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New York Post
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Olivia Munn accuses ‘Newsroom' director of trying to ‘ruin' her career
It was newsworthy. Olivia Munn is alleging that a director from 'The Newsroom' tried to 'ruin' her career. 'There was a storyline where my character and Tom Sadoski's character are dating and falling in love. [The director] kept trying to force me to carry that storyline only on my side,' Munn, 44, claimed during a recent podcast appearance on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. The 'X Men: Apocalypse' actress said that the director encouraged her to stop focusing on what her character, Sloan Sabbith, was doing, and just fawn over Sadoski's character, Don Keefer. 8 Olivia Munn in 'The Newsroom.' HBO 8 Olivia Munn and John Mulaney celebrate son Malcolm's 2nd birthday in an Instagram photo from 2023. Oliviamunn/Instagram 8 Olivia Munn on 'Armchair Expert.' Podcast. Armchair Expert Several directors contributed to 'The Newsroom,' including Alan Poul, Greg Mottola, Anthony Hemingway, Lesli Linka Glatter, Jeremy Podeswa, Alex Graves and Paul Lieberstein. Munn did not reveal which director was involved in the incident. 'He's like, 'Can you look out at him and smile?' And I'm like, 'Why? She's busy doing this.' Or, 'Can you stop and snuggle up to him or flirt with him?' Or, 'Can you give him a kiss?' And I'm like, 'This is in the middle of working.'' Her problems with the director continued even after the show ended, as Munn claims the director negatively impacted her reputation. 8 Olivia Munn and Jeff Daniels on 'The Newsroom.' Melissa Moseley/HBO 8 Olivia Munn attends the 2025 Astra TV Awards on June 10, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Getty Images 'I was on the one-yard-line for [a] movie, and my manager calls me and says, 'Hey, you're gonna get the role. But first, I guess there's another director who they know, and he says that, on 'The Newsroom,' you were late all the time and really combative,' she said. The 'Your Friends and Neighbors' star said she suspected the director said it because they clashed. 'I lived seven minutes from there. I was never late,' Munn said. 'And I was like, 'I know who this is.' He just was trying to bash me. And I told my reps, 'Please tell the directors this.'' 8 Olivia Munn on Armchair Expert Podcast. Armchair Expert 8 Jeff Daniels and Olivia Munn in 'The Newroom.' Melissa Moseley/HBO Luckily, the director's words didn't cost her that movie role. 'But I will always remember that, just because of our conflicts of how we approached a role, he wanted to ruin my chances of getting anything else.' Helmed by Aaron Sorkin, 'The Newsroom' aired on HBO from 2012 to 2014 and followed staffers at a fictional news network. In addition to Munn and Sadoski, it starred Jeff Daniels, Dev Patel, Sam Waterston, Alison Pill, Emily Mortimer, and John Gallagher Jr. Jane Fonda and David Harbour also appeared on the show. During a 2019 appearance on 'The Late Late Show with James Corden,' Sorkin shot down the idea of rebooting 'The Newsroom.' 8 Dev Patel, Olivia Munn, Thomas Sadoski, Sam Waterston, John Gallagher, Jr., Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, Alison Pill in 'The Newsroom.' 'I wish the show was on the air now. I would love to be writing it now. But there are other things coming up. I have no plans to return [to it],' Sorkin, 64, said. In an April 2024 interview, Daniels told The Post that he doesn't think 'The Newsroom' would be able to weather the current news cycle. 'I remember when – I think it was the start of Season 3 – we started with the Boston Marathon. We were shooting that in November. It had happened in March, right? So we're always months and months behind. And then, by the time it airs, it's even further behind. So now Trump gets elected and there's something every 15 minutes,' the 'Dumb and Dumber' star, 70, explained. 'I don't think we could have kept up.'
USA Today
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Mad Men' reunion: Jon Hamm, John Slattery on fake cigarettes, finale, blackface episode
'Mad Men' reunion: Jon Hamm, John Slattery on fake cigarettes, finale, blackface episode Show Caption Hide Caption Why Jon Hamm's 'Your Friends and Neighbors' is crime dramedy gold Actor Jon Hamm tackles dark comedy and crime in "Your Friends and Neighbors." Entertain This AUSTIN, TX – Pour yourself an old fashioned or a Coca-Cola. We're traveling back to the time of 'Mad Men.' Jon Hamm, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of the brilliant ad man Don Draper, and John Slattery − who played his boss Roger Sterling – reunited 10 years after the finale of the AMC series, created by Matthew Weiner, as part of the ATX TV Festival. On May 31, the actors took the stage at a packed Paramount Theatre and reminisced about their days filming seven seasons of the drama centered on a New York advertising agency in the 1960s. The series also starred Christina Hendricks, January Jones, Elisabeth Moss and Kiernan Shipka. Hamm, 54, said that he had a broken hand while filming the scene when Moss' Peggy Olson is promoted to copywriter. So he asked Moss to be mindful and only softly squeeze it during a congratulatory handshake. But she forgot about the injury, Hamm said, and 'hits me with a handshake that is like a president handshake, and a lightning bolt goes all the way through me and I hit the floor so hard.' Slattery, 62, shared his disdain for his Season 7 mustache and again revealed he had first auditioned for the role of Don, though they'd already cast Hamm in the part. Producers lured Slattery with the Draper role, hoping to convince him to apply for agency owner Roger Sterling, who had a smaller part in the pilot. Hamm says he auditioned for the enigmatic Don, aka Dick Whitman, about nine times. The 'disgusting' prop booze and cigarettes Hamm and Slattery dished on the tricks that helped viewers believe they were chain-smoking, booze-guzzling men of that era. 'I think somebody did a count,' Hamm said, 'and in the pilot alone I smoked 75 cigarettes or something.' They were fake, Slattery pointed out. 'That just means that there's no nicotine in them.' Hamm said. 'It doesn't mean you're not burning something and inhaling…' Hamm said some of the younger actors in the pilot episode vowed to smoke real cigarettes to more authentically portray their characters. 'Within three days,' he said, 'they were yellow and sallow and like, 'This is a terrible idea.'' In place of vodka, the actors would sip water, garnished with onions. 'Pop another pearl onion in your glass of water and then you'd smoke 26 more fake cigarettes, and it was 9:30 in the morning," Slattery said. "It was disgusting.' Jon Hamm on Don Draper's finale 'revelation' During the Q&A portion of the panel, a fan asked about Hamm's interpretation of the finale. In the series' last moments, Don dreamed up the 'I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke' ad while meditating on a California cliff. Weiner envisioned Don's end in Season 1, Hamm said. 'He reached the end of land as far away as he could from his life and realized that his life was creating advertising. That was his revelation, that this is what he is and what he does. He's not Dick Whitman. He's not Don Draper. He's some version of this, but he is an advertising man and that was, I think, positive.' John Slattery addresses blackface in Season 3 Slattery told fans that when he was asked to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" in blackface in Season 3, he phoned Hamm, seeking his costar's thoughts. Ultimately, Slattery 'felt like, 'Well, this is probably something that occurred and it's probably something that this character would've done. So what leg do I have to stand on not to do it?' After arriving on location in character, Slattery said, 'The first person I opened the van and saw was a very large African American Los Angeles motorcycle cop, who was helping me open the door. 'We're like face to face,' Slattery continued. 'I had to go and sing that thing in front of them and everybody.' In 2020, 'Mad Men' added a title card to the episode (the series streams on AMC+ and Philo), prefacing it with a warning of 'disturbing images.' 'In its reliance on historical authenticity,' the card read, 'the series producers are committed to exposing the injustices and inequities within our society that continue to this day so we can examine even the most painful parts of our history in order to reflect on who we are today and who we want to become. We are therefore presenting the original episode in its entirety.'
Perth Now
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Your Friends and Neighbours star Amanda Peet faked being waitress to land job at Italian restaurant
Amanda Peet once faked being a waitress to get a job in an Italian restaurant. The 53-year-old actress "made up" a name for a restaurant in San Francisco and put her then-boyfriend's phone number "as the reference" to land the job, but the 'Your Friends and Neighbors' star soon got fired after she warmed bread in the pizza oven. Amanda told PEOPLE magazine: "I had never waitressed, so I put that I had and then made up a restaurant that was in San Francisco, even though I was from New York, and then gave my boyfriend's number as the reference. "Then, on my first day, it was like an Italian restaurant where they had a pizza oven. "A lovely couple whose table I was assigned to asked me if I could warm the bread, which was in a bread basket. I put the whole thing in the pizza oven. "I didn't start a fire, but the dude was like, 'You're fired, you dumb, actress type.'" Amanda plays Mel Cooper - a therapist who has separated from her former former hedge fund manager husband, Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (Jon Hamm), after it was revealed he had been having a fling with his best pal and NBA player, Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman) - in the Apple TV+ thriller series, 'Your Friends and Neighbours'. The show sees Amanda's alter ego take part in steamy sex scenes with Coop and Nick, but Amanda is not fazed by the intimate performances. The 'Something's Gotta Give' actress explained: "Dude, I've been doing this for so long, I'm just like, 'Show me where to be. Show me who to kiss. Who do I have to make out with today?' "Whenever I see Lizzy [Talbot], the intimacy coordinator, I'm like, 'Wait, I have a sex scene?' And she's like, 'No, dear. It's somebody else.' It's so funny when I see her, I'm like, 'Oh my God, I forgot I have a sex scene.' " As well as Amanda, 44-year-old actress Olivia Munn, who plays Samantha 'Sam' Levitt in the show, also had to do intimate scenes with Jon, 54. Their characters had a secret fling while he was navigating his divorce from Mel, and Olivia was so nervous about pushing her teeth into the Hollywood legend's skin when filming the intimate scene. The 'X-Men: Apocalypse' star told the same outlet: "My character had to bite him, and I was nervous, but he just kept saying, 'It's okay. You can bite really hard.' "And then I did. And he's a pretty tough guy. He's a very tough guy."
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How ‘Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong freshly explores mega wealth through tech bro one-upmanship in ‘Mountainhead'
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is continuing to use his distinctive satirical tone to explore how the 1 percent wields power over the world. In his directorial debut Mountainhead, Armstrong hones in on the oversized influence of a group of tech bro billionaires played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith. The HBO film, which will premiere on HBO and Max on May 31, finds the four friends tucked away in a modern mansion in the snowy Utah mountains as one of their social media apps spurs global unrest and violence due to unrestricted generative AI. More from GoldDerby TV composers roundtable: 'Adolescence,' 'Day of the Jackal,' 'Interview With the Vampire,' 'Your Friends and Neighbors' 'Your Friends and Neighbors' composer Dominic Lewis on matching the show's tonal shifts and writing the catchy theme song 'The Joneses' Composer Volker Bertelmann on the shifting tempos and percussive sounds that punctuate 'The Day of the Jackal' At the Mountainhead premiere held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on Thursday, Carell spoke to reporters on the red carpet about the "overwhelming" experience of slipping into the identity of a billionaire. Early in the film, his character Randall, who ranks highest in the group in terms of seniority, is embittered when his net worth falls below that of Youssef's Jeff, who's created tech that safeguards against the dangers of AI. "When somebody is worth 60, 200 billion dollars, the actual amount doesn't even mean anything anymore, I think, to these people. It's a number," Carell said. "But the number itself kind of means something, if that makes any sense. There is a hierarchy within that, even though the actual physical ability to buy things doesn't really change between 60 and 200 billion. But the fact that within this hierarchy of four people, he's second and may end up being third is not a good thing. So that's a huge component of all of this." Armstrong, who traces his script inspiration back to writing a review of Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried, explained to Gold Derby why he's keen on examining the lives of the ultra wealthy. "I guess it's not especially the 1 percent-y wealth that interests me — I think it's the power that comes with that. So for myself, I wouldn't tend to write things that were necessarily just about rich people. It's the fact that they have that power on the world. And that's what Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his family had, and it's what these guys have, or at least some of them. And that's the bit that I'm really interested in: Why is the world the way it is, and who's shaping it?" SEE HBO unveils trailer for Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead In the film, the four protagonists are decidedly separate from the rest of the world as they stay put at the titular Mountainhead mansion that belongs to Schwartzman's character (who is nicknamed Souper for having the lowest net worth in the group with nary a billion to his name). Armstrong detailed how the secluded property was found and its significance to the storyline. "Paul Eskenazi, location manager from Succession, helped us find it. We looked at a lot of places in Canada and Utah, and we wanted to be somewhere sequestrated away from other people. And that's a common thing about wealth, right? Private planes, gated communities. So it needed to feel isolated. It also needed to feel isolated for some of the action that happens in the movie. I wanted them to feel like they were almost like a horror movie removed." Notably, Mountainhead came together in less than a year's time. Executive producer Will Tracy sees the project as "the perfect thing" to release in our current sociopolitical climate. "In many ways, that was part of the appeal, is the urgency of it, that we can maybe get it out very soon, before anyone else had a crack at this fairly new world of government that has in some ways been captured by the techno-futurists, by the Musks and so forth of the world," he said. "It's changing so rapidly, what's happening in the government, so hopefully we got it right." Tracy also spoke to the appeal of telling stories spotlighting the 1 percent. "I think it starts with the characters and the kind of small, more human stories we want to tell about those people — Succession being kind of a family story, and this being kind of a story about male friendship, in a way. And we tell those stories on a very small level," he said. "But the finance and the money and the power just raises the stakes of what these, I think, very emotionally difficult people, the ripple effects they can have on our world, which, as we're seeing right now, those ripple effects can be quite large ripples — waves even. Tsunamis." Mountainhead premieres Saturday, May 31 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max. Best of GoldDerby TV composers roundtable: 'Adolescence,' 'Day of the Jackal,' 'Interview With the Vampire,' 'Your Friends and Neighbors' 'Your Friends and Neighbors' composer Dominic Lewis on matching the show's tonal shifts and writing the catchy theme song 'The Joneses' Composer Volker Bertelmann on the shifting tempos and percussive sounds that punctuate 'The Day of the Jackal' Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
From courtroom to karaoke, ‘Matlock' Season 2 shakes things up: ‘Anything's up for grabs at this point'
Madeline 'Matty' Matlock conquered the bar exam long ago, but in Matlock's second season, she's about to take on a very different kind of bar: a karaoke bar. 'I want her singing karaoke this year!' the hit series' executive producer and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman told Gold Derby at an FYC event at the Directors Guild Theater. It was an unexpected nod to star Kathy Bates' wide-ranging talents — Bates is also an accomplished singer. More from GoldDerby Golden Globes add Best Podcast category to 2026 ceremony Tonys: 'Buena Vista Social Club' choreographer Justin Peck would be the 5th person to win in consecutive years Amanda Peet will campaign for lead actress at the Emmys for 'Your Friends and Neighbors' as Apple TV+ sets acting submissions for Jon Hamm drama 'I think it would be fun,' chuckled Bates, considering the idea. 'I think as far as Jennie's concerned, anything's up for grabs at this point.' Urman, Bates, and the rest of the cast and creative team gathered to celebrate the success of CBS' thoroughly reimagined legal drama, based on the popular Andy Griffith series from the '80s and '90s. A rare blockbuster on broadcast TV in the streaming era, the show is already gearing up for a second season, with the creators teasing what's to come. Michael Yarish/CBS 'We're going to see Matty now get more blindsided about things that she didn't realize,' Bates hinted. 'She's gotten invested in these people. Now, she's being taken along for the ride. These are things that she hasn't prepared for, so I think that's what's going to be exciting about the second season.' 'Matty, in this second season, is not in control the way that she was — in the first season she was the puppet master,' Urman revealed of the series which also stars Skye P. Marshall and Jason Ritter. 'And so what happens to a character like that when suddenly they're out of control? And that's going to be really interesting to watch.' Creating emotional tension and moral dilemmas is part of the thrill for Urman and the writers. 'It's really exciting to paint characters into a corner and then figure out smart ways that they escape from it, and how their relationships continue to build and grow in moments of extreme tension,' she said. 'I'm just excited to put Matty into different positions and situations and watch her charm or trick her way out of them.' Urman shared that she's already deeply immersed in planning for the second season — even before production has resumed. 'We do such a long, detailed season break before we come in, then I pitch to the studio and network,' she explained. 'It's about 40 pages. It takes me over an hour to tell them the story of the season, and it's every character and it's got a lot of twists and it's got a lot of layers and it's all ready, so we have a really meaty, meaty spine. And then we just keep layering on top of that so that we can make them as complex, and yet you can follow them. That's what we want. We want emotional complexity, but we want you to be able to follow the thought.' 'Jennie's got a mind like a Rubik's Cube,' marveled Bates. 'I still can't believe any of this. I never expected this to happen at the end of my career, or something this wonderful that I could dig into and really love doing, and love talking about, and get so excited about the fact that everybody loves it. … I'm living the dream.' Best of GoldDerby MrBeast reveals the machine-gun stunt he had to cut from 'Beast Games,' says he wants to do competition series at least 10 seasons 'What is it that's creepy about Tommy?' Peter Sarsgaard defends his 'Presumed Innocent' character 'The Pitt' star Isa Briones loves the discourse around Dr. Santos: 'I just want people to feel something viscerally' Click here to read the full article.
