Jimmy Fallon taking Fridays off from ‘The Tonight Show’
NBCUniversal
For the upcoming season, Jimmy Fallon is going to join his late night colleagues Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers by taking Fridays off.
The Hollywood Reporter says The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon will move to a four-day-a-week schedule, as opposed to the five-day shooting schedule he’s kept for years.
Most late night shows have been airing repeats on Fridays, even Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, but Fallon’s show had resisted the trend.
The trade suspects NBC’s belt-tightening was behind the decision due to shifting viewer habits. As THR reported, that was behind the decision to clip Meyers’ Late Show house band and CBS’ move not to replace The Late Late Show with James Corden with another chat show, and instead air the cheaper-to-produce game show @Midnight in its place.
He may be a day short, but Fallon recently re-upped his contract through 2028.
“I got a wild career, man,” former Entourage star Jerry Ferrara tells ABC Audio. “I’m not even saying it’s like the best career ever, but I think it’s one of the more unique ones, that’s for sure.”
Indeed, the guy who got famous playing fast-talking dealmaker Turtle in Entourage has appeared opposite Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman in Last Vegas, was directed by Clint Eastwood in Sully and recently appeared on the smash series Power.
He now has a new project: Throwbacks, a sports, entertainment and lifestyle podcast he’s co-hosting with Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart.
Ferrara was early to the podcasting game, having started one with his wife back in 2012, but he explains the new project combines some of his great loves. “My side hustles … have always been about, ‘Hey, how can I figure out how to semi earn a living talking and doing things that I like do for fun,’ which was always like video games, golf and talking sports, right?”
He and Leinart share interests in each other’s respective careers, and with kids the same age, they’re “becoming friends in real time.”
Entourage turned 20 years old in July, and Ferrara describes how fondly he looks back at it. “It’s a lot easier to appreciate it now because when it was going on, I remember just being … always worried it was going to get taken away because it was too good to be true, you know?”
He adds, “So now knowing that, hey, look, there’s nothing that could happen. No one can take it away. … It’s nice to look back on it. I have a 16-year-old nephew who’s watching it now … and it’s so funny to see a young person nowadays watching it.”
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 first photos of the Bridgerton season 4 stars are officially out, featuring joint shots with season leads Luke Thompson and Yerin Ha.
Netflix dropped the new images on Monday and also announced that season 4 of the Regency era series “is officially in production.”
In the upcoming season, Ha is slated to play the love interest of Thompson’s character, Benedict Bridgerton.
The streamer called Ha’s character, Sophie Baek, “a victim of tragic circumstances.”
In one of the new photos, Thompson and Ha are seen sitting next to one another on what appears to be a production cart. Thompson is dressed in a gray tweed three-piece suit, a gray tweed overcoat and a white button down, while Ha sports an oxblood leather trench coat, a brown windowpane tweed suit and gold jewelry.
Speaking with Tudum, Netflix’s official site, about the highly anticipated upcoming season, Thompson said season 4 is “striking” because it features “the struggle between a proper old-school fairy tale — the romance of it — and the actual reality of the world.”
“You have to hold both of them — the romance and the reality — in your hand,” he said. “In its best version, ‘true love’ happens in the middle of that.”
He added, “The storyline is a bit of a twist on Cinderella. You remember being told those stories as a child — the magic and the romance of them. It’s really exciting to have that weaved into the world that we know of Bridgerton. … It’s such a great story, but it’s also, I hope, really relatable.”
