Chris McKittrick

Christopher McKittrick is the author of Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away (2025), Can’t Give It Away on Seventh Avenue: The Rolling Stones and New York City (2019), Somewhere You Feel Free: Tom Petty and Los Angeles (2020), Gimme All Your Lovin’: The Blues Beard, and Boogie of ZZ Top’s Billy F. Gibbons (2024), and Howling to the Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night: The Tale of the Stray Cats (2024). In addition to his work for Daily Actor, McKittrick and his work have been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Observer, Newsday, USAToday.com, CNBC.com, Time.com, RollingStone.com, and dozens of other entertainment and news websites. He has appeared on television on the Tom Petty episode of HLN’s How It Really Happened and Al Araby TV’s Hekayat Al Cinema, and on various radio shows and podcasts.

For more information about Chris, visit his website here!

Boardwalk Empire’s Kelly Macdonald: “I don’t generally get to play the stronger characters…. but I’ve been enjoying getting my teeth into something else”

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.

Bank of America Sued by Child Actors for Depleting Trust Funds with Bank Fees

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.

Ed Lauter on His Late Success After Appearing in ‘The Artist’: It “percolated things”

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

Robert Patrick on Becoming an Actor: “The guys who make it to the major leagues are not there because they are lucky”

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.

Actors Send Letter to SAG-AFTRA Over Foreign Royalty Payments Dispute

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.

Ben Affleck Talks About Directing and The Lowest Points of His Acting Career: “I made a bunch of movies that didn’t work”

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).

Brad Pitt on the Economics of Stars’ Salaries During the Current Recession

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.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Being Bruce Willis in ‘Looper’

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.

Ben Affleck: “If anybody really wants to be an actor, a great advanced class would be to direct some stuff”

Remember when most people thought of Ben Affleck as the less-talented half of the Good Will Hunting duo? Turns out that while Affleck wasn’t always the greatest actor — at the very least his bad moments, like Pearl Harbor, Gigli, and Surviving Christmas were really bad — he’s a great director, with his first two films getting rave reviews and his soon-to-be-released third, Argo, already getting award buzz.

Matthew Perry on the Legacy of ‘Friends’ and the “Valuable Lesson” He Learned on His Cancelled Series ‘Mr. Sunshine’

It isn’t easy to follow up starring in one of the most successful and beloved television sitcoms of all time. We’ve all heard about the “Seinfeld Curse” (though Julia Louis-Dreyfus seems to be handling herself well these days), but most of the cast of Friends have had trouble finding a project that had a fraction of the success of the “Must See TV” hit NBC sitcom.

Naomi Watts on Filming Tsunami Scenes in ‘The Impossible’: “It was intense work. For anyone, but at my age, boy, it was a workout”

One would think that after being manhandled (apehandled?) by a giant gorilla in King Kong an actress could pretty much pull off any physical role. But Naomi Watts, who stars in The Impossible, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, had to fend with far more than a digital gorilla since much of the film takes place during a tsunami in Thailand.

Philip Seymour Hoffman on ‘The Master’: “It’s not a Scientology movie. It’s something else”

One of the most anticipated films of the year is master filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a film that has been controversial since before it even began production because of its subject manner. Thought to be a thinly-veiled look at Scientology, the religion founded by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard that counts numerous celebrities among its membership, the film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Hubbard-like Lancaster Dodd.

Paul Rudd: “Theatre is the best way for an actor to improve”

As funny of a guy as Paul Rudd is, when he takes the lead in a film the box office isn’t always there. His last three starring roles — Wanderlust, Our Idiot Brother, and How Do You Know — all underperformed. So it’s a good thing that Rudd is more than just a movie actor, since he is making a return to Broadway after several years in movies to star in Grace alongside Michael Shannon, Kate Arrington, and Ed Asner.

Broadway’s ‘Chaplin’, Rob McClure: “I really enjoy being onstage, and I believe audiences sense that, and it makes them comfortable”

It would have been easy for the producers behind Chaplin, a new Broadway musical based on the life of the famed early film icon, to find a Hollywood star to cast in the lead. But going that route would have made it unlikely to equal the performance of Rob McClure, who initially received rave reviews portraying the man behind the Little Tramp during the musical’s run at California’s La Jolla Playhouse.

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