

This isn’t the first time this summer the superstar has had a classy response when things didn’t go quite as planned. When she experienced a wardrobe malfunction during her July 25 show, she tossed her skirt — which had fallen to the floor and couldn’t be re-attached — into the crowd and laughed off the snafu. “I’m glad I had underwear on,” she joked. “I don’t usually wear underwear.”

Lopez is in the midst of her Up All Night: Live in 2025 tour, which kicked off on July 8 in Pontevedra, Spain, and has so far taken her to Hungary, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Kazakstan and Armenia, with two remaining dates in Almaty, Kazakstan, on Aug. 10, and Sardinia, Italy, on Aug. 12.

Next up for the multi-hyphenate is the anticipated film adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Bill Condon written and directed musical also featuring Diego Luna and Tonatiuh Elizarraraz due out in theaters on Oct. 10.

Mother Monster Lady Gaga will make an appearance in Wednesday Season 2.

While the “Disease” singer hasn’t yet come on the small screen as of Part 1 of the hit Netflix show’s sophomore season, the streamer did confirm that she will play a guest star role, which was first reported November 13, 2024. Wednesday Season 2 Part 2 comes to Netflix Sept. 3.

On the eve of Netflix’s live Tudum 2025 event, Netflix’s official Wednesday Addams X account tweeted about the singer during her concluding performance of the celebration.

“Rosaline Rotwood. Cloaked in mystery with a reputation that preceds her,” the account tweeted May 31, 2025. “Our paths will surely cross. Welcom to mayhem @LadyGaga.”

At Netflix Tudum 2025: The Live Event, Gaga played a medley of songs including “Bloody Mary” and two tracks from her new album Mayhem, “Abracadabra” and “Zombieboy.”

RELATED: Lady Gaga Closes Out Netflix’s Tudum With Mesmerizing On-Theme ‘Wednesday’ Performance Featuring Viral Dance

“Mysterious and enigmatic, Rosaline Rotwood is a legendary Nevermore teacher who crosses paths with Wednesday,” Netflix’s official character description reads.

In addition to appearing in Season 2, the musician has also written a new song for the show, “Death Dance,” which is expected to release along with an accompanying music video in September alongside the arrival of Part 2 on Netflix. Variety first reported news of the song, and The Hollywood Reporter added that the series director Tim Burton also directed the music video.

When Season 1 of Wednesday came out, Gaga filmed herself doing the viral goth dance that Jenna Ortega did to The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” The songstress is no stranger to having her music featured in movies and tv shows, either. One of her first singles “Poker Face” was featured in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), and her song “Disease” was just featured in the Season 2 finale of The Buccaneers on Apple TV+. She also wrote a companion album of songs for Joker: Folie À Deux (2024), and she contributed “Hold My Hand” to Top Gun: Maverick (2022).

RELATED: Lady Gaga’s Film Roles From ‘A Star Is Born’ To ‘Joker: Folie À Deux’

In 2022, filmmaker Zach Cregger’s Barbarian left a big impression.

Audience, still just venturing back to the theaters following the pandemic, were rewarded with the kind of shocking, has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed moviegoing experience that Nicole Kidman monologues are made of. (“Suffice it to say that anyone willing to go along for the perverse ride will be thoroughly satisfied,” readd The Hollywood Reporter’s 2022 review.)

Positive word-of-mouth and strong theatrical staying power carried the movie to a $40 million domestic haul on a sub-$5 million budget, becoming one of the biggest success stories of the post-pandemic box office, the kind of runaway success story that quarterly earnings reports are made of.

By the time Cregger was going out with his follow-up, Weapons, Hollywood was champing at the bit. The script, set in a small town where 17 kids from the same elementary school classroom mysteriously disappear from their homes in the middle of the night, set off a bidding war that New Line eventually won.

Prior to Barbarian, Cregger was best known for the popular sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and as a journeyman comedy actor with credits across network television series. With Weapons, which has earned rave reviews ahead of its Aug. 8 release, he solidifies his spot as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand filmmakers.

Where did the idea for Weapons come from?

I was in post on Barbarian, and my best friend died in an accident that was really hard to understand. [Writing] was just like an emotional reaction to that. I was spared, because of my emotional pain, of writing from a place of ambition. I was writing from a place of catharsis. Writing where the process is the reward. Not to write a movie, not to write my next project, but to write because I needed to get this venom out. I started typing; I had no idea what the story was going to be. I literally went line by line. This is a true story. What is it? This teacher came to school and none of the kids were there. Okay, why? Yeah, they all ran away the night before. Okay, where’d they go? Nobody knows. Stephen King has that amazing metaphor where he’s like, “You need to be a paleontologist, and you’re unearthing the dinosaur one bone at a time, but you don’t know what the dinosaur is.” That’s a beautiful way to create for me. Remove result from the process and just be discovery.

Did you know writing it that you wanted it to be your follow-up to Barbarian?

I think pretty early on, I was like, this is cool and if I’m able to land the plane, this could be it. You can’t help it. You have that little demon on your shoulder being like, “This could be a movie!” You just have to let that be a good thing and also try and ignore it.

How did it ultimately end up at a studio?

Roy [Lee] and I hatched a plan where we would distribute it to all of the studios at the exact same time, through this program called Ember shot. It is a very secure software where you can only read [a screenplay] through the app. We told everybody: “We’re going to give you this script at 8 a.m. on Monday.” We gave it to all the studios, and at 9:30, [Warners co-chief] Mike De Luca called me and was like, “I have to make this movie with you.” It happened very fast, and by that afternoon, it was done. It was a half-a-day of craziness. It was exciting that day, don’t get me wrong, but the stress didn’t shed until a week later, and then I was like, “Wow, I’m going to make this movie. And I’ll have the resources to make the movie!”

How long did you have from it landing at Warners to beginning production?

That was two years, maybe. I cast it all up and then the strike happened, and then I ended up losing my entire cast because of scheduling issues. That was just a goddamn nightmare. On the other side of the strike, I had to recast the whole movie. If I had my druthers, this movie would have come out over a year ago, but we just had to keep waiting. Every movie is a roller coaster to commencement, I’m not unique in that way, but it was frustrating.

You’re looking for people that are excellent at what they do, but are able to kind of exist in the same tonal space. Everyone has to have a little bit of comedy chops, but be primarily a dramatic actor. Normally, I feel like you built from the top down. You get your star, and then you start building around the star. With this, l’m making seven different movies, and everyone gets to be the star of their little movie, but still they all have to fit to get together.

How did you decide on the structure where you are working through the story  in chapters from each character’s perspective?

One of my favorite books is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s a weird episodic thing that kind of jumps perspectives a lot. I was thinking what a fun way to orbit a central mystery, but tell it in this segmented way and let everyone kind of get closer and closer to solving it. In Barbarian, I jump perspectives, but it’s very disorienting intentionally. It’s very much like you kind of feel the movie abandoned you. You’re like, “Is it broken? What are we doing here?” I don’t know what it is about me, but I just like stories that are chopped. I wanted to make sure that every time we jumped perspective in this movie that we knew already who we were landing with, so it was never disorienting.

[The following question contains spoilers for Weapons.]

You have talked in interview about this being a personal film and how your family’s history with alcoholism informed the story. How did that work its way into the story?

The final chapter of this movie with Alex and the parents, that’s autobiographical. I’m an alcoholic. I’m sober 10 years; my father died of cirrhosis. Living in a house with an alcoholic parent, the inversion of the family dynamic that happens. The idea that this foreign entity comes into your home, and it changes your parent, and you have to deal with this new behavioral pattern that you don’t understand and don’t have the equipment to deal with. But I don’t care if any of this stuff comes through, the alcoholic metaphor is not important to me. I hope people have fun, honestly. It’s not really my business what people make of the movie. I have nothing to say about it, because the movies should speak for itself, and if I have to comment on what people should get from it, then I’ve failed as a filmmaker.

What do you make of the current moment in horror filmmaking?

It seems like horror is one of the few outlets for real creativity right now on a big scale. I can’t really think of another one. Without horror, you go to the theater and you get people in tights for $200 million and there’s not a lot of room for risk in those movies. And no shade, I’m all for entertainment, entertaining. But, it’s a shame that there’s not a lot of room for anything else. I love horror, my creative tuning fork resonates strong with horror, so I’m lucky in that regard. I dearly wish that we could have cool, edgy weird comedies back in the movie theaters. Or dramatic fare for adults in the theater. I feel like there’s not a lot of movies for grown-ups anymore.

With that in mind, how do you choose your projects? You have done two original films and are now in prep on a Resident Evil movie.

That’s an original screenplay, by the way. It’s a weird story. I wrote it and I love the story. It has nothing to do with any of the other Resident Evil movies. If I do my job, it will feel fresh and edgy and weird.

I guess we don’t have words in entertainment to describe an original idea that is still associated, if in name only, with IP.

I have Resident Evil, and then I have a sci-fi movie right after that that’s original. And then I have another finished script that I want to do after that. It actually takes place in the DC Universe, but it’s a totally original and it’s not a superhero movie. I wrote that before I wrote Barbarian. Then I have another one that I’m working on that feels like Night Crawler. But all of those are original. My agents don’t even send me scripts, because I’m not going to direct other scripts. I’m in a very fortunate position to be able to write a movie and have a good shot at getting a movie made why would I not do it if I like to write? The other thing is everything in this business changes on a dime. On the other side of Resident Evil, I may not be able to make anything. You just never know. You can’t plan ahead. So, me talking about I want to do this movie and that movie and this movie — I sound like an idiot.

YNW Melly’s retrial in his double murder case has been postponed once again, this time until January 2027, according to a report from NBC 6.

The Florida rapper, born Jamell Demons, has been in custody since 2019 following his arrest on charges related to the 2018 shooting deaths of two of his close friends and fellow YNW collective members, YNW Juvy (Christopher Thomas Jr.) and YNW Sakchaser (Anthony Williams).

The initial trial began in June 2023 but ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict. Since then, the retrial has faced several scheduling setbacks. A new trial date had previously been set for September 2025, but the court has now pushed the proceedings further, extending Melly’s time behind bars well into a seventh year.

The latest delay comes shortly after a pre-trial hearing in July, during which Judge Martin S. Fein ordered the release of documents connected to Melly’s attorney, Raven Liberty. Liberty has reportedly been under investigation for 18 months for alleged witness tampering, though no formal charges have been filed against her at this time.

Additionally, in November 2024, Melly’s legal team filed a lawsuit against the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, alleging that he was being held in inhumane conditions. The claims included extended periods of solitary confinement and limited access to visits or communication. The Sheriff’s Office responded by clarifying that Melly is in “administrative segregation,” not solitary confinement, citing safety concerns as the reason for the housing decision.

Melly’s request for pre-trial release was denied by a judge in May 2025, ensuring that he will remain in custody until his retrial begins in 2027, unless future legal developments alter his detention status.

Fungal networks in the soil are arguably the basis of much of life on Earth, but they’re understudied and underappreciated in the conservation world. Scientists at the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) are trying to fix that. They just unveiled a global map of mycorrhizal fungal networks, which highlights how widespread they are and how little protection they have. Host Flora Lichtman talks with two of the SPUN mapmakers, Adriana Corrales and Michael Van Nuland, about the importance of fungal networks and why they need more protection.

Check out the map here.

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