Every This Is Us fan is well aware that actress Chrissy Metz has a beautiful singing voice—her character, Kate Pearson, works as a professional singer after all. But last night at the Academy of Country Music Awards (ACMs), Metz performed a brand new song live on stage. A mighty big leap for any artist, and a first for the actress.
She originally recorded the song, called “I’m Standing With You,” for the soundtrack of her upcoming film Breakthrough. “I’m excited,” Metz told People on the red carpet before the show. “I mean, you know, as a little girl, you always dream about something like this. But to actually do it and to hold a stage with these incredible women—Lauren Alaina, Carrie Underwood, Maddie + Tae, Mickey Guyton. Are you kidding? It’s really exciting.”
Metz not only made her live television singing debut, but she did it alongside some country music greats, including Underwood who introduced her on stage. You can see a clip of the performance over at The Hollywood Reporter.
Jeff Kravitz/Getty ImagesKevin Winter/Getty Images
Being amongst country royalty wasn’t lost on Metz. “Here’s the thing. I just ran into Tanya Tucker. I was like, she literally kissed my hand — I have her lip gloss on my hand, folks. I really do love all of these acts and all of these artists,” Metz said. “I got to see George Strait and Miranda Lambert sing one of my favorite George Strait songs at rehearsal. I was like, losing my mind. Everyone here is just incredible. I love country music.”
Fans new and old loved the performance. “You really impressed me tonight @ChrissyMetz – Could you imagine the pressure being on stage with all those strong, fierce female vocalists? Jack would be so proud,” one tweeted. “Never knew Chrissy Metz could sing. I approve #ACMawards,” wrote another.
She even impressed Broadway icon Kristen Chenoweth who wrote, “Omg @ChrissyMetz you just nailed your first live tv singing performance! #standingwithyou #ACMs”
We agree, Jack Pearson would definitely be very proud of his “Katie Girl.”
We’re less than a month out from the premiere of the final season of Game of Thrones. While we don’t know who will reign on the Iron Throne when all is said and done, Sophie Turner is out here doing her best to reign over our hearts. She’s starring in Jonas Brothers videos, slamming Piers Morgan over his tweets about mental health, and skiing with future sister-in-law Priyanka Chopra.
Now she’s chugging wine in the name of the Starks (her Game of Thrones family, for the uninitiated). Turner and her fiancé, Joe Jonas, were attending a New York Rangers game when she was shown on the Jumbotron screen. Instead of shying away from the camera, Turner did a little dab move, raised a fist and her glass of red wine, which she then downed as the crowd went wild. Even wine-loving queen Cersei Lannister would have to admit she’s proud of Sansa in that moment.
Turner posted a video of the stunt on Instagram with the caption, “Send it for the starks ?.”
Her comments section quickly lit up like a who’s who of Hollywood. “Hahahhaha ammmmmazing,” wrote Vanessa Hudgens. Drake said, “Wow inspiration for 2020 and beyond.” Ashley Graham dubbed Turner “my girl.” Meanwhile, the JoBros weighed in on a Barstool Sports post of the same video, as captured by Comments By Celebs. “Oh my god,” Nick said. Joe kept it simple with the ? emoji.
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As with all things GoT, there will surely be a Reddit thread dedicated to theorizing what Turner’s caption tells us about Sansa’s fate on the show. But whatever happens to the Stark family and Winterfell, Sansa will be with Turner forever. “When I started playing Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones, I was 13,” she said recently. “Now the series has finished filming and I’m 23, so it feels like I grew up with the character. She’s part of me.”
Another woman—and a bisexual woman of color, at that—is breaking into the boys’ club of late night television. NBC is filling Carson Daly’s old time slot (1:35 A.M.) with a brand-new show hosted by YouTube star Lilly Singh called A Little Late with Lilly.
According to Variety, the show will debut in September and feature Singh conducting interviews, as well pre-taped sketches and other “signature elements.”
Singh, of course, is excited for this new gig. “An Indian-Canadian woman with her own late night show? Now that is a dream come true,” she said about the news. “I’m thrilled to bring it to life on NBC, and I hope my parents consider this to be as exciting as a grandchild.” Singh rose to fame on YouTube, where she’s known as “IISuperwomanII” and has over 14 million followers.
She made the big announcement on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon Thursday night, March 14. “I’m so excited because I truly get to create a show from scratch,” she told host Jimmy Fallon. “I get to make it inclusive. I get to create comedy segments and interview people and really create something that I believe in. And I’m so honored and humbled.” Singh says the show will be “kind of like my YouTube channel” but joked that now she’ll have more than three staffers.
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The social media love for Singh’s new gig is pouring in from celebs like Janelle Monae, Mindy Kaling, and The Rock, as well as non-famous folks who are happy for more diverse representation on late night.
“My heart is so incredibly full. Thank you so much for all the love and positive energy,” Singh tweeted about the enthusiastic response from people. “I’m speechless. I’m overwhelmed. I need to sleep to process all this. More thank yous to come tomorrow ❤️❤️”
By now, the word’s out about Harvey Weinstein: Actresses’ stories about former Hollywood heavyweight producer allegedly harassing and assaulting them helped catalyze the #MeToo movement’s 2017 shift into high gear. What played out would not only expose and take down Weinstein, who continues to deny the allegations, but many (many) other high-profile men. Now, Lena Headey, who plays ice queen Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, has talked in more detail about her experiences with Weinstein, alleging that he hurt her career for a decade.
Headey had previously opened up in an October 2017 series of tweets about her interactions with him. In 2005, she tweeted, he made a suggestive comment to her at the Venice Film Festival, which she laughed off. Some time after, she wrote, he asked her to come up to his hotel room to get a script. Her body, she wrote, “went into high alert,” and Headey said that she spoke up for herself: “I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason, nothing is going to happen.” He apparently became “furious,” and when his room key didn’t work, Headey wrote, he walked her back to the elevator, holding her arm tightly and telling her not to speak to anyone about it.
After these incidents, Headey says, she was virtually iced out of her career for almost a decade. She told The Sunday Times that refusing the advances she alleges meant she barely saw any roles from Miramax, the studio Weinstein co-founded.
“After he was discovered to be a slimeball, on a grander scale than me just knowing it, I did start thinking, ‘Fuck, maybe because I didn’t shag him, that’s impacted a decade of my working life,’ because I did two jobs for Miramax before those incidents, and after that there was nothing,” she told the newspaper.
A decade with little to no work is hard on anyone, but luckily Headey landed on her feet with one of the biggest roles on one of the biggest shows on television. Weinstein, on the other hand, has recently lost his defense lawyer and is due back in court March 7 for a pre-trial hearing after being indicted last May on charges of rape. His trial, which now includes five charges of sexual assault, is scheduled to begin in May.
Lifetime kicks off a month of true crime biopics, featuring women with incredible stories, tonight with the premiere of Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story. Christina Ricci plays investigative journalist Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, who went undercover to expose the horrendous conditions and treatment at the notorious Women’s Lunatic Asylum in Roosevelt Island. Without giving too much away, Bly undergoes treatment at the asylum and has no recollection of how she got there or who she really is.
If that’s creepy and disturbing, imagine what it was like for Ricci to play the role. “I had a really hard time with one of the scenes, because as a mother in real life it’s just horrendous [to see these women suffer],” she says. But it was important for Ricci to tell Bly’s story, even though she didn’t have an extensive knowledge of her previously. “I found it really interesting to see how we treated our poor and mentally ill. The whole point of studying history is to not repeat the mistakes we’ve made, so it’s important to understand that this was a reality for people.”
Even so, Ricci found herself looking for ways to leave such dark subject matter on set. “It’s natural defenses,” she says. “Your brain doesn’t want to think about terrible things, so [for me], if you just allow it to recover, my brain will go right to the adorable kitten nearby.”
In her nearly 30 year career, Ricci has certainly mastered the art of evolving and focusing on the positive. She says she’s grateful she didn’t grow up in the age of social media (“Thank God I was done with all my hard partying [by then].”) and that there’s now smarter roles for women in TV and film (“For a very long time, the things we were supposed to be in were so stupid”). But it hasn’t been easy either. Ahead of tonight’s premiere, she tells Glamour what she’s learned. Read on.
PHOTO: Michelle Faye Fraser/Lifetime
Christina Ricci in Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story
Glamour: How often do you watch your films when they come on TV?
Christina Ricci: It depends. We have Apple TV, so I’d have to go search for my own stuff. It’s been a long time that I’ve been like, “I really want to go and see that movie…” I think the last one we watched was Addams Family Values. I had to talk about it since it was being re-released for its anniversary, so I watched it again to familiarize myself with it.
My sister was adamant that I mention Now and Then, which is one of her favorites.
CR: I was in a bathroom recently with (co-star) Rita Wilson and didn’t say hi! I don’t think she recognized me. I looked at her, but she didn’t recognize me, and I totally forgot she was in that movie and that I worked with her until after. I should have just gone right up to her. When you’ve worked as long as I have, and I was a child then and am an adult now and such a different person, it’s hard to almost remember that you had contact with some people.
You’ve seen so much change through your career. What’s changed for you personally?
CR: I think there’s a real appreciation for intelligent filmmaking and seeing it reflected in movies and TV. For a very long time the things we were supposed to aspire to be in were so stupid. I had to pretend that I thought it was good, you know? So it’s nice now that you can actually say, “No, I want to be in something really smart, and I don’t care if only 10 people get it. I want to make art.” There seems to be real value to that now.
Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself during your teen years?
CR: Yes, for sure. I would tell myself it’s all about the work I did and what I created, and nothing else mattered. I didn’t know that for a very long time, and I wish I had. I think it’s very confusing when you introduce a child to fame because fame is so warping. People clamor for and want it so badly. I think as a kid, you get confused, when really any adult should tell you, “No, it’s about what you create and the work you do. It’s about valuing yourself as an artist and not something to be put up for people to consume.” I didn’t understand that…I thought that I was meant for other people to consume. [But] I was a kid.
PHOTO: Dave Allocca
Christina Ricci in 1999.
Is there anything you do now to make sure you don’t have to deal with the pitfalls of fame?
CR: I never really went out anyway. The thing is, I’m not naturally attention-seeking, but I tried to be that for so long because I thought I was supposed to be. It led to me doing a lot of things to cope to be this person that I wasn’t, and that caused a lot of problems. I think now just knowing you don’t actually have to [play that game], it’s not about fame, and it shouldn’t be about fame. If what you’re seeking is fame, you’re always going to be empty. It’s something I’m trying to teach my child because I think social media and all of this attention-seeking stuff is soul-crushing. I don’t want him to have to learn that the hard way.
Right. It’s become about the amount of followers you have.
CR: It’s very strange. It’s like taking the worst part of high school and making it [a profession].
Remember when actors would go out to clubs and it wouldn’t wind up on social media?
CR: I don’t know how these young actors aren’t getting into more trouble.
It’s why I think Netflix and chill became such a huge phenomenon. What else are people going to do?
CR: Well, it’s smart and thank God. Nobody needs to be embarrassing themselves. Somebody said to me the other day—and it’s kind of funny—they were like, “You were a part of the last group of young, famous people that were insane.” Because there was no one to cover it! So it was like the last hurrah of like throwing TV’s out of hotel rooms and stuff, you know? Because right after…I think the Internet hit when I was 22 or 23, and thank God I was done with all of my hard partying. [Laughs] It’s nuts.
Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story premieres on Lifetime on Saturday, January 19, at 8 P.M. ET/PT.
If you thought 2018 was the year of the rom-com, just wait. Netflix announced on Friday (January 11) that Noah Centineo is starring in his third romantic comedy for the streaming platform—alongside, wait for it, Riverdale star Camila Mendes.
The movie is called The Perfect Date and, according to IMDB, it centers on a high school senior (Centineo) who launches a dating app wherein he becomes a stand-in boyfriend for people upon request. Laura Marano, who you probably know from Austin & Ally, also stars with Mendes and Centineo.
“Very Important Announcement Alert? @ncentineo will pretend to be your boyfriend this summer! Well, he will in the Netflix original movie The Perfect Date w/ @camimendes and @lauramarano,” Netflix posted to Instagram alongside two stills from the movie feature Mendes, Marano, and Centineo.
Summer isn’t that far away, right? Check out Netflix’s post for yourself, below:
Marano regrammed Netflix’s post, writing, “So excited to finally talk about this!!! See you guys in the summer.”
Netflix was largely responsible for bringing back the rom-com in 2018 with its slate of summer movies, which included The Kissing Booth,To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Sierra Burgess Is a Loser. Centineo emerged as a breakout star from both Sierra Burgess and To All the Boys, and was quickly dubbed the Internet’s boyfriend by, well, the Internet. He’s also set to appear in the Charlie’s Angels reboot later this year, starring Kristen Stewart and directed by Elizabeth Banks.
Here’s hoping The Perfect Date is just one of many romantic comedies Netflix has in store for us this year.
