Brazilian-born actress Morena Baccarin is so strikingly beautiful that ABC designed an entire race around her. As Anna, the manipulative leader of the extra-terrestrial "Visitors" on the network's remake of V, Baccarin has played a pivotal role in the series. Not only was she relied on heavily for the show's promotional campaign last year (there's a good chance people thought V would be a one-woman show), but she plays a politician so fearless and so evil that she would make real-life legislators cry -- or at least fear for the human race.
With two weeks until V's season finale, Baccarin phoned Movieline to discuss the art of green screen, the perks of playing an alien and why she thinks Joss Whedon is ready to direct a mega-budget action flick.
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In 2010, an Olympic gold medal in figure skating qualifies you for two distinctions: 1) undisputed world champion; 2) salsa-dancing wannabe -- at least in the eyes of Dancing with the Stars's judging panel. Evan Lysacek may have cleaned up in Vancouver last February against ferocious competitors Johnny Weir and Russia's hilarious Evgeni Plushenko, but he's just as vulnerable to America's vote on DWTS's 10th season. Last week the 24-year-old athlete suffered a slight concussion when preparing to samba with partner Anna Trebunskaya, recovering enough to earn a score of 21, his lowest yet. Just yesterday, he triumphed with a perfect 30 during his Argentine Tango. It appears Lysacek is back in the game.
Movieline caught up with the gold medalist last week to discuss Dancing with the Stars, transitioning into acting roles, and Johnny Weir's pesky snipes.
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Katee Sackhoff is a self-admitted thrill junkie -- that's why she was a perfect fit for the daredevil pilot Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, and it's what made her casting on the final season of 24 sound like a no-brainer. Still, her character Dana Walsh hasn't always had an easy time of it; during the first half of the season, she was often stuck in a subplot involving a no-good ex-boyfriend, and it's only recently that Sackhoff's gotten to show off her action-packed bona fides as Dana was revealed to be this season's obligatory, villainous mole.
In advance of tonight's episode, Movieline spoke to the always-candid actress to get her own feelings about her character's arc and to hear about the torturous stunt she couldn't wait to do herself.
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Along with Banksy's self-distributed Exit to the Gift Shop, City Island's ongoing box office run is one of the more inspirational indie success stories of the year to date. The excellent ensemble comedy about a dysfunctional, secretive family living on the titular island just off the Bronx expanded over the weekend, crossing the $2 million threshold that few (if any) observers expected it might reach. Among the beneficiaries: Steven Strait, who stars as Tony, a convict in whom prison guard Vince (Andy Garcia) takes an unusual interest on the cusp of his parole.
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Rooney Mara goes through the wringer as the lead of the revamped A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it's nothing compared to what she had to endure in her upcoming film, the David Fincher-directed Facebook drama The Social Network. The meticulous Fincher is notorious for demanding that his actors peform dozens of takes, as Jake Gyllenhaal found out while shooting Zodiac: "Sometimes we'd do a lot of takes, and he'd turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there, 'Delete the last 10 takes,'" Gyllenhaal told the NYT in 2007. "And as an actor that's very hard to hear."
When Movieline spoke to Mara this week, we had to know: Is Fincher still up to his old tricks?
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The grim, almost impossibly violent Harry Brown will no doubt draw endless comparisons to Dirty Harry and other risible exemplars of do-it-yourself crimefighting. But beyond the grit of the British projects where lawless hell descends, the film truly thrives in the quiet dignity afforded by leading man Michael Caine. Even as his ex-Marine title character goes to war against the subculture of hoodlums, addicts, dealers and thieves, the 77-year-old acting legend reinforces the bloodshed with purpose and gravitas. Clearly there's a little something more going on here than just target practice; Brown's mission to restore order is perhaps secondary only to Caine's own to effect change.
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The fictional writer's room of 30 Rock is a dormitory of misfits, droll freaks, and the occasionally sane scribe. Comedian Scott Adsit's character Pete Hornberger manages to be all three: a neurotic, convulsing everyman who can still put Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) in her place or spring Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) from a fight in the basement. For Adsit, a veteran of Chicago's Second City improv troupe, the show has become its own kind of beast, wavering between Laugh In-style absurdity and stark reality. Movieline spoke with the 44-year-old actor about Pete Hornberger's journey on 30 Rock, Second City nostalgia, and performing with a very nervous comic legend.
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If you think you may have read a disproportionate amount of coverage here over the last few weeks about filmmaker Alex Gibney, you're probably right. But it's only because the Oscar-winning documentarian has a staggering number of films arriving on the scene at once: In addition to his three movies debuting at the ongoing Tribeca Film Festival, Gibney's Casino Jack and the United States of Money opens May 7 in limited release. Not even Werner Herzog can match than kind of productivity, though as Gibney told Movieline, it was kind of accidental for himself as well.
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There's something about Kyle Gallner that does "tortured" so well. Whether he's exacting torment on his classmates in Veronica Mars or suffering at the hands of evil in Jennifer's Body and A Haunting in Connecticut, the 23-year-old actor isn't afraid to let fear and ferocity flicker across his baby face, and it's a trait that serves him well as Quentin, the high-schooler who bears the brunt of Freddy Krueger's wrath in the new remake of Nightmare on Elm Street.
This week, Movieline spoke to Gallner about two intriguing indies he has coming up (Goodnight Moon and Beautiful Boy) and the most horrifying part of his Elm Street experience: acting in the near-nude for days on end.
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This week's Please Give returns Catherine Keener to the fraught, funny world of Nicole Holofcener, marking their fourth collaboration since 1996's Walking and Talking. This time, the crisis on hand is as social as it is personal -- the epidemic of white liberal guilt that wallops her Kate into a new, unusual variety of midlife crisis. Making matters worse, Kate's daughter Abby (Sarah Steele) has bad skin and a jones for $200 jeans, while husband Alex (Oliver Platt) has only slightly more compunctions about the affair he's having with his neighbor's granddaughter (Amanda Peet) than he does about waiting for the neighbor to die so he can expand their apartment.
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Movieline on Tuesday dropped by a benefit in Tribeca for Scenarios USA, a non-profit that promotes writing and filmmaking among under-served teens. A handful of the kids wind up working with professional directors (including Michael Apted, Tamara Jenkins, Griffin Dunne and others) to bring their stories to the screen. And just as dinner was getting underway, in walked Doug Liman, who sits on Scenarios' board and had collaborated on the program's first short film -- He Said, She Said -- in 1999. But just as important for him at the moment: He's preparing to send one of Cannes' most anticipated films -- the Valerie Plame thriller Fair Game -- to the festival, where it will screen in competition. Liman took a moment to talk it over with Movieline.
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As indie-film pairings go, The Good Heart's reunion of Brian Cox and Paul Dano is a fairly provocative one. A decade after their collaboration in the controversial L.I.E. -- featuring 15-year-old Dano as a disaffected young man who befriends Cox's pedophile Big John Harrigan -- the duo teams again in the tale of gruff bar owner Jacques (Cox) and his accidental protégé Lucas (Dano). They meet in the hospital where Jacques convalesces after his umpteenth heart attack and Lucas recovers from an attempted suicide. As the older man's health deteriorates, Lucas's applies his sensitivity to opening both the bar and its proprietor to a more inclusive manner of existence. Under Icelandic director Dagur Kári (making his American feature debut), Dano and Cox mount funny, bittersweet pas de deux around the clash of new and old, kind and coarse, and a New York City lost and found.
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Most middle-aged actors would be flattered to find out that one of the hippest series on television had customized a part for them, but for Billy Baldwin, it was a hard pill to swallow. Baldwin begins his Gossip Girl arc tonight as William van der Woodsen, the long-lost father of Blake Lively's affluent Upper East Sider, but at 46, the second-youngest of the Baldwin brothers had a hard time accepting that he was old enough to play the father of a high-school graduate. In anticipation of his debut, Baldwin talked to Lindsey DiMattina (of our sister site Hollywood Life) about finally embracing his role, his "Jewish geography" conversations with Blake Lively, and his own run-in with privileged Upper East Siders.
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Robert Duvall visited New York today for the Tribeca premiere of his drama Get Low, and Movieline sat down for a few minutes to talk about the Oscar-winner's typically superb work opposite Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black. (The film opens July 30 in limited release.) But Duvall also has an eye on the future -- or specifically, a long-accursed Terry Gilliam project that he previously confirmed he'd take on when (or if) the director can pull it together. Perhaps not surprisingly, Duvall explained today, that could take a while.
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She may not be a former Canadian pop star in real life, but Cobie Smulders plays one on TV. As Robin Scherbatsky on CBS's Emmy-winning How I Met Your Mother, the Vancouver-born actress plays a morning-news anchor who dabbled in bubblegum pop music in the early '80s under the stage name Robin Sparkles. And while Robin's clique of thirtysomething friends -- played by Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan -- have only uncovered two recordings to date, the music videos have been so popular that they have inspired dozens of fan parodies on YouTube. Aside from being a former pop star though, Smulders' character is also the show's consummate bachelorette who just this season won the heart of Neil Patrick Harris' comically machismo bachelor.
As How I Met Your Mother's fifth season winds down, Cobie Smulders caught Movieline up on her character's lost variety show with Alan Thicke, the scenes she hated filming this season and her favorite guest star to date.
[Spoilerphobes beware: Smulders revealed a few mild plot twists ahead in the series' fifth season.]
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