Author: business

“Tiger King” star Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado, announced on April 21 that he wed fellow prison inmate Jorge Marquez.

“Never been more proud of someone. Meet my husband Jorge Flores Maldonado,” Maldonado wrote in a post on X, alongside a digitally altered photo of the pair, edited to show them in tuxedos and matching white hats underneath a floral arch.

USA TODAY has reached out to Maldonado’s rep for comment.

Imprisoned Tiger King sues over songs used in Netflix series

The nuptials are not a surprise, following an announcement from Maldonado, 62, in October that he planned to wed Marquez, 33.

“He is so amazing and is from Mexico. Now, the quest of getting married in prison and getting him asylum or we be leaving America when we both get out,” Maldonado wrote in a post on X at the time. “Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago.”

Speeding down Manhattan’s West Side Highway in an Uber, he wonders aloud whether a disastrous occurrence – perhaps breaking down on the side of the road? – would make this interview more interesting.

If imagination took hold and Badgley’s fictional murderer Joe Goldberg were the version of him in the car, that deviously wishful thinking might add nerves to the mix. But since it’s Badgley – the charming, down-to-earth actor who became a household name as Dan Humphrey in CW’s 2007-12 hit show “Gossip Girl,” and again a decade later with his leading role in “You” – worries don’t register.

The most that happens is Eminem’s 2000 earworm “The Real Slim Shady” plays on the car radio, catching Badgley’s attention in a throwback to a time before he became TV’s complicated leading man.

Beyond the backseat, Badgley is driving toward the closing stretch of “You” ahead of its final season (streaming Thursday on Netflix). And he is done with Joe. 

“I’m glad we’re putting him to bed,” he says, ready to retire the charismatically cerebral, violent killer.

The old adage “you can’t go home again” (pulled from the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel and repeated in the opening scene) isn’t exactly true for Badgley’s former bookstore manager Joe, who returns to New York City for Season 5 of the Netflix series.

“I’ve been with (Joe) my entire 30s, actually. I was 30 years old when I signed on to do this. I’m going to be 39 later this year,” he tells USA TODAY in an exclusive series of conversations.

Penn Badgley is ready to say goodbye to ‘You’ character, Joe Goldberg

After playing Joe Goldberg on “You” for the past 10 years, Penn Badgley reflects on the show’s impact.

“He’s been like my little convict brother, who I’ve had to counsel through our 30s together,” says Badgley. “And in that way, he’s kind of taught me to be a better man. He’s failing miserably, but I’ve had to reflect on all the things I share with him, even if they’re not that escalated or that magnified.”

Over the past decade, Penn and Joe both got married (the former to singer Domino Kirke, the latter to Love Quinn in Season 3, then to Kate Lockwood at the end of Season 4), welcomed their first child and explored what it means to be a man.

“For me, it’s been this long, profound, life-changing experience, reflecting on masculinity, misconceptions of love and … abuse,” he says, acknowledging the “satirical social commenting exercise in using high drama and camp.”

The series, which premiered on Lifetime in 2018 and quickly moved to Netflix, is based on Caroline Kepnes’ novels. After four seasons as a bumbling apex predator, Joe faces a new challenge as the show ends: The women are fighting back harder than ever.

“You” has always emphasized contradictions: Joe’s fairytale delusions of being a righteous “white knight” vs. his reality of stalking and killing people each season in pursuit of his obsession. And his alleged hatred for wealth and what it breeds be damned. Repeatedly, he climbs the ladder of “love,” chasing a series of privileged women to finally possess one of the world’s richest and most powerful in this final season. Pair that with viewers lusting after a sociopathic stalker, fantasizing about Joe’s killer looks.

Review: In the addictive ‘You,’ Penn Badgley is even creepier than in ‘Gossip Girl’

The timing of the show’s end probes that duality, in part due to the political landscape and even the similar thirst for Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the brutal shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, at the twisted intersection of attraction, killing and justice. 

Badgley was perturbed “to see ‘justifiable murder’ as a debate-worthy topic.”

“Are we really at a place where we have to investigate our belief system, our moral framework? Is there a circumstance where we feel murder is justifiable? And if we say yes, what are the implications? I think the implications are pretty huge.”

Badgley thinks about the bigger picture. His “Can We Talk?” lecture series, with psychotherapist and relationship expert Nura Mowzoon, aims to connect with a younger generation facing intense division. With talks this year at Harvard and Columbia University, hotbeds of sociopolitical tension, the motivating focus is finding empathy.

We meet for the first time directly after his Columbia conversation with Mowzoon, which fills a large classroom (the same one seen in the 2000s “Spider-Man” franchise) with 400 students, all laser-focused on his cascading curls, a full yet manicured dark beard and earnest eyes.

“In some ways, students represent….” Badgley starts. “Your biggest fans,” Mowzoon interjects.

“Yeah, they represent a demographic that I interact with a lot,” he says. “Both in reality and also in imagination.”

Pulling the curtain back on Penn Badgley

“Do you believe people can change?” Badgley poses the question to the Columbia students, his own trajectory mirroring the response: Maybe so, maybe not.

His acting career began around age 12, with a guest role on NBC’s “Will & Grace,” though child stardom – and fame in general, it seems – unsettles Badgley. “I developed a very contemptuous relationship with whatever you might call Hollywood … very early on. By the time I was on ‘Gossip Girl,’” which he landed at 20, “I felt like I was done.”

The show, a satirical drama about wealthy prep school teenagers on New York’s Upper East Side, almost didn’t include Badgley as Dan Humphrey. (His Brooklynite interloper is revealed in the 2012 finale as the eponymous blogger narrating the series, obsessively chronicling the lives of Manhattan’s elite in a way not entirely dissimilar to his character on “You.”)

“I turned it down first. And I didn’t just turn it down, like, ‘Hm, maybe.’ I was like, ‘No, thank you. Best wishes with this show, I do not want to do this.’ And I had moved on,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it twice and felt good about the decision, and it was partly because I was like, ‘I don’t know that I can keep doing this.’”

But the teen drama became an instant success, creating fame overload for the reluctant star and his castmates, including actress and ex-girlfriend Blake Lively.

His Columbia appearance comes days after his “Gossip Girl” costar Michelle Trachtenberg died in February at 39 from complications of diabetes.

Badgley recalls her laugh as a defining memory. “I knew her from (the 1996 film) ‘Harriet the Spy’ first,” though he “didn’t know her that well,” he admits. “She had, in the best way, a childlike joy and spirit to her. She clearly loved to laugh, and she was so quick to laughter. … It’s surreal, especially given that I hadn’t seen her.”

Badgley’s contemplating how “we’re a culture completely obsessed with celebrity” when we meet again a little more than a month later.  He’s transformed, with a buzz cut, neatly shaven beard and a tan (courtesy of nearly two weeks in the Miami sun). 

“I’m very conscious of the negative impacts it has on folks who are not famous, and I’m also very conscious of the negative impacts it has on people who are famous,” he says. “I actually believe, in both cases, the negative impacts of (celebrity) on all people grossly outweigh the positive.”

And for the second time, we’re sitting without a publicist in sight in the backseat of a car, heading to Brooklyn as the sun begins its descent in the blue sky of a sunny spring day.

“Growing up in Hollywood, I’ve lost people close to me, or worse, seen them struggle in a way that’s worse than loss, that’s worse than death.”

Of his “closest” trio of friends, “one’s dead and one, not for nothing, did try to kill themselves in our 20s,” he says. “I was just seeing the causes. And I don’t just feel like I want to stand idly by and accept.”

Penn Badgley on podcasting, and texting Ariana Grande

Analyzing his unconventional childhood, and those of others, fascinated him enough to start a podcast dedicated to unfurling healing inner truths. On “Podcrushed,” with co-hosts Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, tweendom is dissected with high-profile guests.

His guests have included Drew Barrymore, Demi Lovato, former “Gossip Girl” love interest Leighton Meester (team Dan and Blair!) and fellow Netflix heartthrobs Noah Centineo, Lucas Bravo and Chase Stokes. He’s relied on his wife and cold calling to make connections.

Though he’s decidedly famous, Badgley doesn’t seem like a Hollywood actor. When booking guests for “Podcrushed”: “I don’t know anybody. I don’t know any celebrities.” In describing his workout routine: “I’ve started doing all body-weight calisthenics.” On getting around: the New York subway still, yes, and a Subaru, “such a practical car” for someone who’s “not a car person.” When asked about the Oscars: “I never know … What are the movies?”

Between the podcast and the talk series, he’s become akin to a millennial Keith Morrison, but for investigative nostalgia instead of unraveling mysterious crimes on “Dateline.” Wrap that enrapturing deep voice in the body of an “internet boyfriend,” and you have Badgley.

He does, however, occasionally text with über-famous pop singer Ariana Grande. He starred in her 2024 “The Boy Is Mine” music video. “Stalking THE stalker is genius” one commenter wrote of Badgley’s casting opposite Grande’s Catwoman-esque character. She returned the favor and appeared on his podcast, his most popular to date by far. Grande’s viral “Domingo” sketch from “Saturday Night Live” – including Badgley’s current favorite “SNL” cast member Marcello Hernandez (“I love Marcello”) – made him laugh.

‘The Boy is Mine’: Ariana Grande drops star-studded video with Penn Badgley, Brandy and Monica

“She’s a good hang, she’s so personable and funny,” he says. “She’s one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and everybody’s just scrutinizing every single thing she does, every little bit of footage of her that’s out there, any recording of her voice.”

He says “people psychoanalyze her,” but she’s “a person who I’ve met and know to some degree where I’m like, ‘She may be one of the most down-to-earth people.’” Grande “is very strong. In fact, when we said that about her, Nava said it in the podcast, that’s what made her cry,” he says, growing quiet. “Because I bet you people don’t call her that a lot, and that’s not fair.”

He’s constantly analyzing, making sure his words are exactly correct (“and what I mean by that is” becomes a common phrase). Badgley strives to be meaningful in how he approaches life and the “greater good.” And the greater good is not celebrity.

“Somehow, I just never had to think about (fame) the way that I do now. I didn’t have to factor it into my life, (my) family,” he says. Badgley constructs an ongoing “fortress of wellbeing” through his Bahá’í Faith, the belief system traced back to Persia (now Iran) in the 1800s that he adopted later in life. “I come from such a lack of community that it was like coming home, finally finding a framework for community building.”

48 hours with Usher: Concert preparation, family time and what’s next for the R&B icon

‘You’ finale, what’s next

Badgley wears a baseball cap, just like Joe Goldberg, as we walk around his Brooklyn neighborhood, grabbing food at a local vegan restaurant. It’s just before 5 p.m., but he orders pancakes (with syrup, topped with pecans and a side of peanut butter) and a chocolate muffin to go for his 4-year-old son.

As he tucks into his short stack, he discusses his production company, Ninth Mode Media, created “to convert all of this energy coming at me with the show and have some agency within this business, where an actor has so little … (and is) left waiting for a project to come along that you like, theoretically, (and) that you could get as well. … That is a very narrow Venn diagram.”

But “between the kids, (Ninth Mode) and then the filming, the podcast,” there’s “been no time off” in “a period of responsibility, and hopefully progress and productivity.”

He’s pursuing peace in his own world, punctuated by family (wife Kirke, their two kids and twins due this summer serving as the parentheses around his life); the question mark of the inquiries he makes on “Podcrushed”; the period at the end of “You”; and a subdued exclamation point beside his future.

Does he consider his legacy after leading two major shows? “I should feel some pride, shouldn’t I?”

Badgley wants to get out of the “writer’s medium” of TV and return to movies. “I want to work with directors again, in that way that an actor uniquely needs. That’s what crystallized for me when I started directing, and then also in the last season of the show.”

On Badgley’s bucket list of directors is Jordan Peele. “Of course what he did with ‘Get Out’ was so ingenious. He did something that had not been done before,” and then again with 2022’s “Nope.”

While he waits to get Peele on the phone, Ben Stiller might also want to give Badgley a ring for “Severance,” the original Apple TV+ drama that he feels rebuts the push for more sequels, reboots and has-been ideas. “I’m not saying that I don’t have nostalgia. But to me, like the ‘Gossip Girl’ reboot for instance – I’m like, ‘The thing just ended! Didn’t it just end?’ I know everybody still calls me Dan Humphrey, so it’s not gone!”

And despite roles in early films like “Easy A” and “John Tucker Must Die,” he’s also over the “tired genre” of the rom-com.

“It couldn’t interest me less,” he says. “I would like a new way to explore relationships” that’s not “modeled off of some assumptions and doesn’t reflect an ounce of reality.” With an inventive script, then “maybe I would consider it,” he says, though romance in general is not entirely off the table.

He’s now written a book with his “Podcrushed” co-hosts, “Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age” (Simon & Schuster, out Oct. 7). The essay collection will explore “stories of heartbreak, anxiety, and self-discovery,” according to the publisher, combining Badgley’s biggest roles – Dan as a writer, Joe a book aficionado – with the sentimentality of his own life.

Perhaps fans will never get enough of his fictional characters. But they’re in his rearview: Badgley says he’s had enough.

“The world is a different place now than it was when (‘You’) started,” he says. “I said, I think in the first season, ‘How far are we willing to go to forgive an evil man?’ … It feels like the stakes in the world are a little bit different. I’m glad that this show is closing rather than starting.”

Badgley says he’s felt like a gymnast through the show, wobbling on a balance beam and somehow landing the finale in a way where “they stick it, but they nearly don’t.” But he’ll “miss this,” he says, and “for all the gravity I try to bring to it in certain ways, it also was just crazy and fun.”

“Other times it was beyond draining (with) bringing that level of rage and suspicion and hatred and stoicism all the time,” he says, exhaling deeply. “But I can feel that I’m going to miss the reliability and predictability of a guy like him around.”

Suicide Lifeline: If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 any time, day or night, or chat online.

Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7, confidential support via text message to people in crisis when they text “HOME” to 741741.

On Instagram April 22, Kim Kardashian shared snaps of the family’s Easter celebrations, posting a carousel of photos featuring sister Khloe Kardashian and mom Kris Jenner along with her own children, her nieces and nephews, and a guest appearance from Rob Kardashian, who has shunned the spotlight in recent years.

“EASTER 2025. I couldn’t get all the sisters, kids, aunts, cousins and laughs in the pics but the memories are so real,” Kim Kardashian wrote. “Happy Easter everyone.”

In the photograph with Rob Kardashian is his daughter Dream, 8, whom he shares with model and reality star Blac Chyna.

The youngest child of Robert Kardashian Sr. and Kris Jenner, and their only son, Rob was once a series regular alongside sisters Khloe, Kourtney, Kim, Kylie and Kendall on “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” In later seasons, as he battled health and legal issues, he receded from the spotlight, rarely appearing on the show.

The “Malcolm in the Middle” star, 39, shared a raw message with fans on social media about struggling emotionally after facing several setbacks in his career as a NASCAR driver.

“If I’m being 100% honest … Mentally/emotionally I may be at a new low,” he posted April 21 on X. “Just wanted to say it out loud.”

The message came after Muniz, who announced in October he would begin a full-time NASCAR career in the 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, finished 23rd out of 35 in an April 18 race at Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina. He told ABC45 WXLV’s Peter Stratta that he had mechanical issues with his vehicle.

“My power steering line burst, so I lost power steering,” he said. “I started the second stage with no power steering (and) ripped a hole in my hand. Probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

The electronic music artist, whose real name is Thomas Zimmerman, cut his performance short Saturday after festivalgoers saw and heard him taking shots, slurring his words and falling before being escorted off-stage, according to People and Variety.

In an Instagram post the following morning, Zimmerman, who was slated to perform under the techno-alias Testpilot, wrote: “I don’t remember a thing. But I don’t think I had a cig? So… that’s good, I guess? Going back to bed. Wake me up around Thursdayish.”

Lady Gaga ‘sorry’ for Coachella technical difficulties: ‘At least you know I sing live’

That shocking “9-1-1” death hit star Kenneth Choi especially hard.

The actor, who plays firefighter Howie “Chimney” Han in the ABC series, told Entertainment Weekly that he “fought” showrunner and executive producer Tim Minear over the death of Los Angeles fire captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) in the April 17 episode.

“I was sobbing,” Choi, 53, told the outlet. “It was uncontrollable sobbing. I was laughing at myself saying, ‘I don’t know what is happening! I know this isn’t real! Why am I acting like this?’ But it was devastating to me.”

Choi’s grief then turned to disbelief as Minear revealed Bobby’s death.

“As soon as he said the words, I just waited and waited, because Tim has a very wry sense of humor, and I was just waiting for him to say … ‘Just kidding,’ and those words never came. There was this long period of silence and I said, ‘Are you serious?’”

Right after taping the April 21 episode, the judges stepped out of the sound stage to give USA TODAY insight into what those precious few minutes of negotiation were like.

“My brain was almost like: ‘Six! I can’t do it!’” Carrie Underwood says. “We were pretty much aligned; there were a couple of concessions that had to be made, but all in all I think we’re happy with how it turned out, other than six people had to go home, which is a huge jump.”

Her strategy during the episode, which marked Season 23’s first live show, was “putting my favorites in order,” she reveals, adding, “I told Luke (Bryan), put ’em in order; it helps.”

The renowned contemporary romance author, credited by some for dusting the cobwebs (and stigma) off the so-called chick-lit genre, says conflict is the key to a well-written love story.

“I think the people you find that incredible intimacy with, closeness with, are the people who you can be vulnerable enough with to have those hard conversations,” Henry tells USA TODAY ahead of the release of her newest book, “Great Big Beautiful Life” ($29, out now from Berkley).

“Conflict is such a huge part of building intimacy with someone,” she adds. “If you’re not willing to have that, then you’re shutting the relationship down before it can go to the next level.”

Perhaps that’s why characters in a Henry novel fight, sometimes bitterly, before coming back together. Her latest novel is no different. It features two warring journalists − Alice and Hayden − vying for the chance to write the biggest celebrity memoir of the century. It’s a take on the popular enemies-to-lovers trope, a favorite of Henry’s.