Not that you depend on Patti Stanger's dating series The Millionaire Matchmaker in order to navigate your own romantic life, but the Bravo series seems poised this season to give indispensable advice. Debuting tonight, the season three premiere features two bachelors from a successful moving company called College Hunks Hauling Junk -- and one of those bachelors insists on taking his date to "haul junk" with him. In dumpsters, to be exact. Pheromones and actual toxins flying! In an interview with Movieline, Stanger let us in on a few secrets of the new season, covering everything from misogyny to hooking up her fellow Bravo coworkers.
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The most successful police procedurals on television boast more than a talented cast and expertly-written investigations solved within an hour -- they depend on first-rate comic relief. And the most humorous moments (as well as some of the more sincere) on the most-watched television drama are brought to you by Michael Weatherly, who plays charismatic Senior Field Agent Anthony DiNozzo on NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. As the foil to Mark Harmon's humorless Senior Agent, Weatherly's character regularly taps into pop culture for investigative inspiration (the movie Speed once helped him solve a case) while throwing back to the witty scoundrels played by Cary Grant. Thanks in part to Weatherly's popularity, NCIS rang in its 150th episode on CBS last week.
A few days ago, Movieline caught up with Weatherly, who was en route to the house of recent NCIS guest star Robert Wagner, to discuss his affection for the It Takes a Thief star, his first television gig with Bill Cosby, and why he tends to take his pants off when he is nervous.
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With its two-punch powerhouse of Mad Men and Breaking Bad (which stars Pixar friend and Emmy champion Bryan Cranston), AMC remains the gold standard in television serials. But if Sterling-Cooper's chiseled sociopaths marked new creative vistas for basic cable, the pay-network Starz plans to splatter that view with entrails and bodily fluid via the new series Spartacus: Sand and Blood. The show, which stars newcomer Andy Whitfield as the titular slave-cum-gladiator, is a fresh, "accurate" take on Ancient Rome, with all the frontal nudity and unscrupulous survival tactics of the time. Lucy Lawless, who war-cried for six seasons as the star of Xena: Warrior Princess, co-stars as the scantily-clad Lucretia. Movieline caught up with Lawless at the Television Critics Association panel in Pasadena to discuss the bold new series, which, despite not having aired yet, is already renewed for a second season.
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Flying into Pasadena for the TCAs just hours after wrapping some scenes for its third season (debuting in March), Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston was chatty about the progress of the show. This season his character, Walter White -- a high school chemistry teacher with lung cancer who sells methamphetamine to support his family -- reveals his drug-peddling secrets to key characters. Movieline talked to Cranston about discovering Walter's essence, and his role in Pixar's mysterious sci-fi feature, John Carter of Mars.
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Wes Anderson knows as well as anybody that around this time every year, we all have it pretty easy predicting the winner of the Best Animated Feature prize at the Oscars -- just inscribe the statuette with Pixar's most recent production, and move along to the harder categories. Not so in 2009, when a surfeit of excellent animation resulted not only in an expansion of the Animated Feature category, but a handful of legitimate contenders to upset Pixar come March. Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of them, a lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion gem that signified a creative milestone for a director long prone to accusations of merely repeating himself with every film. Fox's ambition, warmth, humor and style amount to the most accomplished and mature of Anderson's films to date -- a kid's film for grown-ups, a wry meditation on innocence lost. Those qualities -- not to mention its A-list voice pedigree boasting George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray -- should position Mr. Fox well in the ongoing Oscar race against Up.
Anderson spoke to Movieline last week about making the most of awards season, the virtues of animation versus live-action, how he accidentally cast himself as a weasel, and how the French messed up his plans to see Avatar.
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Playing that other Salmon girl in Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones, Kiwi actress Rose McIver turned Lindsey -- older sister to Saoirse Ronan's Susie -- into one of the film's more grounded and enjoyable elements: part Nancy Drew, part budding action hero, and always convincing in her transformation from gawky tweendom through young adulthood. We spoke with the young actress, who might be familiar to your kids as one of the stars of Power Rangers Racing Performance Machines, on a recent visit to L.A. for Bones's U.S. premiere.
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Project Runway is an unfriendly behemoth, and it's forced to chew up and spit out someone every episode, even the first. Unfortunately in last night's premiere, Heidi Klum zeroed in on L.A.-based designer Christiane King, whose dress was deemed poorly executed and disjointed. Movieline caught up with the 30-year-old Côte d'Ivoire native to discuss last night's elimination and the designer whose dress she thought was more worth an auf'ing.
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Cassie Scerbo is the modern-day version of a triple threat. A cable actress, pop singer and an accomplished dancer, her skill trifecta has earned her roles in a number of projects including Bring It On: In It to Win It and currently, ABC Family's second highest rated series Make It or Break It, where she plays Lauren Tanner, Rocky Mountain's "bitch of the beam." When she isn't embodying one of the nastiest characters on ABC Family, the upbeat actress packs her schedule with voice overs, auditions, online college courses, church and a boyfriend, her Make It co-star Cody Longo.
Earlier this week, Movieline caught Scerbo in a rare moment off to discuss her Facebook death threats, an upcoming cameo in the Not Another parody movie co-starring Chevy Chase, and nearly everything in between. Although she was hoarse from a nonstop itinerary, the upswinging actress presented herself with the certainty of a star.
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After being asked a question at HBO's TCAs press conference about whether she'd consider hosting a late night comedy show, Rosie O'Donnell went on to divulge her take on ConanGate: "I'm a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and that franchise that has been 60 years with NBC. If you're privileged enough to be asked to ride the bus, you should say, 'Thank you,' and drive it to the best of your ability. And when it's time for them to a hire a new driver, you should say, 'Thank you for allowing me to drive this as long as I did.' And pass the keys to the new guy. With red hair. And not try to flatten his tires before he gets going."
Over a decade before Glenn Close's character stewed a pet rabbit in Fatal Attraction, Jessica Walter won a Golden Globe nomination for her role as a psychotic stalker fan in Play Misty For Me, the first feature film directed by Clint Eastwood. Thirty years later, Walter won the hearts of an entirely different demographic with her Emmy-nominated role on Arrested Development as the Bluth family's sinfully overbearing matriarch. While Arrested fans may not see the feature film for a couple years still (Mitch Hurwitz is rumored to still be writing the script), they can at least catch Walter in FX's new animated spy series Archer, which premieres tonight.
Movieline caught up with the lovely actress earlier this week to chat about how her Archer role was designed with her in mind, what she thought about her stint voicing Fran Sinclair on Dinosaurs, and her excitement for that Arrested Development script.
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James McAvoy has more than held his own against some of the more domineering screen presences of the last few years, from Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland to Angelina Jolie in Wanted. Now his latest, the semi-biopic The Last Station, drops him into the eye of an ensemble hurricane featuring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and Paul Giamatti. The 30-year-old-Scotman plays Valentin Bulgakov, an idealistic young Russian recruited to work as the secretary of the saintly, celebrated novelist Leo Tolstoy (Plummer). But what begins as an act of moral conscience soon deteriorates into a hot political mess as Tolstoy's inheritance-obsessed wife Sofya (Mirren) and estate overseer Chertkov (Giamatii) vie for Valentin's loyalty. Which is to say nothing of the young man's Tolstoyan vow of celibacy, which is awfully hard to uphold with the beautiful Masha (Kerry Condon) slinking into his bed in the middle of the night.
These outsized personalities orbit around McAvoy's wide-eyed historical witness, with mixed (at best) overall results. Eschewing his co-stars' theatrics, McAvoy delivers at least one modulated success -- a winning performance in which every embattled optimist will likely see a little bit of him- or herself. He spoke with Movieline this week about his crash-course in Russophilia, annoying Christopher Plummer, and the naughtiness of rumors.
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When I checked in with Nina Garcia last week and discussed, among other things, the new batch of Project Runway contestants, she lit up when I asked her to pick a favorite film scene of all time. Get this: Her answer combines style, elegance, romance, and timeless luxury. There's also some thrown-in hotness, if you're into that sort of thing.
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Cougar Town/Scrubs showrunner Bill Lawrence's candor makes you want to pry at him all day. Following a spirited TCA panel where he sat alongside peers from The Middle and Modern Family and riffed on, among other things, Conan O'Brien's liberation and Cougar Town's questionable title, I -- along with the horde of journos -- found myself racking up only more questions. For instance, would he really change Cougar Town to C. Town, as he'd mentioned offhand? Was there real benefit to doing a ninth season of Scrubs? And when is this fragmented network TV viewership going to vault a scripted series to the heights of American Idol? All of Lawrence's answers were provocative, and he also found time to wax optimistic on Conan's future.
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In Andrea Arnold's drama Fish Tank, Michael Fassbender plays Connor, a charming rogue who begins to date the mother of surly Essex teenager Mia (Katie Jarvis) but turns the entire family upside down when Mia, too, begins to fall for him. Fassbender himself has managed to seduce and shake up Hollywood; after impressing (and dieting) in Steve McQueen's Hunger, then swanning through Inglourious Basterds as the debonair Hickox, he's got directors like Steven Soderbergh, Cary Fukunaga, and David Cronenberg falling at his feet to work with him.
As Fish Tank is readied for its U.S. debut, Fassbender talked to Movieline about its tricky moments and his intriguing projects to come.
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Shawn Ashmore just can't help it -- he's drawn to the cold. (Perhaps it's because he's Canadian?) The 30-year-old actor first gained notice as Iceman in the first three X-Men films, but he'll have the opportunity to take the lead in the buzzed-about Sundance entry Frozen later this month. In director Adam Green's thriller, Ashmore plays Lynch, a skiier who is mistakenly stranded fifty feet in the air on a chair lift along with two of his friends (Kevin Zegers and Emma Bell), then must dig deep to survive and escape or stay and freeze.
Ashmore talked to Movieline about how brutally real the shooting of the movie was, the pact he and his fellow actors made for verisimilitude, and his thoughts on Bryan Singer returning to the X-Men franchise.
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