Few figures from Hollywood's Golden Age loom as large as Orson Welles.

The mercurial wunderkind first made a name for himself with his voice, in his Mercury Theater's Shakespeare productions and his iconic radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Then he took Hollywood by storm as a creative force, acting, directing, and producing his own work, including his most famous film, Citizen Kane, which is central to David Fincher's new movie Mank.

As Welles aged, he became larger than life, both in his increasing girth and his tempestuous approach to filmmaking, a realm in which he was often at odds with studio brass and even himself (see: the long-unfinished The Other Side of the Wind).

How then do you find the right person to portray such a towering figure? It's been done before several times, by the likes of Vincent D'Onofrio, Angus MacFadyen, and even Jack Black.

But in Mank (now streaming on Netflix), Welles is a foil to Herman J. Mankiewicz, the quixotic alcoholic screenwriter played by Gary Oldman. Welles is a rising director on the cusp of triumph, with an ego to match. He's neither the young man portrayed in films like Me and Orson Welles nor the Falstaffian creature of later years as seen in Ed Wood. He is Orson Welles at the height of his powers, with one of the most recognizable faces and voices ever put to screen. And those are big shoes to fill.

Mank director David Fincher tells EW he set out to find his Welles with a specific note in mind. "Originally the thing I was so committed to and really wanted to get was the big baby quality of Orson in that moment," he says. "Not to be derisive, but he looked like a giant infant. He's fleshy and his features are very rounded. He had a rounded nose and rounded cheekbones. At 24, he seemed like if you put him in diapers and had him show up on the soundstage, he would look like a big baby.

"There was this sense of a child pulling the levers of this massive motion picture machine," Fincher adds. "As he said, 'A movie studio is the best train set a boy could ever have.' I really wanted to get that idea of this big kid."

That all changed when Fincher found Tom Burke, who plays Welles in the film. Throughout Mank, Welles often appears in shadows or under the brim of an oversize hat, sporting one of his signature capes. But it's his voice that is unmistakable.

"Tom's not a big kid, Tom's a man, and he has certain physical similarities," Fincher says. "But the thing that I kept coming back to was his voice was beautiful. His voice is very hypnotic, and we gave him recordings of Welles and encouraged him. Tom had the power. Tom had the gravitas. Tom had the presence, and he could definitely develop the voice."

Fincher says that by the end of filming, he would hear Burke over the phone or in voice-over and swear he was listening to Welles himself. It was that impeccable replication that helped Fincher find the ending of the film, an epilogue of Mank and Welles winning Oscars for writing Citizen Kane. Welles' speech is conveyed through voice-over, as if he were on a radio broadcast. But that wasn't the original plan.

"It was supposed to be Welles' sign-off in the movie, where he's got a Cuba libre in his hand and he's with all these showgirls in Brazil," Fincher says. "It was funny in a bad way. But what was amazing was when we played the audio from it, it was like, 'Is that a clip of the actual Orson Welles?'" Thus the final, more emotional version of the scene was born.

Welles has been gone since 1985, and yet he's still finding ways to change the final cut.

Related content:

• Best of 2020 (behind the scenes): Why Mank recreated the 'Rosebud' shot from Citizen Kane
• Mank director David Fincher breaks down a pivotal scene in the Hollywood drama
• How Mank costume designer Trish Summerville recreated classic Hollywood

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

Matthew Perry will be there for coronavirus relief.

The Friends star announced Friday that he's releasing an apparel line inspired by his iconic sitcom character Chandler Bing. The collection includes T-shirts, mugs, and baseball caps that reference some of his most memorable quotes on the show, including his frequent rejoinder, "Could this BE any more <insert thing here>?" The items will only be available for two weeks, and proceeds will go to the WHO's COVID-19 relief efforts.

"What is this, a limited edition t-shirt for charity?" he wrote in an Instagram post announcing the line. "For two weeks only, I'm releasing an apparel collection! Proceeds will support the World Health Organization's COVID 19 relief efforts. Link in bio. Banana not included."

Among the T-shirts featured are one with a drawing of Chandler dancing and the phrase "Could this BE any more of a t-shirt?" as well as others that just include that text in set in the distinctive Friends title typeface.

Perry also recently revealed that the long-anticipated HBO Max Friends reunion has been rescheduled for March 2021. The reunion special, which will bring together the entire original six cast members to reminisce about their time on the show, was set to premiere with the HBO Max service this past May, but it's been postponed multiple times because of COVID-19 precautions.

"Friends reunion being rescheduled for the beginning of March," Perry tweeted earlier this month. "Looks like we have a busy year coming up. And that's the way I like it!"

Now he has the perfect shirt to wear.

Related content:

• Courteney Cox recreates iconic Friends turkey-on-head dance
• Friends reunion special will film in March, Matthew Perry says
• Friends' baby Emma actress makes hilarious callback to Chandler's 2020 joke

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

As temperatures sink lower and we hunker down for a difficult winter, there's no better time to curl up with a good book — even better if it's one that generates a little bit of its own heat. This month's offerings feature a contemporary queer take on Pride and Prejudice, a romantic mystery, a story of a one-night stand turned something more, and a crackling historical anthology.

Written in the Stars

By Alexandria Bellefleur

Review: Alexandria Bellefleur makes her debut with this Bridget Jones' Diary/Pride and Prejudice-inspired rom-com about a fake relationship turned real. Elle Jones is one of the astrologers behind a popular new social media account, an unapologetic firework of a human being looking for someone to marvel at her light rather than douse it. Darcy Lowell is her opposite in every way, an uptight actuary who isn't looking for love after a devastating heartbreak. Their first blind date, orchestrated by Darcy's brother, goes disastrously wrong, but they realize a fake relationship could be the answer to getting their families off their backs. But once Elle manages to knock down some of Darcy's walls, things become all too real. Bellefleur has a droll, distinct voice, and her one-liners zing off the page, striking both the heart and funny bone. She has a gift for comedy, possessing more style and panache than a debut writer has any right to. Both Darcy and Elle fear never being enough, the risk that loving them will simply be too much to ask of anyone. But to find happiness, they must first be enough for themselves. It's a stunning rendering of what happens when romance is about meeting someone fully standing in their power versus the expectation that it will heal broken things we have to fix ourselves. There's a sparkling quality here, one that mirrors the starry title. Bellefleur writes as if she's captured fairy lights in a mason jar, twinkly and lovely within something solid yet fragile. This is Elle and Darcy too, a glittery girl and her perfectly imperfect, strait-laced yet vulnerable match. Bellefleur understands what has made Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy a couple that launched a million romance novels. It's the fizzy humor of enemies becoming lovers, yes, but more breathtakingly, it's about the power of vulnerability — how it can override arrogance, offer strength, and fundamentally shift who we are to each other. We like it very much, just as it is.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A-

A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem

By Manda Collins

Review: Manda Collins delivers a delectable mystery that reads like Victorian Moonlighting (with a good heaping of Nancy Drew's gumption). Lady Katherine Bascomb has a fondness for true crime, but when an article she writes leads to an inaccurate arrest in a case of serial murders, she can't help but feel guilty for interfering. To clear her head, she escapes to the country, only to stumble upon another crime scene, thrusting her back into the path of the infernally handsome Detective Inspector Andrew Eversham. Katherine continues to insert herself into Eversham's investigation, as well as his arms, and soon the two are teaming up to catch a killer. Collins writes with a brisk whimsy, her diverting characters popping off the page. The mystery and the romance are compelling in equal measure, with Collins adroitly threading the needle of her darkly amusing sense of humor, genuine suspense, and a deep sense of connection. The novel truly sings, however, when it comes to its themes of violence against women and the large groups of female audiences who can't get enough of true crime. Collins couches Katherine's interest in her devotion to enabling women to protect themselves. Having endured an emotionally abusive marriage, Katherine understands all too well how little power and safety women possess in their patriarchal world. She reminds Eversham and her readers of this fact, determined to crusade not only for justice, but also the right to dictate one's own destiny. The book bursts with pointed commentary on misogyny, particularly when directed at women's power and sexuality. But ultimately, it celebrates a cultural love affair with true crime as a way for women to exert some semblance of control over the chaotic (rarely random) violence that can dot our lives. Katherine's, and by extension Collins', notion of a happy ending is not only love with one who will hold you as an equal, but a prevailing sense of true justice that will allow women to sleep a little easier at night. Collins credits the podcast My Favorite Murder as an inspiration, and her novel is an encapsulation of how the show's motto, "Stay safe, don't get murdered," is not only a glib closing line but a genuine moment of outreach and care. A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem is wickedly smart, so engrossing it'd be a crime not to read it immediately.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A-

The Boy Toy

By Nicola Marsh

Review: This tale of a one-night stand that becomes something more finds surprising depth and manages to spin an often-clumsy subject into gold. Thirty-seven-year old Samira Broderick has spent most of her adult life nursing the wounds of her failed arranged marriage to an unfaithful jerk. When she returns home to Australia, her goal is to repair her fractured bond with her mother, but she tumbles straight into a fling with stuntman and Chris Hemsworth lookalike Rory Radcliffe. Rory has a secret himself, a stutter he's struggled with since childhood. It's prevented him from seeking out speaking roles, until he gets a shot at a role of a lifetime. But when the dialect coach his agent hires turns out to be none other than his mind-blowing one-night stand, things get complicated. Marsh wisely sidesteps the issue of a professional conflict of interest, instead focusing in on Sam's need to heal from her past experiences with infidelity and infertility and Rory's stutter. The two keep secrets from each other, not wanting to complicate their desire with their baggage. But when Sam gets pregnant, they have to quickly re-examine what they could mean to each other. Recently, there have been a spate of romance novels that deal with the gut-wrenching issue of infertility, but it's far too common a trend to see the books magically resolve with a miracle pregnancy. The Boy Toy has a slight bit of implausibility when it comes to the one-in-a-million shot that results in Sam's pregnancy, but it also wisely gives a lot of leeway to the pregnancy itself and the attending issues that logically accompany it. I'm still holding out for the book that tackles the subject by allowing a woman to feel whole without a baby (or via adoption!), but The Boy Toy is at least thoughtful and considerate in the utmost when it comes to its approach. Rory's stutter is also deftly handled, an element that stems from Marsh's own experiences with a speech impediment. It captures his shame and frustration, while also leaving him ample space to grow. Marsh is also a naturally funny writer, her humor and liltingly provocative dialogue zipping readers through a story. The Boy Toy has a hell of a lot going on as it probes everything from cultural tradition to arranged marriage to infertility to speech impediments. It's true to life and the myriad of stressors we face at any given moment, but it does deprive the story of a certain amount of depth. Still, Marsh manages to tie it all together with humor and warmth, turning a one-night stand into a story with the emotional resonance to go the distance.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: B

Duke I'd Like to F…

By Sierra Simone, Joanna Shupe, Eva Leigh, Nicola Davidson, and Adriana Herrera

Review: This new anthology draws you in with its deliciously dirty title and only gets more sinful from there. Five romance writers at the top of their game deliver steamy historical short stories. With the cheeky theme of dukes you'd like to, well, you know, they offer up stories that somehow all manage to be swooningly romantic and breathtakingly sexy. We've bestowed our full heat rating, but I think these ladies were trying to break the flame meter (or maybe just this reviewer). The stories kick off with Sierra Simone's "The Chasing of Eleanor Vane," about a young lady who falls for a dark and damaged duke with heaps of secrets. Simone consistently turns sex into sacrament, and her story is destined to leave readers on their knees once more. But from there, it's full steam ahead (emphasis on the steam) through Joanna Shupe's story of a debutante who hungers for her father's older friend, Eva Leigh's taboo tale of a governess who can't resist her charges' brother, Nicola Davidson's account of a sexual contract that turns to something more, and Adriana Herrera's erotic jaunt to Paris with a biracial healer and an unlikely duke. There are no low points here, with each story more intoxicating than the last. Shupe is a true queen of filth, expert at spinning heartfelt love stories alongside tantalizingly wicked scenarios. Leigh's governess story is adroit in its handling of power dynamics, undoing any issues of consent or power as skillfully as her duke unbuttons a gown. It's all the sexier for it. Davidson's entry is the funniest of the bunch, bursting with wry, quirky humor from her vivacious heroine waiting to be unleashed and the two lesbian pseudo-aunts who advise her. The laughs lace the story's heat with an extra burst of warmth. Herrera has a true talent for writing unapologetic heroines, and this is no exception as she delivers a historical yarn bursting with people of color who boldly claim their space in this world that has for too long privileged the romantic stories of exclusively white figures. The story's excursion to Paris helps end the collection on an electric, bohemian note that ties a scintillating ribbon around a set of stories that champions pleasure, freedom, and the courage to seize both in a quest for true happiness. Duke I'd Like to F… could be seen as merely a cadre of unbearably hot stories, if that's all readers desire. But this anthology is more subversive than a satisfying soupçon of smut. It bursts with heroines who unapologetically chase their desire and slake their lust, all while seeking a life built on consent, independence, mutual satisfaction, and being truly seen and valued for who they are. In some ways, this anthology encapsulates what the romance genre can be in miniature: a feminist declaration of the potently radical nature of sex, pleasure, and happily-ever-after.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A

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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

From its unique sound profile to its lush black-and-white cinematography, Mank is a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood and one of its most enigmatic raconteurs, Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. The fingerprints of the era are everywhere, but nowhere is the homage more noticeable than in a shot of Mank with an empty Seconal bottle that perfectly mirrors that of Charles Foster Kane holding a snow-globe in the opening moments of Citizen Kane. Here, director David Fincher reveals the personal history behind the shot.

David Fincher thought about cutting the "Rosebud" homage in Mank more times than he can count.

The moment, which substitutes Kane's (Orson Welles) snow-globe for Mank's (Gary Oldman) bottle of Seconal, was in his father Jack Fincher's original script.  "He wrote in the script that Mankiewicz drops the bottle that has the Seconal in it, and it was supposed to look like the paperweight from Kane," Fincher tells EW. "He wrote a couple of other things that were similar — the neon of the Trocadero being like the Susan Alexander club. But we didn't get too bogged down in it."

It's the most blatant moment of homage in Mank, with the overall style of the filmmaking doing the bulk of the heavy lifting there. Fincher feared keeping the shot would tie them too closely to Citizen Kane. "I wanted to hearken to Kane without becoming slavish," he admits. "We don't want to water ski behind Kane. But when I went to cut it, I thought, 'Maybe there's room for this homage or the film appreciation side of it.'"

Ultimately, Fincher kept it in. It's a striking shot not just for its referential playfulness, but also because of what it tells us about Mank. The film offers an unflinching, yet non-judgmental portrait of a raging alcoholic.

Cinephiles will know that the snow-globe paperweight in Kane is a potent object, one that Kane clings to as he utters his last words, "Rosebud." That turns out to be his boyhood sled (spoiler alert!), but the snowy scene in the globe evokes the moments when Kane was happiest and landscape upon which he used the sled.

To replace the paperweight with a bottle of a potent, near deadly barbiturate speaks volumes. It tells us everything we need to know about what Mank's own "Rosebud" is, for better or worse. Fincher did that by design. "I'm not good with the cautionary tale. We talk about his incredibly destructive alcoholism in an adult and period way, which is people were expecting him to course correct and he never did," Fincher reflects. "When [he died], they were draining acid from his lower limbs because he had uremic poisoning. By the time they realized they weren't going to be able to save him, it was too late."

On the surface, the shot might feel like winking homage, but it's also a tragic nod to the depths of Mank's self-destructive tendencies and the sway drinking held over him.

In the end, Fincher kept the moment not so much for this richer double meaning, but because it reflected the heart of the script penned by his late father. "Invariably, every time I went to cut it, I ended up saving it because it's heartfelt," he notes. "Jack wrote a love letter to a movie that he adored."

Mank is now available on Netflix.

Related content:

• Mank director David Fincher breaks down a pivotal scene in the Hollywood drama
• How Mank costume designer Trish Summerville recreated classic Hollywood
• How the Mank cast tackled the behind-the-scenes story of Citizen Kane

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a veteran cop who's been described as polarizing...

Brandon Routh, former Superman and most recently The Atom on The CW's Legends of Tomorrow, has been cast in a four-episode arc on The Rookie. ABC confirmed that Routh will play Doug Stanton, an 11-year veteran of the LAPD, whose views prove to be polarizing at the Mid-Wilshire station.

Routh will first appear in the second episode of the third season, which kicks off in January. ABC notes there is also a possibility for additional episodes.

Season 3 finds Nathan Fillion's Officer Nolan facing his biggest challenges on the force yet. He's nearing the end of his training, but the end of season 2 found Nolan being framed by dirty cop Nick Armstrong (Harold Perrineau) for Armstrong's own crimes.

Creator Alexi Hawley previously told EW the season 3 premiere would pick up the right where the cliffhanger left off. "There's a lot of discussions about Nolan and not wanting him to be naive," Hawley said. "I do think that he's a realist. He's been through a lot. I just think that at the end of the day, he's a man who's chosen to see the world with the positive. That will be challenged here... this will shake him to his core, that somebody that he truly cared about betrayed him and what he thought they both believed in. But can he still come out of it feeling like people deserve the benefit of the doubt and all that kind of stuff? That's going to be his struggle in season 3. Just how do I retain my values and my worldview when they've been shaken to the core?"

The Rookie also faces the additional challenges of adapting in a changing media landscape, addressing the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded in the wake of the George Floyd murder in May of 2020. The show is poised to address these issues, as laid out in a panel "Scripted Police Series and Their Impact on Culture," which welcomed Hawley and Fillion, as well as other The Rookie producers and cast members alongside representatives from organizations Breaking Barriers United and Color of Change.

Though there aren't further details, it seems likely that Routh's new character could play a role in this aspect of storytelling, given his description as polarizing.

The Rookie returns Jan. 3 at 10 p.m on ABC.

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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

Big Sky producers are responding to criticism from Indigenous groups over the show's lack of representation for Native and Indigenous women.

On Tuesday, executive producers of the new David E. Kelley ABC series issued a statement in response to an open letter from a collection of Indigenous groups, including the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, and the Global Indigenous Council.

“After meaningful conversations with representatives of the Indigenous community, our eyes have been opened to the outsized number of Native American and Indigenous women who go missing and are murdered each year, a sad and shocking fact," they said in a statement shared with EW. "We are grateful for this education and are working with Indigenous groups to help bring attention to this important issue."

The statement came in response to an outcry from Indigenous groups, including an open letter to Karey Burke, ABC's Head of Entertainment, and the show's creator David E. Kelley. The open letter came from a collective of Indigenous organizations behind the film Somebody's Daughter, a documentary that addresses the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women with a particular emphasis on Montana.

Tom Rodgers, president of the Global Indigenous Council, released a statement in response to ABC's remarks. "ABC Studios claimed it is working with Native Americans to fix the problem of ignoring the epidemic of violence against Native American women in its series, Big Sky," it reads. "We have not heard from the honchos at Big Sky, ABC Studios, or parent company Disney. We have no idea what they are talking about, but we would be very interested to hear from ABC on its ideas for remedying the injustice done by its series, Big Sky. So we’re interested in learning who ABC is working with, since it is curious that no purported Indigenous partners are named in its statement. In our culture, trust can only be earned, not promised.”

Based on a series of novels by C.J. Box, Big Sky is a crime thriller about the hunt to find two young girls (white women) who go missing from a Montana highway. "We write with serious concerns of at best, cultural insensitivity, and at worst, appropriation, in respect to the soon- to-be premiered series, Big Sky," the original open letter read. "We understand that the plot of Big Sky is based on C. J. Box’s novel The Highway. Unfortunately, neither Big Sky nor The Highway address the fact that the disproportionate majority of missing and murdered women in Montana are Indigenous, a situation replicated across Indian Country, which has made this tragedy an existential threat to Native Americans. To ignore this fact, and to portray this devastation with a white female face, is the height of cultural insensitivity, made even more egregious given the national awakening to the need for racial justice."

According to the letter, while Indigenous people make up only 7 percent of Montana's population, 26 percent of the state's missing persons are identified as Native American. The letter requested that the team at ABC and producers enter into a dialogue with the indigenous organizations, including adding an information frame at the end of future Big Sky episodes directing viewers to the Somebody's Daughter documentary.

Related content:

• Big Sky actress Jade Pettyjohn gives us the rundown on her character's harrowing escape attempt
• Big Sky star John Carroll Lynch warns of the road ahead: 'It gets pretty ugly'
• Big Sky star Ryan Phillippe unpacks that WTF premiere twist

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

Audra McDonald is about to rely on the kindness of strangers.

The legendary Tony-winning actress is bringing her voice to Tennessee Williams' fading Southern belle, Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire. McDonald leads the first play in a series of four December releases that will kick off the 2020 Williamstown Theatre Festival summer season produced on Audible.

Directed by 2020 Tony Award nominee Robert O'Hara, this production of Williams' masterpiece stars McDonald alongside Carla Gugino as her sister, Stella, and Ariel Shafir as the brutish Stanley. The Audible production will premiere on Dec. 3 at 3 a.m. ET/12 midnight PT.

When a haunted Blanche comes to New Orleans seeking refuge with Stella and her husband, she must wrestle with her simultaneous attraction and repulsion for Stanley, her sister's lust, and her own unraveling mind. In this exclusive clip, McDonald's Blanche reunites with Gugino's Stella for the first time, interrogating her sister about the shabby conditions she's living in with Stanley.

Streetcar is the first in a season-long collaboration between the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible Theater, an arm of the leading creator of audio storytelling. Reimagined in a different format, the season provides continued work for artists involved in the traditional Festival season, broadening their work to reach an audience of global Audible listeners.

This new collaboration marks the first time a full theatrical season of work will be produced on Audible.

The other three shows being released this December are: Photograph 51, a drama about chemist Rosalind Franklin starring Anna Chlumsky, David Corenswet, and Aasif Mandvi; the world premiere of Animals, a comedy about romantic entanglement and identity featuring Madeline Brewer, Jason Butler Harner, William Jackson Harper, and Aja Naomi King; and the world premiere of Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club, which tells the tale of an international group of transgender women who band together at a hotel in Thailand to confront the challenges and joys of gender confirmation surgery.

Three more titles — Dominique Morisseau's Paradise Blue, the world premiere of new musical Row, and the world premiere play Wish You Were Here — are still to come in 2021.

Listen to the clip above for more, and visit the Williamstown Theatre Festival website and Audible for further details.

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• Hear Audra McDonald in A Streetcar Named Desire clip from the Williamstown Theatre Festival
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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

Rick Legarski warned Ronald he'd kidnapped the wrong girls — and Tuesday night's episode of David E. Kelley's Big Sky proved why.

While the ABC series' heroines Jenny (Katheryn Winnick) and Cassie (Kylie Bunbury) continued their hunt for Cody (Ryan Phillippe) and the missing girls, the captives in question started to fight back in earnest. Jenny journeyed to a questionable mega-church compound that seemed extremely cult-like, only to discover Cody never made it there. Cassie continued to sniff out Rick Legarski (John Carroll Lynch), suspicious of his role yet unable to find anything substantial.

After figuring out how to shed their shackles, Grace (Jade Pettyjohn) noticed that there was a weak point in the wall of the shed she, her sister Danielle (Natalie Alyn Lind), and Jerrie (Jesse James Keitel), were being held captive in. Kicking it loose with their feet, they made a hole large enough for Grace to wriggle through. She then went full Shawshank Redemption, escaping through a sewer grate and pipe while being tailed by Ronald (Brian Geraghty).

Despite the collapse of the pipeline, Grace emerged and high-tailed it through the woods, finding hope in a lone fisherman. But her freedom was short-lived as Legarski slunk from the woods to murder the fisherman with a bow and arrow and hobble Grace with two arrows through the leg.

Back in Legarski's clutches, Grace was returned to her underground bunker alongside Danielle and Jerrie, only to vow that when it came to fighting back, they were just getting started.

Jade Pettyjohn, the actress behind Grace, answered our own far-less pressing distress call to rundown that harrowing escape attempt and what her next bids for survival might look like.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Grace has been a fighter since we’ve met her. She doesn’t succeed in her escape, but has it chastened her or just redoubled her determination?

JADE PETTYJOHN: It goes in waves. I obviously have never been in a situation as intense and traumatic as this particular one. But I would imagine that it would go in waves. By the end of episode 3, you really see that she becomes a woman unhinged by the end of it when she's banging on the trailer door. She's not only afraid of her situation, and upset and all of those things, but there's a lot of rage. That really fuels her getting out. She's furious at her abusers and her captors and that ultimately is what pushes and propels her forward. That's an asset in this particular sense. In further episodes, there are a lot of layers and a lot of colors; I don't think that it's a very linear path. She got hit pretty hard, but what I love about her is just how resilient she is and she's relentless when it comes to saving herself and saving her sister and Jerrie.

Grace ends up having to Shawshank it through a pipe. Did you talk about that famous movie scene as a reference point at all? What was it like filming that?

[Laughs] It was really interesting because they sat me down before shooting that scene and said, "Okay, so we're building this tube for you to crawl through." I remember getting measured for it, and they measured it so that I wouldn't be able to crawl on my knees in it. It was very, very tight. They were like, "Are you claustrophobic? Do you have any issues with this?" I've never been in a situation where I've had to be stuck in the tube for that period of time, so I had no answer for them. It was really interesting going into shooting not knowing if I had a fear of it or not. Luckily, it was very smooth and really fun and a definite adventure.

When you first read the script, were you hoping or expecting this escape attempt would be successful?

It's impossible not to. Each page gets your blood pumping, and you want to know what's happening next. I might be biased because I play Grace, but you really want to root for her, especially as she's doing something intense and risky and badass with this particular sequence. When I was reading it, I was definitely hoping that she'd get through it and make it. It also makes interesting television when she's got a lot of obstacles. But I will tell you this is definitely not over. She doesn't give up, that's for sure.

Grace is pretty incredible in her ingenuity and determination, even still trying to run after getting shot in the leg with an arrow. How much of that is inherent to her personality and how much is fight or flight response?

It's a little bit of both. Ingenuity and thinking analytically is inherent to Grace and who she is. But I also feel like it's very easy for anyone to underestimate how capable one is in a really intense situation. There are other ways of reacting to situations instead of breaking. At a certain point, she's running off of instinct and survival. It is a little bit of fight or flight. A lot of that just is a testament to who she is as an individual, the way that she uses her mind and not necessarily her emotion to drive her. But it also poses a deeper question of what are we really capable of in moments of distress? I love exploring that with her. I am very uninterested in playing a damsel in distress.

She takes two arrows to the leg. That looks brutal and the wound is left untreated. The other girls note it could need stitches. How concerned about that should we be?

The audience should be very concerned. Because not only did she get hit by an arrow in the leg, it was through her leg. Both of those arrows went completely through her leg. She has no medication or any way to clean the wound. Obviously, they can't get stitches. What I'm excited about in episode 4, they do try and help the wound in a very, very weird way and try and save her and it's very gross. But there's a lot of repercussions to her injury and the loss of blood and the adrenaline finally abating and the weight of her injury kicking in. That's something that all three girls have to navigate.

Were you surprised she didn’t try to escape Legarski again? Or was she just in too much shock/pain at that point?

I think at that point she was aware that there's really no way for her to be able to outrun him when she has her wounds. And she is bound and gagged at that point too. She did see this man kill someone and drop them off in a sulfur deposit. So, she's aware that if she tried to escape again, he might kill her. She's also trying to look at her surroundings and try and get familiar [with] where she is so that she can plan her next escape.

Who should Grace hate or fear more — Ronald or Legarski?

I think she should hate Ronald more and fear Legarski more. But that might change a little bit in future episodes. John Carroll Lynch and Brian Geraghty do a really great job of playing villains that are very much yin and yang. Brian is really a vulnerable psycho, and John is just twisted and terrifying as far as the psycho he plays. There's reasons to be afraid of and hate both of them. But at this point, there's a little more hate towards [Ronald], and then confusion and fear toward Legarski.

What was the most difficult stunt for you here?

The fisherman scene. We originally shot that in October when we're running through the woods and meeting the fisherman and the arrow sequence. We shot it up in Squamish, and I thought it was cold at that point. I did not know what cold actually meant. Because we actually reshot it about a week and a half ago, just due to like location issues and things like that. At this point, there's snow on the ground and on the rocks. I think you see it in the episode, there are snowy rocks she's running on. That honestly was the hardest stunt just because I'm from California, I don't run in snow barefoot. That was definitely a first for me.

As soon as she’s put back, she starts banging at the walls and tells Ronald, “We’re just getting started.” What does that mean? What might Grace try next and how far is she willing to go?

She's willing to go very, very far. I definitely don't want to spoil anything. I want to keep the audience on their toes. But I will say in episodes to come, it becomes more of an emotional and challenging mental war between the captives and the captors. Now that Grace is debilitated to a certain degree, they use other tactics to get out. There's this very interesting mental warfare going on in future episodes. But Grace is right — we're just getting started. All of these characters step up to the plate to save themselves and to fight back in any way they can.

If I were a betting woman, should I bet on Grace?

You absolutely should bet on Grace. Without a doubt. She's a woman that doesn't give up easily.

How would you tease episode 4?

Episode 4 really explores the next tactic for getting out. Grace has to deal with her injury. That's very hard, but she's also planning her next little stint of getting her and her sister and Jerrie out of there. It's all a mental war game. It's definitely intense [and] emotionally demanding. I'm really, really excited for people to see what Grace has to offer.

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the series finale of The Spanish Princess.

It's time to say adiós to Catherine of Aragon.

On Sunday night, Starz concluded The Spanish Princess. The two-season tale of Henry VIII's first wife ended, if not on a high note, at least on a tranquil one. As the Tudor court and Henry (Ruairi O'Connor) spun further into madness, Catherine (Charlotte Hope) began to consider her options: either allow herself to be dragged down with them or find peace.

Things came to a head when Catherine spied Anne Boleyn (Alice Nokes) brazenly getting naked with Henry in the gardens. But Catherine no longer had a bargaining chip because Maggie Pole (Laura Carmichael) finally revealed her secret to Henry — that Catherine was not a virgin on their wedding night and had consummated her marriage with his brother Arthur. Maggie divulged the truth to save her own hide, including her title and her possessions. But it left Catherine wondering what Henry might do to free himself from what he came to believe was a cursed marriage.

Meanwhile, the Tudor madness extended to Scotland, where Meg (Georgie Henley) staged a coup to claim the throne for her son, with herself as regent. When her husband, Angus (Andrew Rothney), attempted to storm her castle, she fired on him with cannonballs, laughing manically all the way.

The only people to escape the toxicity of the court were Lina (Stephanie Levi-John) and Oviedo (Aaron Cobham), who decided to seek a new life in the Ottoman Empire. But not before Lina imparted some advice to Catherine, convincing her to re-center her life around God and her daughter. Catherine left the court politically vanquished but on her own terms, going off into an uncertain future with Mary by her side.

Of course, Catherine's real tale had a far sadder ending. But creators Matthew Graham and Emma Frost were determined to give their heroine a more hopeful conclusion, one that would prove more satisfying to modern audiences. We called them up to get the details on why they decided to end Catherine and the Tudors' stories here, the reasoning behind that stirring (and familiar) final shot, and the one thing they regret.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Catherine's story is not over. There's still the divorce, the trial, and her seclusion, which you hint at pieces of through Henry and Catherine's argument and her final choice. How did you decide where to end?

EMMA FROST: What we felt was Catherine had been so maligned by history, it would be lazy, dramatically, and boring, historically, if we ended up in a place where she is a victim, where she's beaten down and defeated by this man who she loved turning into a brute. I don't think a 21st-century female audience wants to see a story where their heroine is vanquished by the end. What we felt was while the Tudors around her descend into madness, Catherine rises above it. She finds peace. She finds her own inner center through God, through her devotion to her daughter, and through love. That felt to us both truthful and a really important message of positivity.

Was it a challenge to balance giving your heroine a satisfactory conclusion on her own terms and the reality of her downfall?

MATTHEW GRAHAM: Politically, she's finished. She's out of court, and she's ostracized. But emotionally, she is centered. That's the only thing you can do. It's a very hard thing when you write a show like this because you're aware that some of your audience know the history, at least well enough to know it's not going to end well. And the other half don't know anything. You want to try and find a journey that has a conclusion. At the same time, you want to honor the reality of the history. We were actually going to end and run the final credit over Catherine's tomb. You see tourists walking by, and you just pull back and there she is. You want to say to the audience, "She really lived." This isn't Game of Thrones. She was a real person, and her body is in that stone sarcophagus. We just didn't do it in the end, which is a bit of a regret. That would have been the best coda. It could have contextualized everything. It puts a bow around them and says, "That was history, these people lived, and that's what happened to them."

Those last words, that letter to Mary, did you draw that from a particular historical document?

FROST: We looked very deeply at what the material was toward the end of her life. There were a couple of things we found that we used as the basis for how we end the show. Particularly, they were her letters. One was her letter to Henry. Right to the very end, she had pride and dignity in saying, "I am still your wife. I am your wife in the eyes of God. Nothing will ever change that. And I love you, and I forgive you." She could see his demons. She had an emotional intelligence. She had an ability not to descend into bitterness and hatred and vindictiveness and spite. She just loves him. That is incredible strength, and I think it's strength that isn't recognized often enough. The other was her letters to her daughter. She championed her daughter, she tried to elevate her, and she tried to instill in her a sense of importance. That was another gigantic victory that Catherine's spirit wasn't vanquished. Catherine, as a person and as a spirit, wasn't vanquished.

Similarly for Meg, there's a lot more of her story to tell, so how did you hit on where to end her tale?

FROST: It was quite easy with Meg, because we knew we wanted to contrast the Tudor madness with Catherine finding acceptance. The whole idea that when Angus tried to storm the castle and Meg started firing cannonballs at him out the window — it felt like the perfect metaphor for Meg doing that in all eternity. We just leave her forever blasting a cannon at the unwanted husband and descending into madness. The contrast of that with Catherine finding acceptance and maturity came to us very early, and we stayed with it.

How did you balance making her a heroine with the fact that especially when it came to romance, this was a person who made chronically bad choices?

FROST: Meg's story is very identifiable. It feels very modern that she is a passionate, impetuous young woman who makes s----y choices in men. She's ruled by her heart or by lust, whatever it was that was driving those choices. She kept trusting the wrong men. I think she's a heroine because of that. We can all understand that. We enjoy watching her spirit as she fights for her sons and grows up. There's a lot of maturity that Meg finds before we leave her firing cannonballs at Angus.

For Maggie Pole, she too had a very tragic end. Here she wins out, but it costs her a lot on a personal level to the point where Henry compares to Margaret Beaufort, her former arch nemesis. Much of her narrative this season has been spun out of supposition, so how did you decide to make her be the one to betray Catherine and divulge this secret?

GRAHAM: There are so many different interpretations of Margaret Pole. In the end, she was the mother of one of the biggest contenders to overthrow Henry in his later reign. Her son Reggie grew up to try to raise an army in Europe to come back and march into England and reclaim the crown. We wanted to try and find a bit of that. So we loved the idea that she became Margaret Beaufort. In the last season, Margaret Beaufort had been her nemesis and such a figure of terror for Maggie. But basically life has beaten her down to the point now that she is cold, she's lost, and she has become Margaret Beaufort. Margaret Pole was a pretty tough and clinical woman. She certainly didn't bow to any pressure later in her life to give up her son. That was what really cost her head in the end, but we wanted to touch on some of that.

Where did the idea for her ultimately doomed emotional affair with Thomas More come from?

GRAHAM: We were researching and we read that when the king and court fled London to escape the new outbreak of plague, Thomas More was actually sick. He stayed behind, and he did get sick. It just started a little cog turning in our brains. We started talking about the idea of all the court leaving London, leaving Westminster Palace empty. Then we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if Maggie was the one who nursed him?" Originally, Thomas was going to get sick and Maggie was going to nurse him. We realized that we didn't want the nursing-back-to-health story; what we wanted was just this Remains of the Day-esque [thing] to have the two of them rattling around in this big empty palace. He felt like the closest to her spiritually and character-wise. [They're] both devout, both quiet and unassuming, but both filled with a kind of steel.

You've always had more leeway with Lina and Oviedo's story. Ultimately, they decide to leave for somewhere they feel is safer. Where did that choice come from and why?

GRAHAM: Well, Lina did stay with Catherine. I'm not entirely sure that Lina stayed with Catherine right until her death, but she certainly stayed with her for many, many years. We just wanted a happy ending, if I'm honest. We wanted one couple to go off into the sunset and be content. Lina and Oviedo are so close to our hearts, both the actors we love, and their characters. We didn't want to leave them stranded.

FROST: Also, it would have been very difficult to end Catherine's story. It would have just limped to a close. If Lina's still with her, would they all leave court together? And what does that mean for Lina and Oviedo? It felt like we needed to punctuate a different fate. For Rosa to turn up at the end and give Lina and Oviedo a way for another new start, away from the toxicity of the Tudor world and London, it felt right. That Lina and Oviedo should go off into the sunset with Rosa to a better future. Catherine learns acceptance, and also, really importantly learns to let her best friend go. That was a really big part of the ending of Catherine's story, was Catherine learning the grace and maturity to allow Lina to do what was right and best for Lina and put Lina before herself.

I was so thrilled you brought Rosa back twice this season. What spurred that?

FROST: Oh my God, we wanted Rosa back right from the beginning. We had to work quite hard to think how we could do it. The truth of the matter was historically, Catherine's lady-in-waiting, Bessie Blount, bore Henry a son, so we had to have a new lady-in-waiting. When we conceived of the show originally as 16 episodes across two seasons, we always knew we were going to send Rosa away at the end of season 1. And then we fell in love with Nadia Parkes. What we wanted was for Rosa to be really pivotal in defining Catherine's journey. Catherine is at a crossroads when she sees Rosa in episode 6. Essentially, she could go to the dark side or she can go to the light. She can go into bitterness, into rejecting her daughter, and fall down the same rabbit hole that the Tudors do of madness and of fighting for something that she's already lost in terms of her relationship with Henry and her fight to have a son.

Rosa turns up at the right moment and says, "Don't be ridiculous. Forget all of that. You've got a daughter, and a daughter is worth just as much as a son. Bequeath her your legacy and turn her into the next ruler and pour all of your love and energy into your daughter." Rosa has this incredible effect on Catherine and sets her on the path to redemption and acceptance, which enables Catherine to have an ending that's not happy, but nor is it negative or destructive. Rosa almost comes back like the guardian angel and hands her the compass and says, "It's your turn now. You've got to find your way."

By this point in the story, Henry has gained weight and Catherine has aged substantially from when we first met her in season 1. I loved how you handled it ultimately, but were there debates about how far to go with all that?

FROST: Good Lord, yes. We did a lot of graying tests, we tried out aging to a lot of different degrees. We did all of that at the end of season 1. It felt a little at the extreme end, like the costumes and the aging effect were wearing the actors rather than the other way around. It can be quite distracting, but also in truth, because the story moves so fast, it's really hard to work out when you bring all that stuff in. Because we have had to conflate history in some ways. So there is a real danger that you just suddenly turn up in one episode and they look 10 years older, but the events on screen feel like they only happened last month. In terms of credibility and narrative flow and the demands of the production, we felt just a slightly more subtle aging was the right thing.

Catherine's final costume is the very famous gabled hood that appears in her portrait that hangs in the National Gallery. Why did you want this more recognizable image of her to be the last view we got of her?

GRAHAM: We just wanted to reach the point where you saw the figure from history that you would know from the Holbeins or from the portraits that you can see in that Salisbury wing of the National Gallery. Now you can understand the person behind the portrait. It was very emotional the day that Charlotte first appeared in that costume because suddenly she was Catherine of Aragon from history.

You've spent a lot of time with the Plantagenets and the Tudors now, but do you have a desire to continue any of these stories? Or pick up on a later wife, say give Catherine Parr her due or something?

GRAHAM: Starz are obviously doing Young Elizabeth, so they will be looking at the Elizabethan era presumably through the eyes of a very young future queen. We are looking at developing a show that will actually take place in the early medieval period and will also be a very strong woman from history, so we're not ruling out going back into one of those worlds and looking at history through a female prism.

FROST: I've made 34 hours of this from The White Queen to The White Princess to The Spanish Princess, and it's been brilliant and fun. You can run the risk of repeating yourself. There is a certain rhythm to the storytelling when you're dealing with true events. I am desperate to be writing contemporary stories. I have a lot of pride in the fact that The White Queen was the first show that really broke through and proved that there was a really big female audience on cable. The White Queen came out of the hatches and stormed it. I'm thrilled that there are now so many historical female shows in the world.

This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Maureen Lee Lenker

On Thursday, Netflix dropped the first full-length trailer for Ryan Murphy's adaptation of the Broadway musical The Prom. A follow-up to a teaser that dropped in October, the new trailer introduces audiences more firmly to Emma (newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman), as she posts her music and thoughts online.

Emma is just an average high school girl who wants to take her girlfriend, Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) to the prom. But when the PTA led by Alyssa's mom (Kerry Washington) forbids it, she finds her life turned upside down by a quartet of washed-up Broadway stars (Meryl Streep, James Corden, Andrew Rannells, and Nicole Kidman) looking for a cause to hang their (gold top) hat on.

The new trailer gives us a closer glimpse of Emma and Alyssa's romance, as well as the antics of the Broadway performers, beginning with their assertion that they'll be the biggest thing to to happen in Indiana since whatever's happened in Indiana. It also showcases more of the glitzy musical numbers and choreography in store.

"I wanted to make something that was in tradition of the old movie musicals that I grew up loving with my grandmother," Murphy previously told EW. "I wanted to make something that had the sparkle and the charm and humor of Singin' in the Rain. That's a show business story. It's a look at the inside of the film world, as opposed to The Prom, which looks at the Broadway community, but when you saw the musical on Broadway, it is just full steam ahead and never stops. I loved that quality, because it did feel old-fashioned and modern."

It's fitting for the trailer to drop on Thanksgiving, considering the Broadway iteration of The Prom made history on this holiday two years ago. During a performance on NBC as part of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, The Prom offered up the first LGBTQ kiss ever to appear during the annual event.

Watch the trailer above for more. The Prom hits Netflix Dec. 11.

Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

When it came to finding the best position (no, it wasn't first, second, or fifth) from which to launch on Netflix, Shonda Rhimes knew they couldn't top focusing on her longtime collaborator, Debbie Allen. Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, which marks Shondaland's Netflix debut, is about Allen and her remarkable career — but it's also about so much more.

Since Allen established the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, fondly known as DADA, in 2000, she's been shaping and teaching young dancers seeking to learn their craft (regardless of their financial status). Beginning in 2009, DADA has performed The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, a modern retelling of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet that serves as a showcase for the Academy's students and an annual fundraiser.

Conceived of by Oliver Bokelberg, who is both a DADA parent and was a producer/director on Scandal, the documentary celebrates both Allen's incredible journey as a dancer and the parallel stories of the young students she educates through the Academy and The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker. 

"What we're doing is we're just uplifting lives every day," Allen tells EW of the work at DADA. "I've been growing generations of young people who bring a humanity and a joy and a positive look on life into the world. That's what I've been doing for 20 years or longer, even before I had the school."

The documentary began as Bokelberg's more casual recordings of rehearsal footage and Academy classes before being shaped into something more defined. "When Oliver asked me if he could come and shoot, I was really busy," Allen recounts. "I said, 'Just stay out of my way, and I don't want to know you're in the room.' So, he really captured something that I would say is cinéma vérité, the behind the scenes of it all, because we would forget he was there. Every aspect and every bit of that footage is very spontaneous and true to the moment."

The idea to turn Bokelberg's footage into a documentary came from none other than Rhimes herself. "After two years [Oliver] said, 'Debbie, we should put this together,'" Allen explains. "So we got an editor that helped us put it together. He said, 'I'm going to show it to Shonda.' She's like, 'Debbie, I have to have this. I want this.' I stepped back because I'm the director and the creator and the choreographer of the stage production. I let this become what she thought it should be. It turned into being a lot more about me than I would ever have done, but I'm humbled by that. She wanted to tell the story. So, here we are."

In what seems a story made for Hollywood, Rhimes and Allen actually first met through DADA. Rhimes' daughter was a student there for over a year before the two struck up a friendship that led to Allen appearing on Grey's Anatomy and eventually transitioning to the role of actor, director, and executive producer within the Shondaland family. "Our relationship was purely dance master, mother-daughter," Allen says. "That was our real first relationship. As a parent, I didn't even hardly speak to Shonda for the first year. I thought she deserved anonymity. I thought she deserved to just be her daughter's mother."

For Allen, there's a special something to this full-circle moment, moving from meeting Rhimes at DADA to working with Shondaland to returning to DADA to tell this story. "I was a student of the classics at Howard University," she notes. "There's something about fate and destiny, hubris, hamartia, all of those qualities that makes sense to me. Sometimes things are supposed to be."

Her relationship with Rhimes isn't the only thing that's full circle about the documentary for Allen. For most of the world, they first were introduced to Allen as a dance instructor, albeit a fictional one: Lydia on Fame. Now, audiences can revisit her career through that lens. "It is my truest self. I have been dancing through every aspect of my career," Allen reflects. "I was on camera dancing. I was choreographing the Oscars. You name it. I have been dancing through it all. So, this is very appropriate. Dance has always influenced and informed my ability as a director. That is a very strong aspect of my style. It's just innate."

As Allen mentions, the documentary is partly biographical, delving into Allen's early experiences with dance, including a life-changing scholarship, as well as her Broadway success and more. Allen says she has plans to write a memoir, but this is the most up close and personal glimpse of her life she's offered thus far.

Bokelberg conducted the on-camera interviews, but Allen says it was simple shifting from their professional relationship to this more personal experience. "You can be yourself when you're with someone you trust," she says. "My life is somewhat of an open book. People are always curious about me in interviews and how we started, what happened, the whole thing. There's a lot to navigate there from Houston to Howard [University] to Broadway to Hollywood. I trusted Oliver, so I could say whatever."

In addition to trusting Bokelberg with her story, Allen had the reassurance that he knew DADA inside and out. The documentary features the journey of several of Allen's students, whom she gave him free rein to select. "Oliver is a DADA parent," she notes. "So, you're getting a story that's deep on the inside. It wasn't just the Hot Chocolate Nutcracker. He had photographed recitals and other things before this, so he was aware [of who these students were]. It was great to have someone who really understood the dynamic of DADA to be doing this, not just someone you hired. He would know what to capture. And he did."

Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker is the story of Debbie Allen, but more resoundingly, it's the story of dancers hustling to realize their dreams and the teachers who open their hearts to get them there. It immortalizes Allen's legacy training the next generation of artists and the incredible program she's built with DADA (even if this year, things have evolved to continue classes safely during the coronavirus pandemic, including shifting to a drive-in gala at the Rose Bowl in lieu of their traditional Hot Chocolate Nutcracker performances).

But for Allen herself, she's not all that concerned with her legacy. She's got too much to do.

"I'm not really thinking about being remembered right now. I'm thinking about what is needed," she confesses. "DADA has given me a real purpose in life beyond something greater than myself. Everyone should be so lucky to find a purpose in life, no matter what it is. It can be something small, but something where you are somehow making the world better."

Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker hits Netflix Dec. 27.

Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

The romance community is looking to give Democrats a happily-ever-after in Georgia.

With the auction Romancing the Runoff, which was organized by authors Alyssa Cole, Courtney Milan, and Kit Rocha (the pseudonym of writing duo Donna Herren and Bree Bridges), the community of authors and readers raised nearly $400,000 in the last week. The auction raised funds for three Georgia voter organizations: former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams' Fair Fight, the New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter.

Abrams herself is, of course, a romance novelist. Writing under the pen name Selena Montgomery, she penned eight romantic suspense novels between 2001 and 2009. "We all lead political lives," Abrams previously told EW of the intersection between politics and romance. "The nature of making decisions of having to meet our choices and find pathways for opportunity — that’s what politics is. Romance is a genre that invites people to explore lives that are not their own, but who understand there’s a common thread for all of us. We may be making choices that don’t necessarily benefit us but we’re all impacted by the decisions that are being made."

"Democracy only thrives when every vote can be cast and counted, and we are fighting to help dismantle the legacy of voter suppression in Georgia," reads the group's mission statement.

As an impassioned voting rights advocate, Abrams spearheaded one of the biggest upsets of the 2020 election, turning Georgia blue in the presidential race for the first time since 1992. Her efforts have also led to two separate run-off races for the U.S. Senate, with Democrats hoping to elect Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock.

Thus, the idea for Romancing the Runoff was born, an auction aiming to help organizations already doing the work to combat voter suppression on the ground in Georgia. Organized in only 12 hours, the website quickly swelled with auction items and raised $95,000 before the auction even formerly began. Over a dozen volunteers helped catalog over 700 items, ranging from rare editions of romance classics to manuscript consultations with prominent authors like Sarah MacLean.

Hollywood even got in on the fun with Bridgerton series author Julia Quinn donating tie-in editions of The Duke and I signed by the entire cast of the forthcoming Shondaland series.

"We read these books about the world falling apart and people coming together to put it back together to get their happy ending,” Bridges told Bustle of the romance community's swift ability to organize and fight for justice. “It’s almost like a training.”

The auction formally ended on Tuesday night, raising just shy of $400,000 and exceeding their original goals by over 150 percent. And that's not quite the end of their journey — Abrams added her own donation of an autographed copy of a hardback edition of her first novel Rules of Engagement. The item is open for bids through Dec. 1.

How's that for a happy ending?

Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

Big Sky

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Warning: This article contains plot details from episode 2 of Big Sky, which aired Tuesday.

Cody Hoyt may have died in that, er, mind-blowing premiere shocker, but there are still plenty of twists and turns on the road ahead.

Following the Big Sky pilot episode, ABC's sinuous thriller from David E. Kelley resumed where it left off — with highway patrolman Rick Legarski (John Carroll Lynch) chastising his accomplice, truck driver Ronald (Brian Geraghty), for making a mess he's had to clean up. But Legarski doesn't even know how much messier things are about to get.

While Ronald faced off against his kidnapping victims — and discovered one of the girls he picked up is non-binary/trans — Jenny (Katheryn Winnick) and Cassie (Kylie Bunbury) hunted for answers and for Cody (Ryan Phillippe). Jenny feared that Cody succumbed to some of his demons and could be on a bender, while Cassie suspected something more sinister and confronted Legarski. Knowing what we know about him now, it was a risky proposition, but she questioned him and managed to leave alive.

Cassie visited Legarski's ex-wife Emily, who then called him to ask how he might have ended up on a private detective's radar. Could this phone call spell doom for Cassie when Legarski had previously seemingly decided to spare her?

We put in a criminal inquiry call of our own, to the man behind Officer Rick Legarski, celebrated character actor John Carroll Lynch. Lynch broke down everything, from where Legarski is headed next to where he lands on the scale of evil when it comes to the serially bad dudes he's brought to life.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: At episode’s end, Rick got some news that Cassie is probably on to him. How worried for her life should we be?

JOHN CARROLL LYNCH: The pilot proves that anybody's fair game. There's nobody who's safe, including Rick. Everybody is in a life-and-death situation, even though they may not necessarily know it. The character has proven that he is capable of anything. And the question is how far is he willing to go to protect himself? That's what's going to unfold over the course of the season — what one is willing and capable of doing. It's interesting to play a character that doesn't have a boundary in that way.

You’ve played some bad dudes before, including famous serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Where does Rick rank in terms of evil, from Gacy to all-around nice guy Mac McDonald?

It's obviously a sliding scale from Mac McDonald to John Wayne Gacy. The interesting thing about Gacy or, to whatever degree, [Zodiac's] Arthur Leigh Allen, or other people who are sociopathic, there's something about them that they can disassociate other people's humanity from themselves. They think of themselves as different than the rest of us. But I don't think Rick Legarski has that gear. I don't think he's a sociopath; at least, that's not the way I look at him. As the episodes unfold, there's a cost to these crimes that build up. If you're willing to shoot somebody in cold blood, there's a level of evil. But he's still a human being. Gacy was a human being too. I just don't think he thought of himself as one. He was a very disturbing dude to play.

I find Rick less disturbing, if that makes sense. Maybe it's because also to play John Wayne Gacy is to accept some of the cost of his actual crimes where there were actually victims. People's lives were taken and other people's lives were destroyed by those people who were taken, so it's a different level of truth in accepting that, as opposed to a fictional world in which we're making the rules and nobody actually has died.

He tells Ronald he chose him, so is he the leader of this ring? How high might he be in this operation we’re starting to get shaded in for us?

Part of the interest is how deep is this organization? Are we talking about an actual syndicate or is it mom and pop? In this case, it would be pop and pop, I guess. It'll unfold over the course of the season. We do discover to some degree what made Rick single Ronald out. But it's an ever-evolving target because there's always excuses, but they're rarely reasons for this behavior. The degree to which people believe that what they're doing is a righteous act, or is a necessary evil, is some of the thought process that goes on in the episodes. One of the things that's so great about the writing of the show and the writing of these characters is that it's not easily cut and dry. He is obviously a horrible person. But he is capable of kindness, and, in a weird way, heroism. And capable of love. That is expressed later on in these episodes, and I think it'll be surprising. My dream is that it's uncomfortable.

When Rick gets in the car with Cassie, it immediately calls to mind what happened to Cody in the last episode. Was there any part of him considering ending that scenario the same way in that moment?

The question starts to become, as he says in the episode, it's like the little old lady who swallowed the fly. Where does the string end? He had an expectation that he could nip it in the bud. And that was clearly not the case. Let me put it this way: Once you've swum past that buoy, there's always a chance you'll swim past it again. Once you've found yourself to be capable of doing it, then it's an option.

In that scene, he waxes on about pulling the trigger and the choices cops face. He says he’s never shot someone before. Obviously, we know that’s not true, but what’s the possibility Cody was the first person he’s ever killed?

What's the juiciest choice? What's the most dramatic choice? And then make it that. It seems to me the most dramatic choice in the material, although we didn't discuss it, was that he'd never done it before. That creates a reverberation in the episodes. He has created a reason for this behavior around the slavery. That makes sense to him; this new cost of that behavior is the life of another [is] a choice he has to make now. But then what are the ramifications of that? And how much blood is he willing to shed? And whose? The mystery of the show is not who did it, the mystery of the show is the why and how. That's one of the interesting things about a mystery where you start out knowing who the murderer is. Then there's the other element: We're in a Wild West. To some degree, you're on your own out here. That creates a situation in which Cassie and Jenny have no backup. And if they do, it's very far away. This is his home turf. This is his patch of road. They're playing in the opposing team's field. And he has a major home-field advantage.

He talks a lot about protecting his pension. Is that all a ruse or is there some sick part of him still motivated by that in all of this?

It's a cover and it's true. I don't know a lot of people who get to the age I am who don't think to themselves, "How's this gonna work out?" Once he retires from slavery, how's he going to be able to pay the bills? There's always a sense of that. But people who become policemen, one of the major things that's a draw is you are able to retire fairly early. Legarski's been a state patrolman for a long, long time. He's well past his 20-year retirement. And he's still out there. So, the legacy of his pension, he's already got that. There's a lot of cover in it. It's also a sense of an underestimation. We were doing the costume fittings for the character and they brought in some T-shirts for the night shoots that we did on the pilot where he's talking to Cody on the phone. I don't even know if you can see it in the shot, but on the T-shirt is a bear. I loved that because bears are really cute until they've got their claws in you. I liked that juxtaposition of the harmlessness with which Legarski seems to run and his vicious side. They coexist. I think that the cover of the pension is an example of that. He's worried about his pension like anybody would be. At the same time, he's wondering if he should shoot her or not. That's part of the weird discomfort of being in his head.

His ex-wife, Emily, seems somewhat invested in protecting him or at least tipping him off. Why? Might we get a better sense of that relationship?

From my point of view reading it, she's telling the truth. Being married to him is like being bored to death. And that was enough. She didn't see any sense of him being capable of what he has become capable of. I think when they were married, he was not capable of what he's capable of now. I think that something happened to him in his thought process around what control he has and where he has control, and how he'd like to see the world arranged. A lot of people are raised for a world that doesn't exist when they get to be adults. If you thought of yourself as being raised for the Montana of 1969, and then you're in the Montana of 2020, I think you were shocked by where you got to. You didn't expect it to be as confusing in all ways as it really is. There's a reaction to that in people, especially when you've been raised to think of yourself like a lot of men have been raised to think of themselves, especially white men, as responsible for society at a fundamental level. [In these people's eyes], they're supposed to be in charge of it, and in charge of it in service to it. And people just don't seem to be listening to them, so they might want to announce their presence with authority. Rick is trying to arrange the world in the way a child would arrange the world.

He clearly seems to genuinely think he’s doing good; he keeps talking about cleaning up the mess of the world.

That's right. He's watched this area of the country, and it's fallen into disrepair. Rick's felt powerless. And then he gets an idea that maybe he could help a little bit. There's a cost to it he understands, but it doesn't really include the lives and well-being of the women themselves. Which is extraordinarily sad and disturbing. But in his mind, he thinks, "Well, I can do something about this patch of road. I can't do anything about the sanctuary cities; I can't do anything about the way in which people want to arrange themselves or how they define it, but around here I can do something." It's definitely not legal. But in some way, he's decided it's right and that's really pathetic. One of the things that's true of all of the people I play who are killers — what they primarily elicit in me is pity. Because it's such a sad choice to be so selfish and self-centered. To decide, "This person has stepped over a line they don't even know about it and I have to get rid of them," that's a really pathetic choice.

He tells Ronald, “Things are about to take an uglier turn.” How ugly?

It gets pretty ugly. It's a bad patch of road we're on. It's not going to smooth out anytime soon. Let's just put it that way. For those three women, they're very close to being erased — in one fashion or another. That's obviously what Cassie and Jimmy are trying to stop and Cody was trying to stop. It's going to get pretty dark. It's a particularly dark show for network [TV]. It's particularly dark for ABC. They were very brave to put it on.

How would you tease next week’s episode?

Rick starts to really consider what the cost of this behavior is. He realizes how deep his marriage is at risk, and he's got to make some decisions as to whether or not he's going to save that. Of course, the other part of that is it's not like the three women in the trailer are willing to go along. Grace, the character that Jade Pettyjohn plays, is just simply unwilling to comply. It's one thing when you have just one person in the trailer, and they're unwilling to comply. It's another thing when you have three of them. That makes itself pretty clear in the next episode of how unwieldy these mistakes are getting. Mistakes begin to compound themselves — and the cost of those mistakes begin to grow.

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Big Sky

From TV legend David E. Kelley, Big Sky is a twisty crime thriller set in the remote climes of Montana.

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Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

Tangled

• Movie

• PG

I can hear an avalanche of cries of “Let It Go” headed my way now, but I’m here begging you to at last see the light and give Tangled the love it deserves.

Released 10 years ago, Tangled featured the first Disney princess to get the CGI-animation treatment in a lush film that blended computer animation with traditional animation to evoke the feeling of a painting. With a script from Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), the stunning result follows Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore) as she dares to explore life outside her tower with the help of hunky Flynn Rider (voiced by Zachary Levi).

Hitting theaters only three years before Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel) became a global phenomenon, Tangled is a complex tale of a princess on an empowering journey to discover who she really is. While Frozen snowballed into an epic success, Tangled never quite got the love it deserved. Sure, Rapunzel and Flynn Rider got some space at Disneyland, but overall the film never swelled to reach the booming popularity Frozen achieved with its feature-length sequel, holiday shorts, and a Broadway musical.

Some of it is probably down to timing and other intangible factors. Then, there’s the fact that Tangled lacks an earworm on the scale of “Let It Go.” Plus, it possesses a script more wry and subtle than Frozen – which is great for convincing critics to love you, but not so much small children.

But we’ve got a dream – that more people will discover what a gem Tangled is. We considered knocking you over the head with a frying pan in true Rapunzel fashion to smack some sense into you, but instead, here are six reasons Tangled is better than Frozen.

A True Disney Villain

The only thing that Disney does better than princesses is villains (hell, they’ve even got a board game celebrating this fact). Can you imagine pop culture without the likes of Ursula, Cruella de Vil, Maleficent, Jafar, and the O.G. herself, Snow White's Evil Queen? Tangled offers an excellent addition to the Disney villain canon: Mother Gothel, voiced with delicious Broadway panache by the incomparable Donna Murphy.

Disney villains range from pure, unadulterated evil to those with more complicated motives. Gothel definitely falls on the more nuanced end of that spectrum. She kidnaps Rapunzel and hoards the princess away to keep access to the magical youth restoring power of Rapunzel's hair. But she does seem to have a small degree of motherly love for Rapunzel – even if her ulterior motives are ultimately toxic, narcissistic, and selfish. What’s more – their relationship is a complex examination of mother-daughter relationships and the emotional scars that can be wrought by controlling, self-involved parents.

Frozen has this to a degree in Anna and Elsa’s parents, but their absence renders it less impactful. The villain of the first film is Prince Hans, but in a sense, also Elsa? In that she’s her own worst enemy/the crux of many of the issues at the heart of the plot. That’s a new spin on things, but it doesn’t really provide the oomph you’re looking for from the panoply of great Disney villains.

Tangled manages to combine iconic cartoonish villainy with a more psychologically astute examination of what villains can look like. Plus, Donna Murphy does the MOST with the role, playing with her vocal levels and campily chewing the scenery, especially on her standout song “Mother Knows Best.”

A hunky hero

Honestly, most Disney movies tend to give more credence to either their hero or heroine. But Tangled gives due measure to both in Rapunzel and Flynn Rider (real name: Eugene Fitzherbert). Zachary Levi makes Flynn charm incarnate with his vocal performance, and his caddish bag of tricks, including his patented “smolder” are good-hearted, goofy send-ups of the square-jawed hero. He’s all bluster, but really just a scared kid on the inside, looking for love and security in much the same way Rapunzel is.

Flynn, inspired by cinema’s greatest swashbuckler Errol Flynn, is the most irresistible of hero tropes: the rogue with a heart of gold. They nail his evolution from mercenary thief to caring love interest with aplomb, making him one of the most attractive characters Disney animation has ever created. His journey to achieve his “dream” and the shift in what that means places him on equal footing with Rapunzel, rendering their love story far more potent. Flynn is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, as testament to how much Rapunzel has changed him. That ending ranks with Beauty and the Beast for yanking at the romantic tear ducts.

Look, I don’t want to suggest that every Disney movie needs a love story. And they especially don’t all need a cis-het love story. I know a lot of people appreciate that Anna’s romance with the dorky Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) is secondary to the relationship between the two sisters. That’s absolutely worth celebrating (it’d be even more amazing if they could go all-in on Elsa’s sexuality). But at the same time, Disney has long been in the business of selling us love stories and happily-ever-afters – and few of their films do it as well and movingly as Tangled.

Rapunzel did naïve and earnest first – and better 

Rapunzel’s two most defining characteristics are her naiveté, a result of being cooped up in a tower her entire life, and her earnestness. When she breaks out of her cozy prison, she waffles between extreme guilt and elation at her newfound freedom in one of the most hysterically relatable montages Disney has ever crafted. But her lack of awareness about the world around her and her genuine joy in discovering everything from the delights of dancing in the village to the floating lanterns is infectious. It never seems forced or overly played for humor, but just genuine to her situation.

Frozen seems to draw on the Tangled model with Anna, who bursts with a similar zealous enthusiasm, but hers purposefully can verge on feeling over-the-top. I’ll take this more subtle version any day.

Those lanterns 

People talk about the Beauty and the Beast ballroom scene as a breathtaking game-changer. And it is. But Tangled ranks up there for me with its lush depiction of floating lanterns. It’s one of the most romantic images they’ve ever crafted, and I’m in awe every time I see this scene. It’s just sheer beauty, a true work of art brought to life. The rich interplay of the purples and darker hues of the night sky with the glowing warmth of the lanterns is extraordinary. This scene alone should put Tangled in the record books for how eye-catching and luminous it is. I dare you not to gasp in wonder while watching it.

The silent animal sidekicks

Disney gives great sidekick, but I’m going to voice an unpopular opinion here: Olaf (Josh Gad) is only enjoyable in very small doses. Conceptually, a snowman who is obsessed with summer is hilarious, and he’s absolutely endearing. But after about five minutes his oblivious shtick doesn’t melt my heart, it freezes it.

In contrast, Tangled features two blissfully silent sidekicks: Rapunzel’s chameleon Pascal and noble steed Maximus. Pascal is watchful and protective of Rapunzel, a loyal companion, who also offers loads of whimsy in his color-changing hues. Maximus is a dog in a horse’s body, at first hell-bent on hunting Flynn down and then his most ardent supporter. Their humor and fanciful nature are all conveyed through the animation of their body language, and it makes them so much more engaging and delightful.

A great score 

There is no escaping the power ballad that is “Let It Go.” And rightfully so. It’s a fantastic song. But beyond that, the rest of Frozen’s score pales in comparison. Tangled, in contrast, bops along to a more even-footed set of songs composed by Disney legend Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater. From Rapunzel’s playful “When Will My Life Begin?” to Mother Gothel’s operetta ditty “Mother Knows Best,” the score is consistently delightful. “I Have a Dream” is a classic Disney track that abounds with hilarious sight gags. Our only real complaint is that Levi doesn’t get enough chances to sing.

Tangled’s best song is its love ballad, “I See the Light,” mellifluously rendered by Levi and Moore as their characters float among a sea of the aforementioned gorgeous lanterns. It deserves to be as well-known as “A Whole New World” when it comes to romantic Disney duets. It’s both intimate and soaring in scope and provides the emotional weight for Flynn and Rapunzel’s relationship in a single song.

It’s hard to ignore Frozen when it’s literally as widespread and intractable as one of Elsa’s snowstorms, but let down your hair and consider why its predecessor might actually be superior. Or at least worthy of the real, lasting kind of love that Rapunzel and Flynn share.

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Tangled

Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

It's become something of rite of passage for talented female multihyphenates to write a book (see: Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler). They chronicle everything from their childhoods (generally unpopular, relatively traumatic) to their experiences with motherhood with a gimlet eye and a knowing wink.

Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and stand-up comic Michelle Buteau (Netflix's Welcome to Buteaupia) are the latest to mine their personal lives for laughs and insight, with Bloom's I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are (out now) and Buteau's Survival of the Thickest (Dec. 8). The pair recently sat down to read each other's essay collections, then came together on Zoom to discuss the essential work of sharing joy in our present moment.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you translate your comedy from the screen or the stage to the page? Was this a particularly different writing process for you from writing a TV show or a stand-up special?

RACHEL BLOOM: For years I've been doing storytelling shows, and there are these special stories I've always wanted to do more with that don't quite fit into anything else that I do. I built it out from there. In the same way on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where there's a heightened emotion and you burst into song, in this book when I'm dealing with heightened emotions from an essay, I pull that out and go into a sketch. I see the non-essay pieces as written sketches, and sketch [comedy] and live storytelling really informed how I wrote this.

MICHELLE BUTEAU: The material will tell you where it's supposed to go. Going through so much pain through IVF and traveling and sticking myself with needles, just telling these sad f---king stories into a dark room in a dirty mic felt healing. The more people that know you, the shorter your logline is. I'm so caught up in the world of "It's got to be funny," [but] I'm also a human being that has been through this human s---. Podcasting really helped me figure out what I wanted to say.

You both circle themes of not fitting in and bullying. Why were those a starting place for you both?

BUTEAU: I am an only child. I've been to three different high schools, three different grade schools. It was always really hard being not only the only one that's not white, but the one that's new that has a name nobody can pronounce. Rachel, your stories about being bullied really spoke to me because what I loved about your writing is I feel like I'm in your brain. You're definitely taking us into your world, but it's almost by not fitting in you've truly learned to stand out.

BLOOM: I feel like I had such an in to your brain and your experience! You were so good at just putting me right there. The fact that your [character was] pregnant in Always Be My Maybe and [you] were going through [infertility and surrogacy] at the same time is truly stunning. I don't know how you got through that, but you walk us through that.

Similarly, you both touch on motherhood and your paths to it.

BLOOM: Michelle, you talked about how being a mom should be a class in school. Why is it not a class? Why is a parenting class not mandated for everyone? Because this is the hardest thing ever. Anything else in life this hard, it's a specialized skill — you apprentice at the blacksmith's for 20 years.

BUTEAU: We have to figure out what's important to us, and we have to take it upon ourselves to shout that out to everybody we love and care about. Advertisers aren't going to do it, the government's not going to do it. I wish society would've told me growing up that I could be president. But no, they always told me, "You've got to get bikini-body-ready. You've got to lose that weight. If men don't find you f---able, you're not worthy." And even if you don't want to be a parent, it should be a class because it's just wild the things that are considered important.

BLOOM: I'm going to raise [my daughter] to be kind and empathetic. All I can do is impart my own wisdom to her if, God forbid, she is bullied. Then I'll be like, "You have to know these people are in pain, and I know that for a fact." The thing of "They're just jealous," that never rang true. They're not jealous. They're in pain themselves and you're different, and you're a way they can assert their dominance.

You both get really personal in so many ways. How do you decide what you can put on the page versus what to hold back?

BUTEAU: It's like stand-up: You figure out what you can defend, what you want to share, how much you want to put out there. I just don't want to be an a--hole. I don't want to come home and my husband's like, "Why does everyone know about this?"

BLOOM: It's all about hurting other people. I want to be true to the experiences because I find talking about pain releases the pain. It's therapeutic to be vulnerable in certain ways because it feels like spitting the poison out. But I really did my best to not put anything that would hurt others, to try to not get people canceled.

BUTEAU: Print is crazy. It's like an emotional tattoo. The way I would say a story at a dinner table is not the way I would write it in a book.

Even before your books, you've both been vocal champions for female desire and pleasure. But was it more intimidating writing about it than talking about in other contexts? What do you wish people were more comfortable talking about?

BUTEAU: Every time there is a dick joke, comments are like, "Female comedians can't think about anything else." It's like, let this female comedian talk about what she wants because it's her f---ing business. I don't know why guys are out here talking about all this s-- but the minute we do it, all of a sudden she's a ho. If I'm a ho, let me be a ho.

BLOOM: I can't stop talking about my clit. I'm really obsessed with it, apparently. But once I realized everyone feels out of place, then the things we consider taboo, they're not taboo if everyone's feeling them. It's a part of human nature, and the taboo and the repression is the cause of so much evil. The only thing I'm actually still a little embarrassed about is my fifth-grade erotic poetry that I put in the book. I was embarrassed for 11-year-old me.

BUTEAU: It's important to own your sexuality to figure out what you like and don't like. Sort of like Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride: She had to eat all of them eggs to figure out how she likes her eggs. Let me f--- the dicks to see which dick I like. They want to control us. They want us to feel bad. And then they're the ones that makes us feel good when they think we're worthy. I'm not going to apologize for who I am and what I've done. If you want to talk about it, great. If you don't, great. Don't judge me, because I'm a good person and I pay my taxes on time.

Michelle, your book often discusses and celebrates "heavy titties." Rachel, you talk about body image more broadly, but you also previously wrote a song called "Heavy Boobs." Why is it important to you to both celebrate and skewer this?

BUTEAU: When I woke up on my 12th birthday and I had woman-sized tits, I was like, "Well, here we are." It's like a short haircut — you have to dress around it. I got unwanted attention from men, and I felt so sad and unworthy and shameful. Until I got to college and got to have sex for the first time, where I'm like, "Oh no, this is great. I'm a good person. I want to be happy I like my titties. They like my titties." When you have a body that isn't on a magazine, you don't feel you're worthy of love. And that's what I love about your show, [Rachel] — some Hollywood producers have figured out big bitches need love too.

BLOOM: It's all the patriarchy, and the patriarchy hurts everyone. I always wanted big tits. Like when I drew myself as an adult, I drew myself with good cleavage. I thought it looked beautiful, but definitely because of the male gaze. I thought about that more, and I was proud of my breasts, but also there were so many inelegant things about them — trying to find the right f---ing bra. Tit sweat. The density and heaviness of them. That's why I started poking into demystifying sex. In every song that I write, I want to make sure there's a boner-killer moment. Demystifying one of the core sexual images in every culture, which is breasts, I wanted to be like, "I know from the male gaze you see these as beautiful sex sacks, but here's how it actually feels when you have sex sacks."

You can only keep one: dick jokes or poop jokes.

BUTEAU: Oh my God! Dick!

BLOOM: Poop jokes.

Your books are coming out in the midst of a global pandemic, right after arguably the most important election of our lifetimes. How has that changed your perspective on the final product?

BLOOM: It feels so weird to be doing publicity for it. The world is truly apocalyptic, but even though [our books have] very serious stuff in them because the state of the world is so dire, I'm like, "It's escapist at this point."

BUTEAU: My Netflix special dropped [recently]. In 18 and a half years, I finally get an hour special and I finally get this book together, and 2020 is essentially canceled. There's so much death. For a hot minute, I'm like, "Do we need to do this?" But everyone keeps reminding me, people need to laugh at something.

BLOOM: I gave birth, my daughter was in the NICU while my friend [Crazy Ex-Girlfriend songwriter Adam Schlesinger] was on a ventilator with COVID in New York. He died a week after my daughter was born. The thing that got me through it was comedy. That s--- f---ing saved me.

BUTEAU: I feel hateful and grateful at every moment.

To read more from the December issue of Entertainment Weekly, order a copy here or find it on newsstands now. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.

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Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

The Spanish Princess

• TV Show

• Starz

• Historical
• Drama

We know you're excited, but don't lose your head.

Henry VIII's second wife Anne Boleyn is finally making her appearance on this Sunday's series finale of The Spanish Princess. Eagle-eyed viewers will note that Anne has circled in the background throughout much of this season, being selected to accompany Princess Mary to France. Her father, Thomas, known as Wiltshire, has, of course, remained one of Henry's most loyal advisers throughout.

But on Sunday's finale, she finally gets named (as does Thomas — it's also the first time we'll hear the word "Boleyn" all season, and that was by design). EW has your exclusive first official look of Alice Nokes as the ambitious young Anne, getting raucous with Henry at dinner and officially joining Catherine's cadre of ladies-in-waiting.

Anne will figure in to the continued demise of Henry (Ruairi O'Connor) and Catherine's (Charlotte Hope) marriage as we near the end, but she's not quite as prominent as you might imagine. For creators Matthew Graham and Emma Frost, that was both a way to honor history and their beloved heroine, Catherine of Aragon — as well as a means of avoiding overdoing a story that's been told hundreds of times over.

"The thing about Anne Boleyn, as far as we were concerned, is that she's very, very familiar territory for any story that involves Henry," Graham tells EW. "She's such an explosively famous figure. She is the defining, wrongly in our opinion, wife of Henry VIII's reign. It would just steal the dramatic oxygen from the story we wanted to tell."

"It was so important to us that we put her in the context of the time that Catherine was married to Henry," he adds. "Anne was very little in court. She was one of the ladies-in-waiting, and she was simply another pretty girl that could catch his eye. We didn't want to give her any more credence than that."

The beginning of Anne's tale when it comes to her life with Henry is the end of Catherine's. Prior to that, she barely registered in their lives. Graham and Frost wanted to emphasize that in their storytelling. "We didn't want there to be a big unveiling of Anne Boleyn," Frost tells EW. "Like she suddenly arrives at court for the first time and Henry first lays eyes on her and falls in love or something. We wanted her just to be there in the background. For the audience to realize, when they do understand who she is, that she's been there all along. That was the reality of it. She was Thomas Boleyn's daughter. It wasn't until Henry's marriage to Catherine had really hit problems that he even looked at anybody else in terms of them being a potential wife, so we wanted to push her into the background."

If there's one thing we've learned about Anne Boleyn over the centuries it's that she's hardly satisfied with staying in the background, but Frost and Graham are exceedingly protective of their Spanish princess. "From a personal point of view, we've lived with Catherine so long I don't want that witch coming in," quips Graham. "I don't want her anywhere near my Catherine."

The Spanish Princess concludes Sunday at 8 p.m. on Starz.

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The Spanish Princess

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Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW

How to present live theater in the time of COVID-19 is a mystery that lovers of the art form are trying to solve.

With stages likely to remain shuttered or severely reduced in capacity until an effective vaccine is widely distributed, theaters around the world are searching for ways to continue to reach their audiences. Citizen Detective, which kicked off Nov. 10 at the Geffen Stayhouse — the at-home iteration of Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse — is one such experiment.

Using the famous 1920s unsolved slaying of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor as a jumping-off point, the show invites audiences to become part of the action in a blend of live performance and interactive game. The evening is hosted by true-crime author Mickie McKittrick (Mike Ostroski), who leads attendees through the potential suspects in the Taylor case to hunt for new answers. There's one other performer, Andrea (Paloma Nozicka), a Mickie McKittrick superfan who functions as a twist on an audience plant to help move the story along.

Written and directed by Chelsea Marcantel, Citizen Detective is a noble stab at creating theater for our virtual age. Using videoconferencing technology, it asks viewers to actively take part in the show rather than sit back in the shadows of the theater (for those who prefer their theater sans audience participation, this is probably not the event for you). It's not so much a play as it is an interactive murder mystery — like Clue meets a virtual escape room.

The plot is largely reflective, teaching us how to be and interrogating the role of the citizen detective. Via McKittrick, it ponders the armchair sleuth and our collective cultural obsession with true crime, whether it comes via books, podcasts, or television series. There's a bit of moralizing, meant to rightfully chastise those who seek to solve crimes for public accolades. "It's not about you, it's about arriving at the truth," McKittrick tells us at one point.

There are also some brief swipes at digging deeper, a notion that perhaps true-crime stories are our modern version of folk tales. We circle back through real cases again and again as perhaps some way of teaching and learning grander lessons about morality, justice, and the arc of the universe — fairy tales with a side of murder.

There's an argument to be made that the game might be more effective with a completely invented case, or at least one not as well known as the Taylor murder. Audience familiarity will undoubtably vary, and a fictional case might lessen some of the show's message, though there's likely still a way to accomplish both and arrive at a more satisfying conclusion than this leaves.

One small quibble is that some of the show's climax hinges on the supposition that the Hollywood studios kept everything pertinent to their history, secret and otherwise. But the fact of the matter is that the studios in the 1920s had a very weak grasp on the notion that they were making history; studio documents and films of this era are lost or destroyed because they were considered disposable. Anyone who's spent any time considering movie history knows that film preservation, both of the films themselves and anything associated with their making, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Working with a real case, this jarringly incorrect assumption takes some wind out of the show's sails.

All in all, Citizen Detective is a diverting evening, a combination of game night with a theatrical endeavor, that at least offers some clues as how to execute entertaining interactive virtual theater — if it doesn't quite crack the case entirely. Grade: B

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Author:Maureen Lee Lenker - Source: EW