Entertainment

The official trailer for The Color Purple is here.

The film, which is based on the 1982 novel by Alice Walker and the Tony Award-winning musical of the same name, stars Halle Bailey, Colman Domingo, Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and more.

In the trailer, Barrino sings the musical’s song “I’m Here” as clips from the movie flash across the screen.

The story, set in rural Georgia in the early 1900s, follows sisters Celie and Nettie, who were separated as girls but correspond in a series of letters spanning 20 years, according to a synopsis of the novel.

Bailey plays the younger Nettie while Ciara plays the older version of Nettie. Barrino stars as an older Celie, and Phylicia Pearl Mpasi plays the younger Celie.

In the 1985 Steven Spielberg film adaptation of the book, Whoopi Goldberg played Celie. The role earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. Actress Margaret Avery, who played Shug Avery, and Oprah Winfrey, who played Sophia, also earned Oscar nominations for best supporting actress.

Winfrey returned to the 2023 film adaptation as a producer. In 2020, she surprised Orange is the New Black actress Danielle Brooks with a Zoom call to tell her that she had landed the role of Sophia.

“I wanted to be the one to tell you I have such love for her, this character, everything she represents and everything she brought to my life,” Winfrey told Brooks at the time. “And what I’m hoping is that she does the same thing for you.”

The Spielberg film also earned an Academy Award nomination for best picture and was nominated for five Golden Globes, with Goldberg winning for best actress in a drama.

The film is expected to be released on December 25.

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Streaming service Max has parted the curtain on a new “rom-doc,” or romantic-documentary, called Swiping America.

The show will launch on the newly rebranded streaming service on June 15 with the first two of six episodes.

Producers tease the show “follows a group of diverse singles from New York City (Ashleigh, Kesun, Kris, Reagan) on an introspective, eight-city dating app journey, as they explore personal issues around sex, relationships, love and connection.”

Each episode finds the group in a new American city, from Asheville, North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington, “as producers swipe through possible matches and curate blind dates for them.”

Max continues, “While forging a special friendship with each other over the course of the season, their journey culminates in Hawaii, where they hand-pick their best match from the season and ultimately decide whether their relationship can go the distance.”

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In a chat about her career with The Guardian, The Little Mermaid star Melissa McCarthy describes her real-life relationship with her character, the villainous Ursula.

The twice-Oscar-nominated star recalls working as a babysitter in New York City in the ’90s and watching the original animated Disney classic every night with the kids in her care.

“My God, I’d like to have a drink with Ursula,” she recalled thinking.

The actress said she lobbied hard for the plum part. “Having just gone through Covid, I was like, ‘Aha, this is [a] character who has been in isolation for long enough that she is not in the healthiest mental state.’ I started to love her in a whole new way. And she’s also been alone for years with two eels? She’s not solid on her tentacles, so to speak.”

While Melissa is about to launch Little Mermaid Friday, she and her husband and frequent collaborator, Ben Falcone, are still hard at work on their own projects. “It’s a fist fight to try to get comedies made right now. And I don’t know why, because we’ve never needed to laugh more,” she says.

“Comedy allows you to sit next to somebody whose ideas don’t match up. And maybe you come out a little closer,” McCarthy expresses.

She adds, “I can’t do a lot of useful things. I don’t know how to clean up the oceans, or stop our violent tendencies. But I can hopefully give someone who’s had a bad day an hour and a half to go into a different world where bills or illness isn’t the top thing on their brain. That’s the only skill set I really have. So I have to keep trying.”

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Andrew McCarthy is making the rounds, meeting up with his one-time “Brat Pack” as part of a new documentary.

As evidence, the actor-turned-TV director and author posted an Instagram photo of him and his St. Elmo’s Fire co-star Demi Moore, along with an image of them together in the 1985 movie.

Moore was just one stop on his way to try to catch up with the rest of the gang, which famously also included Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald.

According to McCarthy, it had been “years and years” since he’d met up with the “wondrous” Moore; the pair are all smiles in the new photo, which also shows Moore clutching one of her beloved dogs.

McCarthy has recently been on the promotional circuit behind his bestselling book, Walking with Sam, about his 500-mile trek with his then-19-year-old son along Spain’s Camino de Santiago in 2021.

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Ray Stevenson, the Ireland-born English character actor who has been seen in movies like Punisher: Warzone and the Indian smash RRR, and who will be seen in the forthcoming Disney+ show Ahsoka, has died, ABC Audio has confirmed.

A rep for the actor said he died on Sunday, May 21, four days before his 59th birthday. No other details were being made available at this time, the rep added.

According to La Repubblica, however, the actor, who also played the burly Volstagg in the Thor films, was on the Italian island of Ischia shooting a film called Cassino on Ischia when he was hospitalized. The Italian-language newspaper says his condition took a turn for the worse while in the hospital, where he passed away.

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The 10th film in the Fast and Furious saga is currently revving up moviegoers, particularly overseas, but for star and producer Vin Diesel and his co-stars, the movie has something box office tickets can’t buy.

As reported, Meadow Walker, the daughter of the late Fast franchise star Paul Walker, makes a cameo in the movie, and Diesel tells People that meant the world to him. “It did something to my soul, to see her want to honor her father and to contribute in her own way to his life’s work,” the actor explains, adding, “It meant everything.”

Vin and Walker’s co-star Michelle Rodriguez added, “It’s everything to us because [Paul’s] memory is never going to die within the franchise, so as long as we’re doing it, we have to maintain that, [keeping his] energy alive.”

Jordana Brewster, another original F&F vet, said the 24-year-old model and actress is “woven into the fabric forever,” adding, “To have her be on set and work her butt off was really, really inspiring.”

Paul Walker died at 40 as a passenger in a fiery high-speed car accident along with his friend, the vehicle’s driver, Roger Rodas, on November 30, 2013.

Fast X is now the number one movie in America, meaning Diesel now has the #1 and #2 movies in theaters, thanks to his role as Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Incidentally, his Guardians co-star Chris Pratt pulled off the same feat in the previous weeks, when Guardians topped the charts ahead of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, for which he voiced the titular plumber.

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After its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, tickets to the final Indy adventure, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, are now on sale.

To commemorate, Fandango has released an interview with co-stars Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who give a sneak peek.

“He is now being forced to retire … and they’re bringing someone else in to be the head of the archeology department,” Ford says of his whip-cracking alter ego. “He has no real future in mind for himself,” Ford says, explaining, “I thought it would be really interesting to see him at the end of his career. Older, not necessarily wiser, but still capable of one last hurrah.”

As reported, Ford describes how the movie begins with an extended look backward, with the 80-year-old actor digitally de-aged to 35. “It’s not like a Photoshop kind of thing,” Ford says of the digital wizardry that will take fans back in time. “They have used all of the footage that Lucasfilm has acquired … 35 or 40 years of footage … and then transfer his current expressions to his younger face,” the actor explains. “It’s really my face. It’s spooky.”

He calls the opening “action-packed” and a good “transition” to the present day in the film, 1969, and describes playing the hero, “in the twilight of his life,” a “great joy.”

Emmy winner Waller-Bridge calls the script “breathless” and says her character, Helena, Indy’s goddaughter, is “manipulative, and that’s always fun to play.”

The Fleabag actress says Helena is a survivor, but “her luck is running out … to save herself from this terrible situation she’s gotten herself into is to hit up her old godfather.”

The movie opens June 30.

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The Little Mermaid swims back into theaters this weekend, this time as a live action version of the 1989 classic animated Disney musical.

Rob Marshall directed the new film, and he tells ABC Audio that the original Hans Christian Andersen story from the 1830s surprisingly has a lot to say about life in the 2020s.

“When we went back and looked at this tale, we saw this incredibly modern story of a girl who feels displaced, who doesn’t feel she fits in and wants to sort of break the boundaries and break the sort of taboo of going to see what another life is like in another world,” he explains.

Even with similarities, executive producer John DeLuca says they did feel they needed to make some changes.

“It was very important for us to make Ariel’s quest for going…above the surface, not just for a love of a handsome man, but to be part of that world, to learn,” DeLuca shares.

The Little Mermaid soundtrack also gets a little update with composer Alan Menken, who wrote the music for the original, creating three new songs for the new film with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s a partnership that Menken says was “really delightful.”

“I know both of us are the kind of people who will just keep writing and writing and writing till we write something that’s fantastic,” Menken expressed.

There were also some lyrical changes to the classic songs this time around, which Menken was “totally open” to do.

“There were cuts made sometimes just for dramaturgical reasons in this, and sometimes it was just to remedy something that might just need adjusting for the times,” he clarified. “As long as it doesn’t at all damage the basic quality of the song, I’m totally open to that.”

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Nick Cannon is pulling back the curtain on how he manages to balance his fatherly duties.

While the host of The Masked Singer ensures he divides his time among all his kids, he shared that he currently spends the most time with his 8-month-old daughter Onyx, who he shares with LaNisha Cole.

“My beautiful daughter Onyx, that’s probably the child that I spend the most time with, really,” Cannon said during Friday’s episode of The Jason Lee Podcast. “I’m with her at least three times a week, for the full day.”

He continued, “LaNisha and I have a super strong understanding and our co-parenting operation is so solid. If you see me on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays, my daughter’s right next to me.”

“Not against all my other kids because all my other kids, they’re in school, they’re babies, as well as Onyx, but the fact that I appreciate that LaNisha gives me the respect enough to allow me to have her really, an equal amount of time as she does,” Cannon added.

In addition to Onyx, Nick shares twins Moroccan and Monroe with his ex-wife, Mariah Carey; daughter Beautiful Zeppelin and twin sons Zion and Zillion with Abby De La Rosa; son Legendary with model Bre Tiesi; sons Rise Messiah and Golden Sagon, and daughter Powerful Queen with model Brittany Bell; daughter Halo with Alyssa Scott. Nick and Alyssa lost their first child together, baby Zen, to a brain tumor in December of 2021.

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Deadline reports that Jena Malone, Terrence Howard, Tom Everett Scott and Christopher Lloyd are set to start filming the supernatural thriller The Movers. The plot follows a family that moves into a seemingly charming neighborhood, only to discover that things are not as they seem…

Kiefer Sutherland has joined Nicholas Hoult in the Clint Eastwood-helmed legal thriller Juror No. 2, from Warner Bros., according to The Hollywood Reporter. Toni Collette and Zoey Deutch are also on board for the film that centers on “family man Justin Kemp — played by Hoult — who, while serving as a juror in a high-profile murder trial, finds himself struggling with a serious moral dilemma… one he could use to sway the jury verdict and potentially convict — or free — the wrong killer,” per the studio. The film is set to start shooting this summer…

Rachel Brosnahan, Laurence Fishburne and Outlander‘s Caitríona Balfe are joining Rami Malek in the 20th Century thriller Amateur, according to Deadline. The plot, per the outlet, follows “a CIA cryptographer who, after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, demands his bosses go after them. When it becomes clear they won’t act due to conflicting internal priorities, he blackmails the agency into training him and letting him go after them himself.” 20th Century Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News…

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