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USA Today
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Modern Family' star Ariel Winter says body shaming 'totally damaged my self-esteem'
'Modern Family' star Ariel Winter says body shaming 'totally damaged my self-esteem' Show Caption Hide Caption 'Modern Family': Ariel Winter, Nolan Gould talk growing up on show Known for playing Alex and Luke Dunphy on ABC's "Modern Family," Ariel Winter and Nolan Gould talk growing up before the fans' eyes over the decade. USA TODAY Ariel Winter is getting real about the emotional toll of body shaming. In an interview with People magazine published May 7, the "Modern Family" star, 27, reflected on being subjected to negative comments scrutinizing her appearance while she was a child actor. Winter played Alex Dunphy, the middle child of the Dunphy family, on the ABC sitcom for 11 seasons. "It was every headline I read about myself, like, grown people writing articles about me saying how I looked terrible or pregnant or like a fat slut," Winter shared. "I mean, I was 14. It totally damaged my self-esteem." She continued, "I understood what it was like to be hated. No matter what I was going through, I was a target. It made it very difficult to look at myself in the mirror and go, 'I love this version of me.'" Winter grew up in the public eye starring on "Modern Family," which debuted on ABC in 2009, when she was 11, and ended in 2020, when she was 22. She started acting at the age of four and before "Modern Family" had already appeared in films like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and shows like "Nip/Tuck." Ariel Winter dishes on trolls, why she left UCLA: 'I don't know what it is about me' Winter previously reflected on body shaming in a 2021 episode of "Red Table Talk: The Estefans," remembering how she was called "fat" at age 13 after "I had gained weight and my body changed." The actress, who explained she gained weight after she started taking antidepressants, also said she received comments labeling her "a horrible role model" for "trying to be sexy." In a 2016 interview with Teen Vogue, Winter shared that she has "struggled with self-esteem and body confidence for years," adding that it was "really difficult" to receive cruel comments about her appearance. "I tried to lose weight, I crash dieted, I tried to change what I looked like so I would fit this standard, and it never worked," Winter told the outlet. "I got to a certain point where I realized I was never going to please people, so I decided to make myself happy instead. I'm so grateful I made that decision, because it really made a difference for me." 'Modern Family' star Ariel Winter shuts down body-shamers: I 'didn't get plastic surgery' In her new interview with People magazine, Winter revealed she no longer lives in Los Angeles, where she grew up. Though she clarified she "didn't leave the industry" and will continue to act, she said she decided to move out of the city because it "holds some not-great memories for me, and I'm young and never lived anywhere else, and thought, 'Why not?'"
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Culture Agenda: The best things to do, hear, see or watch in Europe this week
Monday, monday - always a bit of a slog. The good news is, April is bringing sunshine and eclectic events to help hurry us out of hibernation. Alongside this week's suggestions, we also recommend checking out the Mauritshuis museum's showcase of 60 charismatic takes on Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', and Centre Pompidou's celebration of Black artists in Paris. Following the sad news of Val Kilmer's passing, there's never been a better time to watch (or re-watch) some of his classics - put Kiss Kiss Bang Bang at the top spot. Speaking of cinema, keep in mind that this Thursday is the announcement of this year's Cannes Film Festival line-up... And it's already looking mighty promising. Keep your eyes peeled for our full coverage. Until next time, have a great week. José María Velasco: A View of Mexico Where: National Gallery (London, UK) When: Until 17 August 2025 To see a José María Velasco painting is to fall in love with Mexico, every brushstroke an encapsulation of the country's natural beauty and evolving state. The 19th-century polymath was renowned for his landscape works, combining fascinations in geology, archaeology and botany (to name a few) alongside commentary on creeping industrialisation. What resulted were deeply personal, intellectually textured and elegantly detailed studies of a place few had truly ever seen before, caught in periods of both gentle and dramatic transformation. Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Mexico and the UK establishing diplomatic relations, this is also the first exhibition to be dedicated to a historical Latin American artist at the National Gallery. Inner child Where: Opera Gallery (London, UK) When: Until 5 May 2025 Openness on social media alongside a gradual shattering of stigmas around mental health have led to increased discourse on the concept of the inner child, a way for people to reconnect with and process early experiences and their ripple effect. It was an idea born from Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung's 'child archetype', who would have been 150 this year. The subject is explored in-depth at Opera Gallery's latest exhibition by two artists: Yayoi Kusama and the late Niki de Saint Phalle. A total of 41 artworks depict the playful, eclectic whimsy of childhood while sometimes subverting it, capturing the ways in which returning to our childlike selves opens up a renewed worldview that's both liberating and conflicting, tangled fragments resurfacing. A merging of creativity and psychology, it's a vibrant visual reminder of how art can help us to find and heal ourselves. War Child's Secret 7" 2025 exhibition Where: NOW Gallery (London, UK) When: 11 April – 1 June 2025 For their 2025 exhibition, the charity organisation War Child will display 700 specially designed record sleeves to be auctioned on 1 June 2025. Contributors include The Cure, Gregory Porter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Jessie Ware, in collaboration with artists Yinka Ilori, Sir Paul Smith and Antony Gormley. It's the ultimate record sale for those looking to add something completely one-off to their collection while donating to a good cause. There's also an element of surprise: buyers only find out which artist designed their album cover after the auction ends. For those simply looking to admire, the exhibition includes a dedicated listening space where visitors can tune in to all seven records included, as well as the entire Secret 7" archive. Milan Design Week View this post on Instagram A post shared by milan design week 2025 (@ Where: Milan, Italy When: 7 - 13 April 2025 The world's biggest design festival somehow feels even bigger this year, featuring everything from striking modular lights by designer Michael Anastassiades, an installation by filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, and a collection of exquisite urns by acclaimed architects and designers like David Chipperfield and Audrey Large. While the main event is focused around the Salone del Mobile furniture fair, there are a plethora of diverse events happening all around the city, including plays, talks, and even an exhibition where visitors can live and sleep in the gallery - good to know, we'll undoubtedly need a nap after exploring everything here. Barcelona Beer Festival Where: Barcelona, Spain When: 11 April - 13 April 2025 Beautiful Barcelona and bountiful beer? Need we convince you more?! An idea brewed up by four friends in 2012, the BBF has become the largest craft beer event in Spain. More than 100 breweries from all over the world take part in this yeasty haze of tastings, workshops, talks and good old fashioned communal spirit fuelled by a shared love of sipping something refreshing in the heady glow of Spring. Did we mention that there are also over 600 craft beers on tap (including limited-edition brews)? Cheers to that - and drink responsibly, of course! Drop Where: European cinemas When: 11 April 2025 Ever been sitting on a train when someone airdrops you a meme of a cat wearing sunglasses, leaving you feeling deeply unsettled but also ever so slightly amused? Just us? Ok. Well, imagine that scenario BUT you're on a first date and the airdrops become increasingly sinister, asking you to murder the man you're with else they'll kill your son and sister. Ain't nothing amusing about that. This is the basis for Christopher Landon's latest horror film, Drop. It stars Meghann Fahy as Violet, a widow enjoying a fancy date with Henry (Brandon Sklenar) when the mysterious and nerve shredding events mentioned above start to unfold. A good reminder to switch off your phone when watching - and avoid dating? Death of a Unicorn Where: European cinemas When: Out now Don't mess with unicorns - especially ones with girthsome horns. This latest release from A24 stars Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a father and daughter trying to repair their rocky relationship when they accidentally crash into and kill a unicorn. This leads to the revelation that it has mystical abilities to cure cancer - something Rudd's boss (Richard E. Grant in full Saltburn mode) is excited to exploit, leading to gruesome consequences when the creatures retaliate. Out critic David Mouriquand wrote: "From the premise alone, there's plenty to love about Death Of A Unicorn. Caricatures of pharma arseholes getting bloodily impaled while a fractured father-daughter dynamic gets healed in the process. It sounds like something Roger Corman would have saluted." Then he liked it less... Read the full review here. The Last of Us Where: HBO When: 13 April 2025 After two long years, the wait is finally over baby girls. We last saw Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) during that explosive finale that had the rebel Fireflies militia dropping like, well, (fire)flies. Based on the seminal post-apocalyptic franchise by Naughty Dog, it takes place in a world ravaged by a mutated fungus called Cordyceps that transforms people into rabid zombies, with Ellie's character harbouring a rare immunity. Four years on from the events of season 1, we're now following Ellie on a revenge mission alongside her girlfriend Dina (Shannon Woodward). Expect more high tension, heartbreak and screaming 'holy shiitake' at the screen (we hope the book of puns returns too). Bon Iver: SABLE, fABLE When: 11 April 2025 Bon Iver has always captured transitions; the pause between thoughts, between moments, between who we were and who we're becoming. It feels like perfect timing, then, that we get this new album at the advent of spring, as softer realisations blossom from the chilly ruminations of winter. Recorded in Justin Vernon's hometown of Wisconsin at the tail end of the COVID pandemic, 'SABLE, fABLE' completes last year's EP release, which we called 'an achingly lovely confrontation of anxiety and change.' Through his trademark repetitions, reverberations and layered harmonies, Vernon soothed the restless emotions of a generation - and from the album's already released tracks, like 'If Only I Could Wait', it's clear we're about to be collectively healed once again.
The Independent
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Tom Cruise ‘cried' during emotional reunion with Val Kilmer on Top Gun: Maverick
The American actor, also famed for his performances in Willow, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Tombstone and as Jim Morrison in The Doors, died at the age of 65 on April 1. The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter confirmed. Kilmer, who appeared alongside Cruise in the 1986 original Top Gun, was diagnosed with cancer in 2015. After successfully undergoing chemotherapy and two tracheotomies, Kilmer spoke with the use of a voice box. When he reunited with Cruise in Maverick, his character, Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky, was seen speaking through a computer due to an unspecified illness. 'I just want to say that was pretty emotional. I've known Val for decades,' Cruise said while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2023. 'For him to come back and play that character… he's such a powerful actor that he instantly became that character again. You're looking at Iceman.' 'I was crying. I got emotional,' Cruise admitted. 'He's such a brilliant actor, and I love his work.' In the original Top Gun, Iceman is Maverick's chief rival in the naval aviator training program. Maverick eventually earns Iceman's respect after saving his life, leading Kilmer to the immortal phrase: 'You can be my wingman anytime.' In 2022, 63-year-old Kilmer shared a still from the movie on Instagram with the poignant caption: '36 years later… I'm still your wingman <3.' Cruise previously revealed that he 'rallied hard' to get Kilmer into the first action movie. Top Gun: Maverick was the top-grossing film of 2022; it was the 11th highest-grossing movie in history worldwide and was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. At the Academy Awards nominees luncheon that year, Steven Spielberg credited Cruise with saving 'Hollywood's ass.' 'Seriously. Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry,' the director told the actor.
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Val Kilmer could have been the next Tom Cruise – but he was too interesting
Perhaps the most inadvertently telling phase of Val Kilmer's career was that short-lived period in the mid-1990s in which Hollywood tried to turn him into a conventional leading man. Casting Kilmer as Bruce Wayne in 1995's Batman Forever looked at the time like the snakelike supporting star of Top Gun and Tombstone had been given a fast pass to the front of the A list. Then came 1997's The Saint, in which he played a glossy revival of the suave master thief Simon Templar, previously portrayed by Roger Moore, and the wholesome vocal role of Moses in DreamWorks Animation's The Prince of Egypt. But even though he was amply equipped with the beauty for it – his pillowy pout was so 90s-luxe-glamour it was almost obscene – the gear shift to Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise status didn't stick. Partly it was because Kilmer, who died yesterday at the age of 65, was at the time a notorious nightmare to work with. 'Even if I was making The Val Kilmer Story I wouldn't hire that prick,' John Frankenheimer is said to have told his assistant director on the unhappy set of 1996's The Island of Doctor Moreau. But it was also because he was too dangerous, too prickly, and just too straightforwardly interesting for the job. On screen he exuded a soft cruelty and sensuality that made his characters the last men we wanted to root for, but couldn't take our eyes off nonetheless. While watching Batman Forever as a 13-year-old I remember being semi-hypnotised in the cinema by his lisping delivery of the line 'Tell me doctor, do you like the circus?' Here was a man trying to chat up Nicole Kidman with the tamest date suggestion imaginable, but intentionally or otherwise, Kilmer gave it the velvety mouthfeel of a veiled threat. That's the DNA strand that ran through many of Kilmer's greatest roles: they were all leading men in their own minds. Top Gun's Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky, the bleached and rippling ace pilot slash locker-room bully; Tombstone's tippling, tuberculotic Doc Holliday; Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's hilariously abrasive Gay Perry, Willow's swashbuckling braggart Madmartigan (playing opposite wife Joanne Whalley) – to each of these characters, the plot of the film they appeared in seemed like a distraction which only pulled focus from the thing that really mattered: him. Perhaps attitude and billing aligned only once in Kilmer's career – in his extraordinary, woozily embodied performance as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors. Kilmer's portrayal of the 1960s rock frontman may be the single least likeable lead turn in the history of biopics: he's conceited, pampered, pretentious, destructive, invariably wrecked on a cocktail of substances, and without any obvious talent for music. On its release in 1991, many fans of The Doors loathed it, as did the band themselves. 'It was not about Jim Morrison,' said keyboardist Ray Manzarek, played in the film by Kyle MacLachlan, in an interview shortly after the premiere. 'God, where was the sensitive poet and the funny guy? The guy I knew was not on that screen.' Well, fair enough. But who'd want to watch Kilmer play him? Kilmer thrived on screen as a problem for others to solve, especially rival pack alphas – so it should come as no surprise that his greatest performance was in one of the growliest big-beast ensembles ever recruited. As the professional thief Chris Sheherlis in Michael Mann's Heat he was a knot of contradictions: hyper-capable on the job, at the right hand side of Robert De Niro's Neil Macauley, and bone-chillingly ruthless in the film's masterful centrepiece shootout in Los Angeles' concrete canyons. But he was also addicted to the rush of the job and the high-stakes gambling that would invariably ensue after a payday, while his explosive temper causes untold strife in his marriage to Ashley Judd's Charlene – though with a near-imperceptible wave of her hand it is Charlene who enables his escape from the LAPD during the supremely tense final act. Both Judd and Kilmer's performances in this moment are sensational, as both understatedly come to terms with this wrenching fork in the road in their lives within a handful of seconds. After spending much of the last 20 years out of the spotlight, not least due to his own worsening health, Kilmer's screen career ended on an impossibly perfect note with the converging of another split path. In 2022 he was reunited with Cruise in a moving scene in Top Gun: Maverick, when the two old airmen reconnect and reminisce. In the scene, Cruise looks supernaturally bright-eyed and youthful; swathed in a scarf, Kilmer is older and more weathered, but his earlier beauty still endures. 'It's time to let go,' reads Iceman's poignant message to Maverick: from an actor who never trafficked in sentimentality, there could have been no better final swerve of renegade truculence than bringing a multi-generational audience to tears.
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Val Kilmer: an ethereally handsome actor who evolved into droll self-awareness
Why do some movie careers take off … and others go a bit sideways? Val Kilmer was a smart actor, a looker, a terrific screen presence and in later years an under-appreciated comic performer. His finest hour as an actor came in Shane Black's comedy action thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, when he was quite superb as the camp private investigator Gay Perry Shrike: a gloriously sleek, plump performance which was transparently – and outrageously – based on Tom Ford. If only Kilmer could have started his acting life with that bravura performance, and shown the world what he could do. Instead, and at a crucial stage in his career, he was trapped in the body and face of a staggeringly beautiful young man. He could somehow never quite persuade Hollywood to accept him as a leading man and above-the-title player in the mould of his Top Gun contemporary Tom Cruise, who in 1986 played Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell to Val Kilmer's Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky. As the 80s and 90s rolled by, Kilmer never ascended to the league of Cruise, Hanks, Clooney and Pitt. Medication for the illness he latterly suffered can't have helped, and it is a great sadness that fate never allowed him to mature in the same way as, say, Kurt Russell. In the mid-90s, Kilmer had a real shot at mainstream stardom. He took over from Michael Keaton in the role of the caped crusader in Batman Forever, a film which performed very respectably at the box office but which was received coolly by the critics on the grounds of its sunnier, goofier style, closer to the 60s TV show. This was in an era when superhero movies did not cultivate the Comic Con fanbase in the way they do now, although it is not clear that DC fans would have taken Val Kilmer to their hearts. Kilmer also played Simon Templar in The Saint, the classy sub-Bond caper made famous on the British small screen by the young Roger Moore. To this, the reaction was a resounding meh. Kilmer however made a powerful, even stunning impression in other roles. He was an almost ethereally handsome hero in Willow in 1988, a fantasy adventure planted in relatively stony soil (this being an era before Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones made fantasy a big important genre). A frustrating non-breakthrough came three years later when he was cast in the difficult, unlucky role of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors, but the director encouraged an interpretation heavy on the preeningly self-destructive and unsympathetic 'legend' of Morrison, the iconic rock star heading for an obese drug-addled crisis; the American life with no second act. In George P Cosmatos's acclaimed western Tombstone in 1993, Kilmer got respect for his performance as the tubercular gunslinger, drinker, womaniser and card-player Doc Holliday, and almost stole the picture from Russell as Wyatt Earp. It was the Holliday performance which got him his chance at superhero glory. Kilmer also played a supporting role in the classic Michael Mann action thriller Heat in 1995 as Chris Shiherlis, an armed crew member working for the legendary villain Neil MacCauley, played by Robert De Niro. Here, sadly, Kilmer had no opportunity to upstage the main players Pacino and De Niro, whose alpha-gorilla face-off is epitomised by the great coffee-shop scene. Could Kilmer have taken either of those two leads? Well, it was not to be. Anyone wanting to see the very best of Kilmer should get hold of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and thrill to his wonderfully funny, seductive performance as Perry, the LA dude in gorgeous suits who is sexier and savvier than anyone else on screen: gay or straight, law-breaking or law-abiding. He even managed to make his fleshiness look sensual, with a droll and witty self-awareness. In his autumn years, and all too briefly, Kilmer showed us his real star quality.
