Latest news with #TheWestWing
7NEWS
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- 7NEWS
Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness: Is Hugh's ‘good man' image in tatters?
Hugh Jackman is meant to be one of the good ones. That's his whole thing. He's a husband man. He's a music man. He's a good man. In the third ever episode of The West Wing, press secretary C.J. Cregg, in a moment of frustration, said, 'I don't care what it is, I care what it looks like'. That's her job. Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today The façade of celebrity enabled by a publicity machine means no one ever really knows when it comes to famous people, only what it looks like. Timothee Chalamet looks like he's fun, Gwyneth Paltrow looks like she's a woo-woo queen, Tom Hanks looks like a top bloke. If you Google 'celebrities with good reputations', Jackman is right up top. What it looks like is more potent than what it is. That's why Jackman's soon-to-be ex-wife Deborra-Lee Furness's statement this week, after she officially filed for divorce, has the potential to damage his career. 'My heart and compassion goes out to anyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal. It is a profound wound that cuts deep,' she said. Furness never used the words infidelity or cheating, and betrayal can encompass many things, but the implication is clear. Every woman has either been cheated on or knows another woman who has felt the sting of deception from the person they trusted the most. It's a sensitive topic, triggering terrible memories of empty nights in an emotional black hole, or of nursing their friend through the darkness. Women remember. The same day as Furness's statement, Jackman posted a video of himself doing a skip rope routine scored to NSYNC's Bye, Bye, Bye with the caption 'FINALLY'. Textually, if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, the video is clipped from his Hugh Jackman: From New York with Love show at Radio City Hall. It's been running since the start of the year and he has struggled to nail that particular part of the performance, fubbing his moves or losing the beat. So, to finally get through must be exhilarating. Subtextually? Ooph. Jackman is a smart guy. He knows what it looks like. And it looks like he's trolling his ex-wife. Loading Instagram Post No one knows what happens in someone else's relationship and the factors that go into any marriage breakdown are complex. It's rarely simple, it's rarely one-sided. The only people who know what really happened are Jackman and Furness, and they too will have different versions of the same experience. But that's what it is, not what it looks like. Intentionally or not, one of the foundations of Jackman's career is that he's one of the good ones. He embodies romantic ideals – he can flex out as Wolverine and do an impressive amount of bench presses but is just as comfortable singing showtunes, flashing his big smile, having a laugh and going home to his wife. Jackman's charismatic masculinity is an effortless one, and heterosexual women find that extremely appealing in a world where so many men feel the need to perform a certain type of manhood. Crucial to his reputation, to the ability of female audiences to impose their fantasies about him on to him, has been his and Furness's love story. The pair met in 1995 on the set of Correlli, a 10-episode ABC series in which Furness played a prison psychologist and he portrayed an armed robber with whom she becomes romantically involved. They weren't Harley Quinn and the Joker, but the illicitness of the relationship fuelled the heat. Off-screen, he immediately found himself drawn to her, but it took him weeks before he worked up the nerves to confess his crush. 'I knew very early, I knew before Deb knew. Even when she tried to break up with me, I knew,' he told the Aussies in Hollywood podcast in 2018. 'I'm a very indecisive person, Deb really knows this about me, I can count on my hand the amount of times in my life anything has felt that clear to me, and when it happens it's such a relief.' He proposed four months later and they were married in April, 1996. In 2000 and 2005, they adopted their two kids, Oscar and Ava. When they met, Furness was the bigger name. She had been working steadily in the Australian screen industry since she was a kid with roles in The Flying Doctors, Kings and Neighbours and he was fresh out of drama school. After guest spots in local TV shows including Blue Heelers, Australian films Erskineville Kings and Paperback Hero and roles on stage in Beauty and the Beast, Sunset Boulevard and Oklahoma, he got his big international break when he was cast in X-Men in 2000. The movie was a huge hit and Jackman's turn as the gruff but upstanding Wolverine/Logan was noticed by everyone. His star was ascendant and his name was circulating among Hollywood casting directors. He made three movies that were released the following year: action thriller Swordfish, and rom-coms Kate & Leopold and Someone Like You. Opposite Meg Ryan and Ashley Judd, he played the romantic heroes, one an impoverished 19th century duke who time travels to 21st century New York City, and the other, a womanising TV producer who changes his stripes. While both films are minor works in the rom-com canon, Jackman was beguiling, and persuaded an international audience that he had shades beyond being a mutant superhero. The rom-com would not end up being one of his favourite spaces to play in. In addition to that pair of 2001 movies, he only made two other pure play rom-coms – Paperback Hero with Claudia Karvan in 1999 and Scoop opposite Scarlett Johansson in 2006. While most of Jackman's screen work has been in dramas, thrillers, action movies, many of them male-skewering fare including Chappie, The Front Runner, and 10 X-Men movies, he has still played the romantic lead in a slate of films that leveraged the goodwill of female audiences towards him. These included Australia, The Fountain, Reminiscence, Les Miserables and The Greatest Showman. The musicals are really interesting because Jackman's talents are so entrenched with his ability to entertain with his singing and dancing, and he has created a whole sub-ecosystem with that aspect of his persona. The Greatest Showman netted $US459 million off the back of a relatively $US84 million production budget partly because of repeated viewings from superfans. The movie opened in the US on soft numbers but word-of-mouth among fans pushed it to great heights. Significantly, that opening weekend in the US, 73 per cent of the audience were women. Depending on the country and the report, statistics for what percentage a live theatre audience is women vary, but the lowest estimate is 65 per cent. When it comes to deciding what show someone is going to splash out big money on, it's women who are calling the shots. Jackman needs women on his side. Post-COVID, he has only released two films, Florian Zeller's domestic drama The Son and the Marvel extravaganza Deadpool & Wolverine. He has three movies in post-production, including an action epic in which he plays Robin Hood. What he's been spending a lot of time doing instead is theatre. He did The Music Man on Broadway from late 2021 to early 2023, and now his Hugh Jackman: From New York with Love shows, which is playing sporadically until October. He's also currently doing a drama production off-Broadway, Hannah Moscovitch's Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, in which he plays a middle-aged university professor who engages in an affair with one of his students. The show runs until mid-June and it is all but sold out. For the 400-seat venue, only a handful tickets remain across the shows combined, and they cost between $US297 and $US400. So, at least for this production, Jackman's personal dramas haven't affected sales. There are still tickets available for his remaining Radio City gigs, skip rope routine and all. He and Furness were together for 27 years when they separated, which was announced in September 2023, nine months after The Music Man ended its run. Within two months, rumours flew that he and his The Music Man co-star, Sutton Foster, had an affair during the production, and that was the reason for his marriage break-up. In October 2024, Foster filed for divorce from husband Ted Griffin. Jackman and Foster were first photographed holding hands in public in early January 2025, and by the end of the month, she was at the opening night of Hugh Jackman: From New York with Love. Whether Jackman will take a direct financial hit to his career remains to be seen. Stanley Tucci cheated on his first wife, Kathryn Spath, with co-star Edie Falco before going back to Spath, but we still love him. Ewan McGregor bounced back after allegations of a crossover between his split from first wife Eve Mavrakis and the start of his relationship with Fargo co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Brad Pitt is still riding high after the controversial, allegedly violent way his marriage to Angelina Jolie ended, a relationship that started with his infidelity to then-wife Jennifer Aniston. There's a study from a US company called the National Research Group that surveys 3000 audiences about actors that they would go to a cinema to see in a movie, and Pitt came in fourth in 2024. Jackman didn't make the top 25 but his Deadpool & Wolverine co-star Ryan Reynolds was fifth. Jackman and Pitt's stardom are hinged on different things. Pitt's 'heartthrob' status works differently to Jackman's. Since he's been in the public eye, Pitt has been attached to a bunch of women including Christina Applegate, Juliette Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow as well as Aniston and Jolie. Jackman was always a one-woman man, and to a woman who is 13 years older than him. His female fans like that. Foster is only six years younger than Jackman but she's 19 years younger than Furness. Take a straw poll among the women in your life and ask them if, today, they like Jackman a little less. Don't be surprised at their answers. Whatever happened between him and Furness is, technically, their personal business. But his reputation as a good man, a wife guy who had posted effusive messages about his missus, is a business, so, it's not what it is, it's what it looks like.
The Hindu
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Seth Rogen's The Studio and its ambitious usage of the ‘oner'
In a promotional behind-the-scenes interview conducted on the sets of the Apple TV+ comedy series The Studio (co-developed by and starring Seth Rogen), actress Kathryn Hahn says, 'Seth (Rogen) and Evan (Goldberg) had this really ambitious plan to shoot most of the show as 'oners', y'know, one-shots, long uninterrupted takes with no cuts. As an actor, it makes everything more challenging but also more beautiful because with every scene you feel like you're in a play.' Rogen plays the lead character Matt Remick, a perpetually hassled studio head. He is genuinely in love with the movies but tries to balance that impulse with the bottom line-driven demands of his corporate paymasters. The show has been universally acclaimed not only for its satire but also, as Hahn points out, the ambitious usage of 'oners'. Essentially, Rogen and Co. have expanded the scope of the Aaron Sorkin-esque 'walk-and-talk' sequences popularised by 2000s TV mainstays such as The West Wing, Scrubs and Boston Legal (all 'workplace stories' like The Studio). The walk-and-talk typically takes place in a narrow corridor (at the hospital, law firm, etc.) and focuses on the lead characters. As they walk towards the camera, other characters flit in and out of the frame. The Studio executes the same idea, only the camera isn't right in the leads' faces, like it would be in a classic 'walk-and-talk' 20 years ago. The camera is equally interested in showing us the world around Matt and whoever he is talking to in a scene, weaving and bobbing in and out of the characters' immediate vicinity. After all, a movie set is a more colourful workplace than a hospital or a law firm or, well, the White House. The Studio's oners utilise this rather well, all the way through the show's 10 episodes. The second episode, in fact, is called 'The Oner', and follows Matt as he attempts to help Sarah Polley (playing herself) shoot a oner for her (fictional) film in the show. In the here and now The oner has, historically speaking, been a point of prestige for filmmakers and actors, a show of strength that underlines the technical skills of everybody involved. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) is considered one of the first major films to deploy the oner. In those days, a single reel of film was only capable of carrying around 20 minutes of footage. Four reels, four oners — Hitchcock used lighting and editing tricks to make it look like the film consisted of four long takes. The story follows two friends who kill a mutual acquaintance and then host a dinner party with the corpse hidden in the house. The oners elevate the sense of tension the audience feels, watching two murderers trying to get away with it, while the corpse rests right under their noses. Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil (1958) famously begins with a oner, where we see an unidentified man placing a bomb inside a car. Martin Scorsese takes the audience on a oner-trip through the Copacabana nightclub in his mob classic Goodfellas (1990) (Scorsese, incidentally, plays a tragicomic version of himself in the first episode of The Studio). Robert Altman, John Woo, Alfonso Cuaron et al — in every era, major filmmakers have used the oner to emphasise the 'here and now' nature of specific scenes, or just as a showcase for technical virtuosity. The last decade of oners, however, has been inspired by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman (2014) — the film has been shot and edited in such a way that all of it looks like one big oner, a 110-minute shot if you will. Leading up to 'Adolescence' Other than The Studio, there have been two TV shows this decade that have used the oner in inventive, formally ambitious ways. The first is the Marvel TV show Daredevil (2015), where the first season features several hand-to-hand combat scenes shot as oners. The pick of the lot is a hallway fight scene where Daredevil/ Matt Murdoch rescues a kidnapped child after fighting his way through a corridor jampacked with goons — the lighting is inspired from a famous scene in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003), where the protagonist beats up a corridor full of goons with a hammer. The second TV innovator in this context is the recent, excellent British miniseries Adolescence, about a 13-year-old boy arrested following the murder of a girl from his school. Each of the four episodes of Adolescence is shot like a oner — no editing tricks this time, just a single uninterrupted take. There's a 12 Angry Men-like unreliable narrator edge to the drama in Adolescence, and at their best, the long takes amplify the audience's unease. I love the first and second episodes' usage of the one-shot but also feel that by the time the fourth episode winds down, the novelty value of the device wanes. Oners are great when done expertly, but because of the technical task at hand, creators run the risk of focusing too much on shot-mechanics and too little on the narrative. Thankfully, The Studio understands this only too well and takes care not to use its signature device indiscriminately, or without a clear purpose. The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
Los Angeles Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Elisabeth Moss on ‘The Handmaid's Tale' finale moment that gave her chills
Red cloaks. Stiff white bonnets. Bent heads. If there's a single image that Hulu's 'The Handmaid's Tale' leaves audiences with as it ends its six-season run this week, it's this one: That of women in a dystopian anti-America called Gilead, evolving from anonymous sexual slaves into rebels, warriors and, sometimes, survivors. But for 'Handmaid's' creator Bruce Miller and star Elisabeth Moss, who also directed several episodes in the final season, the series, based on the 1985 book by Margaret Atwood, was never about what the women wore. It was about the women inside the color-coded uniforms. 'June started out as a normal person, a mom, a wife,' says Moss, whose other long-running roles include 'The West Wing' and 'Mad Men.' She won an Emmy for playing the 'Handmaid's' title character in 2017, the same year the show took home the first drama series prize for a streaming show. 'Then [June] had to shut down and become something that I don't think she wasn't proud of,' Moss continues. 'But I feel she comes out of that into a place of true heroism, where she is able to be herself, be generous, forgive, inspire other people, lead — but also be vulnerable, ask questions, not know everything.' Miller, who stepped back from showrunning duties for the final season, with Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang taking over, especially wanted to ensure that as a man, he was telling a female-forward story from the female point of view — both in the writers' room and on camera. 'I'm very mindful of the fact that I'm a boy, and who do I think I am?' he says, adding that winning the Emmy boosted his confidence in being a man telling a story about women's rights. (The series has 15 Emmys total.) 'Definitely, when you win an Emmy it helps you feel a bit less like you have one penis over the limit.' Knowing that, Miller says he centered the story on June and Moss alike, adjusting camera angles to focus on her point of view — but lowered to an eye level that corresponded with the actress' 5-foot-3 height. 'The crowd scenes get much more scary' when you do that, he says. 'I want to see the world not just through June's eyes — but also Lizzie's eyes, as much as she's able to show me those things.' Meanwhile, Moss used roles as executive producer and director to focus on the show's look and how June came across on camera. Frequently, she's shown smoldering with fury or dark intent, gazing up from under her brows with a lowered chin, something Moss says she lifted from Stanley Kubrick's films. 'That is 'Clockwork Orange,'' she says. 'I am certainly not the first person to do that look.' But she might be one of very few actresses to convey it onscreen. 'It's definitely not something women do [on camera],' she says. 'Women aren't allowed to get angry. [June] uses her anger and weaponizes it at so many points during the show — and by the final season, she knows when to do that and when not to.' The journey June, Elisabeth and 'Handmaid's' have been on began at an uncomfortably synergistic time in American politics: Amid the airing of a series about women subject to state regulation of their bodily autonomy, real-world politicians were successfully rolling back women's reproductive rights. In 2018, protestors began showing up at real-world events in those handmaid-red cloaks and white bonnets, putting the show in an unexpected spotlight. 'Art does have an impact,' says Moss about that kind of a response, but suggests that repurposing the show's images, outfits or story in service of real-world politics misses a key element of the series. 'I don't think any of us necessarily set out, when you're making a TV show, to [make a political statement], because that's the wrong way to go about it. You're telling this one woman's story. … It's always been 'The Handmaid's Tale,' her story.' That's one reason why after six seasons the series chose to end as it did: With June back in the house where it all began, starting her memoirs — 'The Handmaid's Tale.' When Miller pitched that final episode script, Moss says it made her cry. 'I love the idea that at the end is when she starts to tell the story that is the book, and the circular nature of that gives me chills,' she says. 'The fact that she realizes that she has to tell it because it wasn't all bad.' But the ending also does one more thing: It shows how little is truly resolved. June's daughter Hannah is still trapped in Gilead, for example. And fans of the series know the action will pick up 15 years later when 'The Testaments,' based on a 2019 sequel by Atwood and now in production, begins airing. (Moss won't say whether she'll cameo.) So this is an ending — just not the ending. Now, the story leaves off, still focused on the woman who escaped the bonnet and cloak and not about the trappings of her enslavement. 'For me, the ending is perfect,' says Moss. 'I also don't feel like it is an ending. The war is not over. June's journey is not over.'
Time Out
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Lights Out: Nat 'King' Cole
Coming off two successive Oscar nominations for acting in film, Coleman Domingo returns to his stage roots as the co-author—with director Patricia McGregor—of a biodrama that examines a pivotal night in the life of the pioneering Black recording artist and TV star Nat "King" Cole. Dulé Hill (The West Wing) plays Cole and Daniel J. Watts (Tina) plays Sammy Davis Jr.; the ace supporting cast includes Krystal Joy Brown, Kenita Miller, Kathy Fitzgerald, Christopher Ryan Grant, Ruby Lewis, Elliott Mattox, Mekhi Richardson and Walter Russell III. Cole standards such as 'Nature Boy,' 'Smile' and 'Unforgettable" are newly arranged by musical supervisor John McDaniel, and Edgar Godineaux and Jared Grimes step in as the choreographers.
Indianapolis Star
22-05-2025
- Automotive
- Indianapolis Star
Meet IndyStar motorsports insider Nathan Brown
It takes a staff of dedicated journalists to bring you the news from around Central Indiana. In this feature, the Indianapolis Star introduces readers to our newsroom staff — or, rather, we let them introduce themselves. Up this week is motorsports insider Nathan Brown. I'm IndyStar's motorsports insider, and I primarily cover the entire IndyCar schedule, along with all the major events at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I started this job Sept. 30, 2019. Indianapolis 500 race day and the thrill and unpredictability of it is unlike anything else I experience or cover the entire year. It's a day where I get to be on camera for a couple hours in the morning hosting our live pre-race show, document in real time the goings-on of the largest single-day sporting event in the world and then attempt to tell the biggest story of the day in as deep and well-reported a way as possible. It turns into a 20-hour day, but the rush gets me through it. I learned at a young age that playing sports for a living wasn't going to be, but I've loved being around all sorts of sports for as long as I can remember. And I especially loved every week when I was a kid flipping through my dad's "Sports Illustrated" and experiencing first-hand the ways in which smart, witty, emotional, well-reported stories can connect people, educate readers and elicit all forms of emotion. I love going to The Garage and trying out new restaurants in there and exploring different cultures through food that way. Spending any quality time I can with my wife and our two young boys is always the best part of my days with how much I travel during the hectic six months of the IndyCar season. I have legitimately zero spare time over the next two weeks until we get past the Detroit Grand Prix, but once we get there, my wife and I will pick back up switching back and forth between watching "The West Wing" and the final season of "You." Dogs I competed in show choir competitions all four years of high school. I'd love to travel all around Europe for two to three weeks and visit as many countries and big cities as possible. For better or worse (mostly the latter), I'm a lifelong Miami Dolphins fan.
