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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 […]
It’s safe to say that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is not a KatyCat. In fact, the conservative podcaster said on an episode of her eponymous podcast this week that she finds Katy Perry‘s music “annoying” before flat-out saying she doesn’t like the pop superstar and claiming she “barely” knows who she is.
The comments came after Perry posted her own edit of Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s controversial May 11 commencement speech at Benedictine College in which the Super Bowl champ attacked LGBTQ rights and slammed what he termed “dangerous gender ideologies.” The 20-minute speech that also included broadsides against abortion, birth control and surrogacy, included Butker suggesting to female students at the private Catholic university in Illinois that they embrace being a “homemaker.”
Perry wasn’t having it and posted her own version on Sunday, writing, “fixed this for my girls, my graduates, and my gays — you can do anything, congratulations and happy pride,” alongside a second draft of the speech that had a much different, more inclusive tone.
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On Tuesday’s episode of her show, Kelly defended Butker’s speech, calling it an “antidote to the general message about stay-at-moms” while denying that the kicker was “condemning working women.”
“Katy Perry is annoying,” Kelly said before cueing up Perry’s edit and loudly huffing over the tape as it played. “She decided to take those comments and switch them around so that he was saying something he never actually said and have him say ‘happy pride.’” Co-host Dave Rubin called the edit “pathetic” and noted that Kelly is an “extremely” successful broadcaster and mother before asking her which title was more important, to which Kelly answered, “there’s no question.”
“But Katy Perry saw her ‘Roar’ moment — which is an annoying song, that’s an annoying song. I don’t like her, I actually don’t think she is a good singer,” Kelly said while mockingly singing Perry’s 2008 breakthrough hit “I Kissed a Girl.” Rubin, meanwhile, claimed he could not even name a single song from the singer who is one of only five artists in history to sell more than 100 million certified units with her digital singles worldwide and who co-hosted American Idol for seven years.
“I barely know who you are,” Kelly added while erroneously saying the singer is married to actor Orlando Bloom ; Perry is engaged to the star, but they are not married though they share a three-year-old daughter, Daisy Dove Bloom. “To manipulate the guy’s remarks is dishonest and petty,” Kelly said before dinging Perry again for closing comments on the post after receiving backlash. “She can’t take it!,” Kelly said as Rubin dubbed the singer’s edit a “leftist 101” move.
At press time a spokesperson for Perry had not returned a request for comment.
Listen to Kelly’s comments on Perry here (beginning at the 1:05:55 mark).
Way back before his shelves were crammed with Grammy Awards for his work with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent, Jack Antonoff was best known as that guy from fun., or maybe the one who sang in Steel Train.
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But in a new video for Vanity Fair in which former Girls co-stars Allison Williams (M3GAN) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) reunite after seven years to revisit the show that helped launch both of them to stardom, the pair also reveal that some of the mega-cringey songs they crooned together as their characters, Marnie and Desi, were actually written by Antonoff.
And, they noted, the Bleachers singer — who dated the show’s star and creator, Lena Dunham, during the five-year run of the HBO series — originally wrote some of them for a major pop star who rejected the tracks. The volatile on-screen couple often played music together onscreen as they struggled through a tumultuous courtship and brief marriage, with Moss-Bachrach telling VF that he just recently learned that most of their duets were “just discards from Kelly Clarkson.”
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“I like that song,” Moss-Bacharach said of “Breathless,” — which Antonoff reportedly wrote for Clarkson, according to Williams. “It’s a great song, she should’ve done it! But we got it, as a result,” Williams added of the track she performed in the first episode of season four that featured the so-Marnie lyrics, “I don’t wanna dream if dreamin’ is without you/ I don’t wanna run unless I’m runnin’ towards you, every single thing I do is all about you.”
Regardless of whether you kind of disliked Marnie or actively despised her, Williams said she actually thought a lot of the couple’s songs “were really beautiful,” though she copped to the fact that “the lyrics are what made them cringey.” She liked so many of them, but her favorite was “Oaxaca,” the final Marnie-Desi song, which, she again notes, has lyrics that are “so cringey” she hardly wanted to repeat them out loud. Moss-Bachrach, however, insisted that she do so. For example: “Shakin’ my maracas, doin’ what you do/ Yeah, you’ll find me in a dark bar/ Where no gringos are.”
“Marnie singing the word ‘gringo’ should be illegal. I shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” Williams laughed, noting that the actors were often were really performing on screen, which was so “nerve-wracking.”
“What was nice that was built in, was that they were supposed to be maybe not so great,” Moss-Bachrach said of the creative release valve that allowed them to lean into the cringe of lyrics he described as often “guileless” and “embarrassing” at best. “Nobody had very high expectations, so that felt very safe to me just go for it.” Williams said that twist made it hard to know how good they should actually try to be, with Moss-Bachrach claiming that he “tried as hard as I could try.”
To put a finer point on it, Moss-Bachrach said the lyrics were often so bad, “Leonard Cohen could sing them and they would still suck.” At press time it did not appear as if Antonoff had responded to the video.
Speaking of mortifying, Williams brought up the absolute peak Marnie moment when her character sang a cover of Kanye West’s “Stronger” as a torch ballad at a party to the stunned mortification of the entire room, including her friends. “It was quiet, except for my voice,” she said of the ninth episode from season two. “There’s no more vulnerable experience than a room full of background, silent and just your little voice in the room echoing against nothing else, singing, ‘I’ll be your white Kate Moss tonight,’” Williams said.
Watch Williams and Moss-Bachrach break down their Girls musical chemistry below (music talk begins at 1:20 mark).
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Spoiler alert: This story contains the identity of the winner and runner-up unmasked on Wednesday night’s (May 22) season finale of The Masked Singer.
It was a fierce scramble for the golden mask on Wednesday’s (May 22) season 11 Masked Singer finale in an action-packed battle that pitted powerhouse male vocalist Gumball against season-long favorite Goldfish.
When the confetti fell at the end of the night, though, it was veteran singer/actress Vanessa Hudgens who triumphed over her former Bandslam co-star Scott Porter (aka Friday Night Lights‘ Jason Street).
To recap, former High School Musical movie star Hudgens got her perfect run off to a killer start early on in the season with a fierce take on fellow High School Musical universe alum Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire,” throwing down the gauntlet that this was a performer with killer pipes and casually cool stage moves. The singer, who released two albums on Hollywood Records early in her career, showed off her performance chops throughout by expertly ruling the stage in the peach-colored costume with a towering mohawk and diaphanous gills.
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She continued to swim upstream all season with a smooth-as-butter cover of Player’s 1977 AM radio classic “Baby Come Back” and further proved her arena-ready bona fides with a Broadway-worthy take on Queen’s “The Show Must Go On.”
The flawless march kept going with a showstopping run through Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” — which again showed off her impressive range — as well as last week’s fierce rumble through Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” that had Robin Thicke jumping on the judges’ table for a standing ovation.
On Wednesday, before her reveal, Hudgens, 27, confessed that she was never good at expressing herself as a young girl, but has lately been on a “journey of self-discovery” that allowed her to express herself “so freely” on the show. And while she said music has taken a “back seat” as she’s focused on film for the past 15-plus years — appearing in Second Act, Bad Boys for Life and Tick, Tick… Boom!, as well as the upcoming Bad Boys: Ride or Die — her victory-sealing covers of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” proved her pipes are as strong as ever.
The judges were close in their guesses but didn’t quite nail it, with Rita Ora suggesting former Glee star Lea Michele or Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev; Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg guessing Selena Gomez, Vampire Academy star Sarah Hyland or Julianne Hough; and Thicke going with Hilary Duff. Always-wrong Ken Jeong missed it by a mile once again, tossing out such wildly disparate suggestions as Carly Rae Jepsen, Kristen Stewart and former panelist Nicole Scherzinger.
Billboard spoke to Hudgens before her elimination about why this was the right time to dip back into singing, how she managed to move like such a pro in her costume, and why her “witch” powers were the key to giving the expectant first-time mom something special to share with her baby. Check out her answers below.
You’ve been a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance and RuPaul’s Drag Race, but never really a contestant on a singing show. Why now?
This opportunity came up at a really interesting time when we [actors] were on strike and this was a category I could actually work in and my fans had been asking for more music, more singing, anything of that sort. I was like, “This would be a really fun and interesting opportunity to give my fans what they want and see who the real ones are.”
People complain about the size and sweatiness of the costumes, but you seemed to be able to move with no problems. What was your secret?
Reckless abandonment? [Laughs] It definitely had its own challenges because I couldn’t see straight ahead because the eyeholes were so far apart. If I wanted to see straight ahead, I had to turn my head one way or another and I was really using a live mic and holding it up to the little opening in my mask. So I had to split my vision and look sideways out of one eye and then look down with the other in the mic hole to see the ground. I just went for it and left it all out there. They would be like, “You’re kind of here and then walk over there and if you want to maybe do a verse there and move over here.” I just really let it fly and they gave me the freedom to play, and play I did.
Which performance meant the most to you and why?
I feel so lucky in that I got to work really closely with my producer and pick songs that meant something to me, from the cheeky nod to High School Musical singing “Vampire” by Olivia Rodrigo to “Baby Come Back,” which I sang at 16 as a cover song for my first single [2006’s “Come Back to Me”]. “The Show Must Go On” for a vulnerable, special performance to “Unforgettable,” which I’d wanted to sing from jump because I just want to sing jazz all the time, to a female empowerment moment with Alanis Morissette.
Did singing “Vampire” make you long for the good old days?
I just think [Rodrigo]’s really great and I really vibe with her. It’s always great to support a fellow Filipina, and it was just a cute, cheeky nod to how things always end up being connected.
It looked like you came to play from jump. How badly did you want to win the golden mask?
You know, it wasn’t really about winning, honestly. I am my own worst critic and I will always be my hardest critic in the room at all times. I just wanted to have fun, and it was a really freeing experience for me to be anonymous and have nothing to do with my name or fame or celebrity. It was a really special experience.
You said your run surprised you and allowed people to really see you for who you are and what you do. Might you go back to music after this?
No. I always say life is about priorities, and that is not a priority right now. I feel like it’s something I will always have in my back pocket.
You said winning would be the “ultimate pat on the back” and really mean a lot to you because you always thought of yourself as an actor first and singer second. Did you give people the “music moment” you hope for?
I think I got to give myself the music moment I was hoping for and in turn my supportive fans got to enjoy it as well. I got to show up every day and put my best foot forward, and I was so uplifted and supported by such an amazing team over there and I got to work on my voice every day with someone who helped me expand my horizons.
On tonight’s show, you said you couldn’t wait to have kids so you could tell them, “Look at mommy go!” Did you know when you taped the show that you were expecting? [Hudgens revealed in March on the Oscars red carpet that she’s expecting her first child.]
No! I’m just a witch! [Laughs] I’ve always worked in a way that kept people guessing and gave me something to show my kids at every stage of my life. That’s always been important to me.
Stars: they’re just like us. In that we all have old social posts that we would probably like the world to forget, especially when they resurface at the worst possible time. That was the dilemma faced by award-winning The Bear star Ayo Edebiri, who found herself in hot water earlier this year when, on the eve of her first hosting gig on Saturday Night Live, some unflattering comments she’d made four years earlier about the night’s musical guest, Jennifer Lopez, were revived to her mortification.
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The Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning Bottoms actress addresses the rumors of tension on the set during the February episode in a new Vanity Fair cover story in which she throws cold water on the suggestion that her years-old Lopez diss caused issues on the episode. “That would be like Mr. Bean and Mick Jagger beefing,” Edebiri told the magazine about the power imbalance between her and the global pop superstar/actress. “And I’m obviously Mr. Bean. She’s J.Lo!”
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For a refresher, the former stand-up comedian said, “I was actually thinking about one of my favorite scams of all time because J.Lo is performing at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Her whole career is one long scam,” during an episode of the 2020 Scam Goddess podcast. To prove there was no ill-ill, she made fun of the dug-up comment that night on SNL in a sketch.
“It’s wrong to leave mean comments or post comments just for clout — or run your mouth on a podcast and you don’t consider the impact because you’re 24 and stupid,” Edebiri joked in the bit titled “Why’d You Say It.”
“She was very chill and nice about it,” Edebiri told VF.
In a Variety story a few days after SNL, Lopez laughed the whole thing off, saying, “I’ve heard similar things said about me throughout my career, so it really didn’t affect me.”
Lopez told a reporter that the actor had apologized before the episode, adding that Edebiri was, “mortified and very sweet. She came to my dressing room and apologized with tears in her eyes, saying how terrible it was that she had said those things. She felt really badly and loved my performance because we had just done my soundcheck and she actually got to hear me perform. She was just like, ‘I’m so f–king sorry; it was so awful of me.’”
Though it likely made for an awkward week, Edebiri told VF that it didn’t ruin her long-held dream of taking her place on the SNL stage. “SNL is something that in my bones, I dreamed of as a comedian, as a young kid. That to me is a pinnacle of success,” she said.
Pitbull is always up for a party, especially if it involves people getting down to his music. That’s why Mr. 305 couldn’t help commenting when the new season of Bridgerton used one of its signature instrumental classical takes on his iconic 2011 hit “Give Me Everything” to score a window-fogging make-out carriage scene between Colin […]