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)

Tame Impala released the highly-anticipated fourth record The Slow Rush in February. But since Tame Impala’s mastermind Kevin Parker has had to shelve touring plans for the time being, the musician is finding creative ways to keep fans entertained for a good cause. Teaming up with the online radio platform NTS, Parker shared a shimmering remix of his album opener, “One More Year.”

Parker’s “One More Year” remix stretches the track into an 18-minute-long trance layered over a pumping beat. The musician remixed the track for charity, sharing it for NTS’ Remote Utopia broadcast. The broadcast features other artists like Jpegmafia, Black Midi, Khruangbin, and more while raising funds for the Global Foodbanking Network.

Just ahead of his The Slow Rush release, Parker spoke with Uproxx about his discography, saying that he expects his fans to have a different reaction to each project:

“I don’t expect people to be on the journey with me the whole way. I expect people to get on the train and get off the next station. It sounds like I don’t care about my fans, but in a way, I’d be slightly disappointed if everyone that liked the first album liked every album after that. It’s one of those things that just has to happen. I think it was Marilyn Manson that said, ‘I don’t make albums for my fans. I make them for a new audience.’”

Listen to Parker’s “One More Year” remix above.

The Slow Rush is out now via Modular. Get it here.

Pro wrestling during a pandemic just doesn’t seem to be going all that well for pretty much anybody. Between the lack of crowds to react in the venue, and missing roster members limiting the booking options, these shows are having a hard time holding the attention of fans, no matter how few their other options are. This week AEW Dynamite once again drew more viewers than NXT, but at the same time it drew the fewest viewers it ever has.

As reported by Showbuzz Daily, Dynamite had an overnight audience of 654,000 viewers, and a rating of 0.23 in the key 18-49 demographic. These numbers aren’t just down from last week’s 732,000 viewership and 0.28 rating, they’re also the worst numbers the show has had since the show debuted last October. The previous low for viewership came on November 27, when 663,000 people watched. The previous low in the demo rating was a 0.25, which they’ve had several times, most recently on April 22.

NXT’s numbers were also down this week. They had 604,000 viewers, compared to 663,000 last week. NXT also had a 0.15 rating in the key demographic, down from last week’s 0.18.

Dynamite fell from the #12 spot to #15 in the Cable Top 150 rankings, while NXT went from #33 to #46, managing to stay in the Top 50 for the second week in a row..

MTV’s Challenge: Total Madness topped the key demo ratings for the night with a 0.49. Hannity on FOX News had the most total viewers of the night with 4.7 million.

It’s worth nothing that this week’s episode of AEW Dynamite was pre-taped, whereas last week’s was live. NXT was pre-taped both times. With no crowd to leak spoilers, it’s not clear what the difference is, but maybe wrestling viewers can just sense the difference somehow.

That Upload season 1 ending. I just want to talk about it so much because it’s such a wild, crushing turn of events that leads into so many, many questions about what comes next for Nora and Nathan on the show. But in a time where the rules of time aren’t quite what they once were, perhaps a couple of weeks isn’t enough to assume that everyone with an interest in a streaming show has seen said streaming show. Especially considering that we’re all drowning a little in streaming options.

Still, Upload is very good, and we wanted to remind you of that and give a little hint, following the season 2 renewal, of where things might go. And so, when we got the chance to talk with series creator Greg Daniels about the upcoming Netflix series, Space Force (more on that closer to the premiere), we also delved into the decision to end Upload season 1 on a cliffhanger (without revealing what happened), the relationship between Nora and Nathan, what actors Andy Allo and Robbie Amell bring to those characters, and some of the rules of the road and ambition going into season 2, which they’re already in the process of writing.

All of this is, for the most part, spoiler-free assuming you have a basic understanding of the show from trailers and such. Though, again, if you have seen the whole season then there will still be value for you as well.

I’m curious because, obviously, Season 1 ends at a point where you can definitely call that a cliffhanger. If you hadn’t gotten to Season 2, would you have been satisfied with where that ended?

When I originally pitched it, I had two seasons worked out in advance. Maybe I was a little overconfident, but I do have a feeling of where we’re going. The amount of closure at the end is something I debated with Amazon, and after we shot it, we pulled back on some of the closing up of things. We’re pretty deep into Season 2 now with the writers, so I guess if they hadn’t picked it up, there would’ve been a good bit of wasted work. I have in my deal, I believe, that if they don’t pick it up, I can finish it as a graphic novel.

Interesting.

Yeah. I’ve been working on this for so long that I was worried about that if I didn’t get a chance to do it, so I somehow retained the rights to put it out as a comic book if it didn’t go forwards.

Is that still something where it could live beyond a Season 2 or go in different directions as a graphic novel or a comic?

Oh, that’s a good idea. I don’t know. I was mostly concerned with it never reaching the light of day at all when I put that in the contract. But with these 10-episode seasons, you generate so many ideas and you just can’t use all of them, so I think that that could be really fun to branch off.

You say you started with two seasons in mind, is that still the case or is there room to expand and go deeper now?

Oh no, I could go further. I could go further. I just had two seasons broken in order to show where I wanted to go.

Does this show end when we see Nora and Nathan together finally, or is there more story to tell when and if that happens?

Well, the romance is part of the show, but there’s also a mystery part, and then there’s, I would say, the sort of a more joyful comedy part, I guess, that’s more like a normal show. So if for some reason there was no more tension in the romance story, I think there would still be some possibilities in the other stories if we wanted to keep going. But I only have a few possible endings floating around; I don’t actually know how this thing ends.

Can you talk a little bit about what Robbie Amell and Andy Allo brought to their characters and just how the show changed from birth to where it is now?

Well, Andy has a tremendous likability to her and she’s just sort of radiant, so there were things where I had it in dialogue and then I changed it so that it was more like the camera’s on her face and we just see her thinking and feeling stuff, which was part of the goal, to be more cinematic with the show anyway. But from the beginning, when she came in to audition, I called an audible on some of the scenes and I made a new moment, which became the first moment that we introduce her in the subway where she’s looking over another subway rider’s shoulder and watching the Adam Sandler movie 50 First Dates and just having this really sincere emotional reaction to the romanticism of it. I was sort of playing it like it’s a classic old Hollywood romance and people in the future looking back on it very wistfully since the future has gotten less romantic.

Anyway, she’s really good at just letting the camera be on her face, so I probably wrote in that direction more for her. Robbie has this… to me, in terms of what makes him funny, I think he has sort of a Cary Grant energy. That’s a bit of an old reference, but he’s very, obviously, attractive, but he’s very composed and he’s very funny, but in a very subtle way. One of the, I think, breakthroughs for the Season 1 writers was that we would watch his comedy reel. He’s done a lot of guest comedy spots on different shows, playing off of Josh Gad and stuff like that, and you could see that he’s got a really good sense of humor, even though his resume leans more into the action area.

Yeah. This was definitely an introduction for me, specifically with him, to see him carry over that charm and really find that comedic rhythm that I didn’t necessarily know that he had. I hadn’t seen Andy in anything, either, so really it was interesting to see them both inhabit these characters. Was that part of the appeal of casting them, that when you see them, you don’t instantly remember them from a big comedy role?

Yeah, I think so. My wife is a TV executive, and she was the original programmer of The WB, among other things. She always says that television makes stars, and I think there’s something very pleasurable as a viewer to come into a show and not know really anything about the actors and just bond with them in their characters that are being presented to you. So yeah, I love doing that. I have had a good experience in finding casts that I really liked and then bringing them to the viewers.

The gray market is something that I thought was really fascinating. Is there room, going forward, to see other offshoots and other areas and alternate afterlives and things along those lines?

Yeah, I think that’s a really fun part of the show. We’re going to explore the (Luddite) world more and the different design and cybersecurity areas of the Horizon company. Yeah, I think that’s super fun to do. It’s expensive, but it’s very fun

Obviously, this is a show that uniquely has the ability to do things like that. Even stuff as simple as the level of detail with the names of companies and certain things buried in the visuals of the show really adds to the charm.

Thanks, that’s something that I always took from The Simpsons — if you’re going to have a mall, you better put jokes on all of the stores. I really like to put comedy in the visuals. I don’t know, for some reason that seems easier to me than… It might’ve been from doing cartoons for so long.

You’re plotting out season 2 now, you’ve got Space Force beginning shortly. How do you juggle the process of both of those shows going almost simultaneously?

Well, it isn’t easy, but it’s easier that it’s not the first season. When I was running The Office, I also launched Parks And Recreation, and there was a season where, with help, I was co-showrunning The Office with Paul Lieberstein and co-showrunning Parks with Mike Schur, and it was Season 2 of Parks and Season 6 of The Office, but the total number of episodes was almost 50 episodes in one year.

That’s insane.

Here, we’re talking like 20 episodes, maybe. The main casting is done and the tone is set. I know I’m going to be working very, very hard, I know that, but I think it’s doable. The hardest part is figuring out how to shoot nowadays. That is, to me, the hardest part. There’s a lot of information going around, some of the production executives are saying you should be on stages more and use more green screens, but then other things I’ve read would suggest the stage is not the best place in terms of circulation of a virus. I don’t know, some aspects of it are a little up in the air.

George Miller is working on a Mad Max Furiosa prequel that won’t star Charlize Theron. This reality, fortunately, didn’t stop the Academy Award-winning actress from recently participating in an oral history from The New York Times about the making of Mad Max: Fury Road. On-set tension surfaced as a topic of discussion, along with the cast’s experiences with the generally harsh conditions of desert shooting, but none of this has quelled Theron’s lingering enthusiasm for the film.

During quarantine, Charlize went into #TBT mode and had a ball on Twitter while posting behind-the-scenes photos that are new to fans. Her commentary is also fantastic. “I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing my war rig for the first time,” she raved. “[A]nd realizing holy sh*t, George is not f*cking around.”

Several other images followed, including talk of the “grueling, intense shoot” that she considers well worth the experience. What a badass character and a badass look.

Some softer moments received representation, too, including a cuddle with Charlize’s child, Jackson, who will one day be able to claim, “I spent most of the first year of my life in a war rig.”

Charlie also paid tribute to most of “my girls” and the legendary George Miller himself.

Max Mad: Fury Road is currently streamable on Amazon Prime.