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Ariana Grande has been in the spotlight for more than half of her life. In an interview with YouTube personality Sally this week, the Wicked star got very candid about what that has felt like, specifically how it feels to constantly have strangers evaluating and judging her body. And, in a super honest moment, she had a simple message for people who do that.
“There’s a comfortability people have with commenting on that [my body] that I think is really dangerous. And I think it’s dangerous for all parties involved,” she said, as her Wicked co-star, Cynthia Erivo, held the singer’s hand and comforted her as she appeared on the verge of tears while answering a question about the struggle for women to live up to society’s exacting, often unreasonable, beauty standards
“I’ve been kind of doing this in front of the public and kind of been a specimen in a petri dish since I was 16 or 17, so I have heard it all,” Grande said. “I’ve heard every version of it… of what’s wrong with me. And then you fix it, and then it’s wrong for different reasons. But that’s everything from – even just the simplest thing – your appearance, you know?”
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Grande, 31, said it’s hard to protect yourself from that noise and it’s uncomfortable no matter where you experience such pressures. “Even if you go to Thanksgiving dinner, and someone’s granny says, ‘Oh my God, you look skinnier! What happened?’ or ‘You look heavier! What happened?’” she said. “That is something that’s uncomfortable and horrible no matter where it’s happening… and I think in today’s society there’s a comfortability that we shouldn’t have, at all, commenting on other’s looks, appearance, what they think is going on behind the scenes, or health, or how they present themselves.”
Getting animated, Grande said those kinds of judgements about what women are wearing and how their bodies and faces look are “dangerous.” She counted herself lucky to have a good support system that allows her to “know and trust that I am beautiful… but I do know what the pressure of that noise feels like… I just don’t invite it in anymore. It’s not welcome. I have work to do. I have a life to live. I have friends to love on, I have so much love and it’s not invited.”
She added that however you have to block that noise out, whether it’s deleting a toxic social app or blocking trolls online, “you keep yourself safe. Because no one has the right to say s–t!”
The latter comment drew a clap from host Sally, as well as an “amen” seconded by Erivo. “Can you tell I needed that today?” Grande said with a smile as Erivo grabbed her arm and displayed yet another example of the way the two women have openly supported and big-upped each other during the exhaustive press tour in support of the hit movie musical which has already rolled up $372.9 million in ticket sales so far.
Grande has spoken before about fans’ concerns over her appearance, including in a TikTok video last year in which she had similar thoughts about people’s concerns about her body.
“I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies — no matter what. If you think you’re saying something good or well-intentioned, whatever it is. Healthy, unhealthy, big, small, this, that, sexy, not sexy, I don’t… We just shouldn’t. We should really work towards not doing that as much,” she said at the time.
“But I also just wanted to say one, there are many different kinds of beautiful,” she added. “There are many different ways to look healthy and beautiful. I know personally for me, the body that you’ve been comparing my current body to was the unhealthiest version of my body. I was on a lot of anti-depressants, and drinking on them and eating poorly, and at the lowest point of my life when I looked the way you consider my ‘healthy.’ But that, in fact, wasn’t my healthy. I know I shouldn’t have to explain that, but I do feel like maybe having an openness and some sort of vulnerability here, something good might come from it.”
Check out Grande and Erivo’s interview with Sally below.
Though the studio surely hopes that many people appreciate Timothée Chalamet‘s deep dive into his role as a young Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic about the folk bard in A Complete Unknown, the 28-year-old star said he has gotten the only thumbs up he needs. “Floored,” Chalamet tweeted on Thursday morning (Dec. 5) after […]
Amy Adams has always liked and appreciated Taylor Swift‘s music. But then the Nightbitch star went to see the Eras Tour, she proudly became “a Swiftie at 50,” the star told Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday’s (Dec. 3) Tonight Show. “I’m a Swiftie at 50, so I’m like a shifty 50 Swiftie… and I’m like ‘isn’t that nifty?’ And now my daughter’s going, ‘Ooh, I hate this for you.’”
Adams said the Eras experience was so profound that she went from “normal” to “‘I’ll take all the friendship bracelets!’”
When Fallon asked if Adams had ever met the singer, the Golden Globe winner said they did cross paths years ago at an awards show afterparty, where they sang karaoke together. In fact, they did a duet on 4 Non Blondes’ signature 1993 hit “What’s Up,” during Adams committed the ultimate karaoke faux pas.
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“And I may have… uh… sang it a little loud,” Adams admitted. “And I’m sure everybody was like, ‘Amy, shut up! Like, we want to hear Taylor sing.’ I was just in it.”
“The one that goes ‘hey, yeah, yeah, yeah’? You went for it? That one?” Fallon asked.
“I did,” Adams said. “When someone does that at karaoke I let them go,” Fallon said.
“But I should have sat down and just let Taylor sing,” Adams realized. “I had a blast. Now, in reflection, if I were to do it now I’d be so different I would like to think… I did the right thing. I sang really loud over Taylor Swift… and probably not great, either.”
Fallon also mentioned that there’s a long-running internet campaign suggesting that the six-time Oscar nominee would be the perfect choice to play Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, in a biopic. “Uh, that would be amazing,” said Adams, whose red hair is a shade darker than Paine’s signature flame mane. Fallon then help up a tweet that said “Amy Adams will win an Oscar for Tree Paine’s biopic.”
“That would be so fun,” said Adams, mother to a 14-year-old daughter who (see above) she noted is now not embarrassed by her mom, but more embarrassed for her mom. “If it got me closer to Taylor then that would be fun,” Adams said.
Adams’ Nightbitch opens in theaters on Friday (Dec. 6).
Watch Amy Adams describe shouting over Taylor Swift during karaoke below.
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Henry Cavill isn’t the only big name attached to Amazon MGM Studios’ forthcoming Voltron movie.
Spotted on Deadline, Sterling K. Brown, Rita Ora, and John Kim have joined the cast of Amazon MGM Studios’ mysterious Voltron movie, based on the popular 80s anime cartoon.
Like with the announcement of Cavill and Daniel Quinn-Toye being a part of the film, Brown, Ora, and Kim’s roles in the upcoming film remain a mystery.
The film will be directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also penned the script alongside Ellen Shanman. No details about the film’s plot were shared, but he did promise fans at Votlcon that his movie would keep the same energy as the classic cartoon.
“I want to make sure that we stay true to the heart and the spirit of Voltron. In this film, we’re going to be introducing an entirely new generation of pilots,” Huber said. “We’ve reimagined Voltron for the live-action world, but we’re going to stay true to … those iconic elements that you love, that I love. And I’m so excited to share it with you.”
The Voltron film isn’t the first new reimagining of the classic cartoon; Netflix’s 2016 animated series, Voltron: Legendary Defender from Dreamworks Animation, ran for 8 seasons and was a hit with fans of the giant fighting robot.
So, let the speculation begin. Fans have already been wondering who Cavill would play. Our guess would be Prince Lotor or maybe Keith, the leader of the Voltron Force, driver of the mighty black lion, and the one who forms the head.
As for Sterling K. Brown, we have no clue who he could be. Rita Ora, we can see her as Princess Allura.
We shall see.
Cynthia Erivo had some gratitude to share on Friday morning (Nov. 22) as she and Wicked co-star Ariana Grande reached the end of an exhaustive, full-court-press media tour promoting the first part of the Broadway-to-big-screen musical.
“This journey has been long, and paved with bright, yellow brick. We have laughed and cried, held hands and walked side by side, our lives intertwined, and because of that, we were irrevocably changed for good,” the Emmy, Grammy and Tony-winning singer/actress wrote in an Instagram post about the yearslong process of bringing the beloved Broadway re-telling of The Wizard of Oz onto movie screens.
With the film finally opening on Friday, Erivo opened up about the transformative experience of slipping into Elphaba’s green makeup and round glasses, confiding that this was more than just a role for her. “We gained more than a movie. We gained a love letter to love, friendship, the celebration of the things that make us different, special, and beautiful, and the bravery it takes to change your mind,” she said before offering targeted shout-outs to the movie’s key players, including her own character.
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“Elphaba, Thank you for the gifts you have brought me,” she wrote before heaping praise on Grande’s Glinda. “Galinda/ Glinda/ Ariana Grande-Butera, I love you. You are the truest, kindest, human being. It has been an honor to share this experience of a lifetime with you,” she added; Grande is credited with what she’s called her “little girl name” in the movie’s credits, which is how she was referred to when she first saw the Wicked musical on Broadway as a 10-year-old.
She also thanked her “dear captain,” director Jon M. Chu, for “your trust and your belief, your heart and imagination. You lead us with love and it is all over that screen.” And, as for the many fans who’ve been waiting three long years for the movie — which has been in development with a variety of directors and actors attached to it for nearly 15 years — to open after several delays, including one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Erivo wrote, “Wicked is now yours, from us with love. Your Elphie.”
The post included a number of photos from set, a time-lapse video of the intensive Elphaba makeup process, choreography rehearsals and moving behind-the-scenes snaps, including one of Erivo laying her head on Grande’s shoulder.
The second part of Wicked is slated to open on Nov. 21, 2025 and a Wicked sing-along is slated to his theaters this Christmas.
Check out Erivo’s post below.
Cynthia Erivo is doing a lot of press to promote her turn as Elphaba in Wicked. And in addition to always showing up for her interviews wearing an outrageously fierce outfit, the singer/actress is also sporting her signature long, lacquered fingernails.
Which brings us to this week’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, in which the actor asked Erivo the one question he thought everyone was dying to ask, but only he was uncouth enough to actually throw out there: how do you wipe with those long nails?
“Can I see your hands?” Shepard asked Erivo. “I couldn’t tell if it was your nails were so long or if you were wearing some kind of hand thing.” Once Erivo assured him that nothing was going on with her hands and that she just naturally has “very long fingers” and that her nails happen to be “very long” right now, the Buddy Games star wondered if he could ask a “really crazy question [that’s] inappropriate.”
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“Go on,” Erivo told him.
“When you’re wiping your butt…” he began as Erivo laughed, “I knew you would ask that question.”
“Everyone’s afraid to ask it,” Shepard responded. “No, no one’s afraid to ask it!” Erivo responded. “Everybody asks that question, and my answer is nobody uses just their fingers to wipe their backside. You use tissue, correct? And you wipe!”
“I guess my question is does the tissue go on the tip of the fingernails or do you try to get the tissue…,” Shepard asked, getting into the nitty gritty of the toileting habits of the actress who is an Oscar short of becoming an EGOT winner.
“Pads of the fingers,” Erivo confirmed.
“Great, great, great, we’re getting somewhere,” a somewhat embarrassed-sounding Shepard responded as he tried to get things back on track before his baser instincts bubbled up one more time. “And then you’re just feeling a little tickle of the nails on the crack of your butt sometimes?”
Erivo once again promised him that that was not the case, because the tissue is on the job, which led to Shepard — who said in 2021 that he and wife Kristen Bell sometimes don’t bathe their daughters for “five, six days” — proposing that if he had such formidable talons he would wrap his whole hand in TP to make a kind of bathroom “mitten.”
Showing remarkable patience, Erivo explained, “I fold.” Saying she was not offended by the question, but rather “annoyed,” she added, “I get it, but also, I’m a functioning adult and I’ve never walked around smelling like… you know… Here’s the thing, there are people who do not have nails who need to check how they’re wiping.”
The first part of Wicked opens in theaters on Friday (Nov. 22).
Listen to Erivo talk about nailing it in the loo below.
While Timothée Chalamet won’t say he went full method during the shoot for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, the 28-year-old Dune star literally says he lost sleep over fears that he would lose even a “moment of discovery of the character.”
In a new Rolling Stone cover story, Chalamet describes the five years of prep work he did to play the folk rock icon in the film due out on Dec. 25, which included subsuming his not insignificant Hollywood star reality in order to crawl into the enigmatic singer/songwriter’s skin as a young man on the cusp of greatness.
“Losing a moment of discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds — because I was on my phone or because of any distraction. I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him,” Chalamet told the magazinbe. “So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!”
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Instead of the four months of prep Chalamet was supposed to have for the shoot, he ended up getting nearly half a decade to ruminate over the part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s Hollywood strikes. In that time, he went from a hip-hop head who knew very little about Dylan to a self-proclaimed “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob,” working with vocal, harmonica, guitar and dialect coaches so that he could credibly sing and play entire songs live on set.
His co-stars in the film all attest to the intense focus Chalamet brought to the role, with Oscar nominee Edward Norton — who plays Dylan’s hero folk singer Pete Seeger — calling the star’s performance “off-the-charts great.” Elle Fanning, 26, a fellow child actor who’s been a Dylan fan since director Cameron Crowe introduced her to the Bard’s work when she was 13, said playing Dylan’s early love interest activist Sylvie Russo was an emotional experience.
“We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists,” she said about tearing up the first time she heard Chalamet sing on set. “[Director] Jim [Mangold] would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.”
The actress also recalled how after the gobsmacking performance she heard some extras having a debate about whether Chalamet was really singing or lip synching. “I tapped them on the shoulder and I was like, ‘He is singing. I know he’s singing!,’” she said. And though she knew Chalamet well after they played a couple in the 2019 film A Rainy Day in New York, Fanning said she was warned early on that her co-star might “keep to himself” on set except in scenes with her.
That might explain why Monica Barbaro, who plays another Dylan paramour, folk singer Joan Baez, wasn’t surprised when she met Chalamet a week before shooting began and he was already dressed in his character’s clothes. “I had a lot of friends who were like, ‘Have you met him yet? Have you met him?,’” she said. “But it just felt like the right thing to wait and just meet in the context of these characters… the way she saw Bob.”
Though Chalamet didn’t go so far as to insist the cast and crew refer to him as “Bob,” Barbaro said he did stay “in his own world” in the same way that the real Dylan seems to inhabit a different universe than the rest of us. “He was relentless,” said Norton of Chalamet’s focus on set. “No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people. And I agreed totally — it was like, we cannot have a f–king audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
Chalamet still has not met or talked to the real Dylan, but he’s well aware that playing the mythical musical hero who was considered the Chosen One of folk rock is in keeping with one of his other recent roles as the golden child Paul Atreides in two Dune films. “The massive difference in the framing is, for Paul Atreides, the destiny is preordained, and it’s part of his resentment for his status. He feels like it had nothing to do with him, in a sense. And it’s a great source of existential strain,” said Chalamet. “And for Bob, it’s the mischievous joy in knowing, yeah, your talent, your special ability is your own doing, your own gift from God in a sense. I think there’s probably always a pride in that for him.”
Okay, but why, then, is Chalamet drawn to these voice of a generation savior roles? “Hey, man,” he laughed, “they’re finding me. Not the other way around.”
The first trailer for the upcoming Beatles 64 documentary chronicling the band’s arrival on U.S. shores six decades ago captures the hysteria that greeted John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all those years ago.
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The nearly two-and-a-half-minute clip opens with black and white footage of the band doing bits on a train ride before cutting to footage of McCartney wailing on a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” The film directed by David Tedeschi (Personality Crisis: One Night Only) and produced by Martin Scorsese will premiere on Disney+ on Nov. 29.
The doc folds in footage shot by famed documentarians Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter), as well as new interviews with living members McCartney and Starr, as well as with Smokey Robinson, Motown founder Berry Gordy and the late Ronnie Spector. “We’re in America! America!,” Starr says enthusiastically to Scorsese at one point in describing the Beatles’ exuberance about making their trip across the Atlantic. Cue archival footage of Ringo raving about arriving in New York only to be told he’s actually in Washington, D.C.
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“It was like being in the eye of the hurricane. It was happening to us and it was hard to see,” Lennon says in voiceover in the film that includes footage of the band’s first American concert. The trip included, of course, the Fab Four’s historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, where more than 73 million people tuned in to what would be the big bang of Beatlemania in the U.S.
A synopsis of the film reads: “On February 7, 1964, The Beatles arrived in New York City to unprecedented excitement and hysteria. From the instant they landed at Kennedy Airport, met by thousands of fans, Beatlemania swept New York and the entire country. Their thrilling debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show captivated more than 73 million viewers, the most watched television event of its time. Beatles ’64 presents the spectacle, but also tells a more intimate behind the scenes story, capturing the camaraderie of John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they experienced unimaginable fame.”
Director Tedeschi told Rolling Stone that the doc features more than 17 minutes of never-seen-before footage — mostly from the Maysles — with the music produced by Giles Martin. He said the movie covers the three week period the Beatles were in America, from their arrival in New York, where they stay four four or five days, before moving on to Washington and then Miami. The Washington show at D.C. Coliseum was the Beatles’ first-ever arena concert, with Tedeschi promising that the Martin-restored sound on the D.C. gig has made it sound “better than it ever has.”
“There’s footage from the Maysleses all the way through, but there’s other stuff. We had a great researcher who found a lot of local Miami footage from local archives — a lot of footage was buried, and he really had to go digging in order to find it. So that’s exciting,” the director said of the cleaned-up tape that was remastered by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Studios, which did the same for Jackson’s Get Back Beatles series.
In a fresh interview, McCartney notes that the Beatles’ visit came shortly after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, speculating that “maybe American needed something like the Beatles to be lifted out of sorrow.”
Watch the Beatles 64 trailer below
On her promotional run for the movie musical Wicked, Ariana Grande has been talking a lot about how her starring role as Glinda is the gig of a lifetime. And while the singer has said she’s been basically prepping for this moment since she was in the single digits, that doesn’t mean she is taking it all so, so seriously.
Which might explain why on Thursday night (Nov. 14) when she dropped by The Tonight Show to talk up the movie that will hit theaters on Nov. 22, she was happy to have a bit of fun with one of the most beloved Wizard of Oz memes of all-time. In a clip posted a few hours before airtime captioned “Ariana Grande’s sister is a witch,” Grande and Fallon recreated the 2018 “THE WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST, BRO!” clip in which two men have a seriously heated discussion about whether Glinda the Good Witch is a princess or not.
In Ari’s hands, she is the overheated bro yelling, “Hold on, hold on, hold on. Her sister was a witch, right? And what was her sister? A princess, the wicked witch of the east, bro. You’re gonna look at me and you’re gonna tell me that I’m wrong? Am I wrong? She wore a crown and she came down in a bubble, Doug. Grow up bro, grow up.”
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Grande sold it like a champ, coming at Fallon hard while wearing a flowing pink gown as he stared at her in disbelief.
The singer later sat down with Fallon — with the long train on her ruffled dress taking up the rest of the couch — to talk about the movie, as well as her super-viral bit from her SNL hosting stint last month in which purposely, and hilariously, sang off-key in a sketch sending up Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.”
Asked if it was hard to sing off-key, Grande said it was “really fun. I really enjoyed it… it was a bit we found in the moment.” Grande said she pitched it the writers, asking if it would be funnier if her vocals got “progressively worse” as the bit went on. Speaking of SNL, Grande also talked about helping to get current cast superstar Bowen Yang a spot in Wicked, calling his performance as Pfannee “absolutely brilliant… he killed it.”
She then recreated the call she had with SNL major domo Lorne Michaels — including a spot-on impersonation of the show boss’ dry persona — in which she nervously asked him if he could spare Yang. “In that moment I realized I don’t have what it takes to get this to happen,” Grande said. “But I did beg,” she added, describing how Yang would fly back-and-forth between SNL and the Wicked set to be a part of the two-part film.
Grande has already spoken quite a bit about how she was willing to put everything else on hold when she heard that director Jon M. Chu was turning the Broadway sensation into a movie musical, saying she knew she had to “earn” the part and was willing to put her music career on hold to prepare for the role she’d coveted since she was a girl.
Ready to take “all” the acting and singing lessons to train her voice to become a coloratura soprano, Grande recalled that she got huge support from Fallon as she was preparing to audition, which was also when she was recording the video for her collaboration with Jimmy on his holiday song “It Was a… (Masked Christmas),” also featuring Megan Thee Stallion.
Even with all the mental preparation she did beforehand, Grande said getting cast along with Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba sent her into overdrive. “When they called me to tell me I had the part, I had one heart attack,” Grande said. “That was the first one. And then they told me I was going to be playing opposite Cynthia Erivo, that was the second heart attack. And then I died and I’m dead. And I’m dead here. And I’m still dead.”
She also brought along a never-before-seen video of her first rehearsal for the show-stopping swinging chandelier bit in which she almost booted a stunt coordinator in the face as she flew around in circles.
Watch Grande on the Tonight Show below.
Grimes needs your help. The singer recently put out a call to her fans in search of assistance in tracking down one of her cinematic idols. In a series of posts on X, the “Shinigami Eyes” star asked her followers for advice on getting in contact with director Quentin Tarantino. Explore See latest videos, charts […]