Here’s how ‘Hacks’ co-stars really feel about each otherEntertain This!
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‘Celebrity Big Brother’ stars Mickey Rourke, JoJo Siwa clash
JoJo Siwa felt ‘pressure’ to outdo her KISS iHeartRadio Awards look
JoJo Siwa teased the announcement of a “massive project” that’s coming soon while wearing a massive rhinestone headpiece.
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Mickey Rourke has been warned about his “homophobic” comments toward JoJo Siwa.
The actor and dancer have crossed paths as contestants on the British “Celebrity Big Brother,” which premiered its 24th season on Monday.
Tensions brewed in the first episodes between Rourke, 72, and Siwa, 21, who accused the actor of being homophobic for various comments he made about her, including saying he was “going to vote the lesbian out real quick,” according to a transcript obtained by BBC ahead of Wednesday’s episode.
Later, when the “Sin City” actor asked the “Dance Moms” alum if she liked “boys or girls,” Siwa said she liked girls, before clarifying that her partner is nonbinary. Rourke responded: “If I stay longer than four days, you won’t be gay anymore.”
USA TODAY has reached out to reps for Rourke and Siwa for comment.
Later in the episode, he used the British slang word for cigarette, the same word used as a homophobic slur, and told Siwa: “I’m not talking to you,” according to the transcript. After former British “Love Island” star Chris Hughes told Rourke he couldn’t say that, the Oscar-nominee claimed: “I know. I was talking about a cigarette.”
Producers of the series, which airs daily on Britain’s ITV, told Rourke his “language was offensive and unacceptable” and issued him a warning: “Further language or behavior of this nature could lead to you being removed from the ‘Big Brother’ house.”
“I apologize,” he responded, per the transcript. “I don’t have dishonorable intentions – I’m just talking smack, you know. I wasn’t taking it all so serious. I didn’t mean in it any bad intentions and if I did, sorry.”
After Rourke returned to the cast, Siwa confronted him, saying his use of the slur was “not an acceptable word.”
He told her: “I want to apologize. I’ve got a habit of having a short fuse. And I don’t mean nothing by it. I do mean (the apology). If I didn’t, I wouldn’t say it to you.”
Siwa responded: “I appreciate your apology.”
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Viola Davis is shredded and mad in her new action movie
‘G20’: See Viola Davis take out the bad guys in Prime thriller
Watch Viola Davis take out the bad guys as the U.S. president in the Prime Video thriller “G20.”
Two things to know about Viola Davis. Don’t get into a pull-up contest with her, and don’t ask her to buy you crazy-expensive sneakers.
Marsai Martin learned both lessons while shooting “G20” (streaming Thursday on Prime Video), an action movie in which Davis plays U.S. President Danielle Sutton and Martin is her precocious hacker daughter, Serena.
The easy friendship shared by the duo was on display during a recent Zoom call, which included Martin, 20, confessing she couldn’t do more than one pull-up, to which Davis just smiled.
“My trainer, Gabriela Mclain, who I call Lord Voldemort or the one who shall not be named, or the brutalizer, she had me doing squats, weights, punching exercises,” says Davis, 59, who also is a producer on “G20.”
“I shot this movie right after doing ‘The Woman King,’ so I never stopped working out,” she says. “So, yes, I can do a lot of pull-ups, let’s just say. I’m tougher than people think I am.”
People will not be doubting Davis’s toughness after seeing “G20,” which shows Davis single-handedly taking down a gaggle of terrorists who infiltrate a G20 summit in South Africa. Davis, buff arms flying, protects her family and literally saves the world.
Why did Viola Davis make ‘G20’? To ‘put every young Black girl in the story’
The film came to Davis, one of Hollywood’s elite EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) winners, and her producer husband Julius Tennon in 2015, and despite obstacles, the couple was determined to see the movie through.
“People want to see Indiana Jones and Ripley (from the ‘Alien’ franchise) sacrifice themselves for the greater good, people who make us feel protected and cared for, and dare I say loved,” Davis says.
She remembers when daughter Genesis, now 14, was young, she would ask Davis to insert her as a character in the fantastical stories she’d make up at bedtime.
“She’d say, ‘Put me in the story, Mama,’” Davis says. “So, why did I do this movie? I did it to put every young Black girl in this story; I want them to see themselves without the limitations society often puts on them. When you see it, you can believe it. But the pressure of seeing something within yourself without seeing the evidence of it in the world, that’s tough. So when you get the baton in your hand, that’s your new job, to pay it forward.”
What is readily apparent watching “G20” is that the plot represents something U.S. voters rejected in the last presidential election with the defeat of Kamala Harris.
But during filming a year ago, the cast felt they were shooting a scenario that might soon echo real life, says Martin, known for TV’s “Black-ish,” which also starred Anthony Anderson, who plays the first gentleman in “G20.”
“As an audience member now, you’ll be thinking, man, this is what could have been, but while we were filming, I was thinking, wow, this is what is about to be,” Martin says. “Movies remind us of things that can still happen. I knew this movie would be needed.”
Viola Davis on mentorship, having X-ray vision, and expensive sneakers
Of Davis, Martin says gained a powerful mentor and “came away understanding how you lead on set, how you greet everyone, how you connect with people, how when you are there, people are just ready to work.”
Davis just nods before heaping praise on her costar, who in “G20” plays a central role in helping vanquish the bad guys. “Marsai has depth, she has extreme sensitivity and a driving need for excellence,” Davis says. “I know this. I have X-ray vision, and I can see people.”
So you’re still wondering about the expensive sneakers? When the duo is asked what they learned about each other during the shoot, Davis immediately starts laughing.
“Well, Marsai learned that I’m cheap, that’s what she learned!” Davis booms.
Martin’s eyes widen in embarrassment.
“Come on, that’s what you were thinking, be honest,” Davis says.
Turns out, a birthday was rolling up for Davis’ daughter, and word was that Genesis wanted a very specific pair of Nike sneakers, so Davis enlisted Martin’s help finding a pair.
“Marsai gave me a lesson in Nike sneakers, which I came to find out cost $425, and I was like, ‘$425, you have got to be kidding me,’” she says with a big laugh. “Marsai just looked at me and said, ‘You are cheap.’”
So who won that battle? Let’s just say, you don’t mess with Viola Davis.
“I’m not going to lie, I did not buy them,” Davis says.
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Watch: 'Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror' documentary trailerTV
Watch: ‘Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror’ documentary trailerTV
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See trailer for ‘American Terror’
Watch trailer for Netflix’s ‘Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror’
Netflix’s documentary ‘Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror’ arrives on the 30th anniversary of the tragedy. See the exclusive trailer.
Netflix is commemorating the 30th anniversary of one of the gravest days in our nation’s history with its upcoming documentary “Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror.”
USA TODAY can exclusively reveal a trailer for the moving 82-minute film, streaming April 18. It chronicles what was then considered the worst act of American domestic terror and the resilience of the capital city and those affected by the 168 lives lost. On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove a large rented truck containing a 4,800-pound bomb to the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where several federal agencies including the Secret Service and Army and Marine recruitment had offices employing hundreds. A daycare center also operated on the property.
McVeigh, an Army veteran who served during the Persian Gulf War, explained his motives for the anti-government attack in a letter published by The Guardian. “Foremost the bombing was a retaliatory strike; a counter attack for the cumulative raids (and subsequent violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years (including, but not limited to, Waco),” McVeigh wrote, referencing the fatal standoff between law enforcement and cult leader David Koresh exactly two years before the Oklahoma City bombing.
At 9:02 on that fateful spring morning, the bomb exploded, causing one-third of the Federal Building to crumble.
“I remember we were having breakfast,” Dr. Carl Spengler, who assisted in triage care, says in the preview, “and then there was this explosion that kind of rocked us out of our table.”
“The whole front of the Federal Building is gone,” a voice describing the emergency says. “All floors to the roof.”
Filmmakers reconstruct the events of that morning and the days that followed with people on site during the tragedy and law enforcement officers desperate to solve the case.
“I thought maybe I was dead,” remembers survivor Amy Downs, who worked in the building. “I realized I was buried alive.”
The preview touches on the rage lodged at callous McVeigh. A child smiles while holding a cardboard sign that reads, “Oklahoma justice hang the sucker.” A woman interviewed at the time declared to the camera, “I think they should let him loose out front and let everybody have at him.”
“Everybody that has somebody in the building,” Renee Moore, whose son attended daycare at the Federal Building, begins in the trailer, “we have to live with this.” Her pain, marked by tears, is a stark contrast to McVeigh. He can be heard saying coldly, “Am I remorseful? No.”
It’s the same alarming attitude that USA TODAY reporter Kevin Johnson experienced in a 1996 meeting with McVeigh, who was executed in 2001. “His self-absorption, against the backdrop of such enormous loss, was particularly striking,” Johnson wrote. “It remained a constant theme throughout the session.”
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Ray Mendoza’s Iraqi War movie is brutally real
‘Warfare’: Alex Garland re-creates Iraqi town for battle scenes
Co-writer/co-director Alex Garland explains how he re-created an Iraqi neighborhood to film battle scenes for the military drama “Warfare.”
There’s a disembodied, bloody leg on a road that’s seen throughout much of the movie “Warfare.” In a slasher picture, it’s a sight that would lean comical. In this fierce war film, it’s a surreal, unmoving constant and a different sort of horrific.
While director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” looked at a battle that could be, “Warfare” (★★★½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) examines a battle that was, in brutally visceral fashion. Garland co-directed and co-wrote this intense, tightly packed narrative with Ray Mendoza, his “Civil War” military adviser, based on a 2006 surveillance mission in Iraq that went awry for Mendoza’s Navy SEALs unit.
To do it, they cast a bunch of young Hollywood up-and-comers to play American soldiers in the middle of a harrowing standoff with Iraqi insurgents, including Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Michael Gandolfini and more.
Poulter plays the leader of a SEAL group – which includes communications officer Ray Mendoza (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) – embedded in a two-story apartment building in the Ramadi province. As preternaturally still sniper Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis) keeps an eye on Al-Qaeda operatives in a nearby marketplace, the rest of the guys do push-ups, tell jokes and listen to radio chatter in a sort of ominously monotonous limbo. You know something’s going to go bad, you just don’t know when.
That kind of palpable tension doesn’t let up. Instead it just changes course over 95 minutes of quasi-real time. And when a couple of grenades are thrown into their space – because insurgents happen to be in the house next door – the action both ratchets up and begins to spin out of control for the soldiers. Elliott’s hand is injured so they call in a pair of tanks to help extract him, but in the course of the rescue, a massive IED explosion causes chaos and casualties.
The SEALs desperately try to help their gravely wounded compatriots while some keep their own injuries, psychological as well as physical, to themselves. Another nearby SEAL team – led by Melton’s character – joins them to help dole out morphine to the injured and figure a way out, even as the enemy dangerously closes in.
“Warfare” leans into immersing its audience in the carnage like recent war films such as “Dunkirk” and “13 Hours.” It’s also much more effective at leaving the viewer as discombobulated as those personas onscreen. You barely get to know the characters – for example, excitable young gunner Tommy (Connor) has some definite “new guy energy” – before the situation turns hellish, but that’s not really the point of “Warfare.” Garland and Mendoza want you to feel, not watch, what they’re going through. The never-ending, gut-wrenching screams. The gory mess of a limb that may never be usable again. The absolute fear of wondering if you have hours, minutes or even seconds to live.
There’s no glamorization of war here – the youth of the actors reflects men sent off to unpredictable battle zones before their lives have even really started. “Warfare” also captures the terror and confusion of those unwillingly caught up in the fight, in this case an Iraqi family whose place is taken over by American soldiers in the dark of night wielding guns and sledgehammers.
And while it’s a true tale, the title card at the opening says that the film’s based on their “memories.” In that sense, rather than a millennial take on “Saving Private Ryan,” “Warfare” seems unflinchingly real, capturing a harrowing moment in these men’s lives that feels lived instead of just another war story.
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Jon Hamm stars in new crime dramedyEntertain This!
Jon Hamm stars in new crime dramedyEntertain This!
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John Lennon’s son says ‘One to One’ is ‘gaining extra time’ with dad
‘One to One: John & Yoko’ replays Lennon and Ono’s benefit show
John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged a benefit show for the children of Willowbrook in 1972, which is seen anew in “One to One: John & Yoko.”
In 1972, the FBI tapped John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s phone at the request of Richard Nixon, who worried Lennon might undermine his reelection bid. The paranoid president couldn’t have anticipated that the couple’s son would be thrilled to hear the captured conversations.
“Growing up without my father, most of my experience of him has been through videos and film and music,” Sean Ono Lennon says. “So I always feel like I’m gaining extra time with him. It was really great fun to hear the audio calls. It’s nice because it’s so candid and unfiltered.”
Those phone calls − some amusing, others goosebump-inducing − are at the center of the new documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” (exclusively in IMAX theaters Friday, in theaters everywhere April 18), which culminates in a benefit concert that would be Lennon’s only full-length post-Beatles show.
Sean Lennon − who has produced the music for a Record Store Day EP and a box set to mark Lennon’s 85th birthday on Oct. 9 − describes it as “an unmanicured window into their lives during a very tumultuous but also very creative time period.”
By the early ‘70s, “my parents had fused into a superorganism. Everything they did, they did together; all the songs they were writing were together. It was a team of two,” he says. “This film represents the reality of that moment in time very faithfully and accurately.”
“One to One,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, follows John and Yoko as they align with Jerry Rubin and other leaders of the radicalized left. Plans are hatched for the couple to head the all-star Free the People tour, with a final stop at the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, the two peaceniks grow uncomfortable with the potential for violence and call the whole thing off.
Instead, as John and Yoko lose hope for the movement, they decide to perform a pair of charity shows at Madison Square Garden, with proceeds providing individualized care for the disabled children of Willowbrook State School, whose heartbreaking plight was exposed by Geraldo Rivera.
“In a way, the film is about moving past political defeat to improve the world in small ways around you,” says Macdonald.
For Sean, the lesson is that “you lose the moral high ground when you become violent yourself. You see my parents realizing that some of the people who were supposed to be fighting for justice were turning into monsters themselves. … As soon as you try to make your point through violence, you’ve lost the argument.
“My parents were always very conscious of spreading messages of positive change and peace and love.”
Perhaps just as radically for the era, “One to One” depicts John Lennon completely committed to supporting his wife in her endeavors, including attending the First International Feminist Conference alongside her. One revelation that will surprise fans is that the couple’s move to America and John’s fight for his green card were almost entirely driven by their efforts to regain custody of Ono’s young daughter, Kyoko, after ex-husband Tony Cox fled with her.
“Imagine being a mother whose daughter has been kidnapped and you’re searching everywhere and you can’t find her and nobody seems to (care),” Macdonald says. “That moment where she sings ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ and screeching and writhing is one of the most amazing moments in the film actually, when you understand that’s about her pain at losing her daughter.
“This is a human tragedy that allows you an access to Yoko and her feelings that I don’t think people have been previously willing to take on board.”
Yoko and Kyoko reunited a decade and a half after Lennon’s murder. “Like me, (Kyoko) was exposed to the limelight and celebrity culture when she was very young, and she had a very hard time,” Sean says. “I love her very much, and I’m just grateful that life has made it such that we’re able to spend these years together, because we didn’t get to when I was a kid.”
Amid an era of eerily parallel political upheaval, Ono, now 92, lives a quiet retirement. (“I’m trying my best to take care of her,” Sean says. “She’s doing well, considering her age.”)
Would Lennon be doing the same, if he were alive?
“John was nothing if not progressive, and I think he would have made his opinions clear about authoritarianism around the world and the move to the right in America,” Macdonald says. “He would have been outspoken, he was always brave. … Sometimes it comes across as naivete, but there’s an enthusiasm for improving himself that’s endearing.”
For Sean’s part, “I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid speaking for him. But I do believe that one thing that was consistent about my dad intellectually and artistically, he was never the same from one year to the next. His mind was always evolving, he was always discovering new ideas and inspiration.
“Whatever you think John Lennon would think today is probably not it. He was always changing his mind. He would probably surprise you because he always surprised everybody.”
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'One to One: John & Yoko' replays Lennon and Ono's benefit showMusic
‘One to One: John & Yoko’ replays Lennon and Ono’s benefit showMusic
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Inside Harris campaign woes, efforts to hide Biden’s health: ‘Fight’
Kamala Harris gaslit by her own campaign team. Makeup before internal aide meetings and fluorescent tape to guide an aging Joe Biden. Donald Trump’s 180 from an early-voting skeptic to an early-voting evangelist. A tearful, pre-assassination premonition from Trump’s chief of staff.
These are among the revelations from “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” where journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes uncover never-before-seen details and strategies that shaped the 2024 presidential election. USA TODAY spoke with the authors about the most surprising takeaways and reactions since the book was published April 1.
Perhaps the most revelatory insight from “Fight” is the lead-up and aftermath to Harris’ succession as the Democratic nominee. Nancy Pelosi’s involvement was paramount for the switch, with the authors telling USA TODAY it felt “Shakespearean,” like a “knifing,” or “a real Brutus moment.” Allen and Parnes outline the chaos that followed Biden stepping down, including Barack Obama scrambling to set up an open convention to “circumvent” Harris and Biden insisting there be “no daylight” between them, even as the White House staff gave the go-ahead to push for her victory. While Harris felt loyalty to Biden, he did not feel the same to her, the authors say.
“I think a lot of people who will read this book will be surprised and, on the left, be saddened at the degree to which Joe Biden put himself above the interests of his party and ultimately … from the Democratic point of view, the interests of the country,” Allen says.
The authors anticipate “Fight” could be a “playbook” for the 2028 presidential election, as Democrats (but also Republicans) learn from the chaos of the 2024 election.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What was the most surprising revelation you found in the process of reporting and writing this book?
Parnes: I honestly was shocked that they (Harris and Democrats) thought they were going to win, and the fact that her campaign had essentially telegraphed a win to her. We have this really big moment in the book, which I think is probably the biggest bombshell, which is that her own campaign gaslit her.
Allen: I think the degree to which Joe Biden clung to every vestige of power and influence, at the expense of Kamala Harris’s campaign, was surprising to me. We revealed for the first time in this book the actual conversation that went on between them when he passed the baton, and he was not ready to endorse her the day that he stepped out, and she had to push him repeatedly to make the endorsement.
What are other people telling you surprised them most after reading the book?
Allen: One of the really cool things about this book so far is that everybody who reads it has a different kind of like, “Oh my God” moment. Some of them were common, but the reaction that we have gotten has been just overwhelming in terms of how many surprises there are for readers.
Whether you’re talking about Biden or Harris or Trump or Susie Wiles, the Trump campaign manager who has sort of a premonition about him being shot that we report for the first time, or you’re talking about Pelosi or Obama. I mean, all of these – I was going to say characters, but they’re real. They’re real people who have these very sort of dramatic motivations.
You say in the book senior White House officials became aware in 2023 of signs that President Biden appeared to be slowing down and having difficulties. That was a year before the election. Why didn’t they do anything to stop him from running again?
Parnes: They felt like he had had a successful first term. I think he really wanted to run again. We detail in the book that Mike Donilon, one of his closest advisers, says, “Look, it’s hard to step away from the house and the plane and the chopper.” I think this was a guy who wanted to run for president his entire political career, just about, finally gets it and has difficulty letting go of it.
Allen: There was never a discussion about whether he was going to run, never a real discussion. He was determined to run, and the people who would, in theory, try to dissuade him, work for him.
There’s the flaw of Biden not seeing his own increasing frailty, but there is also the systemic flaw of who could tell him that and remain close to him. And the answer is, I don’t think any of these people thought they could tell him that and stay in the inner circle.
Some of America perceives it to be a cover-up. Is that what happened?
Allen: There was definitely an effort to cover for him. I think the reason that we don’t use the term “cover-up” is simply because it connotes a criminal conspiracy. I don’t think we have evidence of crimes that were committed.
The one unanswered question that the Democratic party refused to reckon with is, how is it possible that he can get out of the race effectively because he is no longer capable of running for president, and yet he remains in office? The idea that he no longer had the capacity to be a candidate, but somehow had the capacity to be president, I think is irreconcilable for a lot of people.
Whose counsel led to Biden making the historic move to step out of the race? Was it Obama or Pelosi?
Parnes: Both, but more so Pelosi.
She goes on “Morning Joe” and says, famously, he has a decision to make … and the reaction inside the campaign in that moment was like, “F you Nancy.” They were all so upset. And I think that was the moment that really changed it all. Of course, she’s working the phones privately and hearing from colleagues, but to go out there and take such a stand. She felt like she needed to do it on the show that he watches every morning. I mean, it was a real knifing.
Allen: That’s Shakespearean. The chapter title is “Et tu, Nancy?”
Why was there so much internal animosity toward Kamala Harris from the Biden team?
Allen: It dates back to that 2020 race. The Biden family never really got over her attacking him on stage over busing, basically suggesting that he was racist. It continued on through the first couple of years of the presidency. I think Biden and Harris themselves got along pretty well, but there was a lot of animosity between the West Wing and the Vice President’s office.
Once that (2024) debate occurs, and Biden is in trouble, and the donors are choking off money his inner circle basically makes the decision that in order for him to keep his head above water, he needs to drown her.
Harris, I think, always felt loyalty to Biden. Biden did not feel that same loyalty to her. Once he steps away from the race, he doesn’t really step away. He’s constantly in her ear about her not throwing his legacy under the bus to try to win. He doesn’t understand, or is unwilling to accept, that once he gives up the nomination to her, she’s the hope of the Democratic Party.
You report that Wiles confided in tears that she was worried about an assassination attempt weeks before Butler, Pennsylvania. If she had that premonition, why do you think more precautions weren’t taken?
Allen: A lot of mistakes were made in Butler, and as a nation, we narrowly escaped the tragedy of a major nominee for president and former president being killed. And that’s no small thing. If anything, it’s been understated in the public discussion.
But I don’t think she thought in that moment there was a specific, credible threat to him that will be followed through on that means that we need to, like, bulk up our security. I think what she more meant was, what more can this guy face? What is the next terrible thing that could happen? And her mind went to that place of him being physically in danger, potentially.
Parnes: I don’t think anyone could have anticipated how the turn of events and how this election turned out. And that’s sort of why we wrote the book in the first place. It was a completely unprecedented election with twists and turns, things that I think we’ll never see again in our lifetimes.