Jon Bon Jovi is officially gearing up for a major return to the global stage, eyeing a massive stadium run with the upcoming 2027 Forever Tour. Speaking in a recent interview with Spectrum News NY1’s Shannan Ferry at MetLife Stadium, the legendary rocker reflected on his renewed energy and upcoming performances following a challenging four-year hiatus that once left him questioning his future in music.

The frontman’s absence from touring was driven by severe vocal cord damage that required surgery and nearly two years of intensive rehabilitation. Admitting that he used to white-knuckle his way through performances, Bon Jovi said his rigorous recovery has finally restored the stamina and vocal range he needs to feel completely confident tackling deep cuts from his extensive catalog once again.

This physical and mental renewal comes on the heels of a triumphant return to New York’s Madison Square Garden earlier this summer, where the band played nine sold-out shows. Cruising through nearly three-hour sets without any special vocal accommodations, the singer described the milestone not just as a professional comeback, but as a genuine second chance to experience performing with fresh enthusiasm.

Offstage, life has also evolved for the musician, who recently embraced a new role as a grandfather. Reflecting on his priorities, Bon Jovi emphasized that navigating health challenges and personal loss has given him a renewed perspective, making this chapter of his career feel remarkably grounded, joyful and entirely earned.

Teri Hatcher has slipped into the iconic role of Miranda Priestly for the West End musical adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, a bold new chapter in her stage career. Speaking from the couch of BBC’s The One Show in London during her first week at the Dominion Theatre, the actress reflected on taking over the part previously held on stage by Vanessa Williams, her former Desperate Housewives co-star. Hatcher revealed that Williams had been putting her name forward to the producers for roughly a year, and that the encouraging words of both Williams and her own daughter finally convinced her to say yes.

Hatcher described a compressed rehearsal period of about three and a half to four weeks, beginning in late September, before her first preview in front of a paying audience on October 20. Stepping into the fearsome fashion editor Meryl Streep made famous in the 2006 film, she recalled the thrill of her dramatic entrance — rising onstage in an elevator to an ovation that seemed to go on forever. Her director, she joked, knew her insecurities well enough to quip before she could speak: “No, we did not pay the audience to do that.” The production pairs the film’s sharpest dialogue with an original score by Elton John, which Hatcher described as a genuine joy fest.

Now 61, Hatcher said choosing such a demanding musical is a deliberate attempt to leave her comfort zone and confront the insecurities that linger at any age. “The older you get, the less you have to, but the more you should put yourself out of your comfort zone,” she explained, adding that she felt the universe was handing her a chance to grow. She has performed live before — as Sally Bowles in Cabaret some three decades ago, while breastfeeding a young baby, and more recently as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family — but relocating to London for a limited run of just 16 performances has been its own adjustment. To stay grounded in a city where grocery stores, routines and self-care habits all feel unfamiliar, she brought her therapy cat along, greeting her each evening before heading to the theatre: “Okay, Mommy has to go to work now.”

She has also had to adapt to British small talk, admitting that the casual greeting “Are you all right?” still catches her off guard. “I’m internalizing it like, ‘Do I look like there’s a problem?'” she said, before conceding she is getting used to it. Hatcher, who also noted she once played a role other actresses have played well — Lois Lane — said there is always room to bring your own spin. With a kitchen calendar on which she ticks off every remaining date, she is intent on savoring each night of her run, which ends on February 6, 2027.

Adam Brody and Kristen Bell joined The Drew Barrymore Show to talk about the runaway success of their Netflix romantic comedy, Nobody Wants This. With the series sitting comfortably atop the streaming charts, the two leads looked back on the intersecting paths that shaped their careers — and on how those earlier chapters eventually led them to share the screen.

Brody recalled the early-2000s explosion of The O.C., explaining that shooting far from the spotlight kept the cast largely insulated from the frenzy surrounding the show. He also revisited his brief stint on Gilmore Girls, noting that the series has reached an even wider, multi-generational audience thanks to streaming — a shift that has let him fully grasp how far his early work travels.

Bell, meanwhile, opened up about her voiceover role as the unseen narrator of Gossip Girl. After Veronica Mars was cancelled, she took the initiative and pitched herself for narration on the newly launched teen drama. That decision introduced her to Leighton Meester, who had previously appeared on Veronica Mars opposite Adam Scott before landing her career-defining part as Blair Waldorf. Bell joked about the symmetry of now starring opposite Meester’s real-life husband, Brody, years after the two women’s careers first brushed against each other.

The pair also traded favorite moments from their filmographies, including Bell’s time on the camp classic Burlesque alongside Cher, Christina Aguilera and Stanley Tucci. She described a lighthearted on-set dynamic with Julianne Hough, whose character clashed with Bell’s on screen even as the two became friends off it. Taken together, the conversation made clear how decades of shared television history underpin the easy chemistry Brody and Bell bring to Nobody Wants This, still going strong on Netflix.

How did Hollywood turn Jennifer Aniston into a household name?

In October 2019, an actress whose seven highest-grossing films were all released between 2003 and 2013 posted a single photograph online — six old friends crowded onto a couch — and the internet briefly stopped working as intended. It took her five hours and sixteen minutes to collect one million followers on Instagram, a Guinness-recognized record at the time, one that stood until David Attenborough came along the following year. No studio was opening a movie that week. No franchise was dropping a trailer. The number belonged to a person, not to intellectual property — and that is the anomaly worth investigating.

Because that is the real question. Celebrity journalism asks “who is that person?” as an act of curiosity; Hollywood answers it with money, and the more useful version is the one this piece starts from: who is Jennifer Aniston, and how did she become one of the most recognizable women alive — so quickly, and then, more strangely, for so long? Ask it honestly and the usual evidence gets in the way. The hit movies, the thing that used to make a star, had already gone quiet.

The quick part is well documented. She was born in Sherman Oaks, California, to two working actors, John Aniston and Nancy Dow, trained at New York’s LaGuardia High School, appeared on stage in the late 1980s, and then ground through television shows that mostly didn’t last — Molloy, The Edge, Ferris Bueller, Herman’s Head — plus a first film, the low-budget horror comedy Leprechaun, that became a punchline rather than a launch. In 1994 she was cast as Rachel Green on Friends. Ten seasons later she was one of the most famous people on the planet: the entire “how did she become a star so fast” question was answered by one casting decision and one ratings season. Everything that has happened since is a different phenomenon — the maintenance of fame long after the reason for it has expired.

The movies took longer and never quite did what the legend suggests. The Good Girl, in 2002, was her first real test as a lead: an independent film that earned $16.9 million worldwide and serious reviews. The following year she appeared in Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty, which grossed $484.6 million and remains the biggest hit she has ever been part of — a film built around someone else. Then came a decade of romantic comedies with her as the reliable center: Along Came Polly ($178.3 million), The Break-Up ($205.7 million), Marley & Me ($255.7 million), Just Go with It ($214.9 million), Horrible Bosses ($209.8 million), We’re the Millers ($269.9 million). Compiled totals put her filmography around $1.59 billion worldwide — an impressive aggregate, with the caveat that it counts every title in a database, not only the ones she sold.

Look at that list closely and the pattern is the story. She was rarely the only reason to buy a ticket, and almost never the reason a film became huge; her biggest successes paired her with Jim Carrey, a dog, or an ensemble. That is not a takedown — it is the first clue. Hollywood did not discover that Jennifer Aniston could open a picture. It discovered something rarer: that audiences trusted her, consistently, for twenty years. Trust is harder to manufacture than excitement, and considerably harder to lose.

The first machine maintaining her was not a movie but a rerun. Friends never left: syndication, then streaming, then collective memory, and when the reunion arrived it reached an estimated 29% of U.S. streaming households on its first day (a third-party estimate from TVision, reported by Variety). Unlike today’s rising stars, who have to build a legacy in public, Aniston inherited one that renews itself every time someone presses play. Nostalgia is not competing with her fame; it is the floor beneath it. Her family ties to the business are real but modest — two working actors, no dynasty — so the legacy sustaining her image was not handed down; it was licensed, rerun, and kept warm.

The second machine was advertising, which does not care whether a film opens on Friday. She has been selling things with the same face since the L’Oréal Elvive campaign in 1997: Aveeno’s spokesperson since 2013 (Page Six reported the deal could be eight figures — a report, not a disclosure), Emirates’ global campaign in 2015 (her alleged fee, $5 million; the much-quoted $20 million was the airline’s media spend, not her paycheck), Smartwater since 2007 with a fresh campaign this year, Vital Proteins’ chief creative officer since 2020, and an equity stake in Living Proof that ended when Unilever bought the brand outright in 2016 for an undisclosed price. She founded her own haircare line, LolaVie, and has franchised a fragrance since 2010. A Forbes editor estimated in 2018 that endorsements alone paid her more than $10 million a year — an expert estimate, not a contract. Note what she sells, though: not couture but normality — water, supplements, drugstore skincare, haircare. That is an interpretation of a pattern, but the pattern is documented, and it is the opposite of how the newest stars are packaged.

The third machine was the press, and it fed on her the way it feeds on nobody else. Vanity Fair’s 2025 cover story described her as having appeared on roughly two thousand tabloid covers — the profile’s own characterization, but a revealing one. People named her the World’s Most Beautiful Woman twice, in 2004 and 2016. Her romantic life was treated as national property for the better part of two decades. None of that was box-office driven; it was exposure driven, and exposure is the one input the industry can manufacture on demand. Her trophy shelf points to the same place: an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Friends, a Screen Actors Guild win decades later for The Morning Show, ten Emmy nominations in total — and never an Academy Award nomination, which matters less as a slight than as a map. Her legitimacy has always come from television and the public, not from the Oscar corridor.

This is where the three words we use interchangeably have to come apart. Fame means people know who you are, and on that the data is close to unanimous: YouGov measures 95% public awareness, her Instagram following sat at 44.6 million as of a September 2025 count, and her debut on the platform broke a world record. Popularity means people actively like and follow her — the evidence is real but softer: 70% popularity in the same polling, a 91% appeal score in a 2018 survey of 1,000 people by the Marketing Arm, a shelf of audience-voted People’s Choice Awards, and 73 million Netflix households that watched Murder Mystery to at least 70% completion in its first four weeks. Star power is the hard one: the ability to make people pay attention, or money, simply because a name is attached. And on that, the record is genuinely ambiguous.

The classic star-power test — can your name open a picture? — has not been applied to her in years, because her recent work has gone where the test doesn’t exist. Netflix reported 30.9 million households watched Murder Mystery in its first three days (at the time, the biggest movie opening in the platform’s history) and 42 million views for the sequel’s first three days; Apple pays her a reported $2 million per episode for The Morning Show, which has been renewed for a fifth and final season. Those are real numbers, but they are not box office: Netflix counts hours divided by runtime, and Apple does not disclose title-level viewership at all. So the honest verdict splits: her theatrical star power is unproven in the current era, while her streaming and brand star power is documented. Hollywood is buying the second one, and it is buying a lot of it.

The comparison with the previous generation clarifies how much the yardstick moved — not that older stars were better, but that they were measured by a machine that no longer exists. In 2000, Julia Roberts opened Erin Brockovich to $28.1 million domestically, took it to $257.9 million worldwide on her eighth $100 million film, and commanded a reported $20 million salary; Pretty Woman grossed $463.4 million and Notting Hill $364 million. The star was the product. By 2023, the biggest domestic openings belonged to Barbie ($162 million) and The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($146.4 million); by 2024, to Deadpool & Wolverine ($211.4 million); in 2025, to a video-game adaptation, A Minecraft Movie ($162.8 million). Characters, not actors.

The numbers behind that shift are striking, if imperfect. A 2024 independent analysis defined a movie star as someone with at least three leading roles in $20 million-plus films over five years, budgets inflation-adjusted, and found that this population peaked above 150 in the mid-2000s and has shrunk since; a late-2023 National Research Group survey had no actor under 44 in its top fifteen “most want to see in theaters,” with Zendaya ranked 49th and Timothée Chalamet 94th. Both come from outside analysts working with their own definitions rather than official industry counts — but they point the same way as the opening-weekend charts. Even the fastest-rising new names now prove themselves differently: Zendaya’s biggest hit is a sequel ($714.8 million for Dune: Part Two) while her original Challengers took $96.1 million, and her luxury alignment is Louis Vuitton; Glen Powell’s leverage surfaced as a first-look deal with Universal rather than a guaranteed opener, after Twisters ($372.3 million); Sydney Sweeney’s Anyone But You grossed $220.3 million while her original Immaculate did $34.9 million, and her American Eagle campaign was credited by the company with 790,000 new customers and 40 billion impressions in six weeks — company-reported, with foot-traffic data pointing both ways. The new stars are not selling tickets the way Roberts did. They are selling association.

Which finally answers the practical question: why does Hollywood keep putting Jennifer Aniston everywhere? Because in a market where instant recognition is the scarcest resource, she is the safest asset available — 95% awareness, zero explanation required, equally credible in a workplace comedy, a prestige drama, a water ad, and a Netflix mystery, with none of the cost attached to teaching an audience who someone is. One event she co-hosted with Selena Gomez generated an estimated $6.8 million in media impact value in a single week, according to Launchmetrics data reported by WWD — a measurement of exposure, not of demand, and the distinction is the whole point. This is interpretation, not proof: no studio publishes data showing audiences are asking for her. But every number they do publish — follower counts, completion rates, campaign results, per-episode salaries — rewards familiarity, and she has more of it than almost anyone alive.

So: who is Jennifer Aniston, and how did Hollywood turn her into a household name? She was made in one season by a character the world chose to keep, and she has been kept ever since — by reruns, magazine covers, brand campaigns, and platforms that measure her in different units but value her for the same thing. The answer is emphatically not that she is the biggest movie star alive; by the old definition — a name that alone sells tickets — the case has never been weaker. The answer is that “movie star” no longer means what it meant when an actress could open a film on a Friday on the strength of her face. It now means someone the entire industry recognizes on sight and can place anywhere with predictable results, which is exactly why her face is still, inevitably, everywhere. Hollywood did not turn her into a household name with one movie. It turned her into a household name, and then discovered that a household name is worth more than a hit.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar was remarkably candid with Michael Rosenbaum on the Inside of You podcast, opening up about the anxiety that still follows him into every job, the reality of what Saved by the Bell actually paid him, and the time Will Ferrell and Adam McKay fired him from their new comedy while insisting he was great in it. The conversation is worth revisiting now because, in the time since, Gosselaar has earned a Critics Choice Award nomination for his unnerving turn as Sir on NBC’s Found, taken on directing assignments, and stayed steadily employed across networks. He also got into why he can’t remember large stretches of his own life, what he owes the late Stephen Bochko, and the one piece of advice he has for anyone trying to survive show business. The result reads less like a nostalgia tour than a clear-eyed report from a former child star who has been fired, broke, canceled, and hired again — and who is honest about how much all of it still matters to him.

The sharpest story involved Ferrell and McKay, who handed him a role outright, praised him every day in front of the cast, screened the finished episode at his house, and then called weeks later to say the network was moving ahead with five episodes but had to replace him because his character was too dark. The series never made it to air, and McKay’s email promising they would work together again never led to anything. It was hardly his only professional knock: as a kid he lost a toy commercial to Paul Walker, the other in-demand blond child actor of their era, and when Saved by the Bell ended he went about two years without a job, detailing cars with his cousin because being recognized made waiting tables unthinkable. The person who put his career back together was Bochko, the late NYPD Blue creator who hired him to replace Rick Schroder, kept casting him for years afterward, handed him early directing jobs, and told him straight to let his first marriage go.

For a show that made him famous all over the world, Saved by the Bell paid modestly: he estimates roughly $5,000 an episode at its peak, his syndication checks add up to pennies per airing, and the cast never earned a cent from the merchandise. So when Tracey Wigfield’s pitch won him over, he returned to the Peacock revival for the salary and a producer credit, enjoyed the new cast, and directed an episode of it. He was also candid that today’s young actors run circles around his teenage self, even as friends send him clips of their under-10 daughters naming Zack Morris their favorite character. Peacock has since canceled the revival after two seasons, which only underlines the point he kept making in the conversation: nothing in this business — not a renewal, not a rating, not a good review — is ever guaranteed.

Gosselaar’s mind, he told Rosenbaum, holds onto scripts but drops everything else: he can absorb a monologue in minutes, yet real-life moments vanish the moment he walks away, including a car accident involving co-star Tiffany Amber Thiessen that she swears they lived through together and he cannot recall at all. That gap is why he started the rewatch podcast Zack to the Future with writer Dashiell Driscoll, creator of the web series Zack Morris’s Trash, working through the sitcom from the very beginning to rebuild an experience he had mostly lost, and the show has sat on hiatus around its halfway point ever since. He was equally frank about the death of co-star Dustin Diamond, saying it stunned him and wishing the man had reached out to his old friends before it was too late.

Anxiety was the thread running through it all: he admitted he was nervous before the taping, said he has spent his career riddled with it, and told Rosenbaum he manages without alcohol or drugs by leaning on cold-water exposure, jiu-jitsu, hard workouts, sleep, and eating better. His body carries the rest of the toll — he grew up racing motocross, fractured his sternum and tore the ligaments in his neck as a teenager, and went through shoulder and neck surgeries after Pitch, which is why he wishes his younger self had simply taken time off. Car racing, his first love, now loses to real life: four kids in private school price him out of the track, though he jokes he could always fund it the way Patrick Dempsey did, by earning Grey’s Anatomy money. His advice for lasting is not to take any of it personally, even though he admits he still cares too much and would love to learn how to care less. He is still anxious and still cares deeply about the work, but he says both out loud now — and he keeps getting hired for it, from Found to the Crave comedy Bulges he has in the works.

Every few months, the internet rediscovers the same few seconds of film: a woman in a black vinyl bodysuit, perched on the arm of a piano in a red satin dress, cracking a whip hard enough to knock the head off a mannequin standing across the room. Michelle Pfeiffer did that trick herself. Decades later, she would say that learning to use the whip was one of the hardest things she had ever done, and that the character who came out of it seems to have nine lives — a joke about Catwoman that also happens to be the best available description of Pfeiffer’s own career. Everyone can picture the face. Almost nobody, it turns out, has actually done the arithmetic of how that face got there, what it cost, and what she built with it once she arrived.

The popular version of Michelle Pfeiffer is compact enough to fit on a poster: the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, briefly the most acclaimed actress in it, then a long, graceful quiet. Catwoman. The singer on the piano. The woman Jack Nicholson’s character couldn’t stop talking about. What that version leaves out is roughly four decades of refusals, negotiations, producing memos, box-office shocks and at least two complete second acts — one of them behind a fragrance counter. The real career is stranger and more instructive than the legend, and in 2026 it has become more visible than it has been in twenty years, on two television series at once, at an age when the industry historically stops writing women like her into the story at all.

The architecture begins in 1978 in Orange County, where a teenager named Michelle Pfeiffer won the Miss Orange County pageant and placed sixth at Miss California — a detail that matters not because beauty pageants make stars, but because an agent on a judging panel saw her there and started her toward auditions. Her first screen credit came that same year, in a 1978 episode of Fantasy Island, followed by the usual apprenticeship of the era: bit parts in network series like Delta House and CHiPs, and three television movies in 1981. Her feature debut was The Hollywood Knights in 1980, a period comedy nobody remembers for her. Then came the role that should have ended the conversation: Stephanie Zinone, the Pink Ladies’ leader in Grease 2 (1982), the most notorious critical and commercial failure on her résumé. The sequel grossed about $14.3 million domestically and opened to reviews that treated it as an insult to the original. Her agent would later say that the association made it harder for her to get hired at all.

What happened next is the first lesson in how Pfeiffer’s career actually works. A year after Grease 2 flopped, she appeared opposite Al Pacino in Brian De Palma’s Scarface — a film that was itself savaged on release and became one of the defining American movies of its decade. She has said she was terrified during its making. She kept working anyway: Ladyhawke in 1985, then The Witches of Eastwick in 1987 alongside Cher and Susan Sarandon, a $62.8 million hit that put her in the room with Jack Nicholson and proved she could hold a studio comedy against the biggest male star alive. The machine was turning. Dangerous Liaisons followed in 1988, and with it the first of what would become three Academy Award nominations — she lost that year to Geena Davis, though she took the BAFTA for supporting actress — and the performance that taught Hollywood something it had been slow to learn: that the face everyone wanted to photograph could also carry a story about the destruction of an innocent woman, quietly, without vanity, from the inside.

Then came 1989, and The Fabulous Baker Boys, the film that Pfeiffer’s fiercest admirers still treat as the real one. She played Susie Diamond, a former escort hired to sing duets with two brothers act, and she sang the material herself — two months of intensive vocal preparation with a coach, terrified the whole time, delivering “Makin’ Whoopee” on a piano in a red dress in a scene that has since become shorthand for a certain kind of American movie magic. The film grossed about $18.4 million, a fraction of what Batman Returns would earn three years later, but it won her the Golden Globe for dramatic actress and a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She lost that one too — to Jessica Tandy, in Driving Miss Daisy — and the near-miss would become the pattern of her peak: critical vindication, industry applause, and hardware going home with somebody else.

The early 1990s were the years the public version of Pfeiffer was assembled. Katya Orlova in The Russia House opposite Sean Connery, another Globe nomination. Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, another nomination. And Batman Returns in 1992, the role that guarantees she will be recognizable as long as movies are watched. The circumstances were awkward: Annette Bening had been cast as Selina Kyle and left the production after becoming pregnant — a fact Pfeiffer has complained the press turned into a competition it never actually was — and Pfeiffer stepped in, spent months learning to crack a whip, and created a Catwoman that every actress who has played the part since has had to define themselves against. Zoë Kravitz, asked decades later about taking the role, named the women whose Catwomen had shaped hers: Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Halle Berry and Pfeiffer. Batman Returns earned $267 million worldwide.

The number that best captures the strange logic of her career is the one from the following year. In 1992 she made Love Field, a drama about the Kennedy assassination era that she also produced through her own company, Via Rosa Productions, which she had co-founded at the start of the decade. The film earned barely a million dollars at the domestic box office. It also Pfeiffer her third Academy Award nomination in five years — Best Actress, the only category she had not yet been nominated in — which she lost that year to Emma Thompson. An actress nominated three times by age 34, in an era when studios still built calendars around movie stars, had just headlined a film that almost nobody saw. That gap — between the industry’s verdict and the audience’s — is where the real Michelle Pfeiffer story lives.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read the mid-1990s as a slide. Dangerous Minds, the toughest-classroom drama she also produced in 1995, was dismissed by critics and earned $179.5 million worldwide against a $29 million budget, one of the better returns of her career. But the pattern of the decade’s second half was inconsistent in a way that the mythology of that era usually smooths over: One Fine Day underdelivered, A Thousand Acres disappointed, The Story of Us landed at 26 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with $27 million to show for it. In between sat What Lies Beneath in 2000, a $288 million worldwide hit, and The Age of Innocence, a film whose reputation has only grown. Her instincts remained better than her hit rate, and she kept producing — The Deep End of the Ocean, Dangerous Minds, A Thousand Acres — long before “executive producer” became standard issue for anyone with a famous face.

And then, by the standards of a woman who had been everywhere for fifteen years, she mostly stopped. This is the part the popular version of Michelle Pfeiffer gets most wrong, because it is usually filed under disappearance or decline, and it was neither. She has described it precisely: she didn’t set out to stop working, she said in 2023 — the requirements simply narrowed until almost nothing fit. Where it shot, for how long, in what season, whether her children could come, whether filming would collide with school. Her agent began calling her Dr. No. She has said she became so picky that she was unhirable, and that she was at peace with that. The children were the point: a daughter, Claudia, adopted in 1993 while Pfeiffer was single, raised with the screenwriter David E. Kelley, whom she married that year and who stepped into fatherhood within months of their meeting; a son, John, born in 1994. The famous refusals belong to this period, and she has been careful about what they meant: she declined Basic Instinct because of the nudity and sexual material — she described herself, without drama, as modest — and has said the one she regrets turning down is Thelma & Louise. Other refusals, she has pointed out, were never judgments at all; they were scheduling, or a promise to a child.

The re-entry was gradual, and its shape tells you where the industry had moved. Hairspray and Stardust in 2007. The Wizard of Lies on HBO in 2017, as Ruth Madoff, which brought her first Emmy nomination and announced that the most interesting parts for a woman of her experience had migrated to television. Murder on the Orient Express, $352 million worldwide. And the franchise surprise: Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, in Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, a $623 million film, followed by a credit in Avengers: Endgame, which became the highest-grossing film ever released. Paul Rudd later told a story about that period that is the cleanest evidence of her actual star power anyone has produced: at an Endgame gathering, established actors reacted to Pfeiffer’s arrival the way fans react, with undisguised shock that she was standing in front of them. Fame, she has said, terrified her at the beginning. The terror was never visible from the outside.

What she did with the re-entry is the second act almost nobody planned for. In 2022 she played Betty Ford in The First Lady and Gladys Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis; in 2023 she returned as Janet van Dyne in Quantumania. Then came the year she did not take off. In December 2025, promoting the Prime Video holiday comedy Oh. What. Fun., in which she plays a mother whose family takes her annual labor for granted, she said she expected to spend most of 2026 away from work, with a new grandchild. Instead, 2026 became her biggest year since the 1990s. The Madison, an original Paramount+ drama created by Taylor Sheridan’s world but not part of the Yellowstone universe, premiered in March with Pfeiffer as a Montana widow opposite Kurt Russell, renewed for a third season before the second had even aired. In April, Apple TV+ and A24 premiered Margo’s Got Money Troubles, David E. Kelley’s adaptation of the novel, with Pfeiffer as the mother of Elle Fanning’s character, alongside Nicole Kidman — renewed within a month. In June, the Gotham Film & Media Institute gave her its Legend Tribute. By August she had collected two more Emmy nominations, one for supporting actress in a comedy and one, as an executive producer of Margo, for outstanding comedy series — bringing her career Emmy total to three nominations, none of them a win, which is its own small monument to how her industry has honored her.

The August conversation is worth pausing on, because it contains the best available answer to the question this article opened with. At a Hollywood Reporter panel, Pfeiffer said she did not want to star in another movie alone anymore — ensembles, she explained, were more fun. The remark traveled the internet as a retirement-adjacent headline, and she corrected it on The Tonight Show, calling retirement talk the most ridiculous thing and clarifying that she had only ever said she likes working with other people. Read that exchange against the whole career and it stops being a clarification and becomes a thesis. This is a woman who has spent forty years declining the version of stardom that asks you to be available to everyone: the Grease 2 typecasting she refused to be defined by, the nudity she wouldn’t shoot, the school-calendar ultimatums that cost her roles, the solo-billing she no longer wants. Her agent’s joke — Dr. No — was never a phase. It was the operating system.

Which leaves the two questions the story actually turns on: what she is an example of, and why she still matters. On paper, the first question has an unsatisfying answer: three Academy Award nominations and no wins, eight Golden Globe nominations and one win, a BAFTA, roughly fifty film credits, and tracked box-office totals in the billions across the films of her that distributors counted. She was never the biggest star of her era, and by the awards record she was not the most decorated. But star power was never the trophy count. It is the thing that makes other actors forget they are famous when you walk into the room; the thing that makes a whip clip from 1992 travel further than most films released last year; the thing that made Stephen Frears recall, decades after Dangerous Liaisons, that Pfeiffer had met a young Keanu Reeves on that set and told him he would be a big star — before anyone in the industry knew it. She had an eye for what lasts. She always applied it to her own career last.

On the second question — why she still matters — the honest 2026 answer is that it is not nostalgia driving this chapter. Grease 2 has its cult, Batman Returns has its anniversaries, What Lies Beneath has its anniversary reappraisals, and the whip clip will outlive everyone reading this. But none of that explains two series renewed inside a year, an Emmy nomination as both performer and producer at 68, or the observation critics have begun making about the 2026 roles in particular: that they are written for a woman her age with the complexity usually reserved for men’s late careers. Pfeiffer didn’t outlast the machinery of stardom by out-waiting it. She kept producing, kept choosing ensembles over spotlights, kept saying no until the yeses were the ones she wanted — and then, when the industry finally started writing parts worth her time, she was standing there, exactly where she had always been, doing her own stunts.

Now she has two shows streaming, a third season ordered, a fragrance business she founded and still runs, a grandchild she planned 2026 around, and an agents’ nickname that turned out to be prophecy. The name was always famous. The story — of a Movie Star who treated her own scarcity as the last thing she controlled — is what people are only now getting to know.

Actor Chris Pratt made his 10th appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, bringing updates on the long-awaited second season of Prime Video’s hit action series The Terminal List.

More than four years after the premiere of the first season, the star and executive producer confirmed that the upcoming installment expands the franchise into a globe-trotting espionage thriller. Moving beyond the dark, domestic revenge plot of the debut season, the new episodes take the narrative international, featuring locations across South Africa, Morocco, London, Greece, Ukraine, and Washington, D.C.

Addressing the four-year gap between seasons, Pratt explained that production faced several delays, including the industry strikes, while the team also produced a prequel season, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, in the interim. The actor emphasized that authenticity remains the cornerstone of the show, which is adapted from the bestselling book series by former Navy SEAL Jack Carr.

The production heavily incorporates military veterans across its cast and crew, including director Ray Mendoza and executive producer Jared Shaw. Pratt noted that the high level of realism in the combat tactics, jargon, and behavior is a key reason the show resonates so strongly with viewers and military veterans alike.

During the interview, Fallon presented Pratt with a certificate commemorating a personal milestone outside of Hollywood: his very first hole-in-one in golf, achieved on May 23, 2026. Pratt shared the story of scoring the lucky shot on the eighth hole at Ojai Valley during a friend’s wedding weekend. After accidentally hitting the milestone ball into a crowded driving range on the following hole, the actor admitted he had to comb through thousands of golf balls in a secluded corner of the course to retrieve it, so that his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, could frame it alongside his official certificate.

The conversation also touched on a lesser-known chapter from Pratt’s early career, before his breakout roles in television and film. While working as a server at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant in Maui where he was initially discovered, he wore a name tag that originally read “Christopher” but gradually wore down until only “Christo” remained.

The nickname caught on among his coworkers to the point where the actor briefly considered adopting the single name professionally at the start of his acting journey, complete with an early Hollywood headshot from that era.

The Terminal List Season 2 premiered Wednesday, October 21, on Prime Video, with all eight episodes available to stream at once.

Actress Uma Thurman appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to discuss the upcoming second season of Paramount+’s hit series Dexter: Resurrection, which premieres Friday, Oct. 30.

Reflecting on the creative process behind the show, Thurman noted how rewarding it is to collaborate with top-tier creators like Clyde Phillips and Scott Reynolds, whose screenplays shape characters directly around the cast’s strengths. Addressing what fans can expect when the show returns, the actress confirmed that the bloodshed and the relentless pursuit of wrongdoers will continue without slowing down, maintaining the intense tone that made the revival a massive success.

Beyond her television work, Thurman shared a surprising personal hobby: an expanding backyard orchard. Over the past two years, the actress has planted around 40 apple and pear trees, embracing the philosophy of delayed gratification to cultivate fruit for future generations. She brought a batch of freshly harvested apples, picked straight from her own trees, to the talk-show host as a gift, joking about testing the waters with apple-based treats.

Shifting to her early years, Thurman recalled an amusing childhood memory that highlighted her lifelong streak of independence. At about three years old, she embarked on a solo neighborhood mission to buy a pair of red high-heeled shoes she had spotted in a store window, using a small handful of change.

The adventure ultimately resulted in a police encounter and a dramatic rescue by her mother on the street — an early determination that continues to define her career.

Dexter: Resurrection Season 2 premieres Friday, Oct. 30, on Paramount+.

Kristin Kreuk is marking 25 years of Smallville with a more candid look back than fans may expect. In a one-on-one conversation with the podcast, House of El, for a Smallville 25th anniversary interview series, the actress who played Lana Lang said her relationship with the superhero drama was complicated, and that she was never sure acting would be her long-term path. Now 43, she noted that the show covered essentially her entire young adult life, and she still finds it remarkable how much it means to viewers. She also pointed to what has her attention now: a new comic series rooted in her time shooting in Winnipeg.

Kreuk explained that she loved acting as a kid but never saw it as a realistic career, and that she landed the first role she auditioned for. She recalled testing for Smallville in Los Angeles in December 2000, feeling relaxed because she wasn’t attached to the outcome, with pilot director David Nutter putting her at ease. She said she is grateful the show came before social media, since she values her privacy and anonymity. Growing up on camera meant failing in public, she added, and it left her far more comfortable with failure.

She was equally frank about why she moved on after seven seasons. Kreuk said she struggled to reconcile parts of the character, didn’t yet feel she had a voice, and wasn’t experienced enough as an actor to see how to shape Lana from within the scripts. She also wanted work that felt more purposeful. She remembered her last day as a real ending, marked by a gift of a book on Japanese Buddhism to co-star Tom Welling in the studio alley, and she took the lessons into her next series, Beauty and the Beast.

On why the show endures, Kreuk credited its coming-of-age themes, especially the idea that what makes someone feel like an outsider can be their greatest gift. She also pointed to the contrast between supportive and destructive parenting in the Clark Kent and Lex Luthor storylines. The cast’s closeness has surprised her too. She said Michael Rosenbaum became a close friend around season six and pushed her for years to do conventions, which helped her build a new connection with Welling and grow closer to Erica Durance and Laura Vandervoort. Those fan events, she said, have turned the one-way dynamic between fans and actors into a real community that has reshaped her own experience of the show.

Kreuk’s current focus is Black Star, a comic series she created with two friends, inspired by the four seasons she spent in Winnipeg filming Burden of Truth. The idea grew from the Masonic symbolism in Manitoba’s legislative building, including a marble feature known as the pool of the black star. The trio built a two-century mythology that begins with the Red River settlement in the 1800s. Issue four is next, a sign that Kreuk, 25 years after Smallville, is putting her energy into stories she gets to build herself.

Molly Ringwald spent part of her August 4 appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen playing a Bravo Clubhouse game that asked her to rank her own sets on a scale of one to ten — and the number she handed out for the worst of them became the story of the night, covered the next morning by The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Variety, People and Entertainment Weekly alike. The low mark went to ABC Family’s Secret Life of the American Teenager, the 96-episode hit that ran from 2008 to 2013, which she scored a one: she said she loved the cast and that there was one person on it who was really difficult to work with, declined to say who, and made it clear that single presence was enough to drag the entire experience to the bottom of her list. At the other end of the scale she put Pretty in Pink at a perfect ten, and in between offered a portrait of a career that is far more candid than a retrospective usually gets.

The top of the list is also the most revealing. Pretty in Pink, the 1986 John Hughes classic, was Ringwald’s third film with Hughes — after Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club — and she recalled that by then the set felt like family and a well-oiled machine, which is why she rated the experience a ten rather than the movie’s finished quality. Two details from that stretch of the conversation matter more than the score itself: Hughes wrote the part for her, and she kept a collage she made about the film in her bedroom, with one exception to her memories of the wardrobe — she did not love the prom dress. She also confirmed what fans have wondered for decades: Pretty in Pink was her last Hughes film, because she and Matthew Broderick were set to make another one with him called Oil and Vinegar that was fully greenlit and then fell apart before production.

The middle of her ranking traced the shape of a working actress rather than an icon. She gave Teaching Mrs. Tingle an eight — not, she said, because the movie itself is great, but because of the cast around her: Katie Holmes early in her career, Helen Mirren, Michael Keaton. Jem and the Holograms got a seven on the strength of simply having fun making it, and the satirical Not Another Teen Movie a flat four. Near the bottom sat the beginning: she rated her time on Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life a two, recalling that she was hired when Facts of Life retooled around four girls, then let go — something she said was hard on a twelve-year-old, a rare early glimpse of how directly her first professional setback anticipated the showbiz childhood she would later portray on screen.

What gives the ranking its weight is that Ringwald, now 58, has spent decades being treated as shorthand for a single era, and this was a chance to hear her sort the work by what the days on set actually felt like rather than by what the films came to mean. The one she called the worst is the one that employed her the longest; the one she called the best is the one that ended her relationship with the director who made her. Even the game’s misses are instructive — the Hughes project that never happened would have been a fourth collaboration with a filmmaker who wrote directly for her. Six numbers, six sets, and a straightforward answer to the question the segment was built to ask: for Ringwald, the experience was the point, and the two ends of her scale — a sitcom she was fired from at twelve and a prom movie she never topped — are the ones that still define how the work felt from the inside.

Ethan Hawke came to his Drew Barrymore interview wearing the uniform — a bolo tie he borrowed from the aesthetic of The Lowdown, the FX series whose second season is airing right now — and by the end of the conversation he had delivered one of the clearest accounts yet of what Tommy Lee Jones brings to the show. Jones plays Lee Raybon Sr., the estranged father of Hawke’s Tulsa bookstore owner and citizen journalist, in a role FX announced in March that trade press have described as his first scripted television part in nearly four decades. Hawke, an Austin native, said growing up on Lonesome Dove made Jones the great Texan actor of his childhood, so having him play his father carried a weight that felt personal beyond the job. What impressed him most, he added, is that Jones is not there for a token appearance — he delivers a substantial performance that lands hard across the season.

The role makes sense for a show that has quietly become one of FX’s best-reviewed series. Created by Sterlin Harjo, The Lowdown premiered September 23, 2025, with an eight-episode first season that currently sits at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and 87 on Metacritic. Season 2 opened October 14 on FX and Hulu with two episodes and runs eight episodes weekly through the fall. Hawke described Jones as stoic and genuinely formidable in person — Barrymore, who worked with Jones on Batman Forever back in 1995, remembered the same energy — while noting his résumé is almost absurdly broad: Harvard football, a famous roommate in Al Gore, years of sailing the world. In a small Tulsa bookstore drama, that gravitas is the point.

The conversation also landed on the adaptation Hawke has queued up at home. He admitted he had somehow gone through life as a James Dean fan and a Steinbeck reader without ever finishing East of Eden, and that the Netflix series finally forced his hand — he finished John Steinbeck’s novel two days before the interview and called the ending one of the greatest ever written, a rare case of the hype holding up. The seven-episode Netflix limited series, which premiered October 1 with Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist, was created and written by Zoe Kazan — Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, and thus the inheritor of the story her grandfather brought to the screen in 1955. Hawke said he owed it to Kazan as a friend to read the book before watching her version, and he has a specific claim to that friendship: he directed her and Paul Dano in the 2007 Off-Broadway play Things We Want, where the two met, fell in love and built a family. He considers himself their matchmaker, which made the viewing homework a duty of honor.

Rounding out the appearance were the two habits that revealed the most about where his head is at. At 18, his son informed him that The Strokes had put out a new album — news to the man who considers them his band and who has credited them with saving rock and roll since the early 2000s. That record, Reality Awaits, arrived July 24, and Hawke said seeing the band live recently confirmed they still play at full force. Barrymore, for her part, told him she dated the band’s drummer for five years, a piece of trivia that perfectly closed a conversation where a New York rocker, a Steinbeck epic and a stoic Texan legend all crossed paths in the same hour. Between The Lowdown’s second season, Netflix’s East of Eden and a new Strokes record, Hawke’s watchlist and his playlist have rarely been this aligned.

Dame Joan Collins is back in the conversation at 93 with a specific purpose: promoting Shooting Star Unwrapped, a new charity podcast she recorded for Shooting Star Children’s Hospices, which launched on September 15 with her episode alongside Michael Ball’s. Collins appeared on ITV’s This Morning with Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard this week to talk about it — and the conversation, hosted by the same show where Elizabeth Hurley had raved about her a few days earlier, covered everything from the charity’s work to the time a Dynasty catfight sent her to the emergency room. The hospice connection is not a celebrity favor of the moment: Collins has been a vice-president of the charity since 2003, and Shooting Star supports children with life-limiting conditions and their families across Surrey and London. The podcast, hosted by the charity’s executive vice-president Karen Sugarman, ties into a virtual auction running through December 15, for which Collins donated a Valentino clutch that was a birthday gift from the designer roughly 20 years ago.

What made the interview land was her explanation of why the cause matters to her personally. Collins described how, after her daughter was hit by a car and spent a long stretch in a coma, hospital staff told her she could take her home once the girl could breathe on her own — even though she couldn’t walk or talk yet — because rehab was her family’s problem to solve. Collins had the resources to bring in a full care team, and her daughter recovered completely; she used the story to point out that most parents don’t have that option, which is exactly where a hospice like Shooting Star steps in, including support rooms for parents to grieve. She was blunt about why the charity needs more attention than it gets, arguing that children’s hospice care is not a fashionable cause in the way breast cancer awareness is — while carefully adding that Breast Cancer Awareness Month, now underway, is hugely important too.

The Dynasty stories filled the middle of the appearance, starting with the show’s most famous catfight. Collins recalled being told she’d have to do the lily-pond fall herself instead of using her double — she literally flew into the water, hat first, in a shallow pool — and that during the final struggle with Linda Evans, the director never called cut before Evans threw the scripted punch, sending Collins’ head into the side of the pool and earning her a trip to A&E with a minor concussion. She also pushed back on the label that has followed Alexis Carrington for four decades: in her telling, Alexis is not a villain but a woman getting revenge on a man who banished her from her children for 16 years and killed her lover, and that is precisely why audiences rooted for her. Collins added that she barely saw the show air at the time — she’d spend six or seven months a year filming in Los Angeles and then return to England, in the pre-recording era — and it wasn’t until COVID that she and her husband, Percy Gibson, watched long stretches of it together, mostly appalled by the wardrobe and the hats Aaron Spelling insisted on.

Also on the table: her friendship with Elizabeth Hurley, whose mother she played twice on The Royals, and her memories of arriving in Hollywood at 20 during its golden age, shoulder to shoulder with Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, too young to realize what she was witnessing. Of everyone she met, she said Elizabeth Taylor was the one who fully lived up to the legend — enchanting, funny, a girl’s girl who’d talk clothes and gossip — and that she later played Taylor’s agent in the 2001 television film These Old Broads, Taylor’s final screen role before her death a decade later. Collins, who has published 19 books and says she is working on a twentieth, has plenty of material left. But the through-line of the appearance was the one she kept returning to: seven decades in front of a camera, and the current project that actually needs her is a hospice podcast and a designer handbag on the auction block.

Adam Brody has spent the last two years hearing strangers shout at him on the street — and he came prepared to talk about it on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday night, just over a week before the October 22 premiere of Nobody Wants This’ third season on Netflix. In the appearance, the actor said he’d initially sensed the comedy would find a broad audience, but that the range of people who bring it up still surprises him. On a recent trip to Scotland, where his wife was filming, high school field-hockey players approached him about the series, and later that same day, a table of men in their seventies at a lunch restaurant mentioned it too. He took it as evidence that Nobody Wants This is not a niche hit with a single demographic but a genuinely worldwide one.

That reach is backed by hard data. The first season premiered September 26, 2024, and opened with 10.3 million views in its first four days, per Netflix’s Top 10 figures reported by Variety, eventually racking up 15.9 million in its second week. Season 2 arrived October 23, 2025, opened to 8.6 million views in four days, and finished 2025’s second half with 30 million views in Netflix’s own engagement report. Created by Erin Foster, the show earned three Emmy nominations in 2025 — Outstanding Comedy Series, plus lead actor and lead actress nods for Brody and Kristen Bell — and six Golden Globe nominations across 2025 and 2026 without a win. Netflix renewed it for Season 3 on November 4, 2025, twelve days after Season 2 debuted, and the new batch runs ten half-hour episodes.

The interview’s lighter stretch revealed something about how the show lands at home. Brody said his children, ages six and eleven, know he’s on the show and simply don’t care — though his daughter does light up about the fact that he works with Anna, and his wife, Leighton Meester, guest-starred in Season 2 as a mommy influencer with a childhood grudge against Bell’s Joanne. What did register with the kids was darker: Brody showed them a clip from Scream 4, in which he appeared as Deputy Hoss and was killed by Ghostface, and his six-year-old has now decided to dress as Ghostface for Halloween. “He murdered daddy,” Brody summed up, with the deadpan timing his fans know from the show.

There was also a reminder of the road to the rabbi role, which fits the rest of his life better than it might seem. Brody said he flirted with acting at twelve, did a single school play as a paperboy in an adult production, found it unsatisfying, and stepped away for years — during which he worked as a janitor at a local swimming pool (he was too small to hold the leaf blower), a car wash, Einstein’s Bagels, surf shops, a hotel minibar restocker, and a supermarket he got fired from. His last job before acting, he said, was at a Blockbuster, a detail confirmed back in a 2023 Associated Press interview and one he acknowledged his eleven-year-old can’t quite process. The one piece of childhood nostalgia he did hand down: a first concert at age twelve, front row at a local hip-hop radio show — the year, he figured, was 1992, which would put Kriss Kross at the peak of their run. Between the Blockbuster shifts and the Ghostface demise, the guy now famous as the hot rabbi on Netflix has a résumé that reads less like a star’s and more like the plot of his own show’s underdog charm.

Grant Show is opening up about the cost of 1990s superstardom, a career-altering near miss, and the behind-the-scenes tensions that led to his exit from Melrose Place. In a wide-ranging conversation on the interview series Still Here Hollywood, hosted by Steve Kmetko, the actor best known as Jake Hanson reflected on how the Fox hit changed his life — and revealed the one role that got away: he says he was offered the part that Brad Pitt played in Thelma & Louise before Pitt was cast, but a scheduling conflict with another job made it impossible to accept. Show said the loss has stayed with him for years, though he’s made peace with it, noting that he’s proud of the career he built and still has work ahead of him.

Perhaps the most striking part of the interview was Show’s unflinching take on what that level of fame actually felt like. He described a dynamic in which the public stops seeing the person behind the character and engages only with the fantasy — an experience he called deeply dehumanizing, not just for him but for everyone in his circle. He went further, suggesting that this erosion of humanity is where much of the notorious bad behavior of famous people comes from, and admitted that he can look back on moments of his own conduct during those years and barely recognize himself.

Show was equally honest about his departure from Melrose Place in 1997 after five seasons playing Jake Hanson. He said he left because he felt series producer Aaron Spelling was holding him down and getting in the way of outside job offers, making the decision an easy one at the time. But he was quick to add that there was no lasting bitterness — he shed genuine tears when Spelling died, and said the five years he spent on the show, which he credited as the role that gave him a career, made him who he is both professionally and personally. The actor also offered a piece of television history: Melrose Place began as a much sweeter, softer show that struggled in its first season, and only took off like a rocket after Heather Locklear arrived and the series pivoted to sharper, more duplicitous storytelling.

Show, who came to acting almost by accident after abandoning childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut and, briefly, an Air Force pilot, also touched on where he stands now. The grind of Melrose Place — shooting 34 episodes a year, sometimes several at a time, with almost no rehearsal — taught him to deliver fast, a soap skill he still credits, even though he says he barely remembers much of what he filmed. Now he describes himself as hard on himself and still striving, learning to sing, working on comedy, and hoping one day to tackle Shannon in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, a role he admits he’s probably too old for but can’t let go of.

As for a potential Melrose Place reboot, Show said Jake Hanson could realistically go anywhere after all these years, but he believes the rough-edged character — whose defining need, he said, was simply to have a family and be loved — would have ended up in the quiet nuclear family life he always chased. He also made clear he’d be useless on social media, saying he doesn’t see its value and would rather live an experience than document it. For fans, the Still Here Hollywood conversation is a rare chance to hear Show reckon honestly with the fame that defined him — the good, the disorienting, and the parts he’s still working through.

Rob Estes is talking about his latest project — and leaving the door wide open for a return to the show that made him a household name. In a conversation with Entertainment Tonight for its “Then and Now” series, the actor discussed The Italians, the family comedy now streaming on Prime Video, and revealed he would happily sign on if the Melrose Place reboot that some of his former castmates are trying to get off the ground actually moves forward. Estes even joked that he’d fabricated a headline announcement of the reboot on the spot before confirming he is genuinely interested, saying the original show hit at exactly the right time and that he’d love to work with that crew again.

In The Italians, Estes plays Vincenzo, the old-school patriarch of an Italian-American family whose world is shaken when his son brings home a girlfriend — played by Abigail Breslin — who doesn’t fit the family’s traditions. Estes said he was drawn to Vincenzo because the character leads with his heart, and he admitted the role hits close to home: in his own house, he said, he’s the softer counterweight to his wife, who has their household running on a tighter schedule. He told ET that he hopes audiences take away a simple message from the film — that people with different beliefs and backgrounds can still speak honestly and remain a community. The project reunites him with the kind of warm, ensemble comedy that has punctuated a career spanning Silk Stalkings, And Suddenly Susan and Gilmore Girls.

The reboot talk is notable because Estes has deep roots in Melrose Place. He first appeared in two episodes opposite his then-wife, Josie Bissett, before returning full time as chef Kyle McBride in season 5, after Aaron Spelling personally recruited him away from Silk Stalkings. While he acknowledged he never fully understood the show’s cultural footprint while he was living it — the cast was grinding through 12- to 15-hour days — he now counts some of his favorite television moments from that era, including the legendary pool fights between Laura Leighton’s Sydney and Bissett’s Jane. Several former castmates are now working on a reboot effort, and Estes made clear he’d be in.

Estes was equally candid about what he’d tell his younger self during those hectic years: take it less seriously and hold onto the joy, something he admitted he lost for a while before finding it again. He also looked back with good humor on his pre-fame days, from training as a stuntman and breakdancing in the Flashdance era to bombing an audition for Steven Spielberg’s The Goonies. Now 62 and living in Southern California with his wife, teacher and surfer Erin Bolt, and their son, Estes said meeting her helped him grow up — a piece of personal growth that seems to inform his warm portrayal of Vincenzo. For now, fans can catch The Italians on Prime Video, and keep an eye out for whether a certain Melrose Place chef makes his way back to West Hollywood.

Keri Russell is heading into the biggest season of her hit Netflix political thriller with a spring in her step, and her latest chat on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon made clear why the moment matters. The actress has been riding a wave of recognition for The Diplomat — including a Screen Actors Guild Actor Award earlier this year and two Emmy nominations — and she told Fallon that the new run, which premieres October 15 on Netflix, raises the stakes considerably. Season 4, she explained, zeroes in on a timely dilemma: loving your country and your work while your boss asks you to do things you disagree with, or even things that might be illegal. Russell described the season as big and full of twists, and her enthusiasm for the project came through as she said she’s having the time of her life with it.

Russell also offered a candid look at how she survived awards season, and it turns out her favorite kind of show is one she doesn’t win. She joked that her dream is always to be nominated but never take home the trophy, because that way she avoids the pressure of giving a speech — a wish that came true at this year’s Emmys, where Rhea Seehorn took the category and then gave Russell a shout-out. The moment was made sweeter by a tradition of Russell’s: before the ceremony, she sent handwritten notes to every nominee in her category, along with a Gloria Steinem message about women being linked rather than ranked, and a small light. She argued that acting awards aren’t really a competition, and that the gesture matters especially for women in a high-pressure room — a point underscored when Zendaya came up to thank her.

Her partner, Matthew Rhys, had his own nervous run through the ceremony, where he picked up two Emmys plus one for the show itself. Russell revealed that the couple deliberately take each other off their thank-you lists before they speak, so Rhys’s failure to mention her twice onstage was entirely by her own design — and she insisted she’s already thanked enough. The good-natured exchange captured the down-to-earth dynamic the couple has kept even as their awards-season profile has climbed.

There was also a note of welcome nostalgia when Russell reacted to Felicity, the 1998 J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves series that launched her career, landing on Netflix. She called the show a sweet little poem and said she’s been touched by a new generation of fans who tell her they discovered it while raising their kids — though she admitted the timing of the arrival, right as The Diplomat returns, is something she still can’t quite believe. For Russell, the message is a simple one: she took The Diplomat partly because it shot in London while Rhys was working in the UK, it made little sense for her life, and it turned out to be exactly the right call — which is why the October 15 premiere of Season 4 is the thing she most wants viewers to have circled.

Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett are in the middle of promoting Verity, the Amazon MGM thriller based on Colleen Hoover’s novel that opened in theaters October 2, and a new “Ask Me Anything” video for ELLE shows how they talk about the film. Johnson said what drew her to the project was the chance to play someone who is a psychopath through and through, and Hartnett told her she pulled it off. Directed by Michael Showalter, the movie follows Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to finish the novels of Anne Hathaway’s Verity Crawford, whose husband, Jeremy, is played by Hartnett. The chat was playful and full of running jokes, but it also offered a clear look at how both actors view their work right now.

On the question of whether they are Team Manuscript or Team Letter, a reference to the story’s central mystery, the pair declined to steer audiences, saying they would rather viewers argue about it. Speaking as herself, Johnson said she sides with the letter, while joking that Lowen is firmly in the manuscript camp, which she described as the team of murder. The Hathaway connection came up again when Johnson called Rachel Getting Married brilliant and named The Princess Diaries a childhood staple. Hartnett said that one wasn’t a staple for him, though he still praised it and said his kids love it. Both named Cate Blanchett as the actor they would most like to work with next.

Fame was a recurring thread. Hartnett said he lives somewhere nobody cares what he does, so he can still go about his life anonymously, while Johnson said there is almost nothing she can do without being noticed, from working out to eating to walking. Hartnett recalled that being unable to go anywhere at 21 was miserable, and Johnson described fame as a rose and a thorn that is fleeting and not real. Asked about the online buzz around a Josh Hartnett renaissance, Hartnett said he didn’t know whether it was actually happening. When the conversation turned to teen heartthrobs, both named Leonardo DiCaprio as the standard, and their advice to today’s crop was to resist the label and build a career with longevity, with Hartnett adding that good work leads to more good work.

Each actor also named the roles they are most grateful for. Hartnett chose Trip Fontaine in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), the first film where he felt he was making something truly artistic, and Johnson picked Penelope in A Bigger Splash (2015), with each saying they are glad for the other’s pick too. Hartnett said he would happily get the Lucky Number Slevin (2006) crew back together, and Johnson said she recently made a film she enjoyed so much she would do another in a heartbeat. Hartnett also revealed that his children have never seen anything he has made, a policy he is keeping because they would be honest about his acting, and if he had to pick one title to show them, it would be his 2024 thriller Trap.

The lighter answers rounded things out. Johnson described a sleep routine built around lavender, and said hosting Saturday Night Live demands bravery and a willingness to let the writers carry the jokes. On set, they bonded over a mutual dislike of schedules that crawl in the morning and panic after lunch, and both are fans of French hours. With Verity now in theaters, the interview doubles as a relaxed preview of a film built around Johnson’s turn as a character she was happy to play without any restraint.

The first thing the world learned about Julia Roberts was that it could not stop looking at her. In Pretty Woman she was a Hollywood Boulevard hustler in a blue minidress and blonde wig who turned a shopping trip on Rodeo Drive into a small act of class warfare, and the camera did not merely watch her — it believed her. The widening laugh, the walk, the cigarette behind the ear, the way she said “big mistake, huge,” as though she had just invented the phrase. Within a year of that film, a twenty-two-year-old from a small town in Georgia was the most popular female star alive, and the industry had a tidy explanation ready: she had a smile. That explanation is not wrong; it is simply too small.

A smile gets you cast once. It does not survive thirty-five years, a genuine box-office collapse, a Broadway drubbing, a shift from theaters to streaming, and the quiet disappearance of the romantic comedy as a viable star vehicle. The real question is how a performer with one unusually specific gift — an instinct for making artificial situations feel emotionally true — turned that gift into a machine for power. She kept that machine running long after the movies around her changed, and the story begins not with Rodeo Drive but with a struggling theater workshop outside Atlanta.

Julia Fiona Roberts was born on October 28, 1967, to two former actors who had met performing for the United States Armed Forces. After settling near Decatur, Georgia, Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop, a small theater school that happened to be the only racially integrated company of its kind in the region. Among the children who took classes there were the kids of Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr., and Walter coached their daughter Yolanda. The workshop went broke, the marriage ended in 1972, and when the family was struggling, Coretta Scott King — grateful for Walter’s mentorship — paid the hospital bill for Julia’s birth. Her father died of throat cancer in 1977, when she was ten.

As a teenager she wanted to be a veterinarian and played clarinet in the school band. She graduated from Campbell High School in 1985, moved to New York at seventeen to join her older siblings, signed with a modeling agency, and began taking acting classes. The résumé that followed is a reminder that she was a working actor long before she was a famous one: a 1987 guest spot on Michael Mann’s Crime Story, a two-line appearance in Blood Red cast by her brother Eric, bit parts in Firehouse and Satisfaction, and a guest role in the Miami Vice finale. None of it was stardom, but all of it was training. Then two films changed the equation within a single year.

Mystic Pizza gave her Daisy Araújo, a rebellious Portuguese-American waitress, and Roger Ebert noted the “fierce energy” behind the beauty. Steel Magnolias gave her Shelby, a young bride navigating diabetes, a part she won partly against executives’ preference for Laura Dern and Winona Ryder because the playwright Robert Harling, watching her screen test, concluded: that’s my sister. It earned her a Golden Globe and her first Oscar nomination. By the time Pretty Woman arrived she was no discovery — she was a performer with a real instrument, waiting for the right frame.

That frame nearly did not exist. Pretty Woman began as a bleak independent script about drug addiction and street prostitution before Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg pushed for a modern fairy tale, and the role was offered to stars who turned it down. Julia Roberts, then twenty-two, took it and did what the script could not: she made the fairy tale feel earned. The premise is absurd and the transformation preposterous, yet she plays it as if the stakes were real, which is the actual nature of her talent. The film grossed roughly $463 million on a $14 million budget, still holds the record for the most domestic tickets ever sold by a romantic comedy, and stood as Disney’s biggest R-rated hit for more than three decades, until Deadpool & Wolverine.

Hollywood read the result as a formula and spent the 1990s discovering it could not be bottled. Sleeping with the Enemy pulled in about $175 million, Steven Spielberg’s Hook reached roughly $301 million, and The Pelican Brief cleared $195 million, while she appeared as herself in Robert Altman’s The Player and pushed into historical drama with Michael Collins. Then came the rupture. Mary Reilly, a moody retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, cost about $47 million and returned roughly $13 million — the first unqualified failure of her career. The lesson was not that audiences had tired of her; it was that the persona which sold tickets could not automatically redeem an idea that did not work.

The recovery, beginning in 1997, was one of the more remarkable commercial turnarounds in modern Hollywood. My Best Friend’s Wedding handed her the unflattering role of the woman trying to sabotage the romance and still earned about $299 million, while Conspiracy Theory and Stepmom pushed past $137 million and $159 million. Then came the films that defined her late-1990s reign: Notting Hill, opposite Hugh Grant, at about $363 million, and Runaway Bride, which reunited her with Richard Gere for a $309 million global haul and a record opening for the genre. A failing star would have been recast; she was, instead, bigger than ever.

What happened next is the hinge of the whole story. For Erin Brockovich, Steven Soderbergh’s account of the legal clerk who helped build a case against a utility poisoning a California town, she gave the best performance of her career and made history on both sides of the camera. She became the first actress ever paid $20 million for a single film, and the movie delivered, grossing about $256 million and carrying her to a sweep of the season’s major prizes: the Academy Award, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, and the Screen Actors Guild Award. Two years later she broke her own record, commanding a reported $25 million for Mona Lisa Smile. Early in her career the industry cast her as an ideal; by the turn of the millennium she was setting the terms.

The decades since are best understood not as a decline but as a renegotiation. She moved into ensembles and experiments — the Ocean’s films, where the joke is that her character impersonates Julia Roberts; Soderbergh’s scrappy Full Frontal; Nichols’s Closer, in which she replaced Cate Blanchett and deliberately shed the mannerisms that had made her rich. Sometimes the brand pushed back: her 2006 Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain sold furiously and drew some of the harshest reviews of her life. Then came the mature act, in which August: Osage County brought a fourth Oscar nomination and television gave her a new stage — executive-producing and starring in Amazon’s Homecoming, playing Martha Mitchell in Starz’s Gaslit, and producing and headlining Netflix’s Leave the World Behind. In 2025 she took on Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, which flopped yet earned her a Golden Globe nomination, and through her company, Red Om Films, she now helps decide which ideas get made.

It is tempting to file her under nostalgia, but nostalgia describes an audience remembering the past, and what Julia Roberts has is durability — which is a choice. She has been named People’s Most Beautiful Woman a record five times, from 1991 to 2017, and her filmography runs past forty features. The relevance shows up elsewhere: a fifteen-year run as the face of Lancôme’s La vie est belle, campaigns for Chopard and others, an honorary César in 2025, and a French knighthood in the Order of Arts and Letters. Whenever the industry’s idea of her grew stale, she changed the idea rather than disappear.

So who is she, really? Not simply the beautiful woman with the famous smile, and not merely the sum of the films you can name, but a performer who discovered early and almost accidentally that warmth could be made commercially powerful — and then spent three decades learning how to spend that power. Pretty Woman proved an audience would fall for her, Mary Reilly proved it would not fall for everything, Erin Brockovich proved the falling could be converted into leverage, and the television and producing work proved she could let the image change without losing the audience. The smile opened the door; what she did next is the story, because she treated stardom not as a fixed image to be protected but as the ability to make people follow her when the image no longer looked the same. That is the difference between being famous and being a Movie Star.

Two decades after they played Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum reunited in New York for an interview with PIX11 to mark 25 years since Smallville premiered on The WB—and the conversation revealed how close the series came to never happening at all.

Welling said the hesitation struck during pilot season, when the script was not being released to actors. His manager at the time took that as a sign the material was either not good or not ready. That changed when pilot director David Nutter invited him to read it, and Welling realized the story was less about a superhero than about a kid in high school figuring out who he is. The show’s early “no flights, no tights” rule—the young Clark would wear no capes or costumes—made him comfortable enough to sign on, and Welling believes that single constraint is what let the series run for 10 seasons. He admitted he first feared it would come off as cheesy.

The on-screen rivalry between Clark and Lex Luthor was matched by a friendship off screen. Welling and Rosenbaum said they became friends after meeting at the table read, though they were not inseparable at first, since Rosenbaum often worked 14 to 16 hours a day. During the PIX11 visit, the pair toured the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, whose lobby doubled as the exterior and entrance of the Daily Planet in Superman: The Movie (1978), and posed for a photo beside its famous rotating globe—a fitting stop for two actors who spent a decade in that world.

They also described how different the experience was before social media. Filming in Vancouver felt like going away to summer camp: a ten-month bubble in which the cast never saw a rating, a review, or a tweet until episodes aired roughly six months after they were shot. Without comments to react to, they said, everyone could just focus on the work—and they are glad it happened that way.

Now, 25 years later, the show keeps finding fans. Rosenbaum recently brought Welling, along with castmates and series creators Al Gough and Miles Millar, onto his podcast Inside of You to mark the anniversary. Both said streaming has introduced Smallville to audiences who were not born when it premiered: all 10 seasons arrived on Netflix in January 2026 and climbed into the platform’s global top 10, with the full series landing on Hulu on October 1. Rosenbaum called it “a gift that keeps on giving,” and the pair pointed to New York Comic Con as another chance to meet the new generation of fans. Rosenbaum shared a convention memory of a fan who waited in line only to tell him that Gene Hackman, who played Lex Luthor in the 1978 film, was the best version of the character. With viewers who weren’t born when it aired now tuning in, the anniversary is as much about what Smallville is becoming as what it was.

In a interview with documentary filmmaker Raquel, front man Jon Bon Jovi reflected on a profound shift in his personal priorities, revealing how age, family, and recent loss have fundamentally reshaped his view of success. Speaking over a cup of tea, the 64-year-old rock icon explained that while his 20s and 30s were characterized by an intense, single-minded focus on his music career, his current life stage is centered on being of service and prioritizing human connection. Bon Jovi underscored how entering a new decade—and expanding his family to include four adult children and a growing line of grandchildren—has transformed his self-image from the center of his universe to merely one part of a larger, interconnected unit.

The legendary musician pointed to significant family milestones, including the passing of his mother, as pivotal moments that prompted him to slow down and seek a deeper understanding of his own roots. He shared how losing his mother motivated him to actively engage with his father to learn more about his personal history before time runs out. The singer noted that such desire for intergenerational wisdom and connection was largely absent during his youth, reflecting a broader cultural shift in how younger generations relate to their elders and community.

Illustrating this need for genuine human bond, Bon Jovi recounted a transformative encounter in remote Iceland over the summer, where a local girl expressed sadness upon learning he had lived next to neighbors in New York without ever meeting them. Contrast: the tight-knit Icelandic village relied on mutual interdependence for daily survival, highlighting for him how modern society often trades true community for isolated convenience. This realization reinforced his belief that people share fundamental human dependencies regardless of proximity, and that modern life has largely severed necessary social ties.

This evolving perspective on love and community also extends to his long-standing marriage, where simple, daily acts of care have taken center stage. Bon Jovi revealed that preparing a morning cup of tea for his wife is an irreplaceable daily ritual meant to show constant thoughtfulness. This intimate routine even inspired lyrics in his recent songwriting, where he questions if the quiet tenderness of bringing someone tea will endure through the vulnerabilities of aging, serving as a reminder that the simplest acts of service often hold the greatest meaning.

Jason Priestley recently returned to television to reprise his role in a new revival series, Private Eyes West Coast, five years after the original hit show was abruptly canceled. Appearing in a morning television interview to promote the project, the actor shared updates on both his professional comeback and his personal life. He reflected on the contrast between his current character on screen, who is navigating new parenthood with an infant, and his real-life family dynamics as his own teenage children prepare to leave the nest.

The actor opened up about the emotional transition into becoming an empty nester with his wife of over two decades, following their family’s move to Nashville a few years ago. Reflecting on his own youth, Priestley admitted that achieving massive stardom in his early twenties was an overwhelming experience to navigate. He noted that age and perspective have allowed him to realize how much he still had to learn during those chaotic years, though he managed to emerge from the whirlwind of early fame healthy and grounded.

Priestley also spoke candidly about his connection with his former castmates from the iconic nineties series Beverly Hills, 90210, explaining how recent losses within their group have brought them much closer together. He highlighted a recent reunion with the cast, emphasizing how shared tragedy served as a poignant reminder for everyone to stay in touch despite their busy adult lives. This renewed bond underscores how the shared history of their early careers continues to shape their personal lives today.

Addressing his current television project, Priestley expressed his excitement about bringing Private Eyes West Coast back to air, this time set in Victoria, British Columbia. He recalled the initial shock when the original Canadian series was unexpectedly canceled despite its high ratings, making the offer to return to the beloved characters an easy decision for everyone involved. To wrap up the segment, the hosts surprised him with a classic 1990s doll made in his image, bringing a lighthearted moment of nostalgia to his current promotional tour.

After moving from Vancouver to LA, Tracker returns for season 4. Justin Hartley shares what’s next for Colter, from new secrets to crossover ideas.

Justin Hartley says the fourth season of Tracker, which premiered Oct. 4 on CBS, turns up the action and, for the first time, gives Colter Shaw a bit of a personal life. Speaking with Entertainment Tonight in an exclusive interview on the show’s new Los Angeles set, the star teased that if Colter ties up some of the loose ends weighing on him, he may finally become available for romance. Hartley kept the details vague to avoid spoilers, but promised that the season stays true to the show’s blueprint and will feel familiar to longtime viewers.

The new set is the other big story. The drama has relocated to Hollywood after three seasons in Vancouver, helped by a $48 million tax credit from the state of California. Hartley said he is glad to help chip away at the slump LA’s industry has suffered in recent years, while noting that the crew built something special in Vancouver and has a strong fan base there.

Shooting in LA also gives the show more room to play, since it can pass for mountains, ocean, desert or city, which suits a series about a drifter who travels constantly. Hartley, who lives in Los Angeles, joked that the biggest perk is sleeping in his own bed, adding that he has never actually slept in Colter’s Airstream.

On the story side, the season picks up after Colter believed he had solved the mysteries surrounding his father’s life and death, only to uncover new secrets that Hartley says affect him in a big way. The actor explained that he approaches the character as someone shaped by his experiences, much like a person who rearranges their life to avoid rush-hour traffic. In his view, the earlier, more idealistic Colter has changed, but he still believes people are naturally good. That outlook has been tested by his strained relationship with his brother, played by Jensen Ackles, a thread the new season continues to explore.

Hartley also reflected on how quickly the show has reached season four, saying he still can’t quite believe it. He credited the brisk cadence of the production, noting that many series today have no clear timetable between seasons. Although he leaves Colter behind when he goes home, he said he enjoys playing a hero with a moral north star who is also flawed and still figuring things out.
With the show now based in Los Angeles, the interviewer floated the idea of TV crossovers, and Hartley was game. He said Colter would gladly help Kathy Bates on a case in Matlock, and he was equally open to a visit with the NCIS team. For now, the move to Los Angeles marks a fresh start for Tracker, with a bigger canvas and a hero who may finally have time for something beyond the road.

Ben Affleck says Animals is about the gap between image and truth in L.A. and in marriage, and credits Gone Girl and Fincher as key influences.

Ben Affleck says the way he makes movies today traces back to a lesson from Dazed and Confused: treat every part as equally important and let the actors help shape the material. In an interview with Brian Formo, he explained that he took the idea further than ever on his latest film, Animals, asking cast members including Kerry Washington and Steven Yeun to work as co-writers. He admitted the approach is riskier and a little scarier, but said it reliably makes the movie better. The inspiration, he told Formo, is Richard Linklater, who sent the Dazed cast music and invited them to contribute to a script he believed would underachieve if it were shot exactly as written.

Animals is also a more personal project than its Los Angeles setting might suggest. Affleck said he has now lived in L.A. longer than in his hometown of Boston, and he wanted to show the city the way he sees it, not the version projected to the rest of the world. The film, he explained, is about the gap between advertised morality and true selves, and about how fragile the things people build can be, especially a marriage and a family. He contrasted it with Argo, which poked fun at the hypocrisy and absurdity of Hollywood, saying this new film tackles something more serious and reflects where he is as a person now.

That theme led him to David Fincher, who directed him in Gone Girl, and Affleck called working with the filmmaker the great privilege of his life. He described Fincher as having an artist’s taste and an engineer’s mind, ranked Seven among the most perfectly constructed films ever made, and said Fincher’s many takes are a search for mistakes, not perfection. Both Gone Girl and Animals, Affleck noted, compare marriage to a criminal conspiracy and ask how vulnerable two people must be with each other. Thinking it through during the conversation, he said he probably owes more to Gone Girl than he had realized.

Affleck also looked back at the directing lessons that shaped his approach, starting with Gone Baby Gone, his 2007 debut. Worried about his technical skills, he built the film around performances, casting mostly non-professional Boston locals and pairing them with trained actors. He gave the lead to his brother, Casey Affleck, partly because his own career was then coming off several high-profile flops, and because a lesser-known actor could bring vulnerability. On The Town, he said the stakes felt even higher, since he believed it could decide whether he kept getting acting work, and the stress gave him migraines. After a test screening, he changed an ending in which his character dies, feeling he had misjudged the audience, and he said he now sees real value in forgiveness and redemption.

Affleck also praised Letterboxd, saying he is grateful for a social platform dedicated to movies, and that the variety in people’s favorites matters more to him than the titles that top the rankings. Since films are subjective, he said, they work when they are honest enough for audiences to see their own lives in them. It is the same instinct behind his latest project, where he trusted his actors to help write the story, and Animals is the clearest sign yet of how far he will take that idea.

Michael Douglas confirmed in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight that he and Kathleen Turner had an affair while filming Romancing the Stone, something the two had never publicly acknowledged. The 82-year-old actor said he included the story in his new memoir because he wanted to be open and transparent, and he phoned Turner beforehand to tell her. He noted that he was separated from his first wife, Diandra, and living apart from her when production began, and said Turner understood why he wanted to tell it.

The relationship’s aftermath is a big part of the story. After the 1984 adventure comedy made Turner a star, Douglas held a contract for a sequel, The Jewel of the Nile, but she resisted, arguing the script wasn’t ready and pointing to an offer from Steven Spielberg. Douglas said the dispute turned into a legal battle, which he won, and Turner was obligated to return. Shortly before filming began, a plane crash killed his production designer, and Turner arrived under the cloud of the lawsuit. Even so, he praised her as extraordinary and said she helped him fix the troubled script, at one point piecing pages together on a hotel room floor. The two later reunited for The War of the Roses (1989), also with Danny DeVito.

Douglas also revisited a painful chapter tied to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His father, Kirk Douglas, had championed the material for years and had performed it on stage, but when director Milos Forman moved forward with the film, Michael had to tell him he was too old to play McMurphy. He called it one of the hardest conversations of his life, since he knew how rare a part like that is. Kirk was heartbroken, but after watching the finished film, which Michael produced and which won the Oscar for Best Picture, he told his son it was very good and praised Jack Nicholson’s performance.

The memoir is also candid about substance abuse. Douglas said that when his addictions to alcohol and drugs deepened, his career was at a peak, with an Oscar, his own financing and plenty of offers, but his marriage was strained, his son was struggling with drugs, and his stepfather, Bill, was dying. Rather than hitting rock bottom, he said, he sought help because everything had simply become too much to handle. Shown a clip from his first ET interview in 1982, he joked that he looked wasted, then reflected on the traits he inherited from both his father and his English mother.

On the personal side, Douglas spoke warmly about his marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom he calls the love of his life. He said their separation taught them to be respectful and not take each other for granted, adding that both partners have to want to reconcile. He recalled meeting her at a film festival, discovering they share a birthday and a love of golf, and telling her that night he would father her children. Asked what he hopes his children and grandchildren will say about him, he said he hopes they’ll remember that he gave his best as a father and in his career, a fitting note for a memoir built on telling it all.

The actress debuts as the formidable Miss Graves in Coven Academy, a new supernatural series from Disney and Freeform about students at an elite magic boarding school in New Orleans. The show premiered on October 1st on Freeform, with the full season dropping the following day on Disney+ and Hulu.

She opened up about the gig, the show’s format, and the career choices that brought her here on Tommy DiDario’s podcast, “I’ve Never Said This Before.” This marks Thiessen’s first real foray into a mystical and magical role, and she admits she signed on quickly for a practical reason: in a drastically changing industry, she simply wants to work, and work well. The call came while she was taking her kids to a Kendrick Lamar concert, and suddenly she was being asked to fly to Vancouver in about four days. She took the part.

What makes Coven Academy particularly unusual is its format. The streaming version is broken down into brief, 15-minute episodes, which Thiessen described as an innovative gamble with today’s youth audience. She playfully suggested it is designed for viewers with short attention spans, but also admitted it was much harder to shoot than expected, as the team has to build a complete story arc with a strong payoff within those tight limits. Viewers also won’t be able to binge-watch it all at once, as only one batch of episodes drops at a time. She also noted that filming was intense, heavy on special effects and night shoots, which is more demanding now than it was when she was in her early twenties.

There is a sense of “been there, done that” here too. Thiessen, who shot to fame as Kelly Kapowski on Saved by the Bell and later transitioned to adult drama as Valerie Malone on Beverly Hills 90210, knows what it’s like to be introduced to an entirely new audience through a teen show.

It happened to her on Netflix’s Alexa & Katie, where she discovered that viewers her kids’ age knew her from her current work rather than the ’90s hits they never went back and watched. On the set of Coven Academy, she acts as a mentor to her young castmates but insists she absorbs just as much from them — and she suspects the show will captivate the younger demographic as well. Her own kids, she joked, don’t sit in front of the TV to watch her classic hits, though her daughter has taken a peek.

The podcast episode also had Thiessen revealing a near-miss from her past: she once auditioned to be a Bond Girl, making it to the final group of three actresses considered for the film. As a massive fan of the franchise, the rejection was one of the most devastating moments of her career, and she remembers driving down the coast alone, reflecting on whether she should even continue acting. She managed to get over it — and shared that a call from the Food Network turned her love for cooking into the show Dinner at Tiffani’s, followed by two cookbooks alongside her acting career. The advice she gives today to anyone facing an audition room? Find the joy, even if it’s a small part on a rough day.

She has also outgrown the darker side of fame. Thiessen reflected on how different it is to be in the public eye today, when exposure is instantaneous and cruel comments are always just a tap away, compared to the days of TMZ and fan magazines, when you could just choose not to look.

She said she is selective about what she consumes on social media, trying to use her platforms only for positive things — food, humor, family, and connection. Intuition, something she wishes she had trusted earlier in life, now guides her choices.

With Coven Academy now streaming, Thiessen is betting that same intuition will spellbind an entirely new generation of viewers who have never met Kelly Kapowski.