Ansel Elgort Is Augustus Waters in "The Fault in Our Stars" Opposite Shailene Woodley
From siblings to star-crossed lovers! EW reports rising star Ansel Elgort has been offered the male lead in "The Fault in Our Stars" opposite Shailene Woodley - who plays his sister in the currently-filming dystopian adaptation "Divergent." The two Read more
Dylan O'Brien Lands "The Maze Runner" Lead; Ki Hong Lee Also Joins
UPDATE: Director Wes Ball tweets that Ki Hong Lee has also joined the cast as Minho, a fellow Glader and ally to Thomas throughout the series. Lee is probably best known as a regular on short-lived ABC Family Read more
Shailene Woodley Confirmed for "The Fault in Our Stars"
I mean, duh, we called it. It has now been officially confirmed with glowing quotes from director, producer and author in tow that the increasingly in demand Shailene Woodley will play the lead role of Hazel Grace Lancaster Read more
Up and Comers Presents: 20 Faces to Watch in 2013
After a somewhat unpredictable year in which the stars we expected to break out largely didn't but fresh faces came out of nowhere to surprise us all, we are ready to look ahead to the new talent waiting to Read more
Up and Comers Presents: The Breakout Stars of 2012
Another year, another new crop of fresh talent. Just like last year, the hardest part is narrowing down which of the dozens of the year's rising stars shone the brightest. This year we heralded the arrival of the unlikeliest Read more
Rising British actor Simon Phillips has a background in Shakespeare and a film career that started in crime and is moving into comedy – with favourable comparisons to that other great British comedian Simon Pegg.
On a promotional tour for new film “How to Stop Being a Loser”, out this Friday, I caught up with the actor who was happy to discuss drama school, acting and producing vs. writing and directing, and why he won’t be moving to Hollywood any time soon.
While A-List stars got gussied up in black-tie attire and posed on red carpets over in Italy at the annual splashy, high profile Venice Film Festival, a smaller, more selective group of films were quietly shown in the Colorado Mountains at the Telluride Film Festival, where low-key and secrecy reign supreme. At the conclusion of the unofficial kick-off to awards season, the best received film across the board was Alexander Payne’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004′s “Sideways”, family tragedy/drama “The Descendants.” In addition to what some are calling George Clooney’s career best performance, attention is also being paid to the young actress who more than held her own playing his eldest daughter: Shailene Woodley.
The star of ABC Family’s “The Secret Life of the America Teenager” was familiar to a much different crowd than the one that’s suddenly sitting up and paying attention now after Telluride. Top movie critics are tripping over themselves to laud the young thesp with praise in what is undeniably a breakout role, as a rebellious teenager who reveals a heartbreaking secret to her father (Clooney) in the wake of her mother falling into a coma and facing the inevitability that she will most likely die.
THR calls Woodley “essential to the venture’s success… [she] transforms convincingly from a girl who is reflexively condescending toward her father to one who becomes his eager accomplice and staunchest defender.” Variety singles her out in similar fashion: “Woodley… is a revelation in the role of Alex, displaying both the edge and depth the role demands. At face value, she appears to be going through a rebellious phase, but as the story unfolds, she proves to be the strong one, wiser than she appears and potentially better equipped to deal with the tragedy at hand.” Even First Showing, one of the few to not fully love the film, calls Woodley one of the two best performances, the other not being Clooney but, surprisingly, Matthew Lillard, who shows up in a supporting role later on. Zoinks!
It was a cold and windy afternoon under the tents at the 2011 Film Independent Spirit Awards, as many of the usual suspects picked up awards, including James Franco and Natalie Portman for Best Male and Female Leads for their roles in Oscar favorites “127 Hours” and “Black Swan” respectively. “Black Swan” was the big winner of the night, also winning Best Director for Darren Aronofsky and Best Feature. “Winter’s Bone” also made a strong showing, winning both Best Supporting Actor and Actress for John Hawkes and Dale Dickey. Awards juggernaut “The King’s Speech” also picked up Best Foreign Film.
We managed to get a bit of James Franco in the press room on video and a bunch of great images of everyone from Mark Ruffalo to Jesse Eisenberg to Jon Hamm and more.
See the full list of winners below.
Few rise to fame as fast as Jennifer Hudson, who at a speed almost unheard of, flew from an unknown Chicago singer to placing seventh in American Idol to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for Dreamgirls. It was Hudson’s own story as well as her look that drew in Winnie director Darrell Roodt and producer André Pieterse. The South African natives, whose youths were affected profoundly by the Mendelas, were struck with exactly what they needed to bring their vision of Winnie to life. According to Pieterse, there was no one else they would rather see take on the role of Winnie Mandela (now Winnie Madikizela-Mandela) than Hudson.
During an interview with Lorraine Ali of The Daily Beast, Hudson discusses her role in the biopic that follows Winnie Mandela’s life from early teens, her marriage to former South African President Nelson Mandela, her prominent role in the apartheid fight, and onward to the present. As if portraying the living horrors of Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife isn’t challenging enough, Hudson’s job was made more difficult by legal threats from Madikizela-Mandela’s lawyer to stop production of the film. Then, further broadening her challenge, Hudson chose to confine herself to the prison cell set for several days in an attempt to “experience some of the hell that woman went through.”
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The new issue of Entertainment Weekly digs into the unprecedented number of superhero films headed to the big screen in the next couple of years, from “Thor” to “X-Men: First Class” to “The Dark Knight Rises” to “The Avengers”. And playing such iconic roles as Spider-Man, Catwoman, Magneto and Captain America is a new crop of actors, most of whom were relatively unknown when cast, and who are about to become household names. The 2010 awards race has been serendipitous, propelling names like Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man) and Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) into fame before they morph into their superhero alter-egos, but there are still more names to learn in the coming months, like Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill) and the man gracing the cover of EW’s special issue, who is about to become perhaps the most iconic superhero of all time. British actor Henry Cavill was recently chosen to wear the red cape in Zack Snyder’s reboot of “Superman”, and the duo talked to EW about how Cavill convinced Snyder and producer Christopher Nolan that he was their Man of Steel, despite his own misgivings.
Cavill was fairly pessimistic about his chances of becoming Clark Kent, especially since his previous movie before the audition had forced him to tone down any bulk and muscle he had. When putting on a replica of Christopher Reeve’s iconic tights and cape getup, the actor recalls, “All I could think was: Oh, god. They’re going to look at me and go ‘He’s not Superman. Not a chance.’ The actor inside me was going: You’re not ready! You’re not ready!“
For Snyder, it came down to the suit: “If you can put on that suit and pull it off,” he tells the magazine, “that’s an awesome achievement. [Cavill] walked out, and no one laughed. Other actors put that suit on, and it’s a joke, even if they’re great actors. Henry put it on, and he exuded this kind of crazy-calm confidence that just made me go ‘Wow.’ Okay: This was Superman.”
To read the full interview with Cavill and Snyder and EW’s full feature on all the superheroes coming to our rescue over the next two years, pick up the new issue, on newsstands tomorrow!
Director Catherine Hardwicke has never made much of a secret of the fact that her choice for the role of Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” saga was not Robert Pattinson. It was the already-cast Bella Swan, Kristen Stewart, who talked Hardwicke and the producers into choosing the little-known British actor after their screen test together. Hardwicke’s idea of the perfect mysterious vampire stalker/lover was then 22 year old Shiloh Fernandez, and not giving up on the star quality she saw in him, she immediately cast him as the male lead in her next film, “Red Riding Hood”, a dark and edgy retelling of the classic fairy tale that sees Amanda Seyfried torn between two guys and fighting off supernatural predators against a pounding and thoroughly modern rock soundtrack. Sounds like fairly familiar territory.
Hardwicke probably is onto something with Fernandez. After all, she’s made a career out of discovering and showcasing promising young acting talent, from Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood in “Thirteen”, Heath Ledger and Emile Hirsch in “Lords of Dogtown”, and Stewart and Pattinson in “Twilight”. Once “Red Riding Hood” hits theaters, Fernandez and co-star Max Irons could easily become objects of teenage girl fantasy, while Seyfried, fairly famous already from her other projects, could finally tap into the female teen market the way her last couple of films (“Dear John” and “Letters to Juliet”) failed to do. History certainly suggests a fairly successful upward trajectory is in their future.
And how does Fernandez, one of our faces to watch in 2011, feel about losing out on that global superstar-making vampire franchise? He tells Wonderland Magazine (via Metro UK) he doesn’t envy Pattinson’s fame one bit. “It makes me happy that I didn’t do it. How can you want that for yourself? How can you wish that on anybody? I think Pattinson handled it really well – he seems like a neat kid, interesting and kind of strange but I wasn’t in the right mind to take any of that. I wasn’t mentally prepared to have any sort of success in that way. Even with this tiny, tiny morsel of fame I’m experiencing now I still feel uncomfortable.”
Fernandez, who also has 80s indie dramedy “Skateland” down the pike, better start getting a little more comfortable with being famous because this tiny, tiny morsel of fame he is experiencing now is sure to increase exponentially when “Red Riding Hood” is released in theaters on March 11, 2011. You can read his full interview with Wonderland magazine in their Spring Issue, on newsstands now.
Sundance has fallen hard for Drake Doremus’ “Like Crazy” (another of our most anticipated Sundance movies), the long-distance relationship drama that was so buzzed and loved that a bidding war between Paramount, Summit and Fox Searchlight started right in the lobby after the premiere screening. Eventually, Paramount proved victorious for a reported $4mil and will have the lucky task of distributing to the general public the first major hit of Sundance 2011.
Starring the crazy talented Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones and shot entirely in improvisational style, the story follows the American Jacob and the British Anna, who fall in love their senior year of college and then are separated when she decides to overstay her Visa to spend the summer with him, rendering her unable to return to the US after she leaves for home in Britain. Months and years pass while the two struggle to be together and let love be enough when they are separated by thousands of miles, time differences and immigration laws. Last year’s Sundance darling Jennifer Lawrence has a supporting role as a great girl Jacob attempts to move on with but inevitably can’t measure up to the one that got away.
Two days into the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and the first discovery of a talent on the rise has been made. After its premiere today, everyone is buzzing about Sean Durkin’s feature debut, the cult drama “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (one of the 10 Sundance films we’re excited for) and in particular its star, 21-year-old Elizabeth Olsen. Yes, that Olsen: she is the younger sister of media mogul twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. As we covered in our first feature on this promising new star, the youngest Olsen sibling eschewed her sisters’ child-star road to success, and instead did school plays, understudied on Broadway and continues to study acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. All that low-key hard work is paying off big time as her feature film debut is creating major buzz and earning rave reviews in Park City and is poised to make her a breakout in the same vein as Carey Mulligan (“An Education”), Ryan Gosling (“The Believer”) and Jennifer Lawrence (“Winter’s Bone”).
Intercut between present day and flashbacks, the film revolves around a young woman (Olsen) who escapes from a cult and tries to blend back into “normal” society and reconnect with her sister, and THR’s Daniel Miller sums up her performance thusly: “What makes Olsen’s performance one of startling maturity and focus is that she’s playing an entirely guarded woman, yet often using little more than the palpable unease in her eyes, she holds nothing back. Her Martha is both unreadably secretive and an exposed mass of raw nerves.”
Just yesterday we got a supposed unofficial look at some of the major cast members of “X-Men: First Class” in (bright yellow) uniforms from what looks to be a photoshoot, and today the first official stills from the movie itself have been released to Hero Complex. Ditching the yellow spandex, Xavier, Magneto and Co. look stylish, chic and wholly appropriate for their 1960s set story.
The stills also introduce new looks at mutants we didn’t get to see in yesterday’s image. Kevin Bacon‘s Sebastian Shaw, who possesses the ability to absorb kinetic energy and transform it into raw strength, has no visible mutation and neither does Caleb Landry Jones in the role of Banshee, whose ability is to emit a “sonic scream”. Additionally, Jennifer Lawrence‘s Mystique and Nicholas Hoult‘s Beast, who were both in their blue mutant forms in the photoshoot, are displayed in their lovely human forms here.
Wow! Rooney Mara is nearly unrecognizable on the February cover of W magazine, posing in character as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s adapatation of Stieg Larsson’s Swedish best-selling series “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Fincher and Mara spoke to W’s Lynn Herschberger from the set.
Despite the highly publicized casting process, Fincher wanted Mara from the beginning. He did see other girls, big names like Natalie Portman, who was coming off three movies and was too exhausted, Scarlett Johansson, deemed too sexy, and a then unknown Jennifer Lawrence, who was too tall. “It was hard,” Fincher recalled. “We had five or six girls audition with the rape scene. The girls had to kick a dildo up his ass. That’s Salander’s big scene, and we had to see if they could do it.” Mara, among the final five or six with fellow unknows Sophie Lowe, Katie Jarvis and Emilly Browning, was put through the ringer. “David added the rape scene at the last minute, and I said, ‘Ohmigod! They must be really serious.’ They did one test, then another a week later. They shot me in the subway in L.A. in full hair and makeup with a motorcycle. Every day they had a new request. On a Monday morning, David called me in, and I said, ‘What do you want me to do to my hair now?’ I was at the end of my rope. He told me I had the part. I hadn’t even read the script yet.” Five days later, she was in Sweden and in motorcycle training. An even more in-depth look at Fincher and the film can be read in the full article.
Co-starring Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist, Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard and Christopher Plummer, the film will shoot well into the spring to be ready for a December 21, 2011 release.
See a bigger version of the W cover and one more from the shoot below.
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