When the first Joker film hit theaters, it blew the doors off the box office despite being a Rated-R movie about Batman’s greatest foe that didn’t actually have Batman in it. Naturally, its sequel Joker: Folie à Deux is going to stick to that winning formula as it adds Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn into the mix.
The film has officially locked down an R-rating as it continues the original’s trend of being a dark, twisted exploration of the Clown Prince of Crime that very liberally apes Martin Scorsese.
The musical sequel to 2019’s “Joker,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, has been rated R for “some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality and brief full nudity,” according to the MPA’s daily ratings bulletin. This is in line with the original “Joker,” which was rated R for “strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images.”
However, amidst all the violence and depravity, the Joker sequel is taking an unexpected swerve by being a full-on “jukebox musical.” Online Joker fans freaked out after learning that the Gaga-starring sequel will include a total of 15 “very well-known songs” including classic show tunes like “That’s Entertainment.”
While director Todd Phillips had teased that the sequel will be a musical, no one fully believed it would go this hard into the genre. It will be interesting to see whether Joker fans will stir up another billion dollar box office now that they know there’s going to be a whole lot of singing and dancing.
Joker: Folie à Deux opens in theaters on October 4.
Uproxx cover star Conan Gray has been getting fans excited to hear his new album Found Heaven. Now, they don’t have too much longer to wait. After he dropped the lead single “Never Ending Song” last May, he has slowly put out a few more songs — in order to build anticipation for the full project dropping nearly a year later.
Here’s everything to know about what to expect from Gray’s new album.
Release Date
Found Heaven is out 4/5 via Republic Records. Find more information here.
Tracklist
1. “Found Heaven”
2. “Never Ending Song”
3. “Fainted Love”
4. “Lonely Dancers”
5. “Alley Rose”
6. “The Final Fight”
7. “Miss You”
8. “Bourgeoisieses”
9. “Forever With Me”
10. “Eye Of The Night”
11. “Boys & Girls”
12. “Killing Me”
13. “Winner”
Features
As of right now, there are no features on Conan Gray’s new album.
Artwork
Check out the album artwork below.
Republic Records
Singles
So far, Conan Gray has released “Alley Rose,” “Lonely Dancers,” “Killing Me,” “Winner,” and “Never Ending Song” as singles.
Tour
07/11 — Melbourne, Australia @ John Cain Arena
07/13 — Brisbane, Australia @ Fortitude Music Hall
07/17 — Sydney, Australia @ ICC Sydney Theatre
07/19 — Adelaide, Australia @ Spin Off Festival
09/19 — Minneapolis, MN @ Armory
09/21 — Sterling Heights, MI @ Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill
09/23 — Toronto, ON @ Budweiser Stage
09/25 — Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway
09/30 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
10/01 — Philadelphia, PA @ Highmark Skyline Stage at the Mann
10/03 — Raleigh, NC @ Red Hat Amphitheater
10/04 — Atlanta, GA @ Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park
10/06 — Indianapolis, IN @ Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park
10/11 — Las Vegas, NV @ Chelsea Theater at Cosmopolitan
10/13 — Portland, OR @ Alaska Airlines’ Theater of the Clouds
10/15 — Seattle, WA @ WAMU Theater
10/17 — San Francisco, CA @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
10/18 — Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
10/20 — Phoenix, AZ @ Arizona Financial Theatre
10/23 — Sugar Land, TX @ Smart Financial Centre
10/25 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center ATX
10/26 — Fort Worth, TX @ Dickies Arena
11/02 — Amsterdam, The Netherlands @ AFAS Live
11/04 — Brussels, Belgium @ Forest National
11/05 — Paris, France @ Zénith Paris la Villette
11/07 — Manchester, UK @ O2 Apollo
11/10 — London, UK @ OVO Arena Wembley
Charli XCX is about to have the clubs on lock this summer. At long last, we finally have more information about her upcoming sixth studio album, Brat. Today (April 3), Charli shared two new songs from Brat — “Club Classics” and “B2B”
On the punchy “Club Classics,” Charli has one simple wish — to dance to floor fillers all throughout the night. On the song’s bridge, she even shouts out some of the DJs and producers who have inspired her throughout her career.
“I wanna dance to A.G. / I wanna dance with George / I wanna dance to SOPHIE / I wanna dance to HudMo,” she says.
“B2B,” meanwhile, is a trippy track with a hypnotic beat switch, over which, Charli dreads the idea of returning to a past love.
In addition to these two new songs, Charli has revealed the album’s tracklist and release date. The album will arrive just in time for the summer, and will surely be a must for pride events and late-night excursions.
You can listen to “Club Classics” and “B2B” above and see the Brat tracklist below.
Charli XCX’s Brat Tracklist
1. “360”
2. “Club Classics”
3. “Sympathy Is A Knife”
4. “I Might Say Something Stupid”
5. “Talk Talk”
6. “Von Dutch”
7. “Everything Is Romantic”
8. “Rewind”
9. “So I”
10. “Girl, So Confusing”
11. “Apple”
12. “B2B”
13. “Mean Girls”
14. “I Think About It All The Time”
15. “365”
Brat is out 6/7 via Atlantic Records. Find more information here.
Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
For a while there, it seemed NxWorries fans would never get a follow-up to Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s 2016 group debut Yes Lawd!. Although the rapper and producer have been teasing a new album since 2022, the wait felt more like torture with each new single (“Where I Go,” “Daydreaming“) that came without news of the new album.
The wait will finally be over soon, as NxWorries announced the title and release date of their new album along with its latest (first?) single. Why Lawd? will be out on June 7 via Stones Throw. The new single is called “86Sentra” and it does not disappoint. It’s got an animated visualizer depicting the duo cruising in the titular car, a groovy, bass-driven beat, and scintillating, swaggering verses from .Paak in classic rap braggart mode.
The gap between NxWorries albums is understandable, as .Paak has been busy for the past few years, what with dropping the Silk Sonic collaboration with Bruno Mars and popping up on seemingly every artists’ singles. In 2023 alone, he collaborated with Cordae (apparently, on enough songs for a full EP), Shafiq Husayn, Jay Rock, and SiR, in addiiton to starting the ball rolling on a new Free Nationals project AND hosting a podcast, .Paak House Radio. With all that going on, it’s kind of a miracle he had time to get Why Lawd? finished in time for the summer. Thank you Lawd!
Why Lawd? is out 6/7 via Stones Throw Records. Get more info here.
Yesterday (April 2), Doja Cat unveiled the (revealing) album cover for her upcoming Scarlet deluxe edition, titled Scarlet II: Claude Frollo. One question that might immediately bring to mind is:
Who Is Claude Frollo From Doja Cat’s Scarlet Deluxe?
Frollo is the antagonist from the 1831 French novel The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame (and Disney’s The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, the animated 1996 film based on the book). Maybe you recognize the Disney version from this commonly used reaction image.
“Because he is like a… is he a tyrant? He’s like a… I feel like it connects to the story of Scarlet in some way. And if you look up his personality traits and who he is and his story, you’ll understand kind of the whole connection. There’s a control aspect, like he just abuses his power and his control and is just dogmatic and is just a total c*nt. And all Esmerelda wanted to do was just be creative and sing and dance, but nasty old Claude Frollo was just having a field day on her, just being awful and a bad guy, stinky man.
And this isn’t about anyone in… there’s not anything very personal happening to me with one person. Claude Frollo doesn’t depict a single person in my life. It’s like a metaphor for the people that creatives endure on a daily basis in a bigger picture, a bigger scale.”
With Dev Patel‘s directorial debut, Monkey Man, set to unleash its fury in theaters this week, the early reviews are here for this wild actioner. While it’s easy to compare Monkey Man to John Wick, Patel adds a far more personal touch and intensity as both the star and director of this brutal little film that leaves everything on the floor. Along with some teeth, blood, and whatever else flies off his enemies.
Dev Patel brings the gonzo chaos for this very impressive writing-directing feature debut, with Jordan Peele on board as a producer; it’s a wildly over-the-top revenge action thriller on the teeming but uncliched streets of Mumbai – doubling as a boisterous satire of Modi-esque nationalism. As the lead performer, Patel shows us some pretty serious martial arts chops, kickboxing and thumping seven shades of ordure out of the punchbag, and then the bad guys – and periodically pausing, of course, attractively dropletted with sweat, to let us get an eyeful of those sculpted abs.
Dev Patel pours his entire self into “Monkey Man.” Some comes over the sides and the mix might not always be right but there’s an undeniable passion here that comes through in a genre that too often feels like it came off an assembly line. The writer, producer, star, director, and guy who broke a few bones filming this one name-checked Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung, “The Raid,” Korean action, Bollywood, and much more in his intro, and “Monkey Man” often has that overstuffed quality of a filmmaker who finally got his chance to see his visions on-screen and worried he may never get to do so again.
I suspect, though, that “Monkey Man” may be too glum and plodding for much of the mainstream audience. I kept going in and out of the movie. Yet Patel does one thing superlatively well, and that’s using the film as a pedestal for his downbeat star performance. As Kid, he makes himself, quite deliberately, an unlikely action hero — skinny-muscled and morose, with an anger that simmers almost neurotically. When he finally explodes, it’s with a rage we only half saw coming.
It’s entering an environment in which some explosions, a shootout and a few haymakers here and there will no longer cut it. Everything must be a melee. Nothing less than nonstop beast mode will suffice. Luckily, Patel doesn’t have a problem with this way of thinking. In fact, his goal with his directorial debut is not to beat action moviemakers and A-list asskickers at their own game but to work his way into their ranks. A gleefully anarchic addition to the post-Raid: Redemption, post-John Wick world of mix-and-match fighting styles and adrenalized weapon-play, Patel’s pet project is as much a mash note to a way of presenting bloody-knuckled spectacle as it is a standard thriller.
Sharone Meir’s cinematography has it all. Action scene or not, his visuals are all stunning and textured. Every ounce of the city feels lived in and highly atmospheric. On top of that, the closest Monkey Man comes to putting the viewer in Kid’s shoes is during those action set pieces, in large part thanks to Meir’s intimate and high-energy camerawork and the downright phenomenal stunt work. Patel, Meir, and the stunt team always successfully establish a sense of geography, whether a fight takes place in tight quarters or a more expansive space, and from there, there’s no holding back.
That kind of passion exists because Patel knows how to captivate an audience both onscreen and now, as we can see, behind the camera, as well. It would be easy to make this your next John Wick obsession and make it all about a simple revenge story, but Monkey Man has elevated the idea of what a story like this should be.
Patel makes a fine hero. The actor is a consistently charming presence whose capabilities have only grown since Skins and his breakthrough role in Slumdog. In Monkey Man, he delivers a mature performance on par with his work in David Lowery’s The Green Knight. Similar to Gawain, the Kid is out to prove the depth of his moral courage. Much of his commitment is tested through fight scenes in the first and third acts, which demonstrate Patel’s confidence as a director.
The Louisiana-set HBO series, which ran for seven seasons, was about a lot of things: vampire, inconsistent Southern accents, etc. But it was mostly about sex scenes that would make you go “WTF.” Anna Paquin, who played Sookie, opened up about what it was like getting naked on camera, especially once her co-star husband Stephen Moyer (Bill) started directing episodes.
“Stephen cut his teeth directing [on True Blood],” she told the New York Post, “and by season three or four, it would be like, ‘Hi honey, who are you f*cking on camera today?’” Moyer added, “There was actually a day where we were walking from our trailers, [Alexander Skarsgård] and Anna and another actor, and we were all working in dressing gowns going toward our stages. It got to a point where I was about to go to one stage and Anna and Alex to another and I was just like, ‘Go for it, guys, good luck, have a good time, make it look good.’”
“Steve directed us in a rather explicit sex scene,” she said, “so when you ask if it is awkward to shoot a movie with your husband, the bar for awkward is set terribly high in our household, not to mention on that show in general.
Moyer’s advice to Joe Manganiello, who played werewolf Alcide, during a season seven episode he directed: “Joe, you can do it, mate. It’s OK, grab it, you can do it.” Forget true blood. That’s true love right there.
Paquin and Moyer worked together again in the indie-drama A Bit of Light, which she starred in and he directed. It comes out on April 5.
After the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, she’s been sending out flowers to those who played a part in inspiring her. A few days ago, Mickey Guyton revealed on social media that she was one of the recipients.
Now, Bey’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself” collaborator Jack White has shared that she also sent him a very sweet gift.
White posted on Instagram yesterday (April 2) a photo of the large white roses she sent. “I hope you are well,” the card from Beyoncé reads. “I just wanted you to know how much you inspired me on this record.”
“What a sweet gesture to receive here in Nashville this morning from the talented and gracious @beyonce celebrating her new Cowboy Carter album,” White captioned. “Much love and respect to you Madam, and thank you kindly. Keep making beautiful and powerful music, nobody sings like you.”
This post also comes after fan speculation about what Beyoncé will do for the final Act III album of her trilogy — since Renaissance pulled from dance music and Cowboy Carter is country. Many suspect that she might end it with a rock-inspired album, in which case, White could possibly make another appearance for part two of their incredible collab from Lemonade.
Check out White’s post about his gift from Beyoncé above.
Rebel Wilson isn’t holding back. Yesterday (April 2), her memoir Rebel Rising hit shelves, and in the book, she shares about her experiences as an Australian actress.
She notes that she got her start in Hollywood playing self-deprecating, plus-size characters — her breakthrough being Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect — but said she started getting taken more seriously after she lost a significant amount of weight. But before then, Wilson said a certain singer would avoid her at events, believing that others may confuse the two.
“Some actresses would get offended if I called them plus-size in this book, so I have to be careful with what I say. This is why, I think, Adele hates me,” Wilson said. “There was a moment when she was bigger, and some people would confuse us for one another… I am assuming, because to be fair I’ve never asked her.”
Wilson noted that she and Adele have run into each other at events, however, Adele has “always quickly” walked away from her.
“As if my fatness might rub off on her if I were near her for more than thirty seconds,” said Wilson. “That she didn’t like being compared to ‘Fat Amy,’”
Elsewhere in the book, Wilson shares about an uncomfortable experience with actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who has since denied the accusations shared in Rebel Rising.
At the time of writing, Adele has not responded to Wilson’s account.
Multihyphenate doesn’t feel like the right word to describe Joel Kim Booster. He is one, a writer-actor-producer with an IMDb credits list as long as a white woman’s Lululemon receipt. But he’s not content with wearing just three hats, he’s got an entire closet full. Stand-up comedian. Podcast host. Drag Race judge. Professional dinner party guest. And the visionary who once read a copy of Pride & Prejudice while vacationing on Fire Island and (probably) thought, “I’m going to give the world the gayest Austen adaptation they’ve ever seen.”
He did, with Hulu’s Fire Island, a romantic comedy starring Booster, Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Tomas Matos, and Margaret Cho that made history and broke down barriers in 2022. Since then, Booster’s been popping up – on talk shows and Netflix specials – wielding his sharply insightful brand of funny.
His latest stage? The second season of Apple TV+’s Loot, a comedy series starring Maya Rudolph as an out-of-touch billionaire divorcee intent on doing some good with her eye-bulging bank account by way of her nonprofit. Some two years – and a couple of industry strikes – later, Loot’s sophomore outing sees Rudolph’s Molly Novak dead set on giving away all of her money to help those less fortunate. Of course, she’s also living in an oceanfront “cabana” with (only) five pools, a water bed filled with chamomile tea, and an emotional support sloth on call.
Booster plays her assistant Nicholas, a well-dressed wannabe influencer who dishes out biting commentary. He’s softened a bit since season one, building genuine friendships with the do-gooders hoping to use Molly’s influence to implement meaningful change in the community, but he’s still the walking insult generator that delivered some of the show’s most meme-able one-liners two years ago.
We chatted with Booster about the evolution of his character, breaking the “gay best friend” stereotype, and Bowen Yang Voodoo dolls.
You get to make out with Maya Rudolph this season which means I’ve now seen you and Bowen Yang play straight guys. Who do you think pulls it off better?
[Laughs] I think maybe me by a hair, only because I think I have more deep-seated insecurities bubbling underneath the surface in the same way that a lot of toxic straight guys do. So I relate to that experience a little bit more than Bowen, who I think is slightly more self-possessed than I am.
How does season two differ from season one, in terms of the comedy and your character’s arc?
I obviously love season one, but comedy benefits from time. We set the foundation and now season two is just a lift-off, baby. We hit the ground running and it’s very joke forward. In terms of Nicholas, he is still the same prickly, closed-off guy that he was in season one, but slowly, the cracks are forming in the armor. We’re seeing that transformation continue to happen. I think the best part about season two for me is that we established the character in season one, and dropped little hints here and there about his background and how he maybe came to be that way. But we really make good on the promise of the premise of those jokes. We see how he became the guy that he is today and why he might be a little closed off emotionally to some of these people. It was really fun to be able to add that dimension to Nicholas and I hope we continue to do the show so we can just layer more and more on top.
I do appreciate that Nicholas keeps his mean streak a bit. This isn’t the kind of comedy like Abbott Elementary where almost everyone is so genuinely nice to each other all the time.
I’ll never have enough of Abbott Elementary, but you need a Janelle James in that workplace comedy to break up the positivity. I think I am so grateful that I get to play that role on this show because it’s just so much fun. It’s so much fun being so rotten.
In real life, are you a “break up the positivity” kind of person?
No, it’s so cringey. I’m a fairly earnest person. I’m a much more introverted person than I think a lot of people expect me to be, especially people who know me primarily as a standup or from Loot. I’m a little baby sometimes. That is my vibe certainly in real life. It’s very different from Nicholas. I think he’s a much more confident person than I am at the end of the day.
There are some parallels between your character’s background and your own that we get to explore in episode three. Why did you want to inject a bit of yourself into him?
I am really grateful to [creators] Alan [Yang] and Matt [Hubbard] because they’ve always been generous with all of us in wanting our input on how these characters develop and making them characters that we can really relate to. Specifically with episode three, they came to me early in the process of writing and asked, ‘Do you want his parents to be Asian or would you like him to be a transracial adoptee like you?’ I immediately jumped at the chance to be able to portray that kind of family in a really incidental way. The adoption part of it is not centered in that story, and that was really important to me. You just get to see this family existing and they’re just presented to you on screen and audiences are smart, they’ll figure out how that happened. I would love to see that more in media for sure. It’s like, why be so beholden to the race of a family when people like me exist out there and families like mine exist and look like that?
It also separates him from that stereotypical “gay assistant/best friend” stand-in. Were you worried about being boxed into that trope at all?
Listen, the fact is, I get called in to audition for gay assistants constantly. It is a constant rotation. That is the only role that Hollywood is really interested in seeing me play, ultimately. So I was definitely apprehensive at the beginning, but after talking to Matt and Alan at the start, they indicated that they were going to allow me some input to make sure that that character didn’t just become a one-dimensional gay assistant, best friend role. I think that has continued in season two as we’re seeing a lot more of me and Maya’s relationship.
I think that really grows and you see the many different layers to that relationship that makes it slightly different. Then honestly for me as both a gay guy and an Asian man, I think it’s really nice for me to be able to play a character that walks into the room and owns it and is like the alpha in a lot of situations. Being able to play someone who is never the butt of the joke in scenarios or never allows himself to be and gets there first. I think that’s really, for me, what sets him apart in a lot of ways and is the most fun that I have ever had playing that kind of role.
You share significantly more screen time with Maya Rudolph this season. What’s something that surprised you about working with her?
Getting to play with Maya more really is a masterclass in taking big swings and taking risks as a comedian. When I improvise on this show, so much of it is using my writer’s brain. I’m very analytical in the way that I approach comedy as both a standup and as a comedy writer and watching Maya — getting to be in the room with Maya a lot, she comes from the gut and instinct. That’s so inspiring to me. But of course, that isn’t something that I didn’t expect from Maya. Honestly, I always go back to this thing about Maya, which is she’s such a good mom. It is not like a five-nanny situation in that house.
She is driving her kids to dance practice. She’s going to the competitions at the Hilton by the airport. She is on sick duty. Quite honestly, I’ve worked for a lot of bosses who do not care if their families live or die, and it is so refreshing to work in an environment where the number one on the call sheet is like, ‘No, actually, we need to wrap on time because I love my family.’ That just really permeates through the rest of the set, and it is one of the nicest environments I’ve ever had the pleasure of working in for sure because of that.
The season opens with the show mocking the Vogue 73 Questions video series. You recently bought a house. What would a 73 Questions with Joel Kim Booster look like?
I would pull a lot of inspiration from the Donatella [Versace] 73 questions. I think that’s probably top of my list in terms of the most iconic 73 questions. But I would have a lot of fun winking at the theater of spontaneity that they try to create when in fact, it is so scripted and so stilted all the time. I would have little Easter eggs like that, sight gags spread throughout the house just in the background. Little voodoo dolls of Bowen may be sitting on the bookshelf.
How do you decide when to switch hats – from acting to directing to writing? Or is the goal to be able to do all three when you can?
I want to be the captain of the ship and I want to wear many hats. I obviously look up to people like Issa Rae and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, people who did that and created those shows — ran them and starred in them. That’s always been the goal. But barring that, I think for me, I’ll always think of myself as a writer first. There are some projects on the back burner for me right now that I’m writing for other people, and that’s really exciting. But ideally, I’d like to wear all three hats at the same time and continue to do that.
That’s the plan. A lot of things could change between now and then. If they came to me tomorrow and said, ‘Coleman Domingo wants to star in it instead,’ I would say, ‘That seems fine by me. I’d rather the movie get made with him, than not get made at all.’ So yeah, we’ll see. I’m hopeful though.
Apple TV+’s ‘Loot’ Season 2 premieres on April 3.
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