Month: June 2021

Last year, Jensen Ackles officially made the jump from Supernatural to plain ol’ supe when he announced he was joining Amazon Prime’s The Boys as Soldier Boy, a name very hard to say with a straight face. However, while we now have our first look at him in his superhero get-up, we still have many questions about just what brand of crooked Ackles’ caped crusader will assuredly be. While we won’t know exactly what levels of glory and gore to expect from him until he graces our screens next year, we do know a bit more about just want The Boys costume designer wants him to get across to viewers, and a lot more about what role he played in the comics.

Solider Boy’s look was first revealed in an exclusive feature with Entertainment Weekly, where Amazon shared an image of Ackles with the publication as well as a comment from The Boys costume designer Laura Jean Shannon.

“Soldier Boy is the original badass. Our goal was to highlight a bygone era of overt masculinity and grit. With that pedigree we dove headfirst into baking in an all-American quality grounded in a military soldier’s practicality with a heavy dose of old school cowboy swagger. We knew that the actor had to have Steve McQueen looks and chops with a John Wayne attitude, luckily Jensen Ackles embodies all of that.”

Now you might have noticed some words and phrases in there — phrases such as “bygone era,” “all-American,” and “military soldier” — that when coupled with the shield Soldier Boy is holding invoke the image of a certain star-spangled Avenger, and that’s no coincidence. The Boys creators Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson designed Soldier Boy based on the Marvel hero Captain America, but whereas Captain America serves as an optimistic representation of American values, Soldier Boy is more of a glass-half-empty interpretation.

Much like Captain America, Soldier Boy served the United States during World War II, dodging bullets all while maintaining a can-do attitude that — surprisingly enough — is authentic. However, something far more important about Soldier Boy isn’t quite so genuine: his service record. In the comics, Billy Butcher states he is certain Soldier Boy didn’t actually serve in the war. In time, we come to discover this is kind-of-sort-of true. While perhaps the first Soldier Boy did, “Soldier Boy” is not one person but is rather a legacy title passed down to a new man when the former Soldier Boy dies, which, if we know The Boys, might just be an all too apt commentary on how America sees soldier as dispensable. In the show, it’s likely we’ll see the third incarnation of the character portrayed.

When it comes to what super powers Soldier Boy has, it is once again apt to compare him to Captain America. Much like Cap’ he possesses super human strength, wields a shield, and has great weapons skills. However, one of Captain America’s more crucial skills Soldier Boy does lack is any semblance of bravery. Despite how genuine his “golly gee-whiz” safe-for-work heroic act is, Soldier Boy is a coward who will serve any one with power greater than his own, which primarily includes — you guessed it — Homelander.

You see, Soldier Boy is the leader of the super group Payback, which you might quickly realize is a play on Avengers. While Payback is an older group than the Seven, since the Seven was created Payback’s reputation has grown considerably less impressive, leading Soldier Boy to yearn to abandon Payback and earn a spot on the Seven. To do so, Soldier Boy would do just about anything to please Homelander, including mass murder and having sex with him — an incident that’s part of a larger and very explicit movement the show has said they’ll be tackling next season. Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here to any Team Dean fans, but it really doesn’t look like Ackles is here to jump in and save the day.

While the exact details of what Ackles will be doing in season 3 have yet to be revealed, the showrunners stated his character will allow them to “tell a little bit about the history of America and how we ended up in the current fraught position that we’re in.” It looks like we’re in for an even bumpier ride this next time around, folks.

Within hours of WandaVision hitting Disney+, Marvel fans started running wild with theories that Mephisto was the “Big Bad” manipulating the show’s strange events from behind the scenes. (Heck, we even got in on the action.) However, as the series came to its emotional climax, Marvel’s version of the Devil was nowhere to be found because, at the end of the day, it was nothing more than a fan theory. In fact, WandaVision‘s creator, Jac Schaeffer, didn’t even know who Mephisto was until she saw the speculation spreading like wildfire online as the show was airing.

With Loki‘s first episode now available on Disney+, the creative team behind the Trickster God’s new series are already getting ahead of the Mephisto rumors and shutting down the image that started it all: that stained glass window. Back in December 2020, Marvel unveiled a trailer for Loki, which included a scene from the first episode where the Devil is depicted in a stained glass window. It’s plain as day, and it was an impetus for the Mephisto rumors that started plaguing WandaVision. Fans just assumed that Mephisto was going to be in Loki, so it only makes sense that Marvel would slowly tease his arrival. Not so much.

In an interview ahead of Loki‘s premiere, director Kate Herron explained that the stained glass window never had anything to do with Mephisto and is actually a reference to the show’s main character. Via Entertainment Tonight:

“It’s honestly just a super weird coincidence. Like, it’s genuinely a reference to Loki — the horns, he was cast out of heaven, that’s what it’s a reference to. Because we filmed that a long time before– I think WandaVision must have been in post when we filmed that. I did see all the stuff about that online and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be interesting.’ [Laughs] But no, it’s more relevant to the themes of our show and it’s not a nod to that character.”

And there you have it. Despite what WandaVision taught us, the devil is not in the details. At least, not literally.

(Via Entertainment Tonight)

After taking a bit of time off, Megan Thee Stallion is back from her brief hiatus. She’s dropping “Thot Sh*t” this week, and soon, she’ll be back in the classroom: In partnership with the Roc Nation School Of Music, Sports, And Entertainment at Long Island University, she will be offering a full-tuition, four-year scholarship to one lucky student. The deadline to apply for the scholarship is July 15 and interested students can apply here.

Additionally, Megan will participate in Long Island University’s “Industry Expert Speaker Series,” where she will “delve deeper into her industry expertise” for Roc Nation School Of Music, Sports, And Entertainment students.

Meg says in a statement, “Getting an education is incredibly important to me. I still have academic goals that I want to achieve, so if I can use my resources to open doors and create opportunities for at least one student, then it’s a victory. It’s important that we encourage our students to pursue their passions and put them in positions to become the next game changer in whichever fields they choose.”

Megan is truly dedicated to academics: Alongside her mega-successful music career, she is also currently studying Health Care Administration at Texas Southern University.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

(SPOILERS for Disney+’s Loki and the MCU will be found below.)

It’s about damn time that Loki‘s now atoning for his time crimes on Disney+. The show’s premiere episode began the entertaining-yet-complicated process of explaining the multiverse, which apparently is where the MCU wants to be, big time, going into the future. Sure, we already had to know that this would happen, given that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the title of the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring sequel to come. And to a lesser extent, Kevin Feige linking up the MCU and the FOX superhero universes in WandaVision may have been a move in the same direction.

Yet what matters, for the moment, is that Loki is here to explain all the multiverse stuff, and Luke Wilson is doing a lot of that heavy expositional lifting. He’s not done yet, either, nor are the other Time Variance Authority’s employees, who are adding useful and not-so-useful bits along the way. Marvel fans received a shock with that Infinity-Stone joke (that many fans felt was a gut punch regarding Black Widow), and the show ended with a mystery. Why on Earth Midgard did this series take a side trip to Oklahoma?

Let’s review what led up to this moment, and that includes a conversation between Loki and Wilson’s TVA Agent, Mobius, who’s seeking to protect the Sacred Timeline, which Loki disturbed by snatching the Tesseract at the end of Avengers: Endgame. It’s very important to remember that the Loki in this Disney+ show — and he is referred to as a “Variant” — is not the same Loki who Thanos killed in Avengers: Infinity War, so there are no time shenanigans at least for that detail. Yet we’ve long since known that Loki is capable, as the God of Mischief, of replicating himself all over the place, so how does that tie into the show’s trip to 1858 Salina, Oklahoma?

That’s part of the mystery here. Mobius tells Loki that “fugitive variants” have been killing Minutemen at various points in time. He adds, “The variant we’re hunting is… you.” That can be taken in a few ways. It’s clear that Mobius, who engages with Loki in a buddy-cop dynamic, wants time-criminal Loki to help track down an even worse time-offender, one who is killing TVA representatives. That’s a risky proposition. It’s also possible, however, that Mobius is as crafty as Loki is, and he’s perfectly aware that he needs to beat Loki at his own game while hiding an ulterior motive.

Before we can think about those possibilities for too long, the episode’s final scene blips to Oklahoma around the time of the oil rush, where Minutemen noted that there’s an “anachronistic” (out of time and place) artifact in the field, which is “early third millennial,” for what it’s worth. A Minuteman wonders if some “jackass” used a time machine to come back and steal oil, and then a mysterious figure (obviously, a variant) drops a lantern and sets the oil field on fire, torching the group.

Weird. All of it. Oklahoma is now part of the MCU (and that’s canon, so the Sooner State is really on the map now), and who knows if the state will mean anything at all in the grand scheme of Loki. Yet it’s a dramatic note with which to end the premiere, which earlier detailed variant-murders in 1548 France. There’s no telling whether a variant purposefully used the Oklahoma setting because it’d be really easy to kill TVA agents who are standing atop oil. Yet this was an effective way for the variant to easily nab the TVA device that would have “reset” the timeline.

As for whether there’s any other significance to this venue, that’s still left in the open. I would guess that Loki doesn’t want to dive deep into the history of Salina (and any Civil War implications), and that this is more of a case of wanting to bring a firefight into the show because that’s a big visual moment. Also, yeah, Salina was the first place in Oklahoma where oil was discovered (by accident) in 1859. If I was a variant who wanted the TVA to mistake me for a “jackass” who simply wanted to steal oil before its official discovery, then sure, I’d make a trip to Salina, too. Yes, it appears that this was simply a ruse to fool the TVA and easily dispense with several agents, but hopefully, we’ll receive clearer answers next week.

Disney+’s ‘Loki’ will stream new episodes on Wednesdays.

In The Eyes of Tammy Faye, an unrecognizable Jessica Chastain plays Tammy Faye Bakker, the flamboyant televangelist who built an evangelical empire with her husband Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) until it all came crashing down. “We’re not doing anything wrong?” Tammy Faye says in the trailer above. “Is that a question?” Jim replies, knowing full well that he’s doing something wrong, including committing fraud and a rape accusation. The Eyes of Tammy Faye will cover all that, as well as Tammy Faye’s acceptance of LGBT advocacy. “How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them,” she once said.

Hopefully Baby Billy shows up to sing “Misbehavin’.” Here’s more:

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is an intimate look at the extraordinary rise, fall and redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. In the 1970s and 80s, Tammy Faye and her husband, Jim Bakker, rose from humble beginnings to create the world’s largest religious broadcasting network and theme park, and were revered for their message of love, acceptance and prosperity. Tammy Faye was legendary for her indelible eyelashes, her idiosyncratic singing, and her eagerness to embrace people from all walks of life. However, it wasn’t long before financial improprieties, scheming rivals, and scandal toppled their carefully constructed empire.

Directed by Wet Hot American Summer and Stella icon Michael Showalter, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which also stars Cherry Jones, Fredric Lehne, Louis Cancelmi, Sam Jaeger, Gabriel Olds, Mark Wystrach, and Vincent D’Onofrio, opens on September 17.

All hail motherf*cking Jean Smart! The three-time Emmy winner, who should be the namesake of an award for actors who make everything they’re in better just by virtue of their name being in the credits, has yet another reason to celebrate as her new(ish) HBO Max series Hacks has been renewed for a second season. HBO announced the series’ renewal on Tuesday, just ahead of the final two episodes of season 1.

Hacks, which premiered on HBO Max on May 13, 2021, has been a bit of a surprise hit for the streaming network. It’s about Deborah Vance (Smart), an aging mainstay of the Las Vegas comedy scene whose agent sends her Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a twenty-something comedy writer, to help freshen up her act. The beauty of the show is in the delicate, and sometimes contentious, relationship that exists between a mentor and their mentee. Or, as our Jason Tabrys described it: It’s “a funny and complicated story about assholes gradually becoming smaller assholes and better friends.”

In addition to Smart and the supremely talented Einbinder, Hacks—which was created by Broad City alums Lucia Aniello, Paul Downs, and Jen Statsky—has an all-star supporting cast that includes Kaitlin Olson, Christopher McDonald, Mark Indelicato, Poppy Liu, and Johnny Sibilly. According to HBO Max, “the critically-acclaimed comedy has been a top performer on the platform since its debut, consistently ranking in the top 10 most viewed titles out of all available content.”

Meanwhile, Smart is hinting that there might be some even more delicious drama on the horizon as the show enters its second season. “I am absolutely thrilled we are picked up for a second season,” she said in a statement about the renewal, “and I told Hannah it’s ‘No more Miss Nice Guy; from now on it’s Bette and Joan! And guess who’s BETTE??!!’”

A couple days ago, Deafheaven shared a mysterious teaser, which featured a brief snippet of new music and the date August 20, 2021. Well, the group didn’t let the suspense build for long: Today, they’ve announced the release of their new album Infinite Granite, which is set for release on August 20 via Sargent House.

Alongside that news, they’ve also shared a new single, “Great Mass Of Color.” The track is an aesthetic departure for the group, as it sees the post-hardcore group venturing into softer territory more than ever before. Vocally, singer George Clarke focuses on his clean vocals more than he usually does, and the instrumentation is more akin to soaring post-rock.

When the band released their live album 10 Years Gone last year, they wrote in a statement, “We’re thankful we were able to do this project and that fans have stuck with us as we make new music for 2021. Thank you for helping us move forward and I hope you enjoy this record as a small interim in the Deafheaven story. We’ll see you soon.”

and check out the Infinite Granite art and tracklist below.

1. “Shellstar”
2. “In Blur”
3. “Great Mass Of Color”
4. “Neptune Raining Diamonds”
5. “Lament For Wasps”
6. “Villain”
7. “The Gnashing”
8. “Other Language”
9. “Mombasa”

Infinite Granite is out 8/20 via Sargent House. Pre-order it here.

After nearly 30 years on the air as a late-night—beginning with Late Night and leading up to Conan with a memorably short-lived pitstop at The Tonight Show along the way—Conan O’Brien is getting ready to say goodbye. As the former SNL and The Simpsons writer barrels toward his June 24th finale, he’s gathering up some of his all-time favorite guests to help him bid adieu.

On Tuesday night, O’Brien’s TV career came full circle when he sat down with Sarah Silverman, one of his most frequent guests over the years and one of his earliest, too. As the two reminisced about the many times they’ve sat down together with cameras rolling over the past 28 years, O’Brien shared a photo of their very first interview from 1993—when Silverman was a 22-year-old comedian just getting her start, and O’Brien was a 30-year-old host still finding his way. Both comedically and sartorially speaking…

“Why was I dressed like Tom Jones?,” O’Brien asked sidekick Andy Richter—but also the universe in general. “What was that jacket? I’m dressed like The Riddler or something.”

The conversation took a surprisingly emotional turn as both host and guest, clearly moved, talked about what the other meant to their career. As Conan explained:

“I was 30 when you first came on the show. I had just turned 30 when we started doing the Late Night show [and] it takes a while to figure out who you are, comedically. And so, it’s not that you were trying to be someone else, it’s just that you’re trying to figure out how to be you on television.”

For her part, Silverman told O’Brien:

“I love your show so much. I do. I love it so much. I mean, the first time I ever was recognized on the street was from your show. Because you’d always have me on. I’ve been on your show for so many years. I grew up on your show. I honestly feel like my whole death reel could just be clips from your show [and] I’d be happy.”

O’Brien’s response? “I say aim higher.”

You can watch the full clip above.

Earlier this week, CNN reported that Rudy Giuliani, former-president Donald Trump’s personal lawyer “relentlessly pressured and coaxed the Ukrainian government” into investigating made-up claims of election fraud. “During the roughly 40-minute call, Giuliani repeatedly told Yermak that Zelensky should publicly announce investigations into possible corruption by Biden in Ukraine, and into claims that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to hurt Trump,” it reads, adding, “These separate claims are both untrue.”

It’s more baseless nonsense from a cartoon character of a man, and during Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue, host Jimmy Kimmel called the audio the “second most damaging tape of Rudy Giuliani this year.” Presumably the most damaging tape is the scene from Borat 2. You know the one. He continued, “You remember Trump’s ‘perfect call’ with the Ukrainian president? The one he got impeached for? Well, a few weeks before that call, in July of 2019, Rudy dialed up a senior Ukrainian official to put the squeeze on, and now audio from that call has leaked, most likely from Rudy’s head.”

After playing the call, Kimmel joked, “What is in his mouth? It’s like a hard candy in there. So, there you go, he lays it all out. Nothing subtle about that.” All Giuliani does is “dig up dirt, whether it’s on Joe Biden, or Hunter Biden, or just trying to get out of his grave every morning. He’s a dirt digger and he could be in trouble for this. Even his teeth are trying to distance themselves from his mouth.”

You can watch the monologue above.

(SPOILERS for Disney+’s Loki and the MCU will be found below.)

Avengers: Endgame included multiple hero deaths, including the end of Tony Stark, along with Natasha Romanoff, who sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone. She’d done so during a trip to Vormir with Clint Barton, and the pair soon discovered that (as was the case already with Gamora) someone wasn’t going to make it out of that situation alive. And since all of the Infinity Stones needed to be retrieved before Thanos’ snap could be reversed, Black Widow made sure she’d be the one to die, after the two fought over who would do so, and Joe Russo ultimately defended the scene as proof that “she’s a better fighter than he is.”

I’m still not sure that explanation works too well. We already knew that Black Widow was more of a badass than Hawkeye, right? Still, Natasha sacrificed herself for her new family (we’ll finally meet her old family in her solo prequel film, which follows the events on Captain America: Civil War, due out on July 9) and to revive half of the universe from dusting. And Hawkeye could go back to his family after all was said and done, so all good? Nope. People are still emotional over Natasha’s death and for understandable reason. That brings us to what is an otherwise humorous joke in the Loki premiere.

Loki finds himself absolutely aghast to have to turn over the Tesseract (Time Stone) to a rather clueless office worker upon arrival at the Time Variance Authority (TVA). He grows even more irritated when that worker opens up a desk drawer, and there’s a bunch of Infinity Stones — which are rendered powerless, like all magic — inside the TVA’s confines. The other workers even use them as paper weights, the worker explains.

The joke here, of course, is that the Avengers went through all that trouble to gather up the Infinity Stones to defeat Thanos, when those things were sitting (and valueless) inside of the TVA. This outcome, however, feels like a gut punch (the collection includes at least three Soul Stones, which are orange) to many fans, who aren’t thrilled at the implication that Black Widow (and, to an extent, Gamora, although Thanos directly killed her) essentially died for no reason. Is this revelation a case of “too soon”? Perhaps, but c’mon, the TVA had to know the value of those stones, and they just let them sit there — to preserve the “sacred timeline” — in a drawer. Also, Black Widow’s on people’s minds with her movie coming out soon, and yeah, this kind-of stings.

Let’s just say that many fans aren’t happy. Tweets like “nat died for the soul stone only for the tva to have 3 in a desk drawer” are all over the place.

Let’s hope that Natasha is somehow vindicated from this slight when Black Widow lands (in theaters and on Disney+) on July 9.