Hawkeye may be getting a few new allies.

Vera Farmiga and Florence Pugh are joining the cast of the upcoming Disney+ Marvel series, according to multiple trade reports. The show centers on Jeremy Renner’s ace archer Clint Barton, with Hailee Steinfeld reportedly joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as his young bow-wielding protégée Kate Bishop (who, in the comics, also fights crime under the “Hawkeye” name).

According to Variety, which first reported the news, Farmiga will play Kate’s mother, Eleanor Bishop, while Pugh will reprise her role as assassin Yelena Belova (and sister to Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow) from the upcoming Black Widow movie. Fra Fee, Tony Dalton, Alaqua Cox, and Zahn McClarnon are also joining the cast.

Disney and Marvel had no comment on the news.

Hawkeye, which is currently filming in New York City, is one of the many Disney+ series Marvel has planned: First up, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany star in WandaVision, debuting on Disney+ on Jan. 15, 2021, while 2021 will also see the release of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, and Loki, starring Tom Hiddleston. Series about new heroes are also in the works, including She-Hulk with Tatiana Maslany, Moon Knight with Oscar Isaac, and Ms. Marvel with Iman Vellani.

As for Renner, he’s been teasing the show (and Kate Bishop’s introduction) by posting Twitter photos from set, writing, “Ms. Bishop… we need you!”

Related content:

• Farewell, Bro: How Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye changed Marvel Comics
• Kate Bishop is coming to the Disney+ Hawkeye series
• Here are all Marvel's planned Disney+ shows

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Devan Coggan

This week, James Taylor notched a Grammy nod for his 2020 album American Standard — about 50 years after he was first nominated for 1970's influential folk classic Sweet Baby James. The recently released Standard, which is up for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, marks his 19th career nomination, and Taylor says it's a particularly meaningful honor. Although the 72-year-old musician may be best known as an insightful songwriter himself, this new collection is something different: a deeply personal set of what he considers some of the best songs ever written, covers of classic standards he first heard as a young child listening to his parent's records.

"It's funny, but we released the album sort of exactly when COVID struck," he says, adding that the pandemic delayed plans plans for a 2020 tour with Jackson Browne. "At that time, it felt like everything that I'd been working on for the past three years had been sort of eclipsed by [COVID]. Of course, I'm not the only one. Many people have felt, and continue to feel, a huge economic shock from what's happening to us. But it is nice that six months later we should get this recognition for a record that was sort of dropped into a well when we released it."

It's easy to pick out a few of Taylor's many influences over the course of his decades-long career, including folk, rock, blues, and jazz. But for American Standard, he wanted to return to some of the first music he ever loved: early pop standards and Broadway musical cast albums. Last week, he released a new EP to accompany the album, featuring "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz, "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" from My Fair Lady, and "Never Never Land" from Peter Pan, all arranged with his familiar acoustic guitar and soothing voice.

Here, the singer-songwriter opens up to EW about 50 years of Grammy memories, songwriting, and how he's been spending time during the pandemic.

JAMES TAYLOR: I remember that I was driving up from Los Angeles to Big Sur to spend a weekend. I got the word from my management that we'd [been nominated for] that Grammy. At the time, I can't say the Grammys meant anything in particular to me. In those days I thought of it as something that belonged to a prior generation, that was sort of an artifact of a time that we had left behind. Of course, I've changed my thinking since then. I'm very excited to be nominated. But at the time, I didn't really give it much of a thought.

You know, my first time I received that award, in those days we had a real sense that the world was going to change. That certainly our music, the music that belonged to that generation, was a new thing and of its own. There was a real sense of a divide, at least in my mind, between this sort of given showbiz take on what music and music business was. This sort of new territory, maybe starting with Dylan and the Beatles, probably actually starting with the folk music era, but that it wasn't that it was a new thing.

That makes sense. That time was sort of a musical transition period.

It's funny, at that time I sort of thought of the Grammys as being a traditional sort of showbiz — a plastic artifact. Really didn't think much of it. Over time, it is one of those things that you appreciate. I guess I was just self-centered and full of myself and judgmental about things. [Laughs] But it is great to have this album be recognized in that way.

I was listening to American Standard and I was struck by how it ended up being sort of serendipitously fitting for 2020. There's a lot of hope and optimism. It kinda feels like the world could use a little bit of those classic American standards right now.

It's true. They've been with us all for such a long time. Most of them are from my parents' generation. I was introduced to most of these songs from their record collection, actually, when I was a kid. They were songs that I learned on the guitar. So in a sense, they taught me music, too. They taught me those classic changes, and they meant a lot to me.

I had a lot of these songs as guitar arrangements for many years. So when John Pizzarelli, a really a fantastic guitar player, when he and I got together to cut basic tracks for the album, we decided that we'd make it a guitar album, basically — let the guitar arrange everything.

I love that because I think some people tend to think of standards as big orchestras and big arrangements. I love how you sort of strip it down and make it really guitar-driven.

Oh, it was a great project and definitely stretched my guitar technique. It advanced my playing, I think. The other thing is that it's always been my opinion that the high-water mark for popular music in our culture, basically, was this era of songs from the late '20s through to the mid-'50s. Mostly now when we think of songs, we think of a particular recording. But these songs were from a time when you would experience a song by buying the sheet music and playing it on the piano or the guitar. So these are songs that were meant to be performed by the world, by musicians all over the world.

For that reason, the songs have to stand on their own legs. They can't depend upon a great vocalist or production values, which is so much a part of recorded music. The songs themselves had to stand on three legs really: the chord arrangement, the lyric, and the melody.

Your new EP features your take on "Over the Rainbow." Is that another song you have memories of from growing up?

Yeah. Again, it's one of those songs I've had a guitar arrangement for decades. Wizard of Oz, they used to broadcast it every year. One of the original three broadcasts used to. It was a yearly thing that you could watch The Wizard of Oz on the tube, and [I remember] that song in particular. "Moon River" is really a similar song: You get that sense of hope for the future, the excitement of escaping and going on and adventure to find what you're looking for. That’s just a great message.

I feel like we could all use a little bit of that right now.

I know it, especially going into this unbelievable second round of COVID. It's a hopeful time, because it looks like we're going to get a new administration and some leadership, and that, I think, a lot of people are hopeful about.

How have you been spending the last couple months? How has your quarantine been?

We had a big tour planned with Jackson Browne [and] a tour of Canada with Bonnie Raitt. To have that canceled, to have it coming up in a couple of months, and to feel the gravitational pull of that commitment and to re-engage all of the people, my crew and my band and my audience — it felt like falling off a cliff a little bit.

But the great thing was that my kids came home and we got to spend some great time together. It's been mostly family stuff. I have two twin boys that were graduating high school, which was a sort of non-event as well. We were in the final phases of finding their next school, finding where they were going to go to college. That occupied us a lot. Then we got sort of pulled into the [Biden-Harris] campaign and did a lot of work, mostly fundraisers and rallies and virtual events that were focused on the campaign. That's been a big part of the fall.

With American Standard and with your Audible memoir Break Shot earlier this year, you've been looking back a lot at your early career and that point in your life. What was it that made you want to revisit some of those moments in your past?

You know, it was an offer that came in from Audible, the people who released Break Shot. It was a project done for them. Really, it was the offer coming in and accepting it that sort of led the way. I always have the feeling that basically since 1970 or so, my life has been an open book. I've been a sort of public commodity and have been a public person. It's funny, when you're successful at something there's a tendency to keep doing it. But up until that point was sort of a discrete, particular, defined period of time. It was interesting to tell that story. It also really helped me organize that period of time in my head, too. Which was in so many ways about my family and my childhood and how I got into music, how I got into that career, and that focus for my life.

You talked about how some of the songs on American Standard came from your family's record collection. What are some of your earliest memories of music?

That's a lot of it. We weren't a church-going family. There weren't a lot of hymns. Although when I went away to school as a teenager in high school, I went to a boarding school. There was a lot of church connected with that. There was a period of time when hymns were a big part of my musical education. Initially, we got Christmas carols, of course. I remember those early on. Then, the family record collection. It was an interesting collection of music. There was some light classics in there. There was some kind of accessible jazz, a lot of folk music. Then a cast album to Broadway plays: Oklahoma, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, Carousel, all those wonderful musicals.

Then, there came a point when my older brother started bringing home the music he liked. That was really exciting to me, to have an older brother who was deep into rhythm-and-blues and brought home albums of Ray Charles and the Coasters and Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and Fontella Bass, all of the early 1960s, late '50s, those great soul records. That was like the next stage.

Then I met a guy in the summertime. My mom was a Yankee and we lived in North Carolina because my dad was from down there. He was a doctor. He had a job at the University of North Carolina. But every summer, nothing would keep my mom from migrating upstream to the Atlantic Seacoast. That was the next big part of my musical education. I met this guy, Danny Kortchmar, who I still work with a lot, who has been really central in my musical life. Kootch, as we called him, he was the next person to light that fuse in my brain. He and I basically learned guitar together. He really is responsible for a huge piece of that. His preferences, the songs he liked to listen to, which was very much akin to my older brother's taste in music too. Then when I moved to New York City in 1966 to work with my band the Flying Machine, the drummer in that band was sort of a musicologist. He had such wide-ranging taste, and he really opened a whole new set of doors for me.

Your question was, what is my earliest memory? Now, I've given you all of it. [Laughs]

At this point in your career, is there something you haven't tried yet that you really want to do next?

Well, I hesitate to say it, but I think it would be interesting to try to do some musical theater. I have friends, Randy Newman, Sting, Paul Simon, people who have tried their hand in it and have really done beautiful work. I don't know if I have enough discipline to do that. Because I've always just written by just following my nose, following my guitar, following my fingers on the guitar neck. But that has seemed like something that would be interesting to engage in, if it's not too late.

Author:Devan Coggan - Source: EW

Like anyone who's ever wanted to swing from a street lamp like Gene Kelly or frolic through a field like Julie Andrews, David E. Talbert loves movie musicals. The Black filmmaker grew up on classic song-and-dance spectacles, and he couldn’t wait to introduce his son to one of his favorite genres. But when Talbert hit play on his own childhood favorite, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, his then-4-year-old son’s eyes glazed over.

“It hit me: No one on that screen resembled him at all,” Talbert says. “He was not interested in having a joyful, wondrous, whimsical experience through the eyes of people who did not look like him.”

That failed watch party inspired Talbert to make Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (which debuted on Netflix earlier this month) focused on a Black family — and one of the many movie musicals on the way that are revitalizing (and reshaping) the classic form. Some are originals; some are remakes, like Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story; and still others are adaptations of newer Broadway shows, like Ryan Murphy’s The Prom (Netflix, Dec. 11) and Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights. But all are the kind of big extravaganzas that evoke the musical’s golden age — with modern stories that feel tailored for 2020 (and 2021: Releases of Heights and West Side were delayed from this year to, respectively, June 18 and Dec. 10, 2021, due to the pandemic).

Cinematic staples since 1927’s The Jazz Singer, musicals have never disappeared, but their popularity faded over the decades. “It’s this odd thing: Every five or six years, someone would attempt a musical and it’d die immediately,” says playwright Tony Kushner, who wrote the script for the latest West Side Story, starring Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler. “There was an understanding that for some mysterious [reason], the movie musical was dead. Then people would go and watch the great [ones] and adore them.”

Still, movie musicals have had a resurgence in recent years, from awards contenders like La La Land and A Star Is Born to crowd-pleasers such as The Greatest Showman. (Admittedly, not every attempt — cough, Cats — hits the right notes.) The Prom writers Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin say the key to success is embracing old-school earnestness without veering into cheesiness. For The Prom, about professional actors (played by the likes of Meryl Streep, James Corden, and Nicole Kidman) trying to help a lesbian high schooler who wants to bring her girlfriend to the dance, that meant finding the balance between spectacle and real human drama.

“Our show was always trying to [avoid being] too syrupy,” says Martin. “And that was what we continued to try and do here — to balance the gut-wrenching moments with some comedy to make it all palatable.” Adds Beguelin, “[Musicals are] heightened, [so] there are less rules, and there’s more freedom.”

These new musicals are diverse in both their casts and the ideas they explore. Talbert wrote Jingle Jangle — about a Black toy maker (Forest Whitaker) and his granddaughter — and recruited John Legend and producer Philip Lawrence to compose music. “Growing up, I watched Dick Van Dyke and Gene Wilder and Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews and all these big, broad, beautiful dance numbers,” Talbert says. “I wanted to do the same and give it some soul, the kind of swag we have.”

The original West Side Story film cast white actors to play Puerto Rican characters, something the new version sought to rectify, starting with the Colombian-American Zegler. Kushner also vowed to dive deeper into the tensions between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks; although the new film is still set in 1957, he hopes its themes of immigration and discrimination resonate today.

After Disney+’s filmed version of Hamilton brought a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical into millions of living rooms this past summer, Warner Bros. will release one in theaters next summer: In the Heights, Miranda’s earlier Broadway hit, set over three days in New York’s largely Latinx Washington Heights neighborhood. “I’m excited for people to fall in love with Lin all over again,” says Heights director Chu. “Not to say they fell out of love, but [they’ll] be reminded.”

The Prom team hopes adapting their musical for Netflix with a starry cast and a holiday release date will attract new audiences. “We’ve seen how it affects people — especially young people struggling to come out,” says Martin. “To know that this film can be in everyone’s living room and that families can possibly sit down and watch it together is super exciting.”

And couldn’t we all use a little old-fashioned song and dance right now? “There is a place that music can get to that words can’t reach,” Kushner says, “and it is magical.”

A version of this story appears in the December issue of Entertainment Weekly, on stands now or available here. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.

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Author:Devan Coggan - Source: EW

The 355 won't be hitting theaters until 2022.

Universal announced Monday that Jessica Chastain's upcoming spy thriller is being pushed back from Jan. 15, 2021, to Jan. 14, 2022, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Dark Phoenix's Simon Kinberg is directing the film, which follows a crew of female agents from around the world as they team up to stop a global threat.

Chastain helped develop the original idea for The 355, and she stars as American CIA agent Mace, teaming up with German agent Marie (Diane Kruger), British tech expert Khadijah (Lupita Nyong'o), Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penelope Cruz), and Chinese agent Lin Mi Sheng (Bingbing Fan). Edgar Ramirez and Sebastian Stan also star.

“I was seeing all these films with male action ensembles, but I’d never really seen a female action ensemble that took itself seriously [and] didn’t make it silly that girls were actually good at the job,” Chastain said at New York Comic-Con earlier this year. “My experience on making Zero Dark Thirty, I discovered how many women are in espionage and how often they’re utilized. It kind of started from there, and I just went with a wish list of who I thought were the best actresses working today.”

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Author:Devan Coggan - Source: EW