Hoda Kotb announces she’s leaving ‘Today’ early next year
Hoda Kotb made a surprise announcement on Thursday morning: She’s leaving the Today show on January 1.
Kotb has been at NBC since 1988, working as a correspondent for Dateline, and has co-anchored the morning show alongside Savannah Guthrie since 2018, after Matt Lauer‘s tenure as anchor ended following a sexual harassment scandal.
She’s been a part of Today since 2007.
Todayshared a heartfelt message Kotb sent to the show’s staff, which said in part, “They say two things can be right at the same time, and I’m feeling that so deeply right now. I love you and it’s time for me to leave the show.”
Hoda continued, “I’ve been weighing this decision for quite a while — Am I truly ready? — But, my sixtieth birthday celebration on [New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza] felt like a shift. Like a massive, joyful YES, you are!”
Calling the decision the “hardest thing in the world,” Hoda said her daughters, Haley, 7, and Hope, 5, factored into her choice.
“Obviously I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking that they deserve a bigger piece of my time pie that I have,” she expressed, adding, “I feel like we only have a finite amount of time.”
Kotb said, “my broadcast career has been beyond meaningful, a new decade of my life lies ahead, and now my daughters and my mom need and deserve a bigger slice of my time pie.”
Kotb closed by saying, “Happily and gratefully, I plan to remain a part of the NBC family,” adding, “I’ll be around. How could I not? Family is family and you all will always be a part of mine.”
New Yorkers are used to ignoring most stuff they see on the street, but a new guerilla marketing campaign for Alien: Romulus made even some New Yorkers pause.
Spotted by outlets including Screen Thrill, the campaign features people collapsed on the subway, hanging out of a cab window and even in the middle of Times Square, convulsing with “breathing” replicas of the alien parasites known as facehuggers covering their faces.
Back in April, Romulus director Fede Álvarezshowed off his new “favorite toy,” an extremely creepy facehugger prop that can skitter around the floor via remote control.
The Romulus campaign is similar to another viral effort from 20th Century Studios, when replicas of the ape men from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes patrolled California’s Venice Beach on horseback.
Alien: Romulus hits theaters Aug. 16.
20th Century Studios is a division of ABC News’ parent company, Disney.
Deadline is reporting that the estate of author Michael Crichton, the late bestselling author and one of the co-creators of ER, is suing one of the show’s stars, Noah Wyle, along with producers of an upcoming Max medical series called The Pitt.
According to the suit obtained by the trade, Crichton’s widow, Sherri, claims after a yearlong negotiation to reboot ER, Warner Bros. Television, ER‘s producer John Wells and other producers, including Wyle, walked away and “transplanted” the idea to a Pittsburgh-set medical series called The Pitt.
Warner Bros. Discovery-owned Max has already given the forthcoming series a 15-episode order.
The lawsuit states, “After negotiating unsuccessfully with Crichton’s estate for nearly a year for the right to reboot ER, Warner Bros. simply moved the show from Chicago to Pittsburgh, rebranded it The Pitt, and has plowed ahead without any attribution or compensation for Crichton and his heirs.”
It added, “The Pitt is ER. It’s not like ER, it’s not kind of ER, it’s not sort of ER. It is ER complete with the same executive producer, writer, star, production companies, studio and network as the planned ER reboot.”
The lawsuit charges the producers with “breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and intentional interference with contractual relations.”
Critchton’s camp seeks to “redress that grievous wrong and to ensure that studios are held accountable to the creators upon whose imaginations and ingenuity their successes depend.”
It also says Wells’ actions were “a personal betrayal of a 30-year friendship” with the late author, who died at 66 in 2008.
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.”