Pamela Anderson gushes over Liam Neeson after Naked Gun co-star declares he's ‘madly in love'
The pair walked the red carpet at the London premiere of their new film on Tuesday, 22 July.
"I was so excited to work with him, as he's had this incredible career," the former Baywatch star said.
'Watching him, I learned so much.'
Neeson plays the son of Leslie Nielsen's character Frank Drebin in the comedy spoof reboot that also stars Anderson as the female lead, Beth.
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Daily Mail
12 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Original Naked Gun creator gives brutal verdict on reboot as he criticizes Liam Neeson casting and takes aim at Seth McFarlane
The creator of the Naked Gun franchise has no plans to watch the reboot starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson … and not just because he was unimpressed by the film's trailer. Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, David Zucker – who also directed the original 1980s police comedy – revealed that he did not decline to participate in the reboot, but was excluded from the project altogether after Paramount Pictures rejected his script in favor of working with producer Seth MacFarlane. 'I wrote a whole script for Naked Gun 4 on spec for Paramount,' Zucker told the Daily Mail. 'I understand the studio's thinking to go with Seth MacFarlane. He's a proven commodity and Liam Neeson is a big star, but it's not a fresh idea.' When it first hit theaters in 1988, The Naked Gun – starring Leslie Nielson, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban and O.J. Simpson – was a box office success. The spoof-comedy was followed by two sequels in the 1990s. Zucker, along with his brother Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams (otherwise known as comedy trio ZAZ), was also the creative force behind the 1980 cult classic Airplane!, and he went on to direct films in the Scary Movie franchise. In the early stages of the reboot's development, Zucker said he was approached by MacFarlane – best known as the creator of the long-running animated series Family Guy – who praised his work and told Zucker he 'idolized' the original Naked Gun films. 'I had a conversation with Seth and he spent 10 minutes just telling me how he idolized Naked Gun, Airplane, Top Secret,' he said. 'How can you be mad at anybody who tells you how great you are? But it's not enough to be a fan…The guy at my dry cleaners is a big fan, but it doesn't mean he can do Naked Gun.' The original Naked Gun movie, based on the short-lived ABC series Police Squad!, starred Nielsen as police detective Frank Drebin, as his character directly spoofed the widely popular crime dramas of the era. Following its release in December 1988, the film raked in $152.4 million on a budget of $12 million. In 1991, the sequel The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear was released followed by Naked Gun 33+1⁄3: The Final Insult in 1994. In the reboot released this Friday, Neeson portrays bumbling cop Frank Drebin Jr. – who has followed his father's footsteps into law enforcement – while Anderson stars as femme fatale Beth Davenport. Former Saturday Night Live writer and The Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer directed the remake, and also served as co-writer alongside Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Zucker criticized the 2025 version for sticking to the same old formula, with similar gags as the first instalment. He highlighted one particular joke in the film, when Anderson's Beth is instructed to 'take a chair' when she arrives in Drebin's office, to which she replies: 'No thank you, I have plenty of chairs at home.' 'We gave up doing those jokes 40 years ago in Police Squad,' Zucker quipped before questioning Neeson's casting. 'OJ… he didn't need to be funny,' he said. 'And even Leslie Nielsen doesn't need to be funny. He just had to be a B movie actor. That's what we did... We didn't pretend to cast Lawrence Olivier or even Al Pacino, but Liam Neeson, for example, he's like Oscar quality. I think he may have won for Schindler's List. So I mean, what's he making fun of?' Unfortunately, this isn't the first time Zucker has been tossed aside by Paramount Pictures in the early stages of the company developing one of his films for a reboot; he also had no involvement in the 1982 sequel Airplane II, which was written and directed by Ken Finkleman. The sequel was critically panned and earned only $27.2 million in the United States and Canada, compared to the original's $83 million box office total. Much like how Zucker never watched Airplane II, he intends to do the same for the Naked Gun reboot. 'I don't plan on seeing it because, why would I?' he said. Zucker then recalled his late creative partner Abrahams's response to critics who questioned why he never watched the Airplane sequel. Abrahams died in November last year following a long battle with leukemia. 'People ask Jim, "Why didn't you go to see Airplane II?" And Jim said, "Well, if your daughter became a prostitute, would you go watch her work?" That was his way.' Of course, that's not to say that he doesn't wish well for MacFarlane, Schaffer, and the creative team behind the new Naked Gun film. In fact, the reboot has been released to early rave reviews. The Daily Mail's Brian Viner gave the movie four out of five stars, dubbing it 'hilarious' and praising Neeson as 'perfection.' 'I hope people go to see it, as miffed as I am at the whole thing,' Zucker admitted. 'Seth thought he knew best and it may actually do well, which is crazy in itself.' These days, Zucker is focused on his own original projects, such as a script for a 'Naked Gun take on the Mission Impossible and Bond film series' called Counter Intelijence, and film noir parody, The Star of Malta. Zucker is also launching a spoof comedy course on August 4, called MasterCrash: A Crash Course in Spoof Comedy, which will break down the 15 essential rules he uses to write, direct, and edit effective comedy. MasterCrash is a nine-hour course delivered through 18 separate videos, giving students hands-on opportunities to learn ZAZ's method of spoof writing, collaborate with other students, learn from surprise guest lecturers, and work closely with Zucker himself. 'As f***ing old as I am, I have the fresh ideas, not these young guys,' he said. 'I want to do something new.'
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I have different weathers in my brain': how Celeste rekindled her love of music after heartbreak and loss
On Glastonbury's Pyramid stage in June, Celeste appeared wearing smeared black eye makeup and a leather jacket moulded with the impression of feathers, latched at the throat. She evoked glamour and tragedy, a bird with its wings clipped. 'My first album came out nearly five years ago and I didn't expect it to take so long,' she said of its follow-up. 'But I'm here now.' Celeste broke through in 2020, her voice reminiscent of Billie Holiday's racked beauty, but sparkling with a distinctly British lilt: a controlled, powerful vibrato that stirs the soul. Despite her jazz-leaning balladry not being obvious chart fodder, she became the first British female act in five years to reach No 1 with her debut album, Not Your Muse, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She also won the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll and the Brit award for rising star and was nominated for an Oscar for best original song (for Hear My Voice from The Trial of the Chicago 7) the year after – but her chance to capitalise on those accolades was stalled by the pandemic. She had to halt her touring ambitions. Of the years since, she says: 'Sometimes you worry: are you on your path?' Celeste was haunting and spectacular when I saw her at Glastonbury, but now, as we stroll through Hyde Park in central London, she is relaxed and laughs easily. She becomes distracted by a carousel ride – 'They're my favourite! I love the music' – then she is back to talking about the five-year struggle to make her excellent second album, Woman of Faces, which will be released in November. 'The title was kind of a diagnosis of how I feel sometimes; a device to help me begin to understand my own complexity,' she says. She was born Celeste Waite in California to a mother from Dagenham, east London, and a Jamaican father. Her mother had found her way to Hollywood as a makeup artist and Celeste was born 'quite quickly' after her parents met there. They separated when Celeste turned one and she and her mother moved to England to live in Celeste's grandparents' home. 'It was almost like my mother was my sister, because we were both being looked after by my nan and grandad.' These are happy memories, but she has 'these different weathers in my brain … I've always had this little tinge of melancholy.' Maybe, she says, it stems in part from a lack of rootedness: 'You move from America to England and you don't really remember it, but you know that there's people that you've known there and built connections with. And then you don't have that.' She wondered if she would end up with a mental health diagnosis, 'something more clinical later on down the line. But I didn't feel I really needed that.' Instead, she found solace in other artists' music, 'people's lyrics and emotions and melodies, even how they dress themselves – that's always been quite a big remedy without needing to have a professional'. While she is frequently compared to Adele and Amy Winehouse, unlike them Celeste did not attend the Brit school of performing arts, instead studying music technology at sixth-form college in Brighton and working in a pub as she got her career off the ground. 'I'm really glad I taught myself to sing,' she says, arguing that it gives her 'rawness and authenticity'. Her venture into music was galvanised by the death of her father from lung cancer when she was 16: 'When you lose someone, every day you wake up and you're stunned by the fact that they're gone. And there's a certain point where you say to yourself: I can't do this any more, and that's when you start to either go to the gym or get into a practice. For me, that was where I picked up music and became really focused.' In the mid-2010s, she started uploading music to YouTube and SoundCloud and got a manager. She was picked up as a guest vocalist for producers such as Avicii, while Lily Allen's label released her debut single. 'I worked double shifts in a pub on weekends to afford to go to the studio,' she says. 'It took my energy away and I wasn't able to sing as well any more.' But she carried on doggedly, got signed to the major label Polydor, bagged the 2020 John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack and beguiled listeners on songs such as Strange, in which her vocal tone expresses every contradictory emotion in a breakup – resignation, hurt, bafflement, poignancy, even a kind of helpless amusement at how awful it all is – in just four minutes. She is clear that she has received plenty of support and encouragement within Polydor: 'The people that signed me came into music with the intention to make meaningful, poignant, credible music.' But at the commercial end of the industry, there is still 'a huge pressure to make money. If you're not in the top 2% of acts who have such a huge fanbase, you maybe don't get the freedom' to do adventurous work. She says that developing her initial sound caused friction. 'I was hanging around all these jazz musicians like Steam Down and Nubya Garcia, real innovators, and it wasn't easy for me to go into the label and be like: this is what I want to do.' She has managed to preserve a sense of strangeness and singularity. Unlike her earlier peppy soul-pop hit Stop This Flame, familiar to millions as backing music on Sky Sports, most of the songs on Woman of Faces don't even feature percussion – almost unthinkable in 21st-century pop – and there aren't many British singers on major labels doing symphonic jazz. She wanted 'a cinematic feel' and referenced Bernard Herrmann – a composer for films by Hitchcock, Welles and Scorsese – in the studio as she worked with the conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra. 'Herrmann was a real innovator and it's reflected in people like Busta Rhymes sampling him [on Gimme Some More] all those years later. So we wanted to make sure that if we went into that territory of a cinematic string orchestra, it didn't feel like an impression of the 1950s – it sounded like something new.' With this ambitious scope and Celeste shuttling between sessions in Los Angeles and London, it took a lot longer than expected to complete Woman of Faces. It was originally due to be finished by the end of 2022 and released a year later. 'I didn't expect it to take so long,' she says. 'And if I'm really honest with you, at the end of 2021, into 2022, I experienced some heartache and I fell into such a depression about it all.' A relationship had ended. 'When you lose the person from your life that you really love, there's a grief that comes over you,' she says. The album's first single, On With the Show, was written at her lowest point. 'I didn't really want to go to the studio; I didn't really feel like I actually wanted to live at that point. I didn't find meaning and purpose in the music.' She just had the song title, which she shared with her collaborator Matt Maltese. 'I didn't even have to explain to him what it would be about, because he just knew. We spoke about the song and what it needed to be.' She had also recently seen Marius Petipa's 1898 classical ballet Raymonda. 'It's about a woman in the Crimean war and she has two lovers: one is in Russia and one is in Crimea,' she says. 'I could relate, because she was torn between these two entities: at that point, my dedication to music and my dedication to a person. And one was taking the energy from the other. So On With the Show was about me having to find the courage to let go of something, to meet back in with the path of my life as a singer.' Worse, she says, 'social media had come in to erode my relationship'. As a public figure on social media, 'people can view your relationship and have so much awareness of the fact that you're even in one. There's this really strange, invisible, intangible impression that interactions in that space can leave upon your living reality. I was upset at how much that had come to affect my personal, real life.' On Could Be Machine, a curveball industrial pop song inspired by Lady Gaga, Celeste explores the idea that 'the more time we spend with this technology, the more we become it'. 'My phone had become this antagonist in my life, via communication that I didn't want to receive and the fact it could just be in your hand. It was quite alien, in a way. I hadn't grown up with a phone stuck to my hand and it was something that I had to become more and more 'one' with in my music career.' She says that, during the relationship, love had reverted her to a kind of 'child-like state … a really pure version of yourself, before the world has seeped in and shaped you'. Losing the person who brought her into that state meant that she had to 'learn how to steer and guide' herself to rediscover it. She is leaning on other musicians to help her understand these difficult years. She cites Nina Simone's song Stars, a ballad about the cruelty and melancholy of being a professional musician. 'It says so much about the tragedy of where her life is at that moment in time, but then there's so much triumph in the fact she even gets to express herself in that way.' Another inspiration for Woman of Faces was the 1951 musical romantic comedy An American in Paris and one of its stars, Oscar Levant, who spent time in mental health institutions. 'I was really moved by what he seemed to carry in his being. And, I suppose, I relate a lot to artists who carry this pain, but their work eases it.' Whereas Celeste was previously in thrall to American blues and R&B ('the older sense of what R&B was in the 1940s'), down to the way she might 'time things and phrase things and even pronounce things', she has 'learned what my true voice is and who I really am as a person. I still have some of that phrasing and pronunciation there, but I exist a lot more as myself, therefore I sing a lot more as myself.' Buoyed up by her and others' art, does she feel happy? 'Yes!' She grins and throws her hands in the air. 'The main thing is finding happiness within the relationships I maintain around me and making sure those are kept really positive and nourishing.' She is glad to be in her 30s: 'Age becomes kind of taboo for a woman in the music industry – but then you hear people like Solange speak about women really coming into their true sense of who they are within their work. There's been a shift.' And if the happiness in her career ever dissipates, she has decided she will simply move on. 'I don't really see the need to live in a feeling of oppression, when I know there's so much freedom outside this world. And anyway, I'm sure I would find my way back to it again. But on my own terms.' Women of Faces is released on 14 November on Polydor In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Sky News
44 minutes ago
- Sky News
Brian Cox: Trump talking 'b*******s' on Scottish independence
Why you can trust Sky News Hollywood actor Brian Cox has told Sky News that Donald Trump is talking "bollocks" after suggesting there should be 50 or 75 years between Scottish independence referendums. The US president said a country "can't go through that too much" when questioned by reporters during his visit to Scotland this week. The Emmy-winning star, who is an independence supporter, has hit back, branding him "that idiot in America". The 79-year-old told Sky News: "He's talking bollocks. I'm sorry, but he does. It's rubbish. Let's get on with it and let's get it [independence] done. We can do it. "It's been tough as there's a great deal of undermining that has gone on." 2:13 SNP fraud probe causing 'harm' Mr Cox said the police fraud investigation examining the SNP's finances has done "enormous harm" to the party and wider independence movement. Nicola Sturgeon was arrested as part of the long-running police probe but cleared of any wrongdoing earlier this year. The former first minister's estranged husband Peter Murrell, who was SNP chief executive for two decades, appeared in court in April to face a charge of alleged embezzlement. He has entered no plea. Brian Cox is preparing to return to the Scottish stage for the first time in a decade in a play about the Royal Bank of Scotland's role in the 2008 financial crash. Ahead of the Edinburgh festival performances, the veteran actor told Sky News: "I think it's a masterpiece. It's certainly one of the best pieces of work I've been involved in. 'My friend Spacey should be forgiven' The Succession star was also asked about his "old friend" Kevin Spacey. The former House of Cards actor, 65, was exiled from the showbiz world in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct. Spacey has admitted to "being too handsy" in the past and "touching someone sexually" when he didn't know they "didn't want him to". Spacey stood trial in the UK for multiple sexual offences against four men in July 2023 but was acquitted on all counts. Mr Cox told Sky News: "I am so against cancel culture. Kevin has made a lot of mistakes, but there is a sort of viciousness about it which is unwarranted. "Everybody is stupid as everybody else. Everybody is capable of the same mistakes and the same sins as everybody else." Asked if he could see a return to showbiz for Spacey, Cox replied: "I would think so eventually, but it's very tough for him. "He was tricky, but he has learnt a big lesson. He should be allowed to go on because he is a very fine actor. I just think we should be forgiving."
