In a new episode of Dax Shepard‘s Armchair Expert podcast, Emilia Clarke reveals she was told she’d “disappoint” her Game of Thrones fans if she didn’t go nude on another project.
The actor started the interview with Shepard by talking about those initial nude scenes on GoT. (She played Daenerys on the hit HBO series for eight seasons.) “I’d come fresh from drama school, and I was like, ‘Approach this as a job.’ If [nudity’s] in the script, then it’s clearly needed. This is what this is and I’m gonna make sense of it,” she said, according to Us Weekly. “I’m floating through this first season and I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea what any of this is. I’ve never been on a film set like this before, I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do and I don’t know what’s expected of me.”
HBO
Eventually Clarke started pushing back on the scenes—and she had the support of her costar Jason Momoa. “He was like, ‘No sweetie, this isn’t okay,’” Clarke recalled on the podcast.
Now, Emilia Clarke says things are different. Spending eight years playing the Mother of Dragons taught her to speak up when she’s uncomfortable. During the chat with Shepard, she gave an example of a time she was asked to go nude for a project—and that she’d be “disappointing” her GoT fans if she didn’t do it.
“Now things are very, very, very different, and I’m a lot more savvy about what I’m comfortable with and what I’m okay with doing,” she said. “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.’ And I’m like, ‘F–k you’…. I feel like I’ve seen enough now to know what is actually needed. I was also, little did I know, protected by the show in terms of the storytelling being at a very high level and people they were hiring being at a very high level.”
Director Richard Curtis is best known for his beloved 2003 movie Love Actually, as well as classics like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’s Diary. We’re thinking maybe Kate Middleton really loves those movies too, because for some reason she was hanging out with Curtis this week and discussing a new secret project.
According to the Daily Mail, the two of them met on Wednesday, September 11, during an unannounced private visit. The only thing reports revealed is that “the Cambridges are contributing to a project Curtis is working on.” Per the Daily Mail, this project is about mental health.
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If that’s true, it makes sense that Curtis would want to get the Cambridges in the mix. They’ve shown their dedication to mental wellness a few times now, and in 2016 they kicked off the Heads Together project to support discussions and openness around mental health. Curtis himself has been an advocate and has spoken about the subject a few times.
Interestingly, if the Daily Mail sources are accurate, only Middleton met with Curtis. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is that maybe Curtis is making a movie and planning to put her in it. But this could be part of a larger evolution Middleton has been undergoing. People magazine recently spoke to several sources who talked about how Middleton is slowly but surely getting ready to be queen and confidently carrying out more responsibilities.
“She is an adoring mother, and she is contributing publicly in the way we would want her to. You see it more and more. The young student has turned into our future Queen,” a source said. Maybe her meeting with Curtis is just the latest example of how she’s coming into her own. Either way, we can’t wait to hear more about the project.
Since the Harvey Weinstein story broke in the fall of 2017, a steady stream of powerful (and often famous) men have been accused of sexual misconduct. But the era of #MeToo has also seen a cycle of redemption and comebacks for some of these accused men. Louis C.K. is back doing stand-up. Ousted CBS chief Les Moonves is already working on a new venture. Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now Emma Thompson has reportedly quit an upcoming film project over the hiring of one such man: John Lasseter, the former chief creative officer of Pixar. Allegations about Lasseter first became public knowledge in November 2017, though claims of a “whisper network” surrounding him existed for much longer, after he was accused of “grabbing, kissing, making comments about physical attributes.”
Lasseter apologized for his behavior, saying, “I’ve recently had a number of difficult conversations that have been very painful for me. It’s never easy to face your missteps, but it’s the only way to learn from them.” Then, this January, he was hired as the head of Skydance Animation, which is set to produce the film Luck.
That’s where Emma Thompson comes in. The actress was slated to voice one of the characters, but Variety confirms that she dropped out of the project after Lasseter’s hiring. Skydance has not commented on the departure.
She may not have released a big statement about this decision, but it’s major that a Hollywood A-lister of Thompson’s caliber is walking away from what is likely a lucrative deal in response to the hiring of a man with sexual harassment allegations. This is one powerful way allies in positions of influence can show support for the survivors who have been brave enough to speak out about inappropriate behavior.
Ever since The Big Bang Theory introduced the concept of Super-Asymmetry at Sheldon and Amy’s wedding last May, I’ve been reluctant to embrace their enthusiasm. It had nothing to do with Sheldon and Amy working together as a team, but everything to do with feeling like I was back in high school chemistry struggling to understand the basics. It just wasn’t exciting.
The results on the show have been mixed as well; sometimes Super-Asymmetry has paved the way for important discussions; other times I’ve tuned out completely. But in tonight’s episode—titled “The Citation Negation”—I felt truly invested for the first time.
The episode opens with Sheldon and Amy recruiting Leonard to help them track down hundreds of citations before they publish their paper on SA. In an effort to keep their project secret, they ask Leonard to spend hours in a dark library doing the legwork. I’m not sure what Leonard gets out of this, but he already has Penny, so what more does the guy need in life?
Meanwhile, my favorite character, Anu, sadly isn’t in this episode, so the writers pair Raj with Leonard in the dungeon dimly-lit library. It’s as boring as that aforementioned chemistry class until Leonard and Raj discover something that doesn’t look quite right; apparently Sheldon and Amy may not have been the first to discover Super-Asymmetry.
Leonard and Raj bring their findings to Howard, who confirms that in 1978 a Russian scientist already disproved SA. As the findings read, “Super-Asymmetry is inherently flawed and does not bear the weight of further examination.” Yikes.
Leonard breaks the news to Sheldon and Amy, who are in complete and utter disbelief. Sheldon somehow manages to thank Leonard for relaying the news knowing that couldn’t have been easy for him. His maturity then turns to a childlike response as he destroys one of the boards on an easel. I can’t remember the last time I witnessed such profound anger from Sheldon. The moment aims to inject a bit of humor to the scene, but it’s too late; there’s nothing funny about it. Sheldon and Amy are devastated, and they have every right to be.
Sheldon retreats to the other room, rummaging through papers hoping to find something—anything—that could give insight into what just happened. Amy is equally depressed but wants to do what she can to help her husband. She even offers to sing him “Soft Kitty”—if that’s not love, I don’t know what is. Sheldon doesn’t understand how Amy can be so calm in the midst of professional turmoil, but she tells him she’s just trying to hold it together for his sake.
Sheldon tells Amy that her pretending to be OK actually makes him feel worse, which provides the opening Amy needs to come to terms with their disappointing reality. “Fine! I’m not OK!” she says, her voice quivering. “We came up with this idea at our wedding. We poured months of our lives into it. I thought we were changing the course of science, and now it’s all gone!”
Wow. Big Bang doesn’t usually go there, but that scene was nothing less than beautiful and heartbreaking at once.
The next day, a despondent-looking Sheldon and Amy don’t even go to work (who can blame them?). In fact, they don’t even know what day it is.
PHOTO: Sonja Flemming/CBS
“You had a setback,” Penny says before launching into the most ill-timed pep-talk. “This is the time you gotta dig in and try harder! It’s like halftime, and you’re down by 7!” Leonard tries to quell the mood with his own inspiring speech (“Individually you’re the smartest people I know! Together you can do anything!”), but it’s not well-received. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” Sheldon says, “but please stop. You can’t make this better.” Adds Amy, “I’m with Sheldon. We worked our butts off on this paper, and it was all for nothing. If you think some pep talk can help us, then you don’t understand.”
She’s right. Shamy needs time to grieve. This has been their baby for the better part of a year. Of course they’ll find their footing again, but they have to process their disappointment first. And no offense to Super-Asymmetry, but that’s the storyline I want to watch.
As women continue to speak out about the sexual misconduct they’ve had to deal with at the hands of powerful men in Hollywood, Natalie Portman says she’s only just now realizing that she’s a survivor of the entertainment industry’s toxic sexism, too. During a discussion at the Vulture Festival in Los Angeles on Sunday, the actress said that, at first, upon hearing other people’s stories about their encounters with power players like Harvey Weinstein, she counted herself among the few unscathed by sexual abuse or harassment in the workplace. But now, Portman said she’s since realized that she, too, has experienced sexual harassment and discrimination on a disturbingly regular basis since she started acting.
“When I heard everything coming out, I was like, wow, I’m so lucky that I haven’t had this. And then, on reflection, I was like, okay, definitely never been assaulted, definitely not, but I’ve had discrimination or harassment on almost everything I’ve ever worked on in some way,” she said, according to Vulture. “I went from thinking I don’t have a story to thinking, oh wait, I have 100 stories. And I think a lot of people are having these reckonings with themselves, of things that we just took for granted as like, this is part of the process.”
The Oscar winner offered as an example the time a producer offered her a seemingly innocent ride on his private jet. “I showed up and it was just the two of us, and one bed was made on the plane. Nothing happened, I was not assaulted. I said, ‘This doesn’t make me feel comfortable,’ and that was respected,” Portman recalled. “But that was super not okay, you know? That was really unacceptable and manipulative and could have been—I was scared, you know? But just the fact of any woman, if you’re walking down the street alone at night, you feel scared, and I’m not sure guys know what that [feels like].”
She also suggested that the fact that women are still struggling to achieve parity with men in both cast and crew roles in the industry could be a reason that it took so long for men like Weinstein and Louis C.K.‘s long histories of sexual misconduct and harassment to come to light. “Usually, you walk into a movie as the only woman, and you’re often the only woman on set. It’s very rare to have female crew members apart from hair, makeup, and wardrobe—the very stereotypical departments for women to be in—and I think women experience this in a lot of industries,” the Annihilation star said. “If you do get the opportunity to work, you’re often the only woman in the room. I hear this from friends of mine who are lawyers, business people, writers on shows.”
Portman continued, “The surprising thing is, it almost feels strategic to keep you away from other women, because you don’t have the opportunity to share stories. All these accusations are like, ‘Oh yeah, everyone was isolated from each other.’ People didn’t share. They didn’t realize that there were hundreds of people with similar stories…It prevents mentorship of women by other women because you’re just not exposed to it. You have to work hard to find and actually connect to people doing the same thing, because we’re often that one seat at the table.”
Selena Gomez and The Weeknd are adorably guilty of social media PDA: they use Instagram Stories to brag about the other’s successes, post Snapchats of each other’s photoshoots and magazine covers, and can 100-percent count on the other for a heart on just about any pic they upload. The Weeknd’s also been known to deep-like Selena’s Instas, which makes him about a hundred times more relatable.
The latest evidence of their infatuation? Makeup artist Hung Vanngo posted pics of Selena in hair and makeup for a “not so secret” project she’s currently working on—and either The Weeknd really likes to keep tabs on the latest in celebrity beauty or he’s so excited for Selena, he went so far as to like the finished look on her pro’s page.
But really, how couldn’t he: Selena’s wet-look hair and bright red lips are gorgeous (not to mention those earrings). It’s pretty cute. After all, Insta-stalking your S.O. is one thing, but creepin’ on over to their makeup artist’s Insta feed to declare your appreciation for them is true devotion.
Here’s the image in question:
And the receipt:
We mortals, meanwhile, can’t wait to see what this not-so-secret project of hers is—word on the street is that it’s for her next music video, but there’s still no confirmation on that so far. But if it is, count on us to be keeping a close watch out for it. If it’s anything as complex and wacky as her “Fetish” video, it’s going to be pretty cool.
Just check out these sneak peeks Selena posted to her Instagram story:
While we wait for the video (or not, who knows?!) to drop, we’ll be seeing them all couple-y and cute IRL when they attend the VMAs on Sunday night. There’s no doubt they’ll look amazing on the red carpet together—and, probably, be all over each other’s Instagrams the next day. Heart-eye emojis all around for these two.
