Billy Crystal goes all ‘Sixth Sense’ in creepy trailer to Apple TV+’s thriller series ‘Before’
Funnyman Billy Crystal is playing against type as a troubled psychologist in the creepy new trailer to Apple TV+’s thriller series Before.
Crystal plays a grieving widower and former child therapist named Eli, who finds his wife, Lynn (Judith Light), dead — possibly by her own hand — and finds a disturbed young boy named Noah (Jacobi Jupe), who literally shows up at Eli’s doorstep.
The little boy has scratched weird symbols into Eli’s door, bloodying his fingers in the process. As he questions Noah, he realizes Noah is plagued by troubling visions that seem to link to Eli’s past.
Oh, and Eli’s wife is haunting him, too.
“He was my first foster,” Rosie Perez says as Denise. “The other parents found him unnerving.”
“Suffering from hallucinations, repeated expulsions from school,” Eli says of the boy. “I’m starting to think there’s a reason he found me. If we’re connected, maybe I can save him.”
In treating the boy, it becomes apparent Eli’s fixated on the image of a creepy-looking cabin that Noah repeatedly sketches. Eli asks him what makes him mad, and Noah says, “People who do bad things.”
Then he says to Eli, “You know what you did.”
With a montage of disturbing images, it ends with Lynn saying to her husband, “What have you done?”
Apple TV+ teases of the 10-episode series, “You’ve never seen Billy Crystal in a role like this.”
Tallulah Willis is sharing a look inside her relationship with her dad, Bruce Willis.
In an Instagram post shared Sept. 30, Willis’ youngest daughter with ex-wife Demi Moore shared a series of undated photos of her and the Die Hard actor enjoying some downtime together.
“Hey I love this guy so much and feeling feelings is tough stuff, but I’m so grateful to let them flow through me now instead of disconnecting from it!” she captioned the snaps, which she said came from “the forever archives.”
The first photo shows Tallulah, 30, standing in front of her dad, who is giving her a kiss on her head.
In the second photo, the father-daughter duo is smiling as they enjoy some soup.
The third photo shows Bruce, 69, smiling down at his kiddo as she looks at a scrapbook of memories.
Tallulah’s post comes amid her dad’s battle with frontotemporal dementia, which led him to retire from acting.
Moore opened up to Good Morning America in January about how Bruce and their daughters — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Willis — are dealing with his health struggles.
“I think, given the givens, he’s doing very well,” she said, adding of their daughters, “What I’ll say is what I say to my children, which is it’s important to just meet them where they’re at and not hold onto what isn’t, because there’s great beauty and sweetness and loving and joy out of that.”
In addition to his three daughters with Moore, Bruce also shares daughters Mabel and Evelyn with his wife, Emma Heming Willis.
Back in June, Sir Ian McKellen seemed to downplay a fall off a London stage during a performance of the Shakespeare adaptation Player Kings. A statement at the time said he was in good spirits and would make a speedy recovery. But now, several months later, McKellen reveals the whole thing was pretty scary.
“Apparently, I’m told by the company manager who’s holding my head as I lay on the floor, I said to her, ‘I’ve broken my neck. I’m dying,'” McKellen told ABC Audio in an interview from his home in London. “Now, I don’t remember saying that, but I must have felt it.”
He says he’s fine now, after fracturing his wrist and hurting his back, crediting the fat suit he was wearing in order to play rotund Knight John Falstaff with protecting his ribs and hips in the fall. And while physically he’s almost completely back to normal, the mental effects linger.
“I’m left with some disappointment,” McKellen confesses. “I’m ashamed that I didn’t complete — you know, my pride was bruised. How could this happen to me?” he asks with a chuckle. “And I suspect that although physically I’m healing, I wonder whether deep down there’s something mental or emotional that was jolted that needs to be attended to. And I’m attending to it by not working at the moment and resting.”
McKellen appears to be in a reflective mood as he discusses the fall, and his new film The Critic, in which he plays a prominent 1930s London theater critic named Jimmy Erskine, a once feared and respected tastemaker trying to recapture his glory days. Reviews, McKellen reveals, are a necessary evil for actors.
“We are seeking for approval. And we’re probably rather pathetic people who need that approval. We’re not confident enough of ourselves. So if you get a good review — oh, it’s an added pleasure. And if you get a bad review, it can be very hurtful,” McKellen admits.
And although he hasn’t been on the receiving end of a lot of bad reviews, the ones he has had are seared in his brain. Take for instance his turn in a Bernard Shaw revival in London’s West End when he was much younger. He starred in the play alongside a pre-Dame Judi Dench and recalls how he overheard a few fellow actors discussing his performance one night at a restaurant.
“One of them was going on and on and on about how dreadful I’d been. And I was typical of these modern young actors, using my voice in the wrong way and drawing attention to myself. And he just simply hadn’t enjoyed it.” McKellen says he laughed off the criticism, but the next night onstage it crept into his consciousness. “And as I looked into the audience talking away, I suddenly thought, ‘My God, every single person in this audience agrees with that actor that I heard last night. They all think I’m rubbish. I shouldn’t be here.’” He says he froze, forgot his lines and Dench had to rescue him.
Still, he swears if there’s a bad review out there, he’s going to read it. “I like to know. If people haven’t enjoyed the film of Cats I’d like to know about it.” 2019’s film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway musical Cats was savaged by critics, probably the worst-reviewed film McKellen has ever been in. McKellen didn’t get the blame, though. His portrayal of Gus the Theater Cat was mostly praised. And he may be returning to a role that garnered him some of the most praise of his film career: the mighty wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies.
“There are going to be a couple of more films, I think, with some of the same characters in it. And I’ve been asked to stand by,” McKellen says. “But there’s no script that I read, and no date. All I can say, as far as I’m concerned, they better be quick.”
Quick, because at 85 years old, McKellen isn’t sure how much time he has left. “I’m rather living a year at a time, rather than two or three years at a time,” he says.
Gandalf is a part of his legacy, so if he can, he’s going to go to New Zealand and put on the robes. Legacy is a theme in The Critic, as well. In his downtime, legacy and what’s next are things McKellen has been thinking about a lot. He remembers going to visit a friend in the hospital, a friend who was dying, and asking him what he was thinking about as his life neared the end.
“And he said, ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’ And that’s rather my view,” McKellen says wistfully. He wants to know what’s going to happen. “How is AI going to really take over? I mean, what is life going to be like? When is the world going to settle down? Is the world going to survive? I won’t know. I won’t know. And I suppose I won’t care because I won’t exist.”
The play from the creators of the Netflix phenomenon, the Duffer Brothers, as well as writers Jack Thorne and Kate Trefy, first opened to acclaim — and awards — in the U.K., but Netflix just announced it will open at New York City’s Marquis Theater in previews on March 28, 2025.
The play’s official opening will be April 22, 2025.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow opened to rave reviews on Dec. 14, 2023, on the West End, and recently won Oliver Awards in the Best Entertainment and Best Set Design categories. The production is directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin.
The show is set in the series’ Hawkins, Indiana, in 1959 and centers on the younger version of some of the show’s main characters. The West End cast featured Oscar Lloyd as the younger version of David Harbour‘s Jim Hopper; Isabella Pappas played Winona Ryder‘s character, Joyce; and Patrick Vaill portrayed the younger version of Matthew Modine‘s TV character, Dr. Brenner.
Louis McCartney playedHenry Creel, whose telekinesis lands him at the Hawkins National Laboratory — where he’s eventually transformed into the supernatural villain Vecna.
Fans can sign up for first access to presale tickets at www.StrangerThingsBroadway.com. For those who do, presale tickets go on sale Sept. 13. Tickets for the general public will go on sale Sept. 17.