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Evangeline Lilly Drops Clue About Hugh Jackman's Return as Wolverine in 'Avengers'

Evangeline Lilly Drops Clue About Hugh Jackman's Return as Wolverine in 'Avengers'

Yahoo05-07-2025
Hugh Jackman has done his best to sidestep the topic of whether his beloved superhero Wolverine will be in either Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars.
Unfortunately for Jackman, the secretive approach to Wolverine's fate hasn't slowed down speculation about him appearing in at least one of the two upcoming Avengers films. Now, thanks to another face in the Marvel universe, that speculation intensified even more ahead of the holiday weekend.
Evangeline Lilly, who plays Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp in Ant-Man, responded to a comment about her and Jackman's character getting "screen time together" in Avengers: Secret Wars with just one cryptic emoji, as Avengers Updates detailed.
It's an extremely interesting response from Lilly. However, there are a few big questions to answer before reading too far into it.
While Lilly has played the role of the Wasp in three Ant-Man films, along with Avengers: Endgame, there's an obvious reason to buy into the hype on this, at least at first glance.
There is one big asterisk to put next to this, though. As Variety highlighted back in June 2024, Lilly announced she was "stepping away" from acting on Instagram. Assuming there are no plans for a comeback on the horizon, that'd throw a big wrench in this theory, at least regarding the hopes of fans who are pushing for Wolverine to star in one of the upcoming Avengers movies.
Unfortunately, for the time being, it will remain speculation and buzz until Marvel provides clarity.
For good measure, Jackman did address the topic of Wolverine in Avengers: Doomsday back in May during an interview on The View. But in perfect Marvel superhero fashion, the actor stated that he "can't say much."
"I can't say much," Jackman said. "...I really have nothing to add, and if I did, I would find a really cool way to not say it, but I actually have nothing to add."
Here's to hoping Lilly knows something fans don't, because Avengers: Secret Wars isn't slated to hit the big screen until Dec. 17, 2027, so it's bound to be a long waiting game.Evangeline Lilly Drops Clue About Hugh Jackman's Return as Wolverine in 'Avengers' first appeared on Men's Journal on Jul 5, 2025
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For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One
For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One

New York Times

timea minute ago

  • New York Times

For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One

As the title character of the mini-series 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' the actress Grace Van Patten had to convincingly embody a highly examined figure at the center of a real-life legal drama followed by millions. Even more daunting, she had to do it in front of Amanda Knox herself, an executive producer. Those close to Knox were stunned by the results. 'Grace, I haven't told you this yet — when they see you play me, they get chills,' Knox told Van Patten during a conversation with The New York Times last week. 'You just did it, and they were like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.'' Van Patten gasped in response. 'It was some fusion that happened,' she said. 'Because a lot of it felt very subconscious to me.' The eight-part series debuts on Hulu on Wednesday. The chills were inspired, Knox said, partly by Van Patten nailing her personality quirks: her occasionally singsong voice, the snort in her laugh, the cha-cha in her step. These behaviors and others became ammunition for Italian prosecutors and the global tabloid machine during Knox's highly publicized trial for the 2007 sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher. Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student and one of Knox's three roommates, was found dead from a knife attack in the flat they shared in Perugia, Italy. Knox, a 20-year-old Seattle native who was studying there, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian boyfriend of about a week, were arrested and imprisoned just days after Kercher was found. In 2009, both were convicted of the killing, with Amanda sentenced to 26 years and Sollecito to 25 years. In 2011, the ruling was overturned, and Knox returned to the United States. Then in 2014, Knox and Sollecito (played by Giuseppe Domenico in the series) were re-convicted of murder, a conviction that was overturned in 2015, ending the nearly decade-long saga. Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted separately of the murder in 2008 and was released from prison in 2021, after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence. (Guede's original 30-year sentence was reduced on appeal.) A separate slander conviction for Knox was upheld earlier this year. She had implicated Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she had worked, and herself in a confession made under duress, which she had tried to withdraw almost immediately. (Lumumba was in jail about two weeks as a result.) In all, Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison. The mini-series recreates this legal roller coaster in an unconventional style. It is a prison drama, a courtroom drama, a love story and an anxious horror tale. And it is largely in Italian. Van Patten ('Nine Perfect Strangers,' 'Tell Me Lies') plays Knox from her 20s, when she was full of 'whimsy and optimism and innocence,' as Knox put it, into her mid-30s, when Knox was defined more by 'trauma and hauntedness and determination.' 'We asked her to play the best experiences of my life and the worst experiences of life,' said Knox, now 38. 'We asked her to do it in English and Italian.' The series also depicts Knox's decision, in 2022, to return to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, her nemesis during and after the trial. Mignini, the lead Italian prosecutor, had fixated on and promoted the image of Knox as a conniving, sex-crazed murderer. (He compared Knox to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, during the proceedings.) Tabloid headlines smeared her as 'Foxy Knoxy,' a childhood nickname lifted from her Myspace page. Onscreen, Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli) is a relentless figure, a smug monster to be dreaded. Knox's trip to Italy to face (and ultimately befriend) the prosecutor is used as a framing device in the series. 'This is not a show about the worst experience of someone's life,' Knox said. 'This is the show of a person's choice to find closure on their own terms and to reclaim a sense of agency in their own life after that agency has been stolen from them.' To prepare to play Knox, Van Patten had numerous video chats with her and spent time in Los Angeles with Knox and her two children. Knox was also frequently on set during production. It all helped the actress understand the complex emotions involved in such a nightmarish experience. 'I was able to go to those places because of how deeply open Amanda was and how deeply vulnerable she was with me,' Van Patten said. An interrogation scene, in which Knox is mentally and physically tormented by a team of Italian officials, was particularly intense to film, Van Patten said. (Watching Knox spiral and give way under what amounts to psychological torture is brutal viewing.) Van Patten was learning Italian throughout filming, but the show was largely shot sequentially, and those early scenes captured authentic desperation. 'I tried not to learn the other people's lines as much as I could so that I was in a state of confusion,' she said. Knox said the themes of perception and miscommunication are fundamental to the story. 'That clash of perspectives and cultures and language, and the tension there, that's the beauty of drama and it's the beauty of reality,' she said. 'It is what makes this so psychologically and emotionally complex.' Kercher (Rhianne Barreto) is mostly seen in flashbacks of quiet, playful moments of friendship between her and Knox. The limited screen time reflects real life, in which the media circus around Knox and Sollecito overshadowed Kercher's brutal death. Last year, Stephanie Kercher, Meredith's sister, told The Guardian that she found it 'difficult to understand' what purpose the mini-series would serve. 'Meredith will always be remembered for her own fight for life, and yet in her absence, her love and personality continues to shine,' she said. 'The Twisted Tale' was created by K.J. Steinberg ('This Is Us'), and executive producers included Monica Lewinsky; Knox's husband, Christopher Robinson; and Warren Littlefield ('The Handmaid's Tale'). It was Lewinsky who first approached Knox about dramatizing her experiences. In 2021, Lewinsky worked to reframe her own story as a producer on the FX series 'Impeachment,' about her relationship with former President Bill Clinton when she was a 22-year-old intern and the fallout from it. Lewinsky knows 'deep in her bones what it feels like to have a bad experience, the worst experience of her life, used to diminish her and the turning of her into a punchline,' Knox said. 'She has been such a trailblazer in the mission of refusing to be squashed, refusing to be limited.' 'I was really moved by how open people were to me,' Knox said of her collaborators. 'I felt supported not just as a source but as a storyteller in my own right.' Knox said coverage of her was informed and shaped by persistent cultural messaging that 'women are either sluts or virgins, and that they all secretly hate each other and would murder each other if they had the chance,' she said. She believes younger generations are more likely to scrutinize reporting and demand more nuance than the public did during her trial. Still, Knox said she was initially reluctant to saddle Van Patten, 28, with 'this baggage that I have been carrying around my entire adult life.' 'In the same way that I didn't want the dark shadow of being the girl accused of murder passed on to my daughter,' Knox said, 'I didn't want that to pass on to Grace.' Van Patten had few preconceived ideas about Knox's story. She was a child when it happened and first learned about the case in the 2016 documentary 'Amanda Knox,' which included interviews with Knox, Sollecito and Mignini, among others. 'The show gives everyone the opportunity to understand it more and to form an opinion based on facts, and not what they were being fed at the time,' Van Patten said. 'She was just a 20-year-old girl going through this.'

The Passionate Partnership of Two ‘It' Choreographers
The Passionate Partnership of Two ‘It' Choreographers

New York Times

timea minute ago

  • New York Times

The Passionate Partnership of Two ‘It' Choreographers

In a rehearsal studio at Juilliard on a sunlit afternoon, multiple small dramas were unfolding in quick succession. Dancers draped and corkscrewed around each other as they wrestled through a series of fraught, unsettled duets. One extended an arm, and a partner pressed her forehead urgently into its upturned wrist. Another couple's simmering tango bubbled over into a quarrel, with punches mimed in time to a Brahms piano trio. Each pair of dancers seemed both desperate and unable to hold on to each other. The choreographer, Bobbi Jene Smith, stopped the music. As the dancers panted and sipped water, one cocked an eyebrow and asked, 'So — it's about abandonment?' Smith chuckled. 'Sure, abandonment,' she said. 'And,' she paused, 'slippery fish.' Though delivered like a joke, the comment held a truth about the dances Smith creates with Or Schraiber, her partner on and offstage. Nearly everything they make — including this latest work, 'Seven Scenes,' which has its premiere at Little Island on Aug. 22 and runs through Aug. 28 — hinges on an evocative, slippery-fish ambiguity. Their dreamlike montages are often turbulent and disorienting, but can also feel unnervingly familiar. 'I think we're always trying to make the invisible visible,' Smith said in an interview this month after the rehearsal, 'to expose something that is true, but deep inside.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

How I Plan to Get in Shape: Read (and Then Maybe Exercise)
How I Plan to Get in Shape: Read (and Then Maybe Exercise)

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timea minute ago

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How I Plan to Get in Shape: Read (and Then Maybe Exercise)

Too few people realize, the choreographer Martha Graham wrote, 'how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body.' Perhaps you have been pummeled, like me, by the past decade's headlines as if you were a veal cutlet. Perhaps you have responded, like me, by going into a tailspin of physical indolence. Like Oblomov, in Ivan Goncharov's novel, I've often found it hard to get out of bed. In my sloth, I've felt I had literature on my side. 'How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?' Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in one of his 'My Struggle' novels. 'Caffeine was my exercise,' declared the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation.' In her 2020 novel, 'What Are You Going Through,' Sigrid Nunez wrote that good diet and exercise will probably only make things worse in the end — when you long to finally die of a wasting disease but your body will not let you. Writing is a sedentary trade. Perhaps Harold Pinter was right to suggest, in his play 'Mountain Language,' that 'intellectual arses wobble the best.' Writers who work out have rarely seemed like my kind of people. Take Dan Brown, the author of 'The Da Vinci Code.' He's said he programs his computer to freeze for 60 seconds each hour so he can do push-ups and sit-ups. This sounds suspiciously close to the sort of advice Timothy Ferriss dispenses in his perennially best-selling 'The 4-Hour Body,' and Ferriss weighs his own feces. With fall on the horizon, and last season's trousers to squeeze into, I've been thinking about finally shaking off my Decade of Lassitude and Lethargy and getting vaguely fit. Because I've turned to writers to justify my laziness, now I wonder: Can I turn to them for the inspiration to buff up my clerkly physique? I've always liked James Boswell's idea, in diaries published as 'Boswell in Holland 1763-1764,' to take fresh air at your window in the morning and then 'proceed to bodily exercise by dancing and capering about your room for near 25 minutes.' I picked up 'Boswell in Holland' after learning that Julia Child's husband used to read it to her while she was cooking. I like to imagine Julia capering in this manner. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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