Category: BUSINESS

Paul Giamatti stars in emotional Season 7 episode

How Paul Giamatti knows he’s made it: The Oscar-nominated actor gets to wear one of those super-cool signature Experiencer Disks in “Black Mirror.”

“That was very thrilling,” says Giamatti, a noted sci-fi fan and headliner of a new episode in the Netflix anthology series’ seventh season (streaming now). In “Eulogy,” he plays an older man who, courtesy of a virtual Guide (Patsy Ferran) and a nifty device he places on his temple, enters pictures from his youth to help recall memories of a lost love.

Giamatti is known for his cinematic work, including “The Holdovers” and “Sideways,” but the 57-year-old actor also co-hosted the “Chinwag” podcast, which discussed science, the occult, mysteries and more, so “Black Mirror” is “very much” his sort of jam: “I like stuff like this.”

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Though many episodes veer toward the bleakly dystopian or technology-run-amok variety, “Eulogy” is one of the few, like “San Junipero,” that leans emotional and more life-affirming than heartbreaking. Giamatti, for one, is glad to hear that.

“It was always a little bit of a debate, whether it was (positive) or not,” he says. “But when the episode was all put together, I was like, ‘Oh, it is kind of a good thing that happens for the guy.’ ”

“Eulogy” centers on Phillip (Giamatti), a grumpy sort who lives on Cape Cod and gets a message that Carol, a former flame, has died in England. Her daughter is putting together an immersive online memorial, and Phillip is asked to contribute memories from his mind via a virtual-reality device. The problem is, Phillip has done his best to forget her after a nasty breakup several decades ago, including angrily scratching out or tearing up her face in old Polaroids. With the Guide’s help, Phillip is able to immerse himself in these photos from the past to try to piece together what she looked like and what happened in their relationship.

Though punching a viewer in the gut is a “Black Mirror” specialty, creator/writer Charlie Brooker hopes “Eulogy” is “equally powerful, but in a different way. It’s evocative (and) bittersweet, tragic and warm at the same time.” Brooker was inspired by recent efforts to “polish up” the past, like Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, “Get Back”: “We are not just the near-future dystopia show. Sometimes we’re the future nostalgia show.”

And Giamatti was “the perfect fit” for the episode, Brooker says. Not only is he “one of the best actors ever to walk the Earth,” but “he can walk the fine line between grouchy and standoffish and sort of inherently warm and likable, which is no mean feat.”

As his character goes through the paces of recalling this difficult period in his life while revisiting the beautiful feelings as well, Giamatti recalled “the intensity of the relationships you have when you’re that age, and all of that was very much coming back” while filming. “What’s nice is he’s allowed to find her again and fall in love with her again, but let go of it, too.”

The story resonated with Giamatti; it took him back to his early years as an artist. “The first photograph that you see (in the episode) looked in an uncanny way like the rooftop of a lot of places in New York. I wasn’t a musician, but I was trying to be an actor. I was living in a loft like that, in a kind of crappy building on the Lower East Side. A lot of this is just already in my own head because it’s very similar to my youth in 1989,” when he was 22.

Phillip, however, is a very analog person and not very technological − Giamatti says he’s “frozen a little bit in time” − so he gives the delivery drone that brings him his nifty device a curmudgeonly look. In real life, Giamatti thought it was pretty cool. “I had not seen this happen yet with a package. I live in New York City; I don’t imagine it needs to happen here. It’s like, ‘Oh, that works pretty well, actually.’ I thought if I lived out in the desert in Utah, it’d be kind of a great way to have this arrive.”

And like his character, Giamatti has a bunch of old photos, but he confesses he’s “not a nostalgia guy in that way. I’ve kind of inherited them from people who have passed away. I just never pull them out and look at them a lot (or) put them in scrapbooks.

“But they’re there, and I haven’t gotten rid of them. I’ll look at them at some point.”

April 10, 2025
Dad John Mellencamp planning her burial amid cancer

Teddi Mellencamp says famous father John Mellencamp is planning her burial amid her stage 4 skin cancer battle.

The “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” alum opened up about her “Jack & Diane” singer’s plans, after her melanoma metastisized, on Tuesday’s episode of her “Two T’s In A Pod” podcast with co-host Tamra Judge.

“Yesterday my dad calls 11 times in a row. Finally, I answer, I’m like, ‘I’m in the bath. Let me live a little.’ He goes, ‘I just want to make sure you’re going to be in our group family mausoleum,’” the reality TV star recalled, to which Judge replied, “John, no!”

During the episode, Mellencamp also shared that “the Cougs makes me talk to him more than he’s ever made me talk to him,” referring to her dad’s former stage name John Cougar.

Teddi Mellencamp reveals stage 4 cancer spread with new tumors

The former “Celebrity Big Brother” houseguest told Judge she asked the music legend if there would be room in the family’s mausoleum in Indiana for her three kids — 12-year-old Slate, 10-year-old Cruz and Dove, 5 — whom she shares with husband Edwin “Eddie” Arroyave. Mellencamp and the home security entrepreneur have hit pause on their pending divorce during her cancer treatment.

“He’s like, ‘Well, there’s going to be the top five and then we’re going to have little areas around it, and then that’s where everyone’s going to get buried,’” Mellencamp said, later revealing that her dad told her “you’re doing your will right now, so you may as well put it in there.”

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In her signature sarcasm, Mellencamp told Judge that the “Real Housewives of Orange County” star would have to travel to Indiana to visit her grave site, adding that “hot girls never die” would be on her tombstone.

Teddi Mellencamp stage 4 cancer metastasizes

Mellencamp’s burial comments come after a significant update in her health journey shared last week. In an Us Weekly interview published April 2, Mellencamp announced that her stage 4 cancer metastasized, and doctors found four new tumors after the melanoma spread to her brain and lungs.

“There are some days (where) I think you’re allowed to say, ‘I don’t feel confident right now, I feel very uncomfortable and I want to wear a wig.’ And there are some days that I’m like, ‘It is what it is.’ Some days, I’m really sad and really scared, and some days, I’m like, ‘I got this; I’m not worried,’” Mellencamp told the magazine.

Teddi Mellencamp has numerous brain tumors, will undergo emergency surgery

“I’m fighting for my life, but also for my family’s life and all the people I love,” Mellencamp added.

Earlier this year, Mellencamp revealed she underwent emergency surgery after several tumors were found on her brain. The podcaster has long been open about her health on her hit iHeartMedia podcast “Two Ts.”

The former Real Housewife first revealed the news in a statement shared to Instagram on Feb. 12.

April 10, 2025
Jean Smart, on savage sparring, real-life friendship

A gleeful mischief spreads over Hannah Einbinder’s face as she talks about her inspiration for the fourth season of “Hacks” taking center stage on Max (first two episodes now streaming, then weekly on Thursday).

The 10-episode return of the award winning series (which has earned Smart an Emmy for each of three previous seasons and series a best-comedy award in 2024) resumes where last May’s shocking finale left off: Ava Daniels (Einbinder) secured the head writer position on Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) new late-night talk show only after threatening to reveal Deborah’s dalliance with married Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn), CEO of the corporation that owns Deborah’s network.

Einbinder, 29, thought to herself, “Every mob movie I’ve ever watched is about to go into this moment,” she says in a joint interview with Smart, who cannot contain her laughter. Einbinder’s been “studying” those films. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, Ava big boss moment,’” Einbinder adds. “She’s like the Don right now.”

In Thursday’s premiere, Deborah confronts Ava in her new head writer’s office: “Well, aren’t you a big, brave girl?” she asks, glaring at her traitorous protégé.

“I guess I am,” Ava responds. “It’s for the best.”

“We’ll see,” Deborah says, letting the threat linger as she exits.

“Everybody’s world is shifting now that Deborah’s gotten this late-night show,” Downs says of the impact on those in the host’s world. “Jimmy and Kayla (Megan Stalter) have launched their own management firm, and so they’re starting their own office. They’re in their own new workplace environment with a whole new host of characters. For Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), things maybe shift the most, because as Deborah starts to do this late-night show it means there’s less of a place for him in her orbit. So his relationship to her is shifting a bit, which is not easy, because Deborah really likes people to stick around and be loyal.”

Which begs the questions: Will Ava and Deborah ever make up? What will happen with the new late-night show? And will Deborah’s tryst stay under wraps?

Smart, 73, savors the wit-drenched war of the words with Ava, “especially when they trade funny insults,” she says. “Even when I’m pissed off, like when I’m wearing that yellow dress (in Season 3), and you say it’s giving Big Bird. And I’m really insulted, but it’s so much fun.”

“It’s the basis of their relationship,” Einbinder says, bringing up the barbs exchanged in their very first meeting, when Ava interviewed to be a joke writer for the struggling comedian and knocked Deborah’s Las Vegas home as Cheesecake Factory chic.

“And I’m upset because you tracked dirt in on my rugs with your boots,” Smart recalls. “And then you said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know this was a shoes-off thing.’” The costars then deliver the punchline in unison: It’s “shoe dependent.”

“We love it,” Einbinder says chuckling, in a “Sorry we can’t help it” sort of way.

“At the end of the day,” says Lucia Aniello, who cocreated the series with Downs (her husband) and Jen Statsky, “Deborah and Ava’s relationship is bonded by comedy and comedy writing. And that’s the thing that does matter the most to them. I think the thing that hyper complicates that this season is their egos, especially Deborah’s.”

Landing her long-pined-for late-night gig “means so much” to Deborah, Aniello says. “And she also is still reeling at the blackmail from the end of Season 3. As for Ava, she’s doing her best while still trying to remain true to herself, yet also stand up for herself, which is a really difficult thing to do for anybody who’s now a boss, but especially when you’re going toe to toe with Deborah Vance.”

Offscreen, it seems Einbinder and Smart are less likely to go toe to toe and more likely to proceed hand in hand.

“Strangely, I think it would almost be harder to do those really biting, insulting scenes if we were two actresses that didn’t really get along,” Smart says. “It would feel very uncomfortable and get in the way of the work. But because we love each other, it’s fun to say awful things.”

Smart denies hurling a couple of unprintable names at Einbinder before shrinking with embarrassment, merely seconds later. “I can’t believe I said that,” she says with her hands over her mouth. Einbinder wraps her arms around her costar to playfully comfort her.

“The way that they laugh together, the way that they bond and connect, is true to us,” Einbinder says. But none of the “psycho” behavior, she says, or anything cruel, Smart adds.

“It’s really all just kind of positive,” Einbinder says.

April 10, 2025
Photos of the family through the years

© Copyright Gannett 2025

April 10, 2025
Here’s how ‘Hacks’ co-stars really feel about each otherEntertain This!

Here’s how ‘Hacks’ co-stars really feel about each otherEntertain This!

April 10, 2025
‘Celebrity Big Brother’ stars Mickey Rourke, JoJo Siwa clash

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.”

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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.”

April 10, 2025
Viola Davis is shredded and mad in her new action movie

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.”

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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.

April 10, 2025
Watch: 'Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror' documentary trailerTV

Watch: ‘Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror’ documentary trailerTV

April 10, 2025
See trailer for ‘American Terror’

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.”

April 10, 2025
Ray Mendoza’s Iraqi War movie is brutally real

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.

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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.

April 10, 2025