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Everyone has that wacky aunt (or uncle) who love to tell jokes or do weird impressions at Thanksgiving. But not everyone has an aunt who also happens to be one of the most famous cartoon voice actors of all time. And for sure not everyone in that family also happens to be a chart-topping pop […]
Heather Morris paid loving tribute to her late Glee co-star Naya Rivera on the fourth anniversary of Rivera’s tragic death. In a sweet Instagram post featuring a black and white snap of the two women cuddling on a bed, Morris wrote, “I can’t believe it’s been 4 years..boy how time flies. Yet every year I’m taken by surprise how much it still hurts. We grow up together, fell apart, and came back together in such a beautiful way.”
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After going missing for six days, Rivera, 33, was found after taking a boat ride with her then four-year-old son during which she drowned while swimming. The two women worked together on six seasons of the Fox musical comedy, with Morris starring as cheerleader Brittany Pierce, whose romance with Rivera’s closeted fellow cheer teamer Santana Lopez was a fan favorite storyline. “God you’re missed so much… except I can’t shake the feeling you never left… you’re still here with us..guiding us to our highest potential,” Morris, 37, added. “I miss you Nay Nay.”
Rivera starred on Glee from 2009-2015, winning a Screen Actors Guild Award and an ALMA Award for her work on the show, as well as sharing two Grammy Award nominations with her cast mates. In addition to Glee, Rivera appeared in a number of films, including her debut in 2002’s Dana Carvey comedy The Master of Disguise, as well as 2014’s At the Devil’s Door and a posthumous voice role in 2021’s Batman: The Long Halloween.
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The singer/actress married former flame Ryan Dorsey in 2014, and they had a child together in September 2015, a year before filing for divorce; the couple reconciled, but then she refiled for divorce in December 2017. Rivera was reported missing on July 8, 2020 after the couple’s son was found alone on a rented boat in the Lake Piru reservoir in Ventura County, CA. The child told investigators that his mom went swimming and was unable to climb back on the boat before she disappeared. Rivera’s body was found by divers in the lake on July 13.
During Rivera’s disappearance, Morris helped organize search parties to help with rescue efforts, later posting an emotional tribute to her friend and former co-star that included pics of their sons playing together.
See Morris’ post below.
Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker are happy to count their blessings. In the latest episode of the Kardashians, the couple’s seven-month old son Rocky Thirteen made his reality TV debut and mom revealed the health scare she suffered last year that required emergency fetal surgery in September.
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In the episode, Kardashian reveals that the procedure was due to fluid in their son’s lungs that required immediate intervention. “We had a terrifying scare,” she explains on the show. “It’s super rare — the condition that he had — but it’s also super rare and lucky that we caught it. Thank you, God, for a successful surgery. I’m honestly just so grateful, I have no words.”
Before the discussion of Rocky’s health issues, the episode looked back to Oct. 2023, with the couple snuggled in bed dreaming about their first child together. Father of three Barker talks about his excitement for the birth, getting into specifics about the first “natural” birth he will experience. “I’m a little frightened,” he says, promising Kardashian that he will be “right there” when the blessed event takes place. “I’m gonna catch him like a basketball,” he says.
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“You can’t be down there… I don’t want you to be traumatized,” Kardashian jokes about her hubby’s wish for a bird’s eye view during the impending birth. As they prepare to go to the hospital, Barker frets about Rocky’s health, wishing that his lungs will be “perfect” and that he will be a “solid eight pounds.”
The scene then turns to a confessional in which Kardashian looks back at the scare several months earlier, pivoting to the reality star in a hospital bed after the surgery to remove fluid from Rocky’s lungs before his Nov. 1 birth.
Kardashian says she was “filled with fear” before the surgery, and then again when the symptoms came back a short time later. After watching a documentary called Heal about the power of positive thinking’s affect on health, Kourtney says she talked to the baby every day and prayed. “After I had that mindset shift, the fluid was completely gone and we had not one single problem after,” she says. “It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Everything we’ve been through to get to this moment, it just feels so surreal.”
In the end, Kardashian says, “I’m so happy in my blissful baby bubble and the love with Rocky.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt knows that sometimes a card just won’t do. Which is why the Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F star and music lover took a moment during his visit to The Tonight Show on Wednesday night (June 19) to pull out an acoustic guitar and offer his absent wife a very special tribute. Explore See […]
Camila Cabello came to The Tonight Show to play on Wednesday night (June 12), with robot dogs, ice cold stories and killer dance moves. In addition to performing her frenetic single “I Luv It” with help from blindfolded dancers, Cabello talked about her upcoming album, C, XOXO (June 28)) played a new game with host Jimmy Fallon and cleared up some rumors about her viral frozen Met Gala purse.
Cabello and Fallon reminisced about running into each other at the annual fashion fantasia earlier this year and the singer admitted that by the time she saw Jimmy she was “very drunk” because she was so stressed from what happened earlier. Fallon then pulled out a picture of Cabello’s purse from that night, which consisted of a rose frozen in a block of ice.
“I didn’t think about the fact that ice, very quickly, melts,” Cabello said. “And so I get there and it’s my worst, the nightmare situation where suddenly the clutch breaks. I think it was Ed Sheeran was there he was telling a joke or something and somebody accidentally moved it and before I get my picture taken the clutch completely breaks.”
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Cabello described being surrounded by shocked A-listers including poet Amanda Gorman, actress Rachel Sennott and model Kaia Gerber, who all gasped when the purse’s straps broke off. “This is the thing you least want to happen — a bunch of famous people looking at you having a breakdown during the line before you take your picture at the Met Gala!” So Camila said she turned to Gerber and a few others for advice, landing on the solution of converting it into a (very slippery) clutch instead.
Fallon then assured Cabello that she was “glamorously” holding the block of ice, putting up a picture of a stone-faced Camila cradling the drippy purse. Also, for the record, she threw cold water on the viral report that her purse cost $25,000. “Guys! It’s water frozen!” she yelled. “You can make it at home!”
Cabello also explained her fourth album’s title, saying the new collection is a chapter in her life that feels “personal to me and authentic to me and like signed by me. Like writing a letter to someone. This is me, like it or not.” When Jimmy asked Cabello about her writing process, after noting that she has no co-writers on this album, Cabello gave an example of her skills by busting out her phone to sing a tune she wrote for the show on her way to the studio.
The voice note featured Cabello humming lightly while she sang, “New suit, same chair, new dress, blonde hair/ We’ve seen each other through some phases/ Past lives, debuts, Met Ball, saw you/ Good to have a friend in scary places/ Jimmy-a, Jimmy-a, Jimmy alright/ They came for a show well Jimmy alright/ It’s another late night/ It’s another late night talkin’,” as an astonished Fallon looked on.
The singer came back for a round of the new game Dance Charades, in which one player wore headphones and danced to a song whose title the other player had to guess. Cabello proved to be quite adept at the game, acting out Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” while pretending to bite her arm as Fallon shimmied awkwardly to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”
Cabello came back one more time to sing “I Luv It,” the first single from her follow-up to her 2022 LP Familia, which features guest spots from Drake, Lil Nas X, Playboi Carti and City Girls. The set opened with Cabello in a silver dress, baggy leather gloves and a black blindfold with white x’s over her eyes — a spooky look her four dancers mirrored — in the high-energy performance that featured her back-up crew holding a pair of dancing Unitree robot dogs on leashes as giant fans sent their strappy costumes flying.
Watch Cabello on The Tonight Show below.
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Celine Dion was so desperate to alleviate the pain from severe muscle spasms during her secret, nearly two-decade-long battle with the rare neurological and autoimmune disease Stiff-Person Syndrome that she took near-lethal doses of Valium in search of relief. In her one-hour primetime NBC special on Tuesday night (June 11), Dion said she took up to 90 milligrams of the medication used to treat anxiety, seizures and muscle spasms, an amount that is more than twice the recommended daily dose.
“I did not know, honestly, that it could kill me. I would take, for example before a performance, 20 milligrams of Valium, and then just walking from my dressing room to backstage — it was gone,” Dion said of the instant pain relief the medication offered at levels, however that “could have been fatal” if she’d continued at that pace. “At one point, the thing is, that my body got used to it at 20 and 30 and 40 [milligrams] until it went up. And I needed that. It was relaxing my whole body. For two weeks, for a month, the show would go on… but then you get used to [and] it doesn’t work anymore.”
Dion was taking such high doses of Valium every day that, she said, the amounts, “can kill you. You can stop breathing.” The 56-year-old singer said she began to cut back on her intake during the COVID-19 pandemic when the world went into lockdown and she was unable to perform.
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Though she leaves the door open during the special that she will return to the stage this year, Dion has not performed on stage since March 2020, when the global pandemic arrived just in time to give her time away to focus on her health and wean off her dangerously high doses of Valium. “It was an opportunity for me to take a break,” she said. “Do not be brave… I stopped everything with the help of doctors. I was weaning off all the meds, and especially the bad ones. I stopped everything because it stopped working.”
Though the doctors helped her wean off the drugs, Dion noted that even that process can kill you if not done correctly. “You cannot just, like, stop everything,” she said. Another downside, she revealed, was that once she weaned off the medication her symptoms got much worse.
Dion has said that the symptoms of the chronic, incurable disorder began appearing in the mid-2000s, getting progressively worse until she finally revealed her struggle in a December 2022 announcement after cancelling her planned tour that year.
In the emotional NBC special, Dion describes being gripped by fear when the disorder’s symptoms began to affect her in 2008, affecting her mobility and causing spasms so intense they caused broken ribs and sometimes made it feel like “somebody is strangling you.” In a scary moment, she said that “anything” could trigger the painful symptoms. “Too much work, not enough work. If I sit all day long I’ll be wobbly. Walking wobbly.” Shockingly, Dion said even joyful moments could lead to pain. “Happiness, sound, a touch unexpected,” she said.
She described first noticing the symptoms of her body getting “more rigid” during a before a show in Germany on her 2008 Taking Chances world tour. “I said to my assistants and to my people, ‘I don’t know if I can do the show. I don’t know what’s happening,’” she told Kotb, sending her voice into a higher register to imitate the effects on her voice. “I was very, very, very scared. And then you panic, and the more you panic, the more you spasm. I went onstage… of course. And I started to sound more nasal.”
She said the panic led to more spasms, which forced her to lower the keys on some songs in order to gain some control over the situation, lamenting that she had to lie to her beloved fans at the time by blaming her issues on a sinus infection. During the pandemic, Dion’s team struggled to figure out what was going on, with the symptoms persisting even after she stopped performing and the singer worrying that she might be facing the end of her four-decade career.
It was at that point she began working with director Irene Taylor Brodsky on the upcoming Prime Video documentary I Am: Celine Dion (June 25) in which she vows to find a way to make it back on stage for her fans. “If I can’t run, I’ll walk,” she says in the film. “If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl… I won’t stop.” In the NBC special, Brodsky talked about seeing one of Dion’s attacks in person, saying it came on quickly and then, just as quickly, progressed in a scary fashion.
“She was giggling, and five seconds later, we were in a totally different stratosphere,” Brodsky told Kotb. “She had a cramp in her foot, and I thought, ‘That doesn’t look right.’” Then, just minutes later, Dion couldn’t talk because her body had stiffened up so badly. “It was the most extraordinary and extraordinarily uncomfortable moment in my life. As a filmmaker, but also as a mother, as a fellow human, because I didn’t know what was happening,” Brodsky said. “We were this close, and her body was enduring something that was unimaginable, and I wasn’t sure if she was aware of it, and I wasn’t sure if she was going to survive it.”
You can watch the full NBC News interview with Dion now on Peacock.
Jessica Berndt has worked in film/TV music for almost a decade, most recently as music supervisor with independent label Secretly Group. “I had a few items on [my] music supervision bucket list,” she says. “An A24 film was at the top.”
In 2021, that dream inched closer when A24 launched its own record label, A24 Music. The in-house entity partnered with Secretly Distribution to build its own catalog of musical intellectual property and ensure its releases appeared on streaming services and in record stores. While it’s rare for a film company to start its own label (excluding major conglomerates like Disney), A24 Music showed signs early on it could be the first successful independent filmmaker to bet on a label: To promote its 2016 Academy Award-winning best picture, Moonlight — which features an Oscar-nominated score by Nicholas Britell (Succession, The Big Short, If Beale Street Could Talk) — A24 hosted a live performance of its score in London.
Ever since, A24 has maintained a music focus across its projects, from 2021’s C’mon C’mon (scored by The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner) to the upcoming MaXXXine (starring Moses Sumney and Halsey). And in May, Berndt was able to cross off that No. 1 goal from her bucket list with the release of trans horror film I Saw the TV Glow, for which she was co-music supervisor alongside Secretly Group founder Chris Swanson.
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Like Moonlight and others before it, I Saw the TV Glow leaned heavily on its soundtrack as a marketing tool, using its roster of featured artists to drum up anticipation among its target demographic months before release. Featuring a score by Alex G and original songs by a slate of indie-rock staples including Caroline Polachek, Jay Som and a title track from Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane (both of whom make cameos in the movie), Berndt says a catchy new song can drive as much advance interest in a film as a well-edited trailer.
While star-powered soundtracks have experienced a revival in the last decade — including for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Black Panther, The Lion King and Barbie — no one has done it in the indie space quite like A24. The company has expanded its brand as a film company into a formidable and growing music catalog, as well as a meaningful merchandise business and podcast network.
It’s that very strategy that enticed Jen Malone to work with the company as music supervisor on the hit HBO show Euphoria, which was a turning point for series co-producer A24 as a music-focused outfit. “Music can often be an afterthought in TV and film,” Malone says. “In Euphoria, we decided at the top that music was going to be like a character in the show, and A24 supported that the whole way through.”
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Euphoria spawned virality for a number of songs on its soundtrack and, in some cases, led to a streaming uptick of over 2,100%, according to Luminate, following a synch. Whether that was for Labrinth’s original score and songs for the show — two of which he and Euphoria star Zendaya performed at Coachella in 2023 (“All for Us” and “I’m Tired”) — or older licensed works like Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line,” Sinéad O’Connor’s “Drink Before the War” and DMX’s “Party Up,” Euphoria played a large role in igniting trends that would later perpetuate as popular sounds on TikTok.
A24 also creates extended Spotify playlists based on its soundtracks, as well as special-edition vinyl records, both of which continue to strengthen viewers’ relationship with a film long after the lights come on in the theater. On A24’s website, hot pink I Saw the TV Glow vinyl is for sale next to a myriad of other superfan offerings, from coffee-table books and posters to oddities like Marcel the Shell figurines, Everything Everywhere All at Once hot dog fingers and Hereditary-themed gingerbread kits.
And now, just a few years in, A24 Music is rolling out its most ambitious project yet: a star-studded set titled Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense arriving in July. It follows A24 remastering and rereleasing the band’s 1984 classic concert film, Stop Making Sense, last year.
And everyone seemingly did get involved with the album, which is just as stacked with major stars like Lorde, Paramore and Miley Cyrus as it is with indie breakouts like The Linda Lindas and Blondshell. “I feel like there’s a real sense of play permeating the entire project,” says Evan Whikeheart, head of label and shared services at Secretly Distribution. “It was a real joy to hear how all these artists from different musical backgrounds came together to interpret these songs.”
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Representatives close to A24 Music tell Billboard it’s still the early days of its exploration into music-focused programming but cite a desire to “attribute the success of A24 Music to all the incredible artists we work with.” (The company declined to be interviewed for the story.) Yet Talking Heads’ David Byrne says the A24 team is largely responsible for the tribute album’s success, saying that he was “absolutely hands off” with the process. “When I saw the list of artists who wanted to do it, I have to say I was pretty excited,” Byrne says. “I thought ‘Damn, this is going to be an amazing record.’
“It’s hard to imagine that yet another generation might connect with this film,” he continues. “We like to believe that life is short and art is long, but here, it is really happening.”
This story will appear in the June 8, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Jon Bon Jovi wasn’t sure if his band would ever record another album. The Jersey rock icon whose signature raspy vocals lifted his eponymous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band to global superstardom in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to such iconic hits as “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “It’s My Life” chronicled his long, hard road back from vocal cord surgery in 2022 in the recent Hulu series Thank You, Goodnight – The Bon Jovi Story. And in a new interview with EW he talked how that scary career roadblock helped inspire the band’s new album, Forever, which is out on Friday (June 7).
“I went into this surgery and I had a lot of time on my hands — all I could really do was sit around and start to think about songs,” Bon Jovi told EW. “I started to feel joy again. And we — the collective we, who lived through COVID — we’d all come out of that fog, and we were interacting again. There was a new appreciation for life. And I was having this new appreciation for my body. And it led to all these songs.”
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The result was a 12-track album recorded by Bon Jovi and bandmates keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, bassist Hugh McDonald, guitarist Phil X, percussionist Everett Bradley and rhythm guitarist John Shanks that the singer said the crew recorded in a brisk seven weeks. “Nothing was on delay. It just flowed,” Bon Jovi said of the album that features the soaring “Legendary” and talkbox-assisted “Living Proof,” which he wrote in just two days.
Bon Jovi also dropped in for a chat with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show on Wednesday night (June 6), where he smiled and kept his secrets when the host asked what it was like to be “young and beautiful” on the road in the 1980s. “If I were to write a book it would be called, The Best Time I Never Had,” the 62-year-old silver fox said with a grin, joking that he tells his children that he didn’t party and went straight home after shows.
Bon Jovi credited his bandmates with believing in his dream 40 years ago, saying that the new album got its name after he realized that, “these songs are going to outlive us until long after we’re gone.” He noted that he’s “well on the road to recovery” from the vocal surgery chronicled in the four-part documentary series, joking that now was the time to commemorate the band’s 40th anniversary because he has no idea if he’ll be around for their 50th.
The singer who has dabbled in acting over the years described how he got his big screen chops up as a young rocker after a promoter flew them on a private jet to a gig, after which Bon Jovi says he repeatedly convinced other promoters to celebrate the band’s burgeoning success with their breakthrough Slippery When Wet album by flying them to the next gig… on a private jet.
Colbert also congratulated Bon Jovi on the recent weddings of two of his sons; Jack Bongiovi married Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown in May, just weeks after son Jesse married longtime love Jesse Light in Las Vegas. Asked if he’s ever been pressed into service at a wedding to sing one of his songs, Bon Jovi told a funny story about a friend’s son’s wedding where he was “willing,” but not really looking forward to jumping on stage.
When the trumpet player spontaneously began playing the iconic bass line from “Livin’ on a Prayer,” for what he described as a “Salvation Army” band version of the song, the reluctant vocalist said he “sang the s–t” out of it, as one does.
During the double-segment sit-down, Bon Jovi bragged about the rest stop named after him in New Jersey and his early days working around the corner at the Power Station recording studio. One of his favorite memories from the time when he was a teenager “gofer,” he said, was when he watched David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sing “Under Pressure” through the studio window. “I saw them sing that vocal,” he told an astonished Colbert.
Watch Bon Jovi on The Late Show below.
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If you’re looking to watch your favorite movies and TV shows, live sports or play the latest and greatest video games on a new big screen 4K Ultra HD TV with pristine, rich and vibrant picture quality with excellent audio, then now is one of the best times of the year to pick one up for cheap thanks to the Samsung Discover TV Sale.
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We rounded up the best deals during Samsung’s Discover TV Sale — happening right now until Sunday, June 23 — on everything from massive 4K Ultra HD TVs, sharp OLED gaming TVs and other models with savings up to a whopping $2,400 at samsung.com.
Additionally, all smart TVs run Samsung Tizen OS to access your favorite streaming apps, including Netflix, Max, Hulu, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Spotify, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+ and others, as well as smart voice commands via the tech company’s Bixby and Amazon Alexa voice assistants.
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In fact, Tizen OS also features the Samsung Gaming Hub for quick access to popular cloud gaming platforms, such as Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, Antstream Arcade and more. It even includes access to Xbox Game Pass on the TV itself for next-generation gaming without an Xbox Series X/S console. Moreover, when you purchase a qualifying Samsung TV, you can also get an Xbox gift card worth up to $200.
Meanwhile, if you want to give one of the best gifts for Father’s Day or a gift for a recent graduation day, then we’ve got you covered with impressive TV deals.
Ahead, you’ll find the best deals during Samsung’s Discover TV Sale.
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The Samsung Discover TV Sale ends on Sunday, June 23. Shop additional TV deals, below:
Want more? For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best over-ear headphones, wifi extenders, laptop deals and more.
Sam Heughan knows all about grand gestures. The star of the time-traveling romantic saga Outlander posted a video on Wednesday (June 5) in which he revealed that he and much of the costume drama show’s cast are planning to attend Taylor Swift‘s shows this weekend at the Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh, Scotland. “We’re […]