Daniel Craig may only be part of Her Majesty’s Secret Service when he appears in James Bond films, but in an interview with Vanity Fair he has some good advice about fame that Prince Harry and his sister-in-law Princess Kate should think about adhering to.
It should be a no-brainer, but there were no laws on the books in California that prevented convicted child molesters from working with children in the entertainment industry.
In Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is only pretending to play the younger version of Bruce Willis, with Willis traveling back in time to confront his “younger self.” But if Willis could really go back in time, would he do anything differently?
Premium Rush aside, Joseph Gordon-Levitt appears in two of the best-rated action films of 2012, The Dark Knight Rises and Looper, and also stars in the likely Oscar-contending drama Lincoln due out in November. In an interview with New York magazine, Gordon-Levitt talks about the makeup he had to wear to portray a younger version of Bruce Willis in Looper and what inspired him to direct his first film, which is due out next year.
If you took a time machine all the way back to 2010 and started to talk to people about the Oscar-nominated actress Jessica Chastain, there’s a big chance that nobody would know who you were talking about. Of course, I could think of a lot better ways of using a time machine, but the point still stands: after starring in six (!) films in 2011 alone, including The Help, Chastain has become a praised actress in Hollywood and is often on the shortlist for many upcoming projects.
Actor/comedian Billy Connolly doesn’t strike me as the type of person who parrot out generic answers to questions about his latest projects (as opposed to, say, Liam Neeson talking about the “character development” in Battleship). My notion appears to be correct, because in an interview with New York magazine he openly admits that he isn’t a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing even though he is appearing in The Hobbit movie series in the key role as the dwarf lord Dain Ironfoot.
Emily Blunt is one of the many actresses working today that aren’t satisfied by repeatedly starring as giggly girls in lighthearted comedies. Following in the footsteps of her Devil Wears Prada co-star Meryl Streep, Blunt has taken on a variety of roles in many different genres, including a major role in Looper, a sci-fi movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis.
Though Christopher Walken spent a majority of his early career in mostly serious roles, in the last two decades he has surprisingly emerged as a reliable source of a few dozen laughs in comedies.
It’s almost impossible to believe that Harrison Ford is now seventy and is now a regular in “older men” roles. But the seemingly ageless Ford has put Indiana Jones behind him (well, most hope) in order to appear in more dramatic roles, such as the Jackie Robinson biopic 42. Ford stars as Branch Rickey, the general manager who initially signed Robinson to a minor league contract and later called him to the major leagues, making Robinson the first professional African-American baseball player in the modern era.
Nobody would fault you if upon hearing the name Matthew Lillard your first thoughts were of a talking dog and the Mystery Machine. Even IMDb’s #1 “Known for” for Lillard is 2002’s live-action Scooby-Doo, in which Lillard somehow managed to pull off the perfect Shaggy. Considering that Lillard has since stared in a live-action sequel to Scooby-Doo and has also been doing the voice for the animated Shaggy for the last several years he isn’t shying away from what some actors might consider a pigeonholing role.
There is no show on television that I follow as closely as Boardwalk Empire, and a big reason for that is incredibly talented actors and actresses featured on the show. One of the series’ strongest lead characters is Margaret Thompson, played by Kelly Macdonald, whose recent career has even lead her to being cast as the lead character in Pixar’s last film, Brave.
I think it isn’t any secret that working on Community hasn’t been Chevy Chase’s favorite acting gig, as earlier this year he had a very public spat with series creator Dan Harmon and has been very vocal about his thoughts on the quality (or lack thereof) of the cult favorite NBC sitcom
In the last several years Bank of America, one of the largest banks in the United States, has come under fire for a number of its business practices. The latest complaint aimed at Bank of America involves child actors, with the banking giant facing a class action lawsuit for charging child actors’ trust accounts with monthly service fees.
Talk about a late bloomer: Ed Lauter has appeared in dozens of television series and movies in his long career, but at seventy-three the character actor seems to finally have become more than just a vaguely recognizable face after appearing as a butler in last year’s The Artist. This fall he appears in two films, Trouble with the Curve and Ed Burns’ The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
I can’t help it — even though it was over twenty years ago now since the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, whenever I see Robert Patrick on screen I end up thinking of him as the T-1000. Though I don’t think he minds that one bit, Patrick has had a lot of great roles since then, and he is his usual stoic self as the General Manager for the Atlanta Braves in Trouble with the Curve, which stars Clint Eastwood.
As members of SAG-AFTRA likely know, actors receive royal payments for purchases of blank VHS tapes and DVDs, and cable reruns and rentals of media they appeared in. Often this can make up a significant amount of an actor’s yearly income. This applies to foreign countries as well, but a letter sent to SAG-AFTRA by a group of actors alleges that the union has not been paying the proper amount to actors for more than a decade.
There have been numerous actors who have turned to directing (such as recent convert Ben Affleck), but none of them have quite as impressive of a resume as Clint Eastwood, who for decades has been praised for both his acting and his directing and is one of the very few in the industry who can be undoubtedly labeled “iconic.”
It wasn’t too long ago that I looked at new Ben Affleck movies like trips to the dentist, especially the parts involving the dentist painfully picking at my gums. After excellent roles in films like Dazed and Confused, Chasing Amy, and, of course, Good Will Hunting (which he co-wrote) in the 1990s, the new millennium brought with it a string of films starring Affleck that ranged from inoffensively mediocre to reaching new levels of awfulness. But Affleck successfully taped into his Good Will Hunting creative energy to direct Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo, three films that have received strong critical praise (he also co-wrote the first two).
The economic instability that hit most of the world in 2008-2009 and still lingers didn’t just hit the lower classes — A-list stars who used to command paychecks hovering upwards of $20 million per film are far less common than they were before the recession. For a major star like Brad Pitt, who earned a reportedly $20 million salary for Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005, hasn’t gotten paychecks close to that in recent years.
In order to play a younger version of Bruce Willis’ character in Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt underwent three hours of makeup each day before filming. While I personally don’t think the changes are that drastic (I mean, it isn’t like he has to look like the Elephant Man to play Bruce Willis), Gordon-Levitt talked about transforming into Willis and what audiences might discover when watching Looper.
