“To everyone hating on Ashley Benson, please stop!”

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Big sophomore college student energy.

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Apple’s Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet will follow in the footsteps of Parks and Recreaction and Community by delivering a quarantine special shot entirely through social distancing, but with a twist: The episode was written, filmed, and edited solely on iPhones.

Similar to the Parks and Rec special, the one-off episode written by creator Rob McElhenney (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia) will lean into the characters who work for a fictional gaming company as they attempt to navigate lockdown life with mixed results. In a statement to Variety, McElhenney breaks down the impetus behind the special and how they were able to quickly produce it on the fly:

“Lots of workplaces are figuring out this whole working-from-home thing, and the gaming industry is no different. Virtual meetings are a new and special kind of hell, so I think people will relate,” said McElhenney. “Yes we’ve all had low points, but there have also been incredible moments of triumph and we wanted to celebrate that. We needed to shoot this episode fast without sacrificing quality. Thankfully, we’re living in a time when everyone’s got a camera in their pocket. Having an iPhone coupled with the ingenuity of our crew, allowed us to make this unique piece of television in just days. We hope people enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.”

It’s only fitting that McElhenney would jump at the chance to help bring some comedy relief during these stressful times. When the pandemic became a global crisis back in March, McElhenney was one of the first to publicly demand that Hollywood continue to pay the thousands of crew members who will be unemployed during the shutdown.

“This only really works if EVERYBODY makes the commitment to help” McElhenney tweeted at the time. “Just shutting down without a plan is not an option. I am so fortunate that I am in a position to help. I wouldn’t be here without the support of an entire community. No one in my position is.”

Mythic Quest: Quarantine will be available on Apple TV Plus on May 22.

(Via Variety)

Earlier this week, Katy Perry offered a glimmer of hope that Taylor Swift might appear on her next album, as she neither confirmed nor denied an upcoming collaboration in a recent interview. However, now it appears that, at least at the moment, Perry and Swift do not have a joint song in the works.

In an interview from before the release of “Daisies” (the new single that came out today), one of the hosts asks Perry, “Is it right that Taylor Swift appears on this new song, Katy?” She responded, “No, it’s not correct, but fans are definitely excited for something like that to happen in the future and I’m always open.” The host followed up, “So could she appear on the album, or…?” Perry answered, “No, not as of yet! The fans are so fun. They do search far and wide for easter eggs, and we do put them in our visuals, and in lyric videos, and music videos, and content that we create, but not everything is an easter egg! Some things are just… a flower!”

The two pop stars of course has a public reconciliation in 2019 after years of feuding, and Swift previously spoke about how they have mended their relationship, saying, “We have been on really good terms for a while. She sent this beautiful note and olive branch to the opening night of the Reputation stadium tour, a while ago, and from then on, we’ve been on good terms.”

Though the Jr. NBA Leadership Conference won’t happen in-person as scheduled, the NBA and WNBA put together an impressive slate of virtual interviews throughout Friday, starting with ESPN broadcaster Doris Burke and two-time MVP Steph Curry. The Jr. NBA seeks to educate kids not only on the skills necessary to be great players, but how to become better leaders and teammates. Curry detailed his own leadership style, as someone who has never been the biggest, most athletic or most aggressive player on his teams.

“As I look back from when I started playing AAU basketball when I was 9 to now, I have the same personality, I love to have fun, I love to smile, I love to crack jokes no matter what room I’m in,” Curry said.

But that had to change as he progressed in his career and into the NBA.

“Because I was talented and eventually became the best player on a team, there comes a certain expectation that sometimes you have to be the most vocal and demonstrative,” he added. “You don’t have to be anybody but yourself. I can show it better than I can say it. So I know there’s a consistency to that, but I’m pretty selective when I do speak. I’m not the loudest guy in the room, so hopefully when I do speak, it commands attention and there’s a presence about it.”

The Warriors’ locker room impressively held together well over the course of its four straight Finals appearances, despite the vast differences between Curry’s style, that of Draymond Green, and the magnetic cool of Klay Thompson. Though of course their bond wasn’t easily achieved, it wasn’t until last season that major cracks appeared in Golden State’s infrastructure.

Green is the loudest and most brazen Warrior, but Curry is the MVP. They had to figure out how to balance one another.

“Draymond has a totally different approach in terms of what works for him,” Curry told Burke. “The biggest thing is you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror everyday and say did I do everything I could to make everybody better around me? That doesn’t mean its something tangible, it’s just a feeling that you have. You just keep adding dominoes to the stack in terms of what a leader should be.”

Dating back to his time at Davidson, Curry has always been underestimated based on how he looks, how he plays, and his successful father. Trying to lead in spite of all that was difficult, but it was actually the confidence to not go outside his comfort zone that allowed Curry to earn the respect of his incredible Warriors teammates.

Following the death of comedian and actor Jerry Stiller on Monday, Jerry Seinfeld has opened up about what it was like with to work with the comedy legend on Seinfeld where Stiller famously portrayed the hilariously hostile Frank Costanza.

While calling into What a Joke With Papa & Fortune on SiriusXM (via Vulture), Seinfeld revealed that he was initially reluctant to cast Stiller because he just assumed the part of George Constanza’s would also be bald. Fortunately, writer Larry Charles kept pushing for Stiller, so they brought him in for an audition, and he ended up being absolutely perfect.

“He had the most amazing comedic stuff that we didn’t know if he was planning it or it just came out that way, or he couldn’t remember the line, or we didn’t know what it was,” Seinfeld said. “But we did not want to disturb it in any way. We never gave Jerry Stiller a note. I never adjusted his performance once. Whatever he did, that’s it. We’re putting that out there.”

As for Stiller’s penchant for screaming some of his lines while in character, to this day, Seinfeld has no idea how or why Stiller would pick particular moments to explode, and frankly, he didn’t care because it was funny. “I don’t know why he did it like that. I don’t know why he screamed on that line. It doesn’t matter. It’s funny. So funny. I am such a dedicated believer in if it’s funny, don’t touch it. I don’t care why it’s funny. I don’t care what the line was supposed to be. He said it that way, we’re doing it that way.”

Seinfeld isn’t just blowing smoke. Stiller truly transformed the character who was originally supposed to be more “subdued and even-keeled.” But when that approach wasn’t working while auditioning with Estelle Harris, the late actor decided to cut loose by blowing his top during a line, which left everyone in the room laughing. In that moment, Frank Costanza was born.

(Via What a Joke With Papa & Fortune & Vulture)

Previously on Total Bellas: Nikki and Artem had their first fight and looked like they might be on the path to having their first baby.

Was There Anything About Wrestling On This Week’s Episode Of Total Bellas?

There’s a lot of Daniel Bryan in this episode, but the closest thing to a direct reference to his wrestling career is talk about how often he’s away from home.

Swerved

Much more than it was about wrestling, this week’s show was about babies. But it was not about babies in the way last week’s cliffhanger ending led viewers to think! It turns out Nikki isn’t actually pregnant, and Artem, the Total Bellas production crew, and the E! audience see and hear her pee on a stick (in a PG but gross way) in order to find this out. This is not a Best and Worst column, but I’m still going to give the pregnancy test scene a hard Worst.

Nikki not being pregnant raises the question for Nikki-and-Artem of if they both want a kid. Artem does, which the audience learns in this week, but Nikki has apparently known all along. Nikki doesn’t have a straight answer and spends the episode in conflict about her “ticking clock,” which she calls a “clicking tock” after an unknown quantity of wine. I think most women who are in their thirties and either want to have kids or think they might want to have kids experience this panic of like, “Do I need to think about my eggs now? Are they doing okay in there? Also, what about literally all of my other priorities???” and that’s what Nikki goes through here.

She also has a waiter knock about half a glass of red wine all over her at a restaurant and is very chill and nice about it, I will point out! It’s a very non-Diva moment for the former Divas Champion. Nikki goes into the Nice To Service People category now until proven otherwise.

Together Apart

Last week, both of this show’s central couples were ON THE ROCKS, and this week Bryan and Brie are on the rocks again, but actually start to make their way out of the quarry by the end. Brie is still trying to get them to spend more time together as a couple and Bryan thinks the obstacle to that is Brie prioritizing hanging out with Nikki over him (career stuff is in the background for Brie this week.) Since Artem and Nikki are staying at their house, one of Bryan’s examples of this is that he’ll walk into the living room at night and the other three adults in the house will be watching TV and staring at their phones at the same time, “averaging seven-hours-plus of screen time a day.”

Every other time Bryan and Brie have had one of these fights on this season of Total Bellas it has escalated to the point of “Oh, yikes, this marriage is actually not going well at all,” but they make some real progress this week! Brie can’t figure out a date night that works with both of their schedules and generally seems really overwhelmed, so Bryan eventually ditches the argument and makes the save, figuring out a time they could go on a mini-trip and leave Birdie with Kathy.

Previously, these two have hashed out specific problem-causing situations in their marriage, but that never seemed to help their emotional problems. Here, it seems like Bryan finally figures out a way they could actually connect more as romantic partners rather than just pointing out the problems with Brie’s attempting solutions. Sometimes I feel like Bryan gets a less sympathetic edit because his name isn’t in the title of the show, so it was cool to see him work outside the box to make the save this week.

Total Bros

This episode also includes the historic, first-ever Bryan-and-Artem subplot, which is basically the Total Bellas version of that episode of Girls that was called “Boys” and was mainly about Adam and Ray. (I was going to call Alex Karpovsky the Marty Jannetty to Adam Driver’s HBK, but then I googled him, and it seems like he’s doing pretty well these days, actually.)

The Bellas’ fellas’ storyline is that Brie and Nikki want them to bond, but it seems like they have nothing in common. Bryan likes yoga; Artem does not like yoga. When Artem suggests fishing, Bryan explains he isn’t interested because “I just always picture myself as a fish” and then gives a detailed description of what he thinks the experience of a being “fished” as a human would be like. But by the end of the episode, they appear to have formed a sustainable future-brothers-in-law-and-next-door-neighbors relationship through D.I.Y. I feel like we would need significant reality TV machinations to get some drama between these two, which is probably a positive thing for the real-life Danielson-Garcia-Chigvintsev clan.

Celebrity Nail Artist Instagram Of The Week

While the Bellas are getting their hair, makeup, etc., done for a photoshoot, Nikki outlines her pregnancy woes to mother-daughter celebrity nail artists Lisa and Alex Jachno. It turns out Alex’s Instagram is a pretty good source of pictures of nail art and pictures of celebrities in which you wouldn’t really notice their nails unless you saw it posted by a nail artist. That’s a recommendation for something to kill a few minutes of quarantine for you.

Before the league shutdown, Dwight Howard was in the midst of one of the most unexpected redemption stories in recent memory. He’d been bouncing around the NBA for several years, unable to stay healthy, unwilling to adjust his game to his waning athleticism, and he was quickly running out of options.

That’s when the most unlikely of options presented itself: a return to Los Angeles, where he’d alienated himself from the entire fanbase amid arguably the ugliest exit of his career. But, nearly a decade had passed, and the city and the organization proved that they could let bygones be bygones.

And before the season went on hiatus, Howard was proving unequivocally that he could be a contributing member to a title team. Naturally, Howard has been forced to field all sorts of questions about what went wrong the first time around, and that holds true even during the shutdown.

In a recent Instagram Live interview with Jared Dudley, Howard addressed what he believes went wrong back in 2012, confirming what most of us already suspected about the clash of titanic egos.

Howard had teamed up with both Kobe Bryant and an aging Steve Nash in hopes of one final championship run. But with Nash’s ongoing injuries and Howard’s inability to click with Kobe, the season ended in disappointment after a first-round sweep at the hands of the Spurs.

Howard quickly skipped town after that and had become a pariah among Lakers fans. But the chance to team up with LeBron James offered an opportunity — if not to rewrite history — then to correct some of the mistakes of the past. Howard as proving he could be a valuable role player in limited minutes, further endearing himself to a fan base that had previously written him off.

With the league methodically trying to figure out how to resume the season, the Lakers among teams opening their practice facility for voluntary workouts this weekend, although there’s still no clear path for a return. The NBA has said it will make a final decision within the next 2-4 weeks.

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It was all of yesterday WHEN we suggested that Timothée Chalamet should play the Tony Montana role in Luca Guadagnino’s Scarface reboot. Word must have gotten to Dune director Denis Villeneuve (directors love fan-casting), because during an interview with Empire, the Arrival filmmaker compared Timmy to another Al Pacino character.

In Dune, Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, a character previously portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel. “Paul has been raised in a very strict environment with a lot of training, because he’s the son of a Duke and one day… he’s training to be the Duke,” Villeneuve said. “But as much as he’s been prepared and trained for that role, is it really what he dreams to be? That’s the contradiction of that character. It’s like Michael Corleone in The Godfather – it’s someone that has a tragic fate and he will become something that he was not wishing to become.”

He also wears very casual pants.

Which Pacino character should Chalamet be compared to next? (Himself in Jack and Jill, obviously.) Dune, which also stars Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, and Jason Momoa, opens on December 18.

(Via Empire)