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Kanye West Honors His Late Mother’s Birthday With A New Song, ‘Donda’

Kanye West is in the midst of a flurry of activity, from announcing a presidential campaign to signing a huge Gap partnership deal to dropping new music. He continued this prolific stretch last night by sharing more new music: In honor of what would have been his late mother’s 71st birthday this weekend, he released a song named after her, “Donda.”

He shared the track as a video on Twitter, and it features mostly vintage video footage, including a clip of a younger Kanye rapping in a kitchen with his mother by his side. The song begins with Donda reading lyrics from KRS-One’s “Sound Of Da Police,” and later, Kanye raps of needing his mother, saying, “Momma, I need you to tuck me in / I done made some mistakes and they rubbed it in.”

The track samples The Clark Sisters’ 1980 song “They Were Overcome By The Word.” Fans have speculated that the voice that offers a background “uh” towards the end of the video is Kendrick Lamar, or perhaps Consequence or Conway The Machine.

Kanye wrote in the tweet sharing the video, “In loving memory of my incredible mother on her birthday. My mom reciting KRS1 lyrics. This song is called DONDA.” Donda died at the age of 58 in 2007, due to post-surgery complications. Kim Kardashian also shared a longer version of the clip of Kanye and his mother rapping “Hey Mama.”

Listen to “Donda” above.

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David Schwimmer’s Return To TV Comedy In ‘Intelligence’ Pivots In The Wrong Direction

If Friends had launched in 2020, the show may not have worked as well as it did back in the 1990s. For sure (and no matter what year), if any of the five leading characters had been situated more dominantly, the show’s careful balance may have been disrupted, potentially with disastrous results. After all, Monica could be unnervingly controlling at times, Chandler too manic, Rachel too frivolous, Phoebe too goofy, and Ross too shouty and overbearing. Well, viewers will receive a plethora of David Schwimmer in Ross-esque mode (with added perviness and homophobia) in Intelligence when Peacock launches on July 15. Presumably, this spy series was meant to be a feather in the cap of NBCUniversal’s streaming service, but Brave New World (which we’ll review soon) fares better than this Schwimmer-starring effort.

Intelligence will be compared to other efforts from the Friends cast to pivot away from their main moneymaker. They’ve done so with varying degrees of success (Courteney Cox’s Cougar Town and Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback being high points), but the show’s more comparable to Netflix’s recent Space Force (which happens to sparingly feature Kudrow). Here, we’ve got David Schwimmer instead of Steve Carell, seeking to edge his way back into TV comedy. Schwimmer, who managed to humanize Robert Kardashian in The People Vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, surprised many who didn’t realize that a talented dramatic actor lurked beneath the Ross Geller exterior, but the lure of harnessing some workplace-comedy magic must have been too strong.

That’d be okay if Schwimmer’s boss-vibe wasn’t laced with sexual innuendo, and if this wasn’t a “comedy” that lacked comedic qualities. As a result, Intelligence plays like Ross became a maverick NSA agent (named Jerry Bernstein) who not-so-secretly idolizes Larry Flynt. The effect is skeeviness masquerading beneath a Britcom label, and like someone didn’t think this through in the post-#MeToo era. I’m not sure if the goal was satire, but it feels like a misfire even that was the case. Jerry’s a nightmare, plowing through the office, changing rules, and making (bad) lewd jokes, but beyond that, he lacks human qualities. He’s a cardboard standee. Even when we find out about trauma in his past, there’s no way to empathize with this guy or want to toss him any goodwill.

It’s baffling to behold, and Schwimmer recently told E! Online that this was part of the plan for his character. It was a “challenge,” he stated, to portray a “conservative, racist, homophobic, sexist, pompous, ignorant, ultra-patriotic guy who’s come over here to try to grab power.” And I kind-of get that intent. Schwimmer intended to play the stereotypical Ugly American among an office of relatively civilized Brits. Still, the star believes that the show made Jerry “not only likable” but “funny,” and neither is true. The worst part, of course, is the lack of genuine laughs.

A few examples of Jerry’s behavior from the six episodes screened for critics:

– Jerry opens an episode while speaking at the head of a boardroom table: “And in short, that’s why I have to sleep completely naked.”

– A female colleague comments upon something completely innocuous: “It was very brief…”; Jerry hops into the conversation: “… in a premature ejaculation way.”

– A group of co-workers gathers to take a photo for the organization’s social media page. Jerry instructs everyone to sex things up.

– A female colleague admits that Jerry’s methodology is “rubbing off on me.” Jerry is faux-aghast: “You wish!

Yikes. And Jerry is hyper-belligerent, whether he’s cracking sexist jokes or telling everyone that he knows best, or yeah, all the homophobia. Sadly, it’s not as though there’s even any substantive reason for Jerry’s displays, no context beyond him being an awful person, and certainly, no lessons learned. It’s all simply a bunch of wisecracks thrown at the wall. There’s no humanity. There’s no humor. It’s aggressively hostile stuff.

For an unknown reason (there are suggestions that don’t make sense near the end of the six episodes screened for critics), Jerry’s introduced himself at the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, which is like MI5 and MI6 but nerdier and focused on cybercrime (no fancy martinis here), where he recruits an computer analyst, Joseph (Nick Mohammed, who writes the series and is otherwise a competent comedian known as Mr. Swallow and made turns in Bridget Jones’s Baby and the Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie) for some sort of power move. In the process, Joseph, along with the female colleagues on the premises, get buried by Jerry’s baffling displays of toxicity.

Jerry’s pompous-shout factor overpowers the Joseph character by design, but he also relegates all other co-workers — Tuva (Gana Bayarsaikhan), Mary (Jane Stanness), and actual boss Christine (Sylvestra Le Touzel) — to the sidelines. A few of these characters seem mildly interesting, but we don’t get to know them much at all. Instead, Intelligence all comes down to the Super-Obnoxious Ross descendant being, you know, too much.

Peacock’s ‘Intelligence’ streams on July 15.

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Kelly Preston, ‘Jerry Maguire’ Actress And Wife Of John Travolta, Has Died After Battling Cancer

Actress Kelly Preston passed away on Sunday at the age of 57, as revealed by her husband, John Travolta. The pair married in 1991 after meeting on the set of 1989’s The Experts, and he paid tribute to her on his Instagram account.

“It is with a very heavy heart that I inform you that my beautiful wife Kelly has lost her two-year battle with breast cancer,” Travolta wrote. “She fought a courageous fight with the love and support of so many. My family and I will forever be grateful to her doctors and nurses at MD Anderson Cancer Center, all the medical centers that have helped, as well as her many friends and loved ones who have been by her side. Kelly’s love and life will always be remembered. I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother … please know that I will feel your outpouring of love in the weeks and months ahead as we heal.”

Travolta and Preston appeared in multiple films together over the decades, including Battlefield Earth and Gotti, in which she portrayed Victoria Gotti alongside Travolta, who played the infamous American gangster. She also starred with Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire; some of her other notable roles included For The Love Of The Game, Twins, SpaceCamp, Holy Man, and Secret Admirer.

Preston is survived by two of the couple’s children, Ella (20) and Benjamin (9). In 2009, their first-born son, Jett, passed away at age 16.

See Travolta’s full Instagram post below.

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LeBron Recreated ‘The Block’ While Playing 2K With Anthony Davis And Quinn Cook

Video games will be very popular inside the NBA bubble, as players look to pass the time in the hotel at night without much else in the way of entertainment options — aside from pool parties with DJs that only Dwight Howard goes to.

There are plenty of NBA gamers that brought elaborate gaming setups, complete with Twitch cameras and multiple monitors, but even the most casual of NBA gamer will be breaking out their system to kill some time without the usual alternatives, like, nightlife or laying low with family. Late Sunday night, we got a peek at how this is going to look in NBA 2K, as Quinn Cook brought LeBron James and Anthony Davis to the park, where pandemonium ensued.

Other MyPlayers chased James, Cook, and Davis, all of whom play as themselves, just in street clothes, so there is no attempt to hide that it’s them. The cuts from Cook’s Twitch stream of people running and flocking around them is pretty hilarious, and once they finally found an open court — after getting bypassed by a team that used VIP status to get on the court they were waiting on — it looked, well, an awful lot like if LeBron James was playing in a random park.

James’ MyPlayer is just as capable of ridiculous plays as the real LeBron, and he recreated “The Block” on a poor, unsuspecting player who thought they had a wide open layup, only to have it swatted off the backboard to the delight of Cook.

This surely won’t be the last time some major NBA stars crash the 2K park, and if anything this will only make 2K even more popular as folks will be hopping on hoping for the chance to play against some of the NBA’s best — even if the end result is a little embarrassment.

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A Decade Later, Nothing’s Topped ‘Inception’s’ Mind-Bending Hallway Scene

Inception, the boundary-pushing psychological thriller that explored dreams and the architecture of man’s subconscious debuted 10 years ago, but fans and cinephiles are still fixated on it. And proceeding films are still struggling to catch up to the scale of its high concept practical effects wizardry — best exemplified by the iconic hallway fight scene. To be sure, that’s another reason audiences and critics are eager to get a look at Nolan and team’s latest, visually stunning, and cerebral high concept film in Tenet (whenever its safe to do so in a theater, of course).

Born from the necessity of trying to find a way to match Nolan’s gravity-defying vision without breaking the limbs of those involved, actor Joseph Gordon Levitt (who played Arthur opposite Leo DiCaprio’s Cobb) somehow survived the chaos, running through a gauntlet hiding sizeable drops and other potential dangers. All this while trying to play a character desperately fighting to set up the “kick” that will awaken the rest of his team of dream thieves.

How, exactly, did they pull it all off? To celebrate this achievement in spectacle filmmaking and assess its legacy and modern impact, we connected with production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, stunt coordinator Tom Struthers, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, and Levitt to find out, sharing details, stories, and pre-production visuals of the epic undertaking that was the hallway fight scene.

Guy Hendrix Dyas

Planting The Idea

Creativity often strikes in the most unusual of places and for Christopher Nolan, typically that place is his garage. It’s where he invited production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas to discuss plans for the climactic fight scene and where the two men bonded over their love of action movies – Dyas had previously worked on films in the Indiana Jones and X-Men franchises.

“A lot of it was talking about how we could perhaps redefine the action-adventure film,” Dyas tells Uproxx. “Tapping into classics, the way you used to feel when you were a kid and you’d go and see your first James Bond film.”

The answer: go as practical as possible.

Nolan is famous for preferring practical effects and innovative camera work over the use of CGI, something that’s helped drive the success and adulation for films like The Prestige and The Dark Knight over the years. But is that a negative response to new technology or a means of staying within the tradition that represents a certain way of movie making and some of Nolan’s influences.

“Chris and I were on a heavy-duty diet of old archives of classic films, whether it was Fred Astaire dancing around a room that’s rotating, or whether it was the iconic scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the astronauts are trying desperately to get back into the airlock,” Dyas recalls. “All of those scenes were created before the dawn of CGI.”

That “old school” approach extended to the film’s set design, as well. A heist thriller set in the confines of various dream worlds certainly could have allowed for splashier colors and more fantastical backgrounds and other-worldly locations but Nolan wanted to keep shared dream sequences, like the hallway scuffle, as grounded in realism as possible. That’s a signature element of his Batman trilogy, of course, allowing for stories that feel more at eye level — which, in turn, makes villains like The Joker and Bane seem more terrifying. But in this case, it was also done to make the audience question their own sense of reality.

“What Chris wanted was a sort of restrained elegance, restrained sophistication,” says Dyas. They also apparently wanted to keep their audience from feeling disoriented. That’s why Dyas incorporated Japanese architecture into certain scenes and warmed up the film’s color palette.

“There was a distinct decision by Chris and me to give each of these landscapes a very different color scheme because that is the first thing your eye reads when you enter a scene,” Dyas explains. “So at the same time, you had Joseph spinning around in that golden corridor, you also had characters tumbling in the van, in a very gray, urban environment. At the same time that’s all going on, of course, you have the snowy landscape for the final layer. So every time you’re cutting back and forth from these layers, you know, hopefully, where you are at any given time.”

Guy Hendrix Dyas

Building The Dream

Constructing a useable hallway that could house filming equipment and multiple actors while rotating a full 360 degrees was one of the biggest hurdles the crew faced during their 10-month shoot. Nolan tapped special effects supervisor and Batman trilogy collaborator Chris Corbould to help build the massive set-piece in the same hanger where they’d filmed action sequences for those films.

“Just the sheer scale of it was a challenge. We had to really get our heads around how do we drive it? How do we make sure the integrity was strong enough to do what we wanted to do?” Corbould admits.

Initially, the corridor was just 40 feet long but Nolan upped it to 100 feet. Then he wanted to add a cross-section which meant the entire structure needed to be lifted 20 feet off the ground and powered by two giant electric motors. Another corridor was built, one that tilted upward to simulate the loss of gravity.

“You had the rotating corridor so that you could get Joe basically running around and hitting the walls,” Dyas explains. “Then we placed a camera on the ground and pointed it up and had him on a wire harness, and he fell towards the camera. But of course, when you look at that, it looks like he’s floating down the middle of the corridor.”

Once the hallway was finished, Dyas was able to build an interior that resembled an actual hotel corridor. But, the set design and production teams had to get creative in order to keep Levitt and the stuntmen from seriously injuring themselves.

“You may wonder what the texture is on the walls. It’s not paint, it’s actually fabric,” Dyas says. “And underneath that fabric is a very thick, three-inch layer of neoprene rubber so that our actors and stuntmen wouldn’t break their limbs. That thing was very dangerous. I tried it out.”

Warner Bros.

Staging The Fight

Once the set was created, it was up to the film’s stunt team, led by coordinator Tom Struthers, — another Nolan veteran — to choreograph Levitt’s vital fight through the dream’s deepest layer while facing down trained henchmen in a match-up with life or death stakes.

“Chris is very classic,” Struthers says. “He tries to bring across a whole sense of something new while still using the methods that we learned when we first started in the business.”

The key to making this fight sequence feel authentic was the set, yes, but it was also vital to find the right actor to sell the brawl. Arthur was Cobb’s right-hand man and a restrained, calculating presence for most of the film. In this sequence, we finally see him on his back foot, scrambling to survive and complete the mission at hand. Now imagine how hard it was to pull that off while trying to not get injured or fall out of step with the intricate choreography required to get through the scene in a way that met Nolan’s vision.

“Really, the key to it was casting someone that is capable of handling the workload physically that we were going to throw at him,” Struthers says, adding that “Joseph did every shot himself. He put a massive amount of energy and homework into doing this.”

“I was just so inspired by the physical challenge of it,” Levitt stated when we spoke with him recently ahead of his latest film, 7500, which sees him constrained in a cockpit while fending off terrorists for much of the film — another challenging shoot. “I was probably very territorial about doing stunts and pulling any double in there [with Inception], but that team was so supportive and taught me so much.”

Explaining why he felt a responsibility to endure the rigorous training and choreography so he could perform as much of the action as possible, Levitt said, “I think a lot of Chris’s [Nolan] action scenes, there are not as many edits in them as some standard Hollywood action scenes. What he wanted to do, especially with that hallway scene, was he wanted the camera to stay in one shot for longer periods of time. And that meant that it was going to be on my back sometimes, and then I’d turn around, and all in the same shot, you would see my face. So it had to be me.”

And because Nolan wanted the dream sequence to feel as real as possible, he made sure that the fight felt gritty and authentic in a way that fit his characters and not some idealized vision of what fight sequences should be.

“Our characters were not martial arts experts,” Dyas explains. “They were architects and sleuths and people who were con artists. They were not these sorts of incredible athletes. So it became very obvious that our action needed to be sort of messy and clumsy in a way. I remember standing there as we were filming it and watching him fall about the corridor. A lot of the crew was there looking on and going ‘What a disaster.’ And of course, Chris [Nolan] was lapping it up because it was exactly the tone that he wanted. He wanted people to look at this and see somebody struggling for the first time and not being so perfectly poised.”

Because of that choice, Dyas sees a disconnect between the legacy of Inception and comic book movies. “I think they make the audience [feel like they’re] removed from the experience. But when you look at that corridor scene, everyone can imagine they’re in that corridor.”

From casting with an eye on getting a great 360-degree performance and not just with a physical type in mind to the commitment to practical effects and ornate sets whenever possible, you can easily see a separator between the big-budget action movies (comic book inspired and otherwise) of the last decade and Inception. Dyas does, telling us, “Even in the comic book films of recent years, there’s sort of a rehearsed elegance to a lot of the fights. I think they make the audience [feel like they’re] removed from the experience. But when you look at that corridor scene, everyone can imagine they’re in that corridor.”

With that in mind the question of “why” stands out. Why does a film that changed the game not scan as something that drove a revolution of films that aimed to beat it on its playing field? Is it just too hard and/or expensive to do things the Nolan way? That kind of risk aversion that stops sparks of innovation from becoming an industry-wide brush fire?

Even if Tenet does take the baton from Inception when it comes out, causing wallets to open and jaws to drop, the impact of COVID on theaters and the economy (both in Hollywood and worldwide) has likely made it even harder to get adventurous with studio money, continuing the tradition of still amazing but somewhat antiseptic largely digital moments that don’t quite blow our minds. Or like something truly new has the capacity to do. Think about 2012’s The Avengers and the thrill of seeing the main heroes gathered together and how the evolution of that in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame is a lot more heroes, all in front of a green screen, causing a swell of fist-pump inspiring emotion but not necessarily something that is sure to linger as iconic. And perhaps that’s good enough, providing the empty calories that these kinds of films are expected to deliver. But while Nolan is getting (legitimate) criticism for his reported insistence on opening this film as a statement to the viability and worth of the movie theater experience right when theaters open, perhaps we should also remember and appreciate his commitment to pushing boundaries that only he may be able (or willing) to top someday.

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Rajon Rondo Reportedly Suffered A ‘Significant’ Hand Injury At Lakers Practice

Like the rest of the 22 teams in Orlando for the NBA’s restart, the Los Angeles Lakers have begun practicing again as they hope to regain the form that made them the top team in the Western Conference prior to the hiatus.

At the core, it’s about LeBron James and Anthony Davis playing at the MVP and DPOY caliber they were respectively when at their peak this season, but there’s ample pressure on their supporting cast to step up and fill the necessary roles around them. With Avery Bradley opting out of the restart, the Lakers backcourt figured to rely heavily on the efforts of Rajon Rondo and Alex Caruso to run the offense, with new signings J.R. Smith and Dion Waiters capable of filling in minutes at the two-guard spot but unlikely to take on major roles.

On Sunday, that plan may have been changed when Rondo reportedly suffered a “significant” hand injury, and will be evaluated further on Monday, per ESPN’s Dave McMenamin and Malika Andrews.

Rondo missed significant time in the 2018-19 season due to a pair of hand injuries — a fractured hand and, later, a sprained finger. It’s unknown exactly what the injury he suffered on Sunday is, but if he is to miss major time it will be a big blow to the Lakers backcourt depth. Caruso would step into the starting lineup and likely need to play big minutes, and their newly signed reserves would likely be needed to play more often come playoff time than would’ve been originally planned.

We will have to wait for an official release to know the specifics of the injury and a potential timetable, but it’s an inauspicious start to the Lakers restart.

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Bruce Smith Gave A ‘Family Feud’ Answer So Wild Steve Harvey Said ‘What The F*ck’

Bruce Smith was among five NFL Hall of Famers that played together on Celebrity Family Feud on Sunday night, and, given the presence of Michael Irvin and Cris Carter, he was not at the top of the list of who you’d expect a wild answer from on that team.

However, that’s exactly what happened during the Fast Money round, when Smith just needed 72 points to reach the coveted 200 number. The first question of Fast Money was, “If Captain Hook was moonlighting as a handyman, he might replace his hook with what tool?”

After answering “a hammer,” which had already been given, Smith panicked and, for some reason, decided the next tool he could think of was “a penis.” Steve Harvey got about halfway into the next question before stopping, turning to the camera, and saying “what the f*ck did he just say?” as the rest of the Hall of Famers burst into laughter.

Carter and Irvin’s reactions are hysterical, while Harvey stands there in absolute disbelief. Smith is doubled over in laughter, half-embarrassed that’s what he came up with on national television, and the entire Fast Money round comes to a screeching, hilarious halt.

Moments like this are why Steve Harvey is the absolute best Family Feud host in history, as his reactions to wild answers make the show as entertaining as it is. This is one of the all-timers, and that it came from Bruce Smith of all people only makes it funnier.

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Report: Washington Will Announce A Name Change Monday, But Will Not Unveil A New Name Yet

The Washington D.C. football team will finally and formally announce their intentions to change their names from Redskins on Monday, after a week-plus long review of the team name has come to an apparent conclusion, per Ben Fischer of Sports Business Daily.

The review of the name, one that has long been called into question as a slur towards Native Americans, was precipitated by FedEx, Pepsi, Nike, and other sponsors saying they’ll pull their sponsorships of the team if the name is not changed. Unsurprisingly, it was the pressure of financial loss that caused the team to take calls for a name change seriously, when the arguments against it have long been present, but at the least it is finally happening.

As Fischer notes in his report, the announcement set to come on Monday will be only to note they will be getting rid of the Redskins nickname, as they still have a trademark process to go through with whatever their new name will be.

The Redskins intend to announce on Monday that the team will retire its nickname, two sources said, 11 days after naming-rights sponsor FedEx’s public statement asking for a change to the controversial moniker. The new nickname will not be announced immediately because trademark issues are pending, the sources said, but insiders were told today that the “thorough review” announced July 3 has concluded. The team felt it was important to remove any doubts as to the future of the name, one source said.

The news was confirmed by Mike Jones of USA Today.

Redtails and Warriors have been consistently rumored as two of the top options for the new nickname, but there are other possibilities that have been floated by fans and media. Whatever the new name, even if it ends up being uninspiring to the fan base, it will be an upgrade over the current moniker.

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Sideline Cancer Stunned Overseas Elite On A Game-Winning Three To Reach The TBT Finals

Overseas Elite has been a dominant force since the inception of The Basketball Tournament, having won it all four times, and this year, with top-seeded Carmen’s Crew getting knocked out in the round of 16, they were considered the favorites to take home the $1 million once again.

Led by Joe Johnson, who dominated play up to the semifinals, Overseas Elite came up on 22-seed Sideline Cancer, led by Marcus Keene, in the semifinals, with a chance to play for the title against the Golden Eagles up for grabs. Early on, Overseas Elite took control of the game and had an 11-point advantage at one point in the second quarter, as things were looking dire for a Sideline Cancer team that couldn’t buy a three-point bucket.

However, in the second half it was the four-time champs that went cold from beyond the arc, and Keene and company came alive. The two teams were tied at 59 inside four minutes, triggering a race to 67 points in the Elam Ending, and the two sides traded buckets in the closing stretch. Keene hit a deep three to put Sideline Cancer within three points of the target score first, but would be answered by a Joe Johnson and-1 on the other end.

On the ensuing possession, Keene drew iron on a three and Overseas Elite, needing just two points for the win, won a wild scramble for the loose ball and had a 2-on-2 fast break opportunity. They got a bucket in the paint, but after their coach called a timeout in a questionable decision that ultimately backfired after Johnson got knocked off balance spinning and driving to the rim, missing a contested layup.

That gave Sideline Cancer another shot to win, and this time they cashed in on a contested three-pointer by Mo Creek from the right wing.

Sideline Cancer’s run has been incredible, spearheaded by Keene who’s averaged north of 22 points per game in the tournament. Now they’ll face the Marquette alumni team that lost in last year’s title game as TBT will crown a new champion this year.

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Valentina Sampaio is Sports Illustrated’s first transgender swimsuit model

For the first time in its 56-year history, Sports Illustrated will feature a transgender model on its glossy cover. 23-year-old Brazilian model Valentina Sampaio will appear in the July issue, which hits stands early next week. Sampaio wrote on Instagram that she was “excited and honored” to be part of such an iconic issue, adding: “The team at SI has created yet another groundbreaking issue by bringing together a diverse set of multitalented, beautiful women in a creative and dignified way.”

A native of Fortaleza, a city in northeastern Brazil, Sampaio has been making history in the fashion world in recent years. She was already the first trans model to make the 2017 cover of Vogue Paris. Scouted while she was a young teen, she quickly made her way onto key runways in her home country. She managed to make an impression in a short time— launching her career at 18 years old—as L’Oréal Paris’s first trans model. She hit another milestone last year, when she was the face of Victoria’s Secret campaign, breaking barriers as the first trans woman working with the brand.


“Being trans usually means facing closed doors to peoples’ hearts and minds,” she wrote on Instagram. “We face snickers, insults, fearful reactions and physical violations just for existing. Our options for growing up in a loving and accepting family, having a fruitful experience at school or finding dignified work are unimaginably limited and challenging.”

Sampaio mentions on her social media that her success hasn’t come easy, as she’s fighting against discrimination and using her voice and platform to advocate for LGBTQ rights. I feel strong and I feel inspired to fight,” she wrote. “Not just for me, but for everyone who face[s] discrimination.”

Even though our world is slowly changing, Sampaio claims that she was born trans in a remote fishing village, and although she loves her beautiful country, she doesn’t feel accepted in Brazil. “It has the highest crime and murder rate against the trans community,” she wrote.

According to a report filed by two transgender activists at the International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights panel in D.C. on Sept. 13, 2019, 163 trans people were reported murdered in Brazil in 2018. According to The Blade, it represents 47% of all reported murders of transgender people globally. One of the activists, Bruna Benevides of Associação Nacional dos Travestis e Transsexuais (ANTRA), claimed “a trans person is killed every 48 hours in Brazil.”

With Sampaio’s visibility and voice, she’s quoted by Sports Illustrated’s Instagram account, claiming that she hopes to “give the world a good message of love and respect for every kind of human, for everyone.” The magazine made sure to stand with her vision and support her cause for inclusion on their socials. SI notes that discrimination will absolutely not be tolerated. If you violate their conditions, they say “you will be deleted, blocked and reported.”

Kudos to Sampaio for all her success and her vision for a brighter tomorrow.