Jeffrey Wright Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Da’Vine Joy Randolph is one of the biggest breakout stars of the year and she’s getting a lot of awards love right now!

Stuart Miller Hollywood being what it is, “This Is Us” star Sterling K. Brown has spent years deflecting roles to yet again play “a Black guy in a white family who’s finding his way in.” Brown said no because he’s adamant about not getting pigeonholed, as he demonstrated this year by shifting to “Biosphere,” a post-apocalyptic two-hander with Mark Duplass, and then “American Fiction,” which is simultaneously a family drama, a meta-literary satire and a commentary on race in America today. “I wouldn’t want to do three movies in a row with the same kind of role,” he says.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jeffrey Wright‘s latest stop on his “American Fiction” press tour was a cast interview with Entertainment Weekly in which he shocked his co-stars with a story about how he once refused a studio’s request to censor his dialogue. The Emmy winner starred in Ang Lee’s 1999 Civil War drama “Ride With the Devil” as a former slave fighting for his freedom. “In this scene in which he has this kind of the apex of his awakening and his need to emancipate himself, he says, ‘Being that man’s friend was no more than being his n—–.

Hello, and welcome to the Scene 2 Seen Podcast. I am Valerie Complex, an associate editor and film writer at Deadline.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Who says you can’t laugh and win Oscars, too? In a stunning year for cinema, the candidates for the coveted best picture category are overflowing with prime comedic endeavors that surpass their dramatic counterparts. From a toy doll to an author with a triumphant “Black book” to a reverse Frankenstein tale that shows a whole lot of sex, the Academy has an opportunity to invite the softer side of cinema to its ceremony.

Andrew Haigh’s drama All of Us Strangers has landed nine London Critics’ Circle Awards nominations, ahead of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which has scored seven.

Katcy Stephan Another season of Variety’s beloved interview series, “Actors on Actors,” has come to a close – with a bang. Season 19 is officially the most successful rollout in franchise history, racking up over 145 million views across the brand’s social media platforms. This round of interviews featured stimulating conversations between the biggest stars in this year’s Oscar race.

The topic of race in America is a challenging one to discuss nowadays. On the one hand, you have various groups of non-white people who are exhausted trying to explain how racism runs rampant.

Angelique Jackson Erika Alexander got her start as a teen on “The Cosby Show” before assuming the breakout role of attorney Maxine Shaw on “Living Single.” But it’s her latest performance in “American Fiction,” a satire that critiques our culture’s obsession with stereotypes, that’s put her in a conversation she’s never been in before — that of awards season contender. Alexander plays Coraline, the love interest of Jeffrey Wright’s Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a cantankerous author who challenges the industry’s perceptions of “Black entertainment.” On Dec. 5, just hours before sitting down with Variety, Alexander learned she’d been nominated in the supporting category at the Independent Spirit Awards; she attended last year’s ceremony as a guest.

Jeffrey Wright and Taraji P. Henson sit down to discuss their acclaimed performances — as cantankerous novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in “American Fiction” and sensuous singer Shug Avery in “The Color Purple” — Wright is eager to address one topic first: their shared hometown. It turns out both acting titans hail from Washington, D.C.

Variety FYC Fest on Dec. 6 in Los Angeles. Variety‘s senior awards editor Clayton Davis, Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay and Senior Entertainment & Media Writer Matt Donnelly moderated several panels throughout the event.

“He’s changing the narrative.” The new comedy, “American Fiction,” features a wickedly sharp and bitingly funny premise. The feature-length directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, a producer and writer on acclaimed series such as “Watchmen,” “Station Eleven” and “Master Of None,” the film is adapted from Percival Everett’s “Erasure,” a brilliant indictment of the way modern culture handles race, a pointed satire about the commodification of marginalized voices and a writer forced to confront himself and his own creative integrity.

Valerie Wu Intern The Palm Springs International Film Festival has announced its 2024 lineup. Held by the Palm Springs International Film Society, the PSIFF aims to spotlight and celebrate a range of global films. The 35th annual festival’s opening night will host the U.S.

Jon Burlingame Laura Karpman is one of very few composers who has made a genuine difference in the scoring community. A five-time Emmy winner, she co-founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers, which is widely credited with helping to propel the nearly invisible community of female music writers into prominence. No one asks “why aren’t there any women film composers?” anymore.

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Rustin, Netflix‘s biopic of civil rights icon Bayard Rustin. Colman Domingo stars in the film, which is directed by Tony winner George C. Wolfe and hit theaters and the streamer in November after its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

Michaela Zee Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series returns featuring the biggest stars in this year’s Oscar race for Season 19. The four episodes will debut on PBS SoCal on Jan. 11 at 8 to 10 p.m., followed by encores on KCET and public television stations across the country and the WORLD Channel (check local listings).

Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles on Saturday drew 28 of this season’s biggest and buzziest films for our annual panel showcase of cast and creatives, with a list of films that included everything from Barbie and Oppenheimer to John Wick: Chapter 4 and Trolls Band Together and every kind of movie in between.

Todd Gilchrist editor Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” is a nesting doll of a film—a television broadcast of a documentary about a play, assembled with the same precision and detail as Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch” among others. Thematically, the connective tissue between its layers of reality, like many of those earlier films, is the notion and processing of loss.

Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles kicks off Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. PT spotlighting 28 movies, with panel discussions featuring cast and creatives from this awards season’s most talked-about films, including actors scheduled to return to post-strike duty from Margot Robbie, Bradley Cooper, Cillian Murphy, Jeffrey Wright, Colman Domingo, Lily Gladstone, Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and Annette Bening to Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Carey Mulligan, Anna Kendrick, Eve Hewson and America Ferrara.

There were so many celebs in attendance at the 2023 GQ Men of the Year party in Los Angeles this year, with Kim Kardashian, Megan Thee Stallion, and Megan Fox among those bringing star power to the event.

The trailer for season two of What If…? has dropped!

Jaden Thompson The Critics Choice Association has announced that Edward James Olmos, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Ken Jeong are among the honorees for the upcoming Celebration of Cinema and Television: Honoring Black, Latino and AAPI Achievements. The event will be held at the Fairmont Century Plaza on Dec.

When you’re composing music for a character named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in the movie American Fiction, it should be pretty obvious where a composer like Laura Karpman might find her inspiration.

Rustin, the long-awaited biopic directed by George C. Wolfe, and written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, drives home the point that the arc of U.S.

Valerie Wu Intern The 2023 annual Newport Beach Film Festival (NBFF), hosted from Oct. 12 to Oct. 19, has announced its slate of awards winners.

It’s a big year for Colman Domingo, with three starring roles (four before Focus pushed “Drive-Away Dolls” to next February): “The Color Purple,” “Sing Sing,” and “Rustin.” And “Rustin” reaches audiences first, fresh off its world premiere at Telluride in August (read The Playlist’s review here).

American Fiction” from writer, director and producer Cord Jefferson, and the recent winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award. Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison,” a frustrated novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired narratives and themes. After he writes an outlandish book making fun of the offensive tropes, his success propels him into the center of hypocrisy.

“American Fiction” has quickly become the movie to watch in the awards season after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to critical acclaim, garnering the festival’s People’s Choice Award. The award has come to be seen as a precursor for Academy Award nominations.

Michaela Zee After winning this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s people’s choice award, “American Fiction” has pushed back its limited release to Dec. 15 and will expand in theaters on Dec. 22.

EXCLUSIVE: Cord Jefferson’s feature directorial debut, American Fiction, is changing up its release plan from Nov. 3rd limited opening to Dec. 15.

TORONTO – “American Fiction,” the directorial debut from Cord Jefferson, is genuinely a very, very funny movie. And that’s hyperbole on our part.

Trends change and ebb and flow, but in years past, winning the Toronto International Film Festival audience award used to be a surefire way to mean you were getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and, and many instances, winning the big Academy Award prize. And while the winning element of that trend has somewhat waned in recent years, the power of the prize is still there.

Brent Lang Executive Editor It’s been a Toronto Film Festival like few others. The writers and actors strikes meant that many A-listers opted not to touch down in Canada this year, depriving the gathering of film lovers of the star-studded red carpets and Q&As that make Toronto so memorable. Even if this year’s festival was starved for glamour, it was still a good opportunity to get a clearer picture of the awards race — and to check the pulse of Hollywood at a tumultuous time for the industry.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In Cord Jefferson’s idea-dense “American Fiction,” no one wants to publish literary professor Thelonious Ellison’s latest novel. Thelonious — or “Monk” to his friends — has delivered a modern reworking of Aeschylus’ “The Persians” (hardly bestseller material to begin with), but all the industry can see is the color of his skin.

In Cord Jefferson cinematic adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure, American Fiction emerges as a hard-hitting commentary on identity, storytelling, and the microaggressive terrains of the publishing industry. With a powerhouse ensemble, led by Jeffrey Wright and supported by the likes of Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown, the film aims to deconstruct the publishing world as it relates to myriad facets of Black lives.