In brief … Lin-Manuel Miranda added to Broadway’s ‘All In: Comedy About Love’ and more
Lin-Manuel Miranda has been added to the rotating cast of Broadway’s All In: Comedy About Love, according to Broadway.com. Comedian John Mulaney will lead the first round of cast members, which includes Saturday Night Live stars Fred Armisen and Chloe Fineman, Girls5Eva‘s Renée Elise Goldsberry and Richard Kind, appearing Dec. 11-Jan. 12. The play, running at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, features “a series of vignettes about dating, heartbreak and marriage,” adapted from short stories by Simon Rich, per the outlet …
Tamara Smart, who recently starred in Netflix’s Resident Evil, has been tapped to play Thalia Grace in the Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Season 2 is based on The Sea of Monsters, the second installment in Rick Riordan‘s acclaimed book series. Thalia is described as “the Demigod daughter of Zeus who made her last stand to protect her friends at the edge of Camp Half-Blood,” per the streaming service. Smart joins series regulars Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri, Charlie Bushnell, Dior Goodjohn and Daniel Diemer. Disney is the parent company of ABC News …
The Tony Awards will return to New York’s Radio City Music Hall for the first time in two years when the 2025 ceremony takes place June 8, according to Deadline. The 78th celebration, presented by The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, “will recognize all of the awards categories and honor the incredible artistry of the 2024-2025 season,” per CBS. The Tony Awards will air live to both coasts on CBS and stream on Paramount+ …
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.”
Shailene Woodley stars in the new limited series adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s New York Times bestselling nonfiction book, Three Women.
The show follows Woodley as Gia, a character loosely based on Taddeo, as she interviews three different women from across the United States, exploring their varied sexual and emotional experiences.
Woodley told ABC Audio that after she read Three Women, she felt Taddeo had written everything she “felt but didn’t know how to articulate.”
According to Woodley, crafting a character based on Taddeo was more than just collaborating with her.
“It wasn’t a collaboration as much as it felt like a connection and then a true desire to honor what our natural connection elicited,” Woodley said. “Gia is not Lisa, but Gia also isn’t me. It almost felt like she was the intersection of both of us.”
Taddeo wholeheartedly agreed, saying Woodley’s performance made her feel seen “in the most dynamic way.”
“Shailene’s performance made me feel seen without even, like, mimicking or mirroring me,” Taddeo said. “She’s one of the most talented actors out there, but she also has one of the warmest hearts.”
The show covers many serious topics ripe for discussion. So, what does Woodley hope viewers take from it?
“I hope that they walk away feeling a little less alone and maybe feeling like it isn’t weird or obscure to go through things that are very normal, everyday experiences that women have, like miscarriages or, like, having sex on your period or having body dysmorphia,” Woodley said. “I don’t know one woman who hasn’t been through one … if not all of those things. And I think it’s important that we take these situations that have become such taboo in our culture and really normalize them.”
Saturday Night Live kicked off its 50th season with a star-studded cold open that featured SNL alum Maya Rudolph reprising her Vice President Kamala Harris, joined by fellow SNL vets Andy Samberg and Dana Carvey, playing second gentleman Doug Emhoff and President Joe Biden, respectively. Comedian Jim Gaffigan was tapped to play Harris’ running mate Tim Walz. Current SNL cast member James Austin Johnson returned as Donald Trump, with Bowen Yang taking on the role of Trump’s running mate JD Vance. Hacks‘ Jean Smart hosted the season 50 premiere and Jelly Roll was the musical guest …
Days of Our Lives actor Drake Hogestyn, who played John Black on the long-running soap opera, has died at the age of 70 due to pancreatic cancer, his family shared Saturday on the show’s official Instagram. “After putting up an unbelievable fight, he passed peacefully surrounded by loved ones,” the statement read in part. Hogestyn was a minor league baseball player before joining the soap in 1986 …
John Ashton, the actor best known for his role as John Taggart in the Beverly Hills Cop film series, “passed away peacefully” in Fort Collins, Colorado, on Sept. 26, his rep confirmed in a statement obtained by Good Morning America. He was 76. Ashton’s other film roles include Midnight Run, alongside Robert De Niro, as well as Little Big League, Some Kind of Wonderful and She’s Having a Baby …
