Innholdsfortegnelse for 5/24/2023 i Variety

It’s usually a disaster for a journalist when a famous person cuts an interview short. In April, Janeé Bolden and Jem Aswad spent the evening with Offset at one of his houses. He was keen to talk about the next chapter in his music career until the conversation turned to his former collaborator Takeoff, the late rapper who made up a third of the hip-hop group Migos until he was shot and killed at a Houston bowling alley in 2022. Offset briefly spoke about the death of his longtime friend; then he had to leave the room to collect himself. And that was the end of the night. Fortunately, Offset invited our team back to his house the next day to continue talking about his evolution — as an artist,…

“For the First Time” The scene: Audiences hear what Ariel (Halle Bailey) is thinking as she gets acclimated to the human world, with music that riffs on Menken’s score for the 1989 animated movie. The inspiration: To portray the voiceless mermaid’s inner thoughts, director Rob Marshall had Bailey view “Yentl,” Barbra Streisand’s 1983 musical drama, which frames many of its songs in the protagonist’s head. “I could watch how the power of song can still translate through your face,” Bailey says. “Wild Uncharted Waters” The scene: There’s more to Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) than just a pretty face, or his love story with Ariel — he gets his own number too, a ’90s-era power ballad that illuminates the young royal’s desire to find himself at sea. The theme: “He’s grateful…

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” star Ismael Cruz Córdova (1) is opening up about the cast and crew’s mental health while shooting the Amazon Prime Video series. During an appearance on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast, the actor tells me that an on-set therapist was on hand to offer help after the show received racist backlash against its inclusive and diverse casting. “You need support when this happens because the voices are so loud and they’re coming at you from so many places,” Córdova says. Córdova, who is shooting Season 2 in the U.K., says the therapist’s presence alone was beneficial. “I loved seeing her there, even if we didn’t speak,” he said. “I knew there was someone there seeing me completely. It wasn’t just…

LiZZY CAPLAN iSN’T iNTERESTED iN FAME. ACTUALLY, SHE’S A LITTLE TURNED OFF BY IT. “I don’t know how people do that and don’t go completely insane,” she says. “The pressure is wild — pressure to look a certain way, or that every single thing you’re saying is being dissected. I just want to pretend to be other people for a living.” That’s not to say that the actress, whose career began in 1999 with a role on “Freaks and Geeks,” hasn’t enjoyed critical and commercial success — she earned an Emmy nomination for “Masters of Sex” in 2014, and still gets recognized daily as Janis Ian, her grungy outsider from 2004’s “Mean Girls.” When we meet over oat milk lattes and Earl Grey tea in West Hollywood, Caplan is effortlessly…

“If I made this album four years ago, I probably wouldn’t have written some of those songs.” The road from boy-band fame to solo stardom is notoriously bumpy, but Niall Horan made the transition look easy with 2017’s “Flicker.” Eschewing the pop of One Direction for earthier, singer-songwriter fare, the Irishman carved out his own identity — one hit at a time. Sophomore albums can be tricky in the best of circumstances, but Horan’s “Heartbreak Weather” arrived just as the world shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Promotion ground to a halt, and a planned tour was scrapped. With time unexpectedly on his hands, Horan looked inward and started writing “The Show.” The album, due June 9 via Capitol Records, finds the hitmaker laying his feelings bare as he comes…

Executive editor of music Jem Aswad braved not one but two Hollywood Hills mansions for this week’s Offset cover story. He has profiled the Weeknd, Billie Eilish, Bruce Springsteen and Dua Lipa and Elton John for the magazine. Janeé Bolden was one of the first people to see Offset’s Takeoff tribute tattoo and bonded with the rapper over their shared Atlanta roots. She previously profiled Future, Muni Long and Latto for Variety. Social media editor Katcy Stephan grabbed coffee with “Fatal Attraction” star Lizzy Caplan for this week’s issue. No bunnies were harmed. “I am reminded how much I love what I do when I get to work with artists like Offset,” says Mason Poole, who photographed the rapper in Los Angeles on March 10. “The shoot felt more like a…

Michael Engleman has been promoted to chief marketing officer for Paramount+ Domestic and Showtime. He had been CMO and global brand director for Showtime. Nicole Kim has joined Columbia Records as VP of A&R. Kim most recently served as A&R for BigHit Music/HYBE and headed all creative for K-pop superstars BTS. Vinnie Malhotra has been named president of Higher Ground Prods. He comes to the banner led by former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama after heading unscripted and documentaries for Showtime Networks. Kristen Killackey has advanced to VP of production and operations for NBCUniversal Syndication Studios. She started her career with NBCU as a production accountant.…

May 16-20 Cannes Film Festival Cannes, France The 76th annual festivities opened with a screening of “Jeanne du Barry,” starring Johnny Depp as King Louis XV. The star power continued with Harrison Ford walking the Palais red carpet for the premiere of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the James Mangold action adventure that also marks Ford’s final bow in the decades-old franchise. Martin Scorsese’s epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” received a nine-minute standing ovation at its premiere. During the film’s press conference, star Robert De Niro took a shot at former President Donald Trump, describing him as “evil” but refusing to say the 2024 presidential hopeful’s name: “There are people who still think he can do a good job. Imagine how insane that is.” May 16 ‘Reality’…

“I knew I wanted to talk about it, but I just didn’t know how to make it funny.” Though Wanda Sykes began working on “I’m an Entertainer,” her latest Netflix stand-up special, in 2019, hardly any of the material she wrote prior to March 2020 made it into the show. Instead, it was the radioactive events of the pandemic era — from COVID vaccinations to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the battle over trans rights to the murders of Black Americans like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Elijah McClain — that Sykes was drawn to. Those deaths and the racial reckoning that followed were not obvious fodder for making people laugh. So the 59-year-old comedian began with herself, digging deep into her personal life for what’s funny about racial…

Since she was a child, Ming-Na Wen has been a “Star Wars” fan. “To this day, whenever I get on a plane,” she says, “I still pray to God, Buddha and The Force.” And while might be cliché to open a profile of Wen by saying The Force is strong with her — when Lucasfilm’s own Dave Filoni invokes the phrase, it would be wrong not to do so. Long before Wen was playing bounty hunter Fennec Shand on “The Mandalorian” or its spinoff “The Book of Boba Fett,” she and Filoni attended the same high school in a Pittsburgh suburb. And he says both have always loved “Star Wars.” Says Filoni, “Working with Ming-Na Wen has been full of surprises. The Force is definitely strong with her. Always has…

FILM REVIEW Director: Wes Anderson Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks As much as any filmmaker alive, Wes Anderson has a canon of movies that look and feel all of a piece. The diorama design, which extends from his life-size-doll-house sets to his graphic lettering; the acting so stylized it’s like postmodern jokey-music-video kabuki; the fable-within-a-fable structure that can seem the cinematic equivalent of nested Russian dolls; the heavy frosting of ironic whimsicality. Most of his movies share these elements, yet the truth is that not all Wes Anderson films are alike. A few, like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” spin finely wrought tales beneath the filigree. One, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is an exhilarating caper — as well as (to me) his finest work, ironically because…