January 14, 2021 • No Comments • Entertainment News

Saban Films(LOS ANGELES) — In his new film Redemption Day, former C.S.I. star Gary Dourdan plays a U.S. Special Forces vet suffering from PTSD, who gets back into the action after his wife is kidnapped by terrorists. 

Dourdan’s super-fit in the film and while he was already familiar with firearms, he tells ABC Audio how he prepared to accurately play the character before the cameras rolled in Morocco.

“What I do is I go to a…Thai boxing camp in Thailand, and I take as much time as I possibly can to just get my fight training…top-notch, and also get my my cardio there,” the laid-back actor explains.

“But while I was there, I also got to get gun training because…they have strict gun laws in Morocco and you just can’t be working around firearms unless you’re shooting that day,” he adds. “So I made sure I got a bunch of training in Thailand.”

He laughs, “They’re a bit more lax with the heavy artillery in Thailand.”

Once Redemption Day started shooting in Morocco, Gary explained he brushed up on-set with the firearms master.

“But everything happened so fast,” Dourdan explains, “So before you know it, you got stuff exploding around you and you’re doing flips and whatever else is going on and you’re diving away from the fragments that are being blown at you.”  

Redemption Day, which also stars Ernie Hudson, Andy Garcia, Tenet‘s Martin Donovan, and Marvels’ The Inhumans vet Serinda Swan, is now in theaters and streaming.

By Stephen Iervolino
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

January 14, 2021 • No Comments • Entertainment News

ABC/Randy Holmes(LOS ANGELES) — Jeff Bridges shared some good news about his battle with lymphoma.

The Big Lebowski actor, who announced his cancer diagnosis in October, revealed his tumor has “drastically shrunk.”

In a post on his website, the 71-year-old Oscar winner said he learned the positive news after he went in for a CT scan on January 6 to evaluate how his “new protocol” is affecting him.

“Turns out, it’s working beautifully,” he wrote. “The thing has drastically shrunk.”

Bridges also wrote about receiving the news that his tumor shrunk amid the riots at the U.S. Capitol.

“I come home elated with the news. I turn on the TV to find out what’s going in the world, and….well…I don’t have to tell you what’s goin’ on,” he wrote. “To see our country attacking itself broke my heart. A question rose in me — what’s an individual to do in a situation like this? My mentor, Rozzell Sykes, came to mind. His manta was ‘Be Love.'”

Bridges has kept his fan base updated throughout his cancer fight. In December, he shared a photo revealing he’d shaved his head and was “feeling good.”

Lymphoma is cancer of the body’s lymphatic system, which helps fight germs, according to the Mayo Clinic. Treatment for the disease varies but may involve chemotherapy, immunotherapy medications, radiation therapy, a bone marrow transplant or some combination thereof.

When he publicly announced his diagnosis last year, Bridges shared, “Although it is a serious disease, I feel fortunate that I have a great team of doctors and the prognosis is good.”

By Hayley Fitzpatrick
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

January 14, 2021 • No Comments • Entertainment News

Rocco Spaziani/Archivio Rocco Spaziani/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images(WASHINGTON D.C.) — Tilda Swinton opened up in a new interview about her sexual identity and what it means to her.

Speaking to British Vogue on Wednesday for its February 2021 issue, the Doctor Strange star opened up about playing characters that identified as queer and says she shares something in common with them.

“I’m very clear that queer is actually, for me anyway, to do with sensibility,” the 60-year-old British actress stated. “I always felt I was queer – I was just looking for my queer circus, and I found it.”

Swinton, whose been in a romantic relationship with German/New Zealand visual artist Sandro Kopp since 2004, continued, “Having found it, it’s my world.”

She furthers that her circle has expanded to several new “family” members, which are all acclaimed filmmakers.

“Now I have a family with Wes Anderson, I have a family with Bong Joon-ho, I have a family with Jim Jarmusch, I have a family with Luca Guadagnino, with Lynne Ramsay, with Joanna Hogg,” the Oscar winner disclosed.

Also during the interview, Swinton confessed that her goals in life were anything but launching a successful movie career.

“I’ve never had any ambition as an artist,” she exclaimed. “That may sound crazy and transgressive, but it’s a fact. If you’d asked me when I was 10 or 20, I would have said my only ambitions were to live in a family, to have friends that made me laugh and laughed at my jokes, and to live in the Highlands of Scotland, by the sea with a lot of dogs and a kitchen garden. Seriously.”

The Snowpiercer star says she is “blessed” to have achieved those dreams of hers, adding, “Everything else is a bonus. Everything else is just icing and candles and flowers alongside.”

By Megan Stone
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

January 14, 2021 • No Comments • Entertainment News

IFC Midnight(NEW YORK) — As most actors do, Devon Sawa physically prepared and trained for his role as a rugged trapper and outdoorsman for his new thriller, Hunter Hunter. 

“We tried to learn as quickly as possible how to be authentic as possible, and then and then just did the whole acting thing to look as if…this is second nature,” he tells ABC Audio.

However, while the Nikita vet expected having to handle the tools of the trapping trade, one aspect of his character was a real commitment. “You know, the the skinning, the traps, even the smoking — I had to look like I had I was an old school smoker…and boy, was that a thing!” says the actor.

Sawa, who’d only smoked briefly in his late teens, recalls with a laugh, “Well, the director told me…’You smoke in this film.’ I’m like, ‘Oh ok.’ He goes ‘No, you smoke in this film…These guys that live out there…they they put one out and they put one in…”

Sawa says director Shawn Linden asked if he wanted milder clove cigarettes, but the actor refused — perhaps without thinking it through. “We’d be doing a take, I’d be like on take four, I’d be like, (gasping) ‘OK, ok…’ Like cigarette eight. Cigarette nine,” Sawa laughed. 

In the movie, his character Joe stalks a rogue wolf, but soon discovers there’s a different danger closer to his remote cabin, which he shares with his wife and daughter, the latter played by newcomer Summer H. Howell.

A former child star himself, Sawa says Howell has the goods. “I’m pretty good at telling who wants to be there and who doesn’t because that’s where I came from…On set, there’s always two types of kids: the kids who want to be there and the kids whose parents wanted them to be there,” he says.

Of Howell, he says, “She was asking me constantly what films she needed to watch, and…you could tell that she she really wanted to be there. And it shows. She’s she’s a phenomenal young actor.”  

Hunter Hunter is now streaming. 

By Stephen Iervolino
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

January 14, 2021 • No Comments • Entertainment News

Honoree Debbie Allen — ABC/Mike Rosenthal(WASHINGTON D.C.) — The 2020 Kennedy Center Honors, which would have normally aired in December, has been postponed until May 2021 due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization announced on Wednesday.

This 2020 honorees at the 43rd annual national celebration of the arts include beloved Dick Van Dyke, choreographer and actress Debbie Allen, singer-songwriter and activist Joan Baez, country singer-songwriter Garth Brooks and violinist Midori.

In keeping with COVID-19 protocols, the event will feature “small, in-person events and re-envisioned virtual tributes” featuring “multiple events for physically-distant audiences in locations across the Kennedy Center’s campus.”

Each event will include performances and speaking tributes for the honorees.  Virtual events will also be held throughout the week beginning May 17, with additional in-person events still under consideration.

“This past year has taught us many things including the need to be flexible and adaptable,” Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter said in statement on Wednesday.  “They say necessity is the mother of all invention.  The unusual circumstances inspired and opened up new ways for us to present a deeper experience, and hopefully understanding, of the art and lifetime work of our Honorees.”

“Each of the 43rd Kennedy Center Honorees and their work continues to speak to American culture and our national fortitude,” adds Rutter. “We are thrilled to be able to fete these cultural icons in a time where the world and the nation needs the arts more than ever.”

By George Costantino
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.