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Bucky Barnes’ life hasn’t been a barrel of laughs.

In nearly 15 years of Marvel movies, Sebastian Stan’s character has been through the wringer: Bucky “died” in World War II, was turned into the infamous international assassin Winter Soldier, tried to kill his best friend, caused an Avengers civil war, and was blipped out of existence.

The new movie “Thunderbolts*” (in theaters May 2) shows a different side to Bucky. Once he was brainwashed, now he’s washing his mechanical arm next to the knives and forks. He’s also seen spilling a messy sandwich all over himself.

“It’s fun and hilarious for me,” says Stan, who is at this point an elder statesman in the cinematic universe. “I was able to finally kind of tap into maybe what his sense of humor is, which I never would’ve thought when we did (2014’s) ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier.’ ”

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The latest Marvel adventure puts a spotlight on Bucky and other supporting players from Marvel projects. Russian assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and her boisterous dad, Red Guardian (David Harbour), the foster family of Black Widow, are front and center. Also along for the ride: John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a disgraced former Captain America and now U.S. Agent, and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), whose invisibility has done a number on her psyche. All have done bad things but have to look at the darkness inside for the sake of redemption.

“Thunderbolts*” discusses “themes of feeling like an outsider, uncomfortable in your own skin. Feeling isolated, even depressed, ashamed, those are not happy feelings,” says Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays antagonistic CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. The movie is about “peeling back the layers on that and to understand where you’ve been in order to figure out where you’re going.”

‘Thunderbolts*’ story got a boost from ‘The Bear,’ ‘Beef’ creators

The scrappy antiheroes team up to take on Valentina, their former employer, who tries to trick them into murdering each other. From the start, Eric Pearson’s original “Thunderbolts*” script was meant to be a flip on the “Suicide Squad” mold, about characters who need to learn to work together.

But the introduction of Bob (Lewis Pullman), a guy with amnesia who becomes the extremely powerful Sentry, unlocked an emotional narrative for director Jake Schreier. He enlisted the help of writers Joanna Calo (“The Bear”) and Lee Sung Jin (“Beef”) to tackle a mental health angle as each character faces their past in The Void, an otherworldly surrealist space caused by Bob’s appearance.

The Bob storyline was personal for Schreier:  “I tracked it to a friend of mine who’s gone through a lot of this stuff. These heights that you could reach, and the hubris that it takes to get there, but then this self-destructive depression and isolation that almost seems linked (and) you needed to learn to find some balance or middle ground.”

Bob is “a very difficult character to wrap your head around,” Pullman adds. “Whether it’s Marvel or not, the continuity and the complexities of this man is very nebulous at times.”

‘Thunderbolts*’: Marvel castoffs get their own movie adventure

Ace assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) teams with her dad, Red Guardian (David Harbour), and other unlikely heroes in Marvel’s “Thunderbolts*.”

Wyatt Russell’s John Walker faces a father’s ‘horrible’ shame

The returning Marvel characters also have to take on a lot psychologically. Walker’s rise and fall were one of the main storylines in the Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” and in “Thunderbolts*” he needs a win desperately: His wife has left him and taken their baby daughter.

Walker grows as a person during the movie – he “now can take a hint and understands how to be part of a team a little more,” Russell says. But Walker also faces a “shame room” in The Void that originally was written as an argument between Walker and his wife. Because Russell thought a child should be involved, it turned into a scene where Walker neglects his kid while reading an exposé about himself on his phone.

“Seeing your lack of empathy to your own child and to your own experience, through your own eyes, is really sad. That’s a horrible moment for him that he doesn’t want anybody to know,” Russell says. “As a father myself, there’s nothing more special than your children. And there’s nothing more difficult than knowing that you’re not being the best father that you can be. He knows he can’t go back to that moment and actually get that time back and that crushes me.”

‘Thunderbolts*’ stars are already at work on ‘Avengers: Doomsday’

But alongside the deep themes at play, “Thunderbolts*” offers goofy interactions between its main characters and a heartwarming bond that forms among the team. Which is nice since most of the Thunderbolts will be returning for Marvel’s “Avengers: Doomsday” (out May 1, 2026). That started filming this week and revealed its cast in March via livestreamed empty director’s chairs.

“My brain always just goes to, I hope the movie’s good,” Russell says. “But you look at your name on the back of that chair and you’re like, ‘This is so cool. What a crazy experience.’ ” While Louis-Dreyfus didn’t get a “Doomsday” chair, “I stand at the ready. Also, at this point, I’m not really allowed to say too much, let’s just put it that way,” she teases.

Stan appeared in the last two “Avengers” movies, “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” and those “felt so out of this world in terms of achievement and being able to get all those people together and everything. So how do you build from there to this?” the actor says. Stan is looking forward to working with the legacy “X-Men” actors such as Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, plus seeing Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom.

Russell views the Marvel universe as a big summer camp. He felt a little awkward at first doing the “Winter Soldier” TV show with Stan and Anthony Mackie, “and then (with ‘Thunderbolts*’) I was like, ‘I’m not the new kid! All right!’ That was a fun feeling.”

He grins, joking with Stan: “And you started the summer camp.”

Sammy Hagar isn’t holding back.

The rock star, 77, aired some grievances about former Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth in a blunt conversation with Rolling Stone published April 29. Hagar said he “wanted to break the guy’s” neck sometimes during their 2002 tour together.

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Roth for comment.

“Dave always wants too much,” Hagar said. “He always tries to upstage. He tried to pull stuff on the Sam and Dave tour (of 2002). The nights when he was opening, when we flip-flopped … which I would never do again. I would never bother. But look, I’m not an opening act for anybody.

“On those nights, he would call in and say that the bus broke down, 10 minutes before he was supposed to go on. And because I care about my fans, I would go on. And I did that about four times.”

Roth, 70, served as lead vocalist for Van Halen until leaving the band in 1985 and being replaced by Hagar. In 2002, the duo launched a co-headlining tour together. During a press conference at the time, Roth, who noted there was a “rivalry between us,” announced that he and Hagar would “flip a coin and the winner will headline opening night and then we’ll flip-flop,” according to Ultimate Classic Rock.

Sold! What did Sammy Hagar’s custom Ferrari LaFerrari sell for at Arizona auction?

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Hagar declared that Roth “did the worst when he headlined.”

When the magazine asked the rocker whether he would ever share the bill with Roth on tour again, he said the “circumstances would have to be right.” But when Rolling Stone mentioned that Roth is coming out of retirement this summer to play some shows, the outlet reports that Hagar fell “off his chair, roaring with laughter, out of the frame of the camera.”

“Let’s see if he makes the shows,” Hagar said.

In a 2002 interview with Guitar World magazine, Hagar declared that his tour with Roth “could have been a heck of a lot better” because Roth is “an unreasonable guy” and “not a fun guy.” He added, “Boy, I hate to ever say I’m sorry I did something, so I can’t say I’m sorry I did it. But I certainly wouldn’t do it again, let’s put it like that.”

Sammy Hagar ‘keeping alive’ music of Van Halen in summer Best of All Worlds tour

Hagar also told AXS TV that he “never really had a lot of respect for” Roth, adding, “To me, I wasn’t buying it. There was something that was fake about him. The old Van Halen fans, if I’d have said that in the beginning, would have crucified me. But he was the enemy.”

In 2023, Hagar extended an invitation for Roth to join him on tour in an appearance on “The Howard Stern Show.” But Hagar later said on the “Eddie Trunk Podcast” that Roth “went AWOL” and “went to sleep” on the offer.

Broadway’s biggest night is nigh, but a number of Hollywood heavyweights weren’t invited to the party.

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal were passed over for Tony Awards recognition for “Othello,” their high-priced William Shakespeare revival that was completely shut out of Thursday’s nominations.

Other big names including Robert Downey Jr. (“McNeal”), Julianna Margulies (“Left on Tenth”), Jim Parsons (“Our Town”), Kieran Culkin (“Glengarry Glen Ross”), Bill Burr (“Glengarry Glen Ross”), Bernadette Peters (“Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends”), and Idina Menzel (“Redwood”) were similarly missing from this year’s Tony nods, which honor some of the very best plays and musicals in New York.

It was an ultra-competitive and unusually star-studded theater season, which routinely made headlines for its astronomical ticket prices and outspoken political firebrands.

Other notable omissions included Nick Jonas, who made a much-publicized Broadway return in “The Last Five Years” that was roundly dismissed by critics. More surprisingly, David Hyde Pierce and Jinkx Monsoon were both overlooked for their hilarious turns in “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” as was Helen J. Shen for playing an outdated robot in the tear-jerking “Maybe Happy Ending.”

“Maybe Happy Ending,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Buena Vista Social Club” led the nominations with 10 nods a piece, including best musical. The strange-but-true “Dead Outlaw” and World War II spy satire “Operation Mincemeat” rounded out the best musical category.

As expected, Cole Escola’s madcap “Oh, Mary!” was a major force with five nods, including best play, best actor (Escola) and best featured actor (Conrad Ricamora). The unlikely hit comedy, which tells a deranged alternative history of Mary Todd Lincoln, has attracted high-profile celebrity audience members including Dua Lipa, Jennifer Lopez, Meryl Streep, and Steven Spielberg.

The other nominees for best play were “The Hills of California,” “English,” “Purpose,” and “John Proctor is the Villain.” Notably missing from the category was “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” Netflix’s high-budget yet critically divisive prequel to the sci-fi streaming sensation. Although, the theatrical spectacle still made off with five nominations, including best actor for newcomer Louis McCartney.

“Succession” star Sarah Snook earned her first Tony nomination for her one-woman tour de force in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” as did former Pussycat Dolls frontwoman Nicole Scherzinger for her bewitching performance as fading film star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” an audacious revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical.

A-listers George Clooney (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), Sadie Sink (“John Proctor is the Villain”), Mia Farrow (“The Roommate”), and Bob Odenkirk (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) all garnered their first Tony nods as well.

In addition, Audra McDonald looks to extend her record as the most Tony-winning performer in history. The Broadway legend, who has won six Tony Awards, is vying for her seventh trophy with a best actress nomination for the classic showbiz musical “Gypsy.”

How to watch Tony Awards

The 78th annual Tony Awards will air live on Sunday, June 8, from New York’s Radio City Music Hall (8 ET/5 PT on CBS and streaming on Paramount+). The ceremony will be hosted for the first time by Cynthia Erivo, the three-time Oscar-nominated star of “Wicked,” who takes over emcee duties from Ariana DeBose.

If the ground floor of Deyan Sudjic’s north London house looks a little bare – all white walls, stripped floors, high ceilings and a slick, steel-counter-topped kitchen – it serves all the better to display the furniture. This is, in its way, exactly the house you might expect the former director of London’s Design Museum to have: a perfect backdrop for a collection, in this case, of remarkable chairs, in a neighbourhood with gentility and grime within easy reach.  

These exhibits, though, are not on pedestals but in everyday use: a set of Hans Wegner dining chairs, a Gerrit Rietveld Red and Blue armchair that still looks ridiculously modern despite its design being more than a century old, and a pair of vintage Alvar Aalto plywood stools placed side by side beneath the tall kitchen window. 

If anything jars in the elegant early-Victorian house it is not the modernist furniture but rather an elaborate stone fireplace, clearly an import from France and looking a little arrogant in this very British interior. “Before we bought it,” says Sudjic, 72, sitting across an enormous dining table that is as big as a bedroom, “this house belonged to Jasper Conran and John Galliano. They had their studio on the top floor. It was remodelled by [British architect] Nigel Coates, but unfortunately the people they sold it to had it completely remodelled. The fireplace is one of the few things that survives from that earlier period.” 

Its latest incarnation was designed “with a bit of advice from John Pawson”, Sudjic says. It shows. Particularly in the floor, the boards of which seem unusually wide. “Some of them go all the way, back to front,” he says. “We had to get a crane to get them in.” We head upstairs. “There’s too much furniture,” Sudjic admits, a little sheepishly. It’s not exactly rammed, but the airy (white) drawing room does look a little like a designer beauty parade. There’s an Eames lounger and ottoman right where you’d expect it. There’s an unusual Harry Bertoia chair clad in purple velvet, a Jasper Morrison sofa, a Le Corbusier chair, a Marcel Breuer coffee table and Dieter Rams’s unavoidable and possibly unimprovable shelves for Vitsoe, neatly stuffed with books. 

It’s a relief almost to find a lovely-looking old wooden sunbed and a pair of dining chairs that came from the home of Sudjic’s father-in-law, the architect John Miller. Sudjic’s wife, Sarah Miller, the founding editor of the UK’s Condé Nast Traveller magazine who now runs a brand consultancy (she is away on an exotic photoshoot when I visit), is from an architectural dynasty: her stepmother was Su Rogers, one-time wife of Richard Rogers who once had a practice with him. “Sarah is trying to implement a policy of one book in, one book out,” Sudjic says. “It’s not working that well.” 

I’m always a little wary of the word ‘design’ as if it’s a thing

Sudjic himself (his parents emigrated to the UK from the former Yugoslavia) began by training as an architect, though quickly gravitated towards media. He was a co-founder of Blueprint magazine in 1983, a big-format, lush and self-consciously cool mag that brought the disparate tentacles of London’s then-buzzing design scene together to suggest more coherence than there probably ever was. When I ask him where he now thinks design is going, four decades after he founded Blueprint, he says, not necessarily helpfully, “I’m always a little wary of the word ‘design’, as if it were a thing. It isn’t, it’s a method.”

Maybe. But the home of the co-founder of the UK’s former leading design magazine and former director of the Design Museum certainly does seem to have a lot of design in it. I ask whether he thinks there might be too many chairs in the world? He adopts a slightly pained expression. “As Jasper Morrison said, we don’t need to design a new chair just to refine an existing one.” 

Sudjic is finishing a book on the furniture manufacturer Vitra. The company has the licences to make some of the best-known and best-loved modernist designs, from Charles and Ray Eames to Jean Prouvé and Hella Jongerius, and an impressive museum in Germany. Now, under the leadership of CEO Nora Fehlbaum, it is making a radical shift towards sustainability. “Its former CEO, [Nora’s uncle] Rolf Fehlbaum, is a very unusual businessman. He has a PhD in utopian industrial settlements and what he’s built in Weil am Rhein, with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza and others is like a contemporary version of something by Tomáš Baťa or Robert Owen. He made a kind of architectural collage that maybe no one else could have done.”

Vitra is a remarkable company. But it is joined in the design ecosystem by hundreds of other outfits churning out fast-fashion furniture, infinite chairs, sofas and unpleasant coffee tables. Is there not too much production in design now? Even Vitra itself admits its Eames loungers are CO2 intensive. “What makes [Vitra] different,” Sudjic insists, “is that it’s designed to last 50 years. If you were to have, today, a 1950s fridge, or a car, they’d both look quite eccentric. By comparison with all the other objects designed in 1956, I think this chair [he nods towards the lounger] has lasted pretty well. ”

As we look around, more and more chairs begin to trigger anecdotes, from a fantastically lightweight Cassina Superleggera by Gio Ponti (which he was given as a former editor of the Italian Domus magazine) to a chunky Ron Arad design made from an old Rover car seat that looks rare. Is he a collector? “Oh no, I’m far too disorganised to be a real collector,” he says. “Perhaps more of an accumulator.”  

All those chairs might have fitted more easily into one of his former homes. “When we started Blueprint, I lived in a Wapping loft big enough to cycle around. It was a bit like living on the set of The Long Good Friday. The river had such a presence then but it was very quiet.” He continues: “In those days I believed an architecture editor should put his money where his mouth is, so I commissioned John McAslan to design a living pod in the middle of the loft.” His first flat was designed by the Czech émigré architect Jan Kaplický. “It was an indoor spaceship.” Anyone who has seen Kaplický’s media stand at London’s Lord’s cricket ground will know exactly what he means.  

Towards the top of the house, lurking in a hallway is yet another remarkable-looking chair, a bit of a miniature throne with its upholstery replaced by gleaming slats of brass. “That one was designed by Rei Kawakubo,” he says. “She gave it to me when I wrote a book about her.” Paul Smith introduced him to the Comme des Garçons designer on a trip to Japan. “I went to visit textile mills with her, and went to the Paris showing of her collections, where John Malkovich and Julian Sands were models. At the same time I was looking at an Issey Miyake store designed by Shiro Kuramata, and the dividing line between design, fashion and architecture began to dissolve.” He still gets his suits from Paul Smith’s bespoke operation (“it’s a very fine thing, a bespoke suit”).  

No longer leading the Design Museum, for which he commissioned John Pawson to reimagine the wonderful midcentury Commonwealth Institute as its new Kensington home, you might think Sudjic was slowing down. But he is writing books, has his Vitra volume coming soon, edits an annual design magazine, Anima, and is a professor of architecture and design at Lancaster University. And he regularly dips his toes into newspaper journalism, which he still clearly loves. “Really, it’s a licence for curiosity, isn’t it?” I agree, as I nose around his bookshelves one last time. 

Netflix’s new dramedy, “The Four Seasons,” highlights love and friendship with a star-studded cast.

Released on May 1, the show follows six married friends who go on quarterly weekend trips. However, old tensions and new conflicts arise when one couple decides to end their relationship.

“The Four Seasons,” created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield, is a reimagination of the 1981 movie with the same name.

“I’ve always loved this movie since I was a kid, and I do think that a series like this where you can really just expand things and take your time a little bit more felt like a perfect way to hang out with these characters a little bit longer,” Fey told The Hollywood Reporter.

Here’s what we know about Netflix’s “The Four Seasons”:

When and where does ‘The Four Seasons’ air?

The first season of “The Four Seasons,” which consists of eight episodes, is now available on Netflix. It premiered on May 1 at 3 a.m. EDT.

‘The Four Seasons’ episode list

• Episode One: “Lake House”
• Episode Two: “Garden Party”
• Episode Three: “Eco Resort”
• Episode Four: “Beach Bar”
• Episode Five: “Family Weekend
• Episode Six: “Ultimate Frisbee”
• Episode Seven: “Ski Trip”
• Episode Eight: “Fun”

‘The Four Seasons’: Tina Fey, Erika Henningsen bring real-life friendship to Netflix show

‘The Four Seasons’ trailer

‘The Four Seasons’ gets mixed reviews from critics

According to USA TODAY TV critic Kelly Lawler, “The Four Seasons” “feels surface-level at best, unfunny and dull at worst,” adding that it ” is a big miss when it should have been an easy home run.” Read the full “Four Seasons” review.

The Guardian says the show is “full of properly funny lines, rooted in properly middle-aged experience. In its comedy and its drama it captures the warm, weary affection for life and each other that only old friends and enduring couples really know.”

Per The Hollywood Reporter, the miniseries has “some pleasantly sweet moments and some poignant ones, but few of them land with much weight since the characters are so thin.”

The show has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes so far.

‘The Four Seasons’ cast

• Tina Fey
• Steve Carell
• Colman Domingo
• Will Forte
• Kerri Kenney-Silver
• Marco Calvani
• Erika Henningsen

Taylor Ardrey is a news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at [email protected].

There’s no business like show business.

Take it from Bryan Cranston, who pulls back the curtain on the life of a working actor in “Everything’s Going to Be Great” (in theaters June 20). The “Breaking Bad” Emmy winner stars as Buddy Smart, a lifelong thespian who uproots his wife (Oscar winner Allison Janney) and sons (Jack Champion and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) to New Jersey to run a regional theater.

The feel-good dramedy follows Buddy as he tries to keep his family afloat while they pursue their respective dreams in a new town. The film is rounded out by an all-star cast that includes Simon Rex (“Red Rocket”) and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”).

“Everything’s Going to Be Great” will be released by Lionsgate and premiere at the Tribeca Festival in New York on June 9.

The trailer premieres exclusively at usatoday.com, along with the first look at the movie’s poster.

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Audiences “are going to recognize elements of these characters in their own life because it encompasses adventure, sorrow, joy, aspiration,” Cranston said in a statement to USA TODAY, praising screenwriter Steven Rogers’ “beautiful” script and the “imaginative creative mind” of director Jon S. Baird. “I couldn’t be happier. I’m very proud of this movie.”

For Baird, who last directed “Tetris” in 2023, “this film restored my faith in the creative process,” he wrote in his own statement. “This movie, at its core, is about the importance of family. We were so lucky we found such a supportive group to help us achieve even a little bit of hope in the darkest of times.”

The early signs are in, and meteorologists are predicting a hard launch summer.

Lucas Bravo is taking the season seriously, heading to social media April 30 to treat fans to an Instagram-official announcement of his relationship with fellow actor Shailene Woodley.

The “Emily in Paris” heartthrob posted a carousel of photos, featuring one of the couple holding hands, one of the two sitting on the ground together while attending the Stagecoach music festival, and several of Woodley by herself enjoying the sights in nearby Slab City, California.

Shailene Woodley says she drank to cope with hunger, goes viral yet again

“Howdy Slab City,” Bravo, 37, titled the photo dump. The unincorporated California territory is just a few miles from Indio, where the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals − both celebrity-packed affairs − are hosted.

USA TODAY has reached out to reps for Bravo and Woodley for comment.

Fans first began to speculate that Woodley, 33, was involved with Bravo when the pair were spotted together in Paris in March, in what appeared to be a PDA-filled outing.

Neither part of the duo has been particularly vocal about the new entanglement, though Bravo did offer a subtle confirmation earlier this month, responding to a question from People about the relationship by saying: “Yeah, I’m really happy.”

Woodley, who was previously engaged to football player Aaron Rodgers, has yet to post Bravo to her own grid.

Woodley, who first rose to fame as the lead in the book-to-movie adaptation of the popular young adult novel “Divergent,” has since become a mainstay on the film screen, and was recently tapped to join the cast of Hulu’s thriller series “Paradise.”

Bravo, best known for playing hunky Parisian chef and key love interest Gabriel on Netflix’s “Emily in Paris,” is an up-and-coming star. He has also appeared in several romantic comedies, including “The Honeymoon” and “Ticket to Paradise.”