Amy Sussman/Getty Images(LOS ANGELES) — The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has been a stressful time for all of us, including Chris Rock, and he’s turned to counseling for help.
In an interview with CBS This Morning, obtained by People magazine, Rock says he’s upped his therapy visits to about seven hours after the pandemic hit the U.S. in March.
“You have to tell the truth,” the 55-year-old actor/comedian says of his therapy sessions. “You have to go into therapy prepared to tell the worst part of yourself every week, you know?”
Rock says his therapy eventually taught him that he “could be very hard” on himself. “I need to relax. And I need to listen, I need to take chances,” he added.
In September, Rock told The Hollywood Reporter that he was in therapy as a way of coming to terms with his childhood traumas;
“I thought I was actually dealing with it, and the reality is I never dealt with it,” said the comedian. “The reality was the pain and the fear that that brought me, I was experiencing it every day.”
ABC/Christopher Willard(LOS ANGELES) — With just one day left in 2020, the folks from the coming attractions-spoofing YouTube hit Honest Trailers have slammed the door on the accursed year.
“From the world that brought you 1918, 1347, and Woodstock ’99, comes a year we can’t wait to close the book on,” Trailer Voice Guy intones, over shots of plague, pestilence, and rioting Gen Xers from back in the day.
The trailer starts the look back in January, when we were enjoying “two months of blissful [Sonic the] Hedgehog-filled ignorance,” and fast forwards to the, “hot new virus that affects everyone,” but still remained polarizing, because society.
“The only thing that brought us together was Tiger King,” the trailer notes. “Can you believe that came out 10 years ago?”
Patton Oswalt interrupts in voiceover, contrasting this year to the uplifting climax of Avengers: Endgame. “Think about the ‘On your left’ moment: Cap was down, the odds were against him, and suddenly — hope!” But Patton says 2020 is like, “instead of Wakandans and wizards and zero body fat hunks coming out of those portals, it’s…a never-ending…torrent of diarrhea…That’s 2020.”
This year we discovered “The new home of entertainment is your home,” Trailer Guy says. “And the new home of work is your home. And the new home of school is your home…As we…keep bingeing the shows that help us escape to the ‘Before Times’…because staying home all day eating snacks on a hot couch is literally saving lives.”
The trailer ends with a montage of movie clips in which the various characters all declare, “At least it can’t get any worse.”
“Have you people ever seen a movie?” says Oswalt. “What did you think was gonna happen?”
LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX(NEW YORK) — Bridgerton stars Phoebe Dynover and Regé-Jean Page joined Good Morning Americavirtually on Wednesday to discuss the latest hit from Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland.
The Netflix series, created byChris Van Dusen and based on Julia Quinn’s bestselling novels, is set in London during the Regency era and depicts the equally dramatic and romantic twists and turns of high society’s courting season. The couple at the center of it all, Dynover’s Daphne Bridgerton and Page’s Simon Basset, aka the Duke of Hastings, has sparked the interest of viewers.
Page told GMA the chemistry between his character and Dynover’s was “probably the easiest part” of the job for him.
“We were working with such wonderful material,” the Sylvie’s Love actor said. “The characters already existed … and they have great chemistry in the books, so all we had to do was channel through this amazing chemistry that already existed.”
There was also an intimacy coordinator on the set to help make shooting the most passionate of scenes more comfortable for the actors.
“It was so great to have an intimacy coordinator,” Dynover said. “We blocked every scene weeks before we started shooting them, so by the time we got to set, we knew exactly what we were doing, and we both felt safe. I think it just made the whole experience a lot easier and nicer for both of us.”
With an effortlessly diverse cast, Bridgerton doesn’t look like other period pieces you may have seen set in the early 1800s. It also doesn’t sound like what you might expect, often featuring instrumentals of today’s most popular songs like Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next.”
Dynover said the series is a “reimagined world” of the historical era, with the music and dancing being a “really special part” of the experience.
Dawn Wells Archives(LOS ANGELES) — Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann Summers on the campy classic TV show Gilligan’s Island, has died from COVID-19, ABC News has confirmed.
Her rep noted the actress, motivational speaker and philanthropist “passed peacefully [Wednesday] morning, in no pain as a result of complications due to Covid at the age of 82.”
The brunette actress was the wholesome, “girl next door” castaway counterpart to Tina Louise’s Marilyn Monroe-clone movie star Ginger Grant on the series, which ran from 1964-1967 on CBS.
Wells, a former Miss Nevada, made many stage and screen appearances after her pageant days, but it was her stint on the famously popular show — which saw seven castaways stranded on a deserted island after a three-hour boat tour gone awry — that cemented her pop culture status.
In fact, Wells’ rep noted in a statement, “Dawn’s gingham dress and famous belly button covering shorts worn on ‘Gilligan’s Island’ are currently on display in the lobby of The Hollywood Museum.”
Wells remained close with the character and its legacy. A constant at autograph signings at pop culture conventions, she published a self-help book in 2014 called What Would Mary Ann Do? A Guide to Life.
In it, Wells noted, “It’s not my ego talking, but Mary Ann wasn’t just a silly and sweet ingenue. She was bright, fair-minded and reasonable.” She added, “Sherwood Schwartz, the show’s producer and creator, was smart enough to put her in short shorts so you wouldn’t think of her as your bossy sister.”
Walt Disney Television/Yolanda Perez(NEW YORK) — As the Daily Maildetailed the “Spanish flavored” wedding ceremony of Alec Baldwin and the lifestyle influencer Hilaria Baldwin, she insisted Wednesday to The New York Times that she’s never been unclear about her true heritage.
“The things I have shared about myself are very clear,” she insists. “I was born in Boston. I spent time in Boston and in Spain…I moved to New York when I was 19 years old and I have lived here ever since. For me, I feel like I have spent 10 years sharing that story over and over again. And now it seems like it’s not enough.”
The bilingual fitness model and yoga instructor called “very disappointing” a now-scrubbed bio on her acting agency page that previously noted she was “born in Mallorca, Spain, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.” The New York Times reports, “she can only assume the agency used unverified information from the Internet to write a sloppy bio.”
The interview with the Times comes after a Twitter user accused Baldwin of a “decades long grift in which she impersonates a Spanish person,” complete with interviews Baldwin had in which she appears to affect a Spanish accent, and comments about her parents, who are actually from Massachusetts.
That accuser, who subsequently made her viral tweets private, talked to The Times under the condition of anonymity. She noted that Baldwin’s American identity was what the paper described as an “open secret,” adding that the “grift” tweet string came from the fact that, “We’re all bored and it’s just seemed so strange to me that no one had ever come out and said it, especially for someone who gets so much media attention.”
The flap sent Mrs. Baldwin to Instagram over the weekend to “clarify” some details. There, the mother of Eduardo Pau Lucas, Carmen Gabriela, Leonardo Ángel and Romeo Alejandro insisted for the record that she’s a “white girl” born “Hillary,” not Hilaria, which she said is what her Spanish relatives called her and which she eventually adopted professionally.
Baldwin also chalked up to nervousness appearances in which she seemed to drift into a Spanish accent: the Twitter user that started the flap cited a Today show gazpacho cooking segment in which Baldwin claimed on camera not to know the English for “cucumber.” Baldwin insisted on Instagram, “Sometimes I mess it up. It’s not something I’m playing at.”
Meanwhile, The Daily Mail Wednesday detailed the couple’s bilingual 2012 wedding ceremony in New York City, in which Mrs. Baldwin waved a Flamenco fan and wore a head covering similar to a traditional Spanish mantilla. The paper also cited an interview with Vanity Fair Espa?ol, in which Baldwin recalled how her parents, who are from Massachusetts, couldn’t pronounce “Baldwin.” In Spanish, Hilaria explained, ‘I had to repeat it to my family three times: ‘Baldddwinnn.’ And the third time they said ‘Oh, we already know who it is! Why didn’t you pronounce it right the first time?”
Mrs. Baldwin denied accusations of cultural appropriation, telling The New York Times that her parents’ frequent vacations to Spain, where they now live in retirement, shaped her life.
“Who is to say what you’re allowed to absorb and not absorb growing up?” she tells the publication. “This has been a part of my whole life and I can’t make it go away just because some people don’t understand it.”
Amy Sussman/Getty Images(LOS ANGELES) — The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has been a stressful time for all of us, including Chris Rock, and he’s turned to counseling for help.
