Priyanka Chopra Jonas is taking the red pill.
The actress and international beauty icon is in final talks to join the cast of the untitled fourth film in the Matrix saga, the Wachowskis’ game-changing action franchise, insiders close to negotiations said.
The Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow film is being directed by series co-creator Lana Wachowski. She’ll join the previously announced Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Neil Patrick Harris. Details about her prospective character are currently under wraps.
The “Matrix 4” cast has been in fight training for weeks for production start, which will begin imminently in Northern California.
Chopra Jonas is a National Film Award winner with more than 60 films to her credit. Her U.S. television debut was on the ABC drama “Quantico,” which ran for three seasons. Chopra Jonas made history as the first Indian-born actor to star as the lead of a primetime network series and won a People’s Choice award for this role in 2016. She was featured on the cover of TIME magazine’s coveted TIME 100 issue in 2016, named as one of the “Most Influential People” in the world, and recognized as one of Forbes Most Powerful Women.
Chopra Jonas recently starred in and co-produced “The Sky is Pink,” an indie in the official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival. She’ll next be seen in Netflix’s “We Can Be Heroes,” from by Robert Rodriguez, and an adaptation of the Man Booker Prize winning novel ‘”The White Tiger,” which she is also executive producing. She’s also developing an Indian wedding comedy with Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor for Universal, in which she is set to star and co-produce. She’ll film “Matrix 4” concurrently in tandem with “Citadel,” an Amazon series with Richard Madden from The Russo Brothers.
Chopra runs her own production company, Purple Pebble Pictures, which is headquartered in Mumbai and Los Angeles. She is repped by manager Anjula Acharia, UTA’s Chris Hart and Jason Heyman, and Grubman Shire.
Source: Variety
The Maze Runner star Dexter Darden has been tapped to star in Peacock’s Saved By The Bell reboot.
According to Deadline, Darden will join Josie Totah as one of the members of the new cast. Returning cast members Mario Lopez and Elizabeth Berkley are also set to star.
His role hasn’t been divulged, but this show won’t be the only thing Darden will be seen in the near future. He has Hulu’s The Binge coming up as well as the Spike Lee-executive produced Son of the South.
30 Rock writer-producer Tracey Wigfield is set to executive produce the Saved by the Bell reboot. While it’s not known if the series will debut at the same time as Peacock’s launch, but the streaming service itself will debut in April for Comcast subscribers for being available to everyone by January.
Source: Shadow & Act
Casting for the second season of Jordan Peele’s rendition of the famed anthology series The Twilight Zone has been rounded out. Some heavy hitters and Emmy winners are joining the CBS All Access show.
The new additions include If Beale Street Could Talk actor Colman Domingo, Emmy and Tony Award-winning actor Billy Porter and Tony Award-nominated actor Daniel Sunjata.
Last year, Porter made history when he became the first openly gay Black man to be nominated and win in a lead acting category at the Primetime Emmys for his portrayal of Pray Tell on the FX drama Pose. Porter took home the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama Series.
Prominent actors featured on The Twilight Zone’s first season include Sanaa Lathan, Damson Idris, Jessica Williams, DeWanda Wise and Tracy Morgan.
The first season of Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone and the original series are available to stream on CBS All Access.
Source: Shadow & Act
Dave Chappelle won the best comedy album award for the third year in a row at the 2020 Grammys on Sunday.
Tanya Tucker and Brandi Carlile, who presented the honor, accepted on Chappelle’s behalf as he wasn’t present at the ceremony, which was held at Staples Center in Los Angeles.
The comedian’s reign over the category began in 2017, when he won for the album version of his two Netflix comeback specials, The Age of Spin and Deep in the Heart of Texas. Last year’s winning album, Equanimity & The Bird Revelation, along with this year’s, Sticks & Stones, were also distributed by Netflix.
His latest effort covers everything from gun control to the opioid crisis, though much of the focus is on Chappelle’s views of “cancel culture.” He examines what he describes as “celebrity hunting season” through the lens of the accusations and controversies surrounding Michael Jackson, R. Kelly and Kevin Hart.
Chappelle beat out Ellen DeGeneres’ Relatable, Aziz Ansari’s Right Now, Trevor Noah’s Son of Patricia and Jim Gaffigan’s Quality Time in the category.
DeGeneres’ nomination prevented the category from completely shutting out women, as it has done many times before. But even the women who do receive noms rarely win, as it has only happened five times in the category’s 60-year history.
Alicia Keys hosted the 62nd annual Grammy Awards, which aired on CBS from Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Fresh off of last night’s buzzed-about season premiere, “grown-ish” has been picked up for a fourth season on Freeform. Starring Yara Shahidi, Trevor Jackson, Francia Raisa, Emily Arlook, Jordan Buhat, Chloe Bailey, Halle Bailey, Luka Sabbat and Diggy Simmons, the series is a contemporary take on the issues that students face in the world of higher education.
Currently airing on THURSDAYS at 8 p.m. EST/PST on Freeform, the gang returns as confident, eager and seasoned upper-classmen, with Zoey and her girls (… and Vivek) moving into an off-campus home, ready to take on the school year. They quickly realize that they have been mistaken about the disillusionment of adulthood, with real-life problems coming for them, including student loans, work/life balance and, of course, messy breakups.
Freeform’s “grown-ish” is produced by ABC Signature Studios, a part of Disney Television Studios, and executive produced by Kenya Barris, Julie Bean, Jenifer Rice-Genzuk Henry, Craig Doyle, Anthony Anderson, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Sugland and E. Brian Dobbins.
Season two of “grown-ish” ranked as last year’s No. 1 live-action comedy on cable among Women 18-34 and Females 12-34.
When Sony says Bad Boys for Life, the studio means for life.
Just as Sony readies for the Friday release of the third installment of the action franchise starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, it is making moves to develop a fourth entry, thus extending even further the sporadic buddy cop movie series that began in 1995.
Chris Bremner, who worked on Bad Boys for Life, has been tapped to pen the script, we have learned.
Smith and Lawrence are, of course, expected to return and the plan is therefore not to have the same time lag between Bad Boys II and Bad Boys for Life. The time lag was due to several factors, such as spiraling budgetary costs, but also about finding the right story.
The sequel had several fits and stops in recent years, with different writers and directors coming and going. The movie’s final writing credits include Joe Carnahan and Peter Craig receiving “story by” credit and sharing “screenplay by” credit with Bremner.
The movie has been garnering quite positive reviews and, despite the lines of “One last time” in the trailer, leaves plenty of room for a sequel by the end.
Bremner’s schedule is heating up as he is also writing National Treasure 3 for Disney, among other projects. That project is being produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is also the producer behind Bad Boys for Life. He is repped by Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
The latest film to the Bad Boys Trilogy, titled Bad Boys For Life, could be considered the most action-packed yet most touching of them all, catches up with ladies man Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and married man Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) almost 15 years later after the last film. After having defended Miami—and almost destroying the city in the process—the crime-fighting duo faces a new threat in the new villain Isabel Artreas (Kate del Castillo) and her son Armando Armas (Jacob Scipio).
Smith and Lawrence—largely known to audiences for their roles on Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air and Martin, respectively—expertly filled those roles, carrying over a likeability and familiarity to the characters of Lowrey and Burnett. Audiences related enough that a sequel — Bad Boys II — premiered in July of 2003 (almost a decade later, mind you) with Michael Bay once again returning to the director’s chair. As expected, particularly given Bay’s boisterous resume at the time, he doubled down on the hyperviolence of the original film to create what some junk-food cinema connoisseurs (and modern genre auteurs such as Edgar Wright) consider to be a masterpiece of gonzo action.
While Bay did not return to the director’s chair for this year’s much-delayed second sequel, Bad Boys for Life, his music video aesthetics linger in the work of directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah and cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert. It’s all in the perpetually moving camera, the saturated neon, and the sweeping shots of the Atlantic ocean and the Miami skyline at dusk. Each kinetic shot is edited at a brisk clip, of course, recalling Bay’s original vision.
Bad Boys for Life wisely opts out of surpassing the over-the-top carnage of its predecessor. Instead, the film scales some things back to focus on its characters. The plot is a boilerplate revenge tale.
Keeping things within the area code, Bad Boys for Life tears a few pages out of the Michael Mann handbook by setting its sights on the relationship between the two cops: lifelong friends who joined the force together and have saved each other’s asses on countless occasions. Exploring the same themes of aging and friendship as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, Bad Boys for Life finds the two characters coming to terms with age and realizing they’re hardly the invincible superheroes that they once thought they were.
But they’re not alone. This time around, they’re joined by Rita (Paola Núñez), a former flame of Lowrey and the leader of a team of young police officers in a special outfit named AMMO (who are clearly being primed for their own series of films.) The youngbloods of AMMO are a new breed of cop: they do things by the book, and they’re sort of dorky compared to the ultra suave Lowrey and even family man Burnett. They also utilize technology to surveil and bring criminals to justice, eschewing the style of brute force and explosions that Lowry and Burnett have perpetually incurred the wrath of loveable Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano). The world is changing and they need to adapt — or quite literally die.
With this film, there’s a weighted currency to the more emotional moments in Bad Boys for Life. Screenwriters Chris Bremner, Peter Craig, and action movie favorite Joe Carnahan treat all of the drama with a dose of severity, even despite all the soap-iness. Unlike past chapters, the writers really try to dig into the characters and their motivations. Whereas Smith’s Lowery was once all suave and silk shirts, he’s given some depth here as his origins begin to surface. Smith, in turn, delivers a memorable performance with the material, one that’s equal parts funny, emotional, and introspective.
At the same time, Bad Boys for Life retains the irreverent sense of humor associated with the series without overtly relying on winks towards the audience, largely thanks to Lawrence’s performance. Throughout the film, Lawrence’s Burnett almost acts as an omnipotent narrator, someone who has seen every over-the-top car chase movie and provides just the right quip, parlaying exactly what your average know-it-all in the audience is thinking. Yet Lawrence’s comedic chops and affable charm make this device work, never coming off as cloying or too cute for its own good. Even when his humor feels like it may be undercutting the “drama” of a scene, it brings the audience back to reality: This is a Bad Boys movie.
Yes, don’t get it twisted: Bad Boys for Life is hardly an arty meditation on friendship, life, and aging. The film still delivers an impressive amount of car chases, gunfights, and explosions. Without spoiling too much, Smith beats up an informant, a dead body destroys a minivan, a helicopter crashes, and a motorcycle chase through the streets of Miami is the centerpiece of the picture. Bad Boys for Life even has the imagination to indulge in the supernatural.
Bad Boys for Life thrives from stellar action filmmaking and could be an affecting closer to an action film trilogy, even if there are moments that feel like an attempt to build a cinematic universe of sorts (including a post-credits tag). The quieter character gasps are appreciated, particularly following the extreme bombast of the second film, and while it could be a nice capper to a series that has spanned three decades, audiences would undoubtedly show up in another 17 years just to hang out with Mike and Marcus again. Maybe even two years.
Bad Boys for Life crashes into theaters on January 17th.
Eddie Murphy is reflecting on his time at Saturday Night Live, including how he survived the show’s infamously tumultuous times in the 1980s.
In the first episode of SNL’s new web series Stories From the Show, Murphy details his time on the NBC series, including his rocky start. His first episode as a cast member aired Dec. 13, 1980, right after the original cast and series creator Lorne Michaels left. Murphy recalls the audience’s disdain for the changes: “It was hard at first for the simple fact that the show was so beloved,” he says. “So the audience was like, ‘F— all of y’all, and f— this show.’”
The comedian, who was just 19 at the time, says he wasn’t fazed because he was just “so happy” to be on television. After his first year on the show, Murphy says head writer Michael O’Donoghue “came in and fired everybody,” except for Murphy and Joe Piscopo. The reason he made the cut was simple, Murphy says: He ate fake dog food during a Weekend Update sketch.
“[O’Donoghue] came in and said, ‘And the only reason Murphy didn’t get fired was because he ate that dog food,’” Murphy recalls, adding that he told O’Donoghue it wasn’t dog food, it was hash. “He looked at me like ‘What the f—?’ But it was too late and I kept the show. But I was that close. If he had known that was hash, none of this would be happening.”
Murphy eventually left the show in 1984 to pursue his burgeoning film career. In December, Murphy notably returned to the SNL stage for the first time in 35 years as host, bringing back some of his most memorable characters to boot.
Watch the first episode of Stories From the Show above.
Source: EW