‘Harry Potter’ Star Evanna Lynch: ‘I Wish People Would Give’ J.K. Rowling ‘More Grace and Listen to Her’

“Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” actor Paul Grant has passed away at age 56.

Paul Grant has died at the age of 56, his family has confirmed.The actor, who famously played an Ewok in the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi alongside Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, had been found collapsed outside King's Cross Station in London on Thursday afternoon.The father of three, who also had a turn as a goblin in the Harry Potter film series, was pronounced brain dead after being rushed to hospital. His family has since confirmed that his life support machine was switched off on Sunday 19 March. His daughter Sophia Jayne Grant, 28, paid tribute to her father, saying she was "devastated" by the news.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Sam Neill revealed in an interview with The Guardian that he is being treated for stage-three blood cancer. Neill, best known for playing Alan Grant in the “Jurassic Park” franchise, first “experienced swollen glands during publicity for ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ in March last year and was soon diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma,” the publication reports. “I can’t pretend that the last year hasn’t had its dark moments,” Neill said in an interview touting his upcoming memoir, in which he writes frankly about his cancer diagnosis. “But those dark moments throw the light into sharp relief, you know, and have made me grateful for every day and immensely grateful for all my friends. Just pleased to be alive.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Elizabeth Olsen has no idea when she will return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, but she’s hoping her character finds humor and redemption whenever that time comes. Scarlet Witch was the villain of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” which ended with the character being crushed under a collapsing building after she sacrificed herself to destroy the Darkhold, the evil book of sorcery that had corrupted her. “We can do anything with her now!” Olsen recently told ScreenRant about Scarlet Witch’s next appearance. “I feel like we’ve done so much. Now, we can really have fun; I feel like there’s a lot more humor to be had with her. She’s often the emotion of a story, and I’m curious to see what we can explore. And hopefully [we can] give her some redemption.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Lucy Liu is making her comic book movie debut in “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” playing the villainous Kalypso alongside Helen Mirren and “West Side Story” breakout Rachel Zegler. The three actors play the daughters of Atlas, who come to our planet to reclaim the magic that fuels Zachary Levi’s Shazam. Liu was recently asked by The Cut about starring in a superhero movie for the first time at 54 years old. “If it had happened earlier, it would have been miraculous,” Liu said. “It would have been a different story; my career would have been easier. There would have been more opportunity.” Sizable comic book movie roles for Asian-Americans simply did not exist when Liu was coming up in the industry. She had her action breakthrough playing Alex Munday opposite Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore in 2000’s “Charlie’s Angels” and its 2003 sequel, “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Freddie Prinze Jr. marked the launch of his new horror movie podcast “That Was Pretty Scary” by talking to TooFab about one of his own seminal horror films, the 1997 teen slasher classic “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Prinze Jr. said making the movie was a miserable experience because of director Jim Gillespie, who the actor said was “such an asshole” to him on set. Alleged tension between the two started because Gillespie wanted to cast Jeremy Sisto in the role of Ray Bronson but the studio and screenwriter Kevin Williamson wanted Prinze Jr. instead. “I’ll give the man this, I think his name is Jim, he made no bones about it,” Prinze Jr. said of the director. “There was no passive aggressiveness — which I hate — he was very direct in the fact that, ‘I don’t want you in this movie.’ So when that’s your first job and you hear those words, it just wrecks you, man. It just wrecks you.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Mira Sorvino is calling out the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after her father, Paul Sorvino, was left out of the In Memoriam montage during the 2023 Oscars telecast. Mira, an Oscar winner herself for “Mighty Aphrodite,” called it “baffling beyond belief” that father Paul did not make the TV broadcast. She wrote on Twitter after the ceremony ended, “I for one am remembering Dad on this Oscars night…” “It is baffling beyond belief that my beloved father and many other amazing brilliant departed actors were left out,” Mira then wrote on Twitter the day after the 2023 ceremony. “The Oscars forgot about Paul Sorvino, but the rest of us never will!!”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Dwayne Johnson took a moment on the Oscars red carpet to reflect on the DC Universe overhaul that put a pin his plans for a Black Adam-Superman crossover movie. Variety‘s senior culture and events editor Marc Malkin caught up with Johnson and asked about Cavill’s Superman being dropped from the DC Universe despite his highly-touted comeback in Johnson’s “Black Adam.” “All that I can do, and all that we could do when we were making ‘Black Adam,’ was to put our best foot forward and surround ourselves with the best people and deliver the best movie we could,” Johnson said. “Our audience score was in the 90s. Critics took a couple shots, but that’s just the business of it.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director New “Lord of the Rings” movies are officially on the way from Warner Bros., and Andy Serkis is the first original cast member to say he’s ready to return to Middle-Earth. Serkis gave an iconic motion capture performance as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s original trilogy and reprised the role in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” “Look, [producers] Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens are sort of a second family that I have become part of and have gone on to make so many films with,” Serkis told BroBible’s Post-Credit Podcast. “And — let me tell you — they are the best and most incredible people to work with. I think that there are so many other potential Middle-Earth projects which could come about, and if they’re doing them, I would, of course, jump at the chance to have that relationship rekindled.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Michael Keaton’s Batman isn’t the only big comic book character return happening in Warner Bros.’ long-awaited “The Flash.” As the film’s official trailer confirmed last month, Michael Shannon is also coming back to the DC Universe as “Man of Steel” villain General Zod in the upcoming Ezra Miller-led comic book tentpole. Shannon admitted in a recent interview with Looper that he was quite baffled when the offer came in to reprise General Zod. “I was a little confused,” Shannon said. “I said, ‘As memory serves me, I think I died in ‘Man of Steel.’ Are they sure they got the right guy?’ But then they explained to me the whole multiverse phenomenon, which I was a little behind the times on that. I can’t say that I’m a huge consumer of this genre of films — not that I have anything against them. If I’m going to watch a movie, the odds are it’s not going to be one of those, but I sure love making them.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director James Gunn is the new co-head of DC Studios, where he’s shepherding a new DC Universe that will include movies about Superman, Supergirl and more, but first Gunn will return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the release of his trilogy-ending “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” The new Marvel tentpole pits the eponymous superhero gang against the High Evolutionary, played by Chukwudi Iwuji. The villain is Rocket’s creator and is hellbent on creating a special race of enhanced beings. Gunn recently celebrated Chukwudi Iwuji’s introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by posting to social media a photo of the High Evolutionary with the following caption: “Can’t wait for you all to meet this guy.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Hugh Jackman is officially in Wolverine mode. The actor shared a photo of his daily meal plan as his bulking phase goes into overdrive ahead of filming “Deadpool 3,” in which he will reprise the role of Wolverine opposite Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool. The film marks the first “Deadpool” movie and Jackman’s first time playing Wolverine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Bulking. A day in the life,” Jackman wrote as a caption while sharing a photo of the six meals he will eat in a given day. “Thank you, Chef Mario, for helping me stay healthy and properly fed whilst… Becoming. Wolverine. Again.” Jackman’s meals include black bass (2,000 calories), Patagonia salmon (2,100 calories), two chicken burgers (around 1,000 calories each) and two grass-fed sirloins (1,100 calories each). That means Jackson is consuming over 8,000 calories a day now as he gets bulked up for Wolverine. To put that into perspective, Jonathan Majors ate 6,000 calories for four months in order to be play a bodybuilder in his buzzy Sundance movie “Magazine Dreams.” Jackson is eating far more.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Marc Guggenheim has been a staple of DC Entertainment on television for over a decade as the co-creator of The CW’s Arrowverse, which launched in 2012 with “Arrow” (Guggenheim developed the series with Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg) and continued through “The Flash,” “Supergirl” and more. In a February 2023 blog post that’s now circulating online (via Entertainment Weekly), Guggenheim lamented over not being included in the new DC Universe that’s taking shape at Warner Bros. under DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran. Guggenheim admitted in his blog post that friends had told him Hollywood would come calling after he pulled off The CW’s ambitious “Crisis On Infinite Earths” storyline. That crossover event, which aired in December 2019 and January 2020, brought together six different superhero series for a story that ran through five hours of television. It was no easy feat, and Guggenheim said he even put up thousands of dollars of his own money to pull it off.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director With the Oscars right around the corner, it’s good timing for Ruben Östlund’s satirical dark comedy “Triangle of Sadness” to make its streaming debut on Hulu. The film is up for three Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, so make sure to catch up on it before the 2023 Academy Awards air on March 12.

Evanna Lynch, the actress who played Luna Lovegood in the “Harry Potter” films, is shedding some light on what she thinks of J.K. Rowling’s controversial opinions on gender identity.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Michelle Yeoh was already an actor star overseas by 1997 thanks to popular Hong Kong movies like “Police Story 3: Super Cop” and “Supercop 2,” but it wasn’t until the James Bond tentpole “Tomorrow Never Dies” opened that year that Yeoh had her Hollywood breakthrough. The actor played Wai Lin, a Chinese spy who is highly skilled in marital arts and bucks every “damsel in distress” and “Bond girl” stereotype. “The first movie I did after I came to America was ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ with Pierce Brosnan,” Yeoh recently told People magazine. “James Bond at that point had only been known as macho, and the girls were just the ones with cutesy names.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Emma Stone hasn’t acted in a film since 2021’s “Cruella,” but that will soon change thanks to two new collaborations with her “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos. The first is “Poor Things,” a Frankenstein-inspired story in which Stone plays a woman whose brain gets replaced by that of her unborn child, and the second is “And,” plot details for which remain under wraps. In both films, Stone stars opposite Willem Dafoe. But it was only “And” that required Stone to slap Dafoe across the face 20 times. In a new Dafoe profile published by The New York Times, it’s revealed that Dafoe asked to be slapped repeatedly for a scene in which he does not even appear on camera. Stone slaps Dafoe’s character, who is off camera in the shot. But that didn’t stop Dafoe from wanting to be present on set even though he wasn’t required to be there.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Chris Pratt’s voice role as Mario in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” has been a point of debate ever since he was cast. Pratt is not Italian, after all, and many fans were left baffled when the movie’s first trailer dropped last October and revealed Pratt’s Brooklyn-heavy Mario voice. It’s not a concern for the film’s directors, Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath. The filmmakers told Total Film magazine that casting Pratt made sense given the Mario at the center of their story. “It’s a bit of an origin tale. It’s the story of Mario becoming Super Mario,” Horvath said about the film, adding that finding the perfect Mario voice meant finding an actor who could believably portray a plumber from Brooklyn who is “a blue-collar guy from a family of Italian immigrants.”

Harry Potter actor Evanna Lynch has addressed J.K. Rowling’s trans controversy, describing her as an author who advocates for “the most vulnerable members of society”.In recent years, Rowling has generated uproar with a number of remarks that many have perceived as transphobic. In 2020, Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint defended transgender women and men after Rowling questioned the phrase “people who menstruate” on Twitter.“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction,” Rowling wrote in a Twitter thread at the time.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Chris Pine is finally ready to talk about one of the biggest debates from 2022: Did Harry Styles spit on him during the world premiere of “Don’t Worry Darling” at the Venice Film Festival? It’s a question that Pine’s representative immediately shot down at the time, saying in a statement: “This is a ridiculous story — a complete fabrication and the result of an odd online illusion that is clearly deceiving and allows for foolish speculation.” So what really happened? Pine explained all in a video interview for Esquire magazine. “Harry did not spit on me,” Pine said. “Harry is a very kind guy. I was on the plane and we’re flying back from Venice having a great time on the plane and my publicist wakes me up and says, ‘We have to craft a statement on what happened in Venice.’ She showed me the thing and it did look, indeed, like Harry spit on me. He didn’t spit on me.”