Saints quarterback Drew Brees took to Instagram on Thursday morning to apologize for an interview he gave to Yahoo! Sports this week in which he said he wouldn’t respect anyone who protested during the upcoming NFL season, even in the wake of another onslaught of deaths at the hands of the police this spring. Yet even in the apology was not enough to satisfy many, who felt it came across as empty after the uproar this week.

As many have said in recent days, words are empty without action. They seem even more empty when they come only in the face of backlash.

Booger MacFarland of ESPN, who is also a native of Louisiana and NFL veteran, was succinct in his frustration, tweeting that he believed Brees said, “Im sorry for the way that America is crucifying me , I’m not sorry for what I said. Got it.”

New York Giants running back Jonathan Hililman one-upped MacFarland’s comment by noting Brees, in his eyes, only felt the need to apologize after teammates responded with disappointment.

This is in reference to comments from a handful of teammates like Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara, who made their feelings known about Brees’ stance shortly after he gave the interview.

In question here is why Brees continued to hold onto the idea that players’ protests, from Colin Kaepernick and beyond, are about the American flag or U.S. military, when these players have been quite vocal about the intention behind their protests and the strategy of doing it the way they do.

Others were frustrated that while Brees had no qualms about getting on TV to relay his opinions in the first place, his apology only came via social media, finished off with a picture that many have discovered might be a stock photo.

To that end, 76ers forward Tobias Harris, who had previously wished that Brees would avoid making a statement altogether, urged Brees to “take your ass on camera and apologize” if he wanted to make true inroads and critiqued his photo choice.

At the same time, Saints linebacker and Brees’ teammate, Demario Davis, called Brees’ apology “leadership at its finest” in a CNN appearance on Thursday morning.

Another Saints player, left tackle Terron Armstead, put up a Twitter thread shortly after Davis’ TV appearance and wrote, “Speaking with him and a few of my teammates we know that accountability and responsibility is the only way to move forward from this.”

Some NFL reporters noted that the Saints’ locker room was not pleased in general with how Brees spoke out, but Davis and Armstead’s comments indicate something of a pacification, at least for now. The rest of the sports world seems to want more out of Brees to atone.

Earlier in the week, animal rights activists Carole Baskin was awarded full control of the infamous zoo featured in the Netflix series Tiger King. Baskin had successfully sued Joseph Maldonado-Passage, a.k.a. “Joe Exotic,” and the animal trainer isn’t taking the decision lying down.

According to CNN, Exotic’s legal team plans to file an appeal to fight the lawsuit decision and take back control of the animal sanctuary, but not before drumming up public support by referencing the death of George Floyd? That’s an awkward approach to say the least:

“While we again acknowledge it is truly time to pray for justice for George Floyd’s family as well as an end to systemic racism in America, we must address Carol [sic] Baskin’s treachery before it goes unchecked,” a tweet from an account run by Maldonado-Passage’s management team read.

Of course, it doesn’t bode well for Exotic’s case that he’s currently serving a 22-year sentence for animal abuse and attempting to have Baskin killed in a murder-for-hire plot that was prominently featured in the Netflix docuseries. However, Baskin has recently ran into some trouble of her own.

As part of the ongoing investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Baskin’s husband Down Lewis, the Hillsborough County sheriff’s department has confirmed that the strange will leaving Baskin her husband’s fortune is “100% a forgery.” The will had raised eyebrows from the start due to the fact that it contained a line about making Baskin the beneficiary if Lewis should ever disappear. Experts have said that wills don’t normally predict that a person will go missing before it happens, but nothing in the Tiger King world has ever been normal.

(Via CNN)

The NBA’s return from the COVID-19 pandemic appears slated to begin on July 31 in Orlando. Twenty-two teams will make the trek down to Disney — the 16 playoff squads, plus five additional teams that were on the outside looking in from the West and one, the Wizards, from the East — with eight regular season games and a play-in tournament eventually occurring for the 8-seed.

There are obvious logistical questions that come with this, like where all of these teams will be housed, how they will avoid individuals who enter Disney World’s gigantic complex in some form or fashion as it begins readmitting park-goers, and most prominently, what happens if someone contracts the virus that has killed more than 100,000 Americans? From a pure, basketball perspective, there is a gigantic ask being put on players, as there is a scenario in which a team could be asked to play a monstrous 36 games in 73 days.

This season is already one of the strangest, if not the strangest, in league history. It is fair to believe, as I do, that coming back at all is misguided, while others will argue that this season’s champion will carry an asterisk next to its name until the end of time. There’s also another question looming less large: What the hell is next season going to look like?

What we know so far is that the league plans on finishing up the 2019-20 regular season no later than Oct. 12 and, uh, that’s it. This is not meant to be a knock on the league, because so much of this is being figured out on the fly, as is oftentimes the case in rapidly-changing and unprecedented situations. Perhaps Adam Silver, the NBPA, and the Board of Governors have spent substantial amounts of time discussing how 2020-21 will play out, but given the complexity of the task at hand, it’d be hard to blame them if they put that on the back burner for the time being.

As such, we wanted to map out what things could look like in a perfect world from the day this season ends, leading into the 2020 offseason, training camp, and next year. As an added twist, this hypothetical included one stipulation: Next season must begin on Christmas Day, in large part because that is the marquee day on the league’s regular season calendar and this gives the NBA the opportunity to test out a Dec. 25 start date, a permanent alteration to the schedule that gives them the flexibility to avoid overlapping with the NFL for nearly four months. (You’re currently saying “they can start on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to further avoid this,” but don’t worry, we’ll get there!)

Let’s jump ahead to Oct. 12, 2020, where the [spins a big wheel] Memphis Grizzlies just beat the [spins another big wheel] Indiana Pacers in a seven-game Finals slugfest. In a normal offseason, things would wrap up in mid-June, followed by the NBA Draft several days later and free agency beginning about 10 days after that. This time around, with the draft lottery and combine having already occurred (something Shams Charania of The Athletic says is the plan), we can try to follow this, with the 2020 NBA Draft taking place on Oct. 16 (a Friday) and free agency beginning at 6 p.m. EST on Oct. 30, exactly two weeks later.

The next month or so is a standard offseason on a shorter timetable. Teams are afforded the chance to build via trades and free agency throughout November. At the start of December, training camp and preseason begins, with the league easing back into regular season basketball on Dec. 25, with the gigantic caveat that this would be much easier to pull off in the event a vaccine is found for COVID-19. And to be clear, that caveat applies to everything in this post.

Vaccine aside, this is going to be an awfully tricky needle for the league to thread. Some teams will have 1.5 or two months worth of an offseason depending on how far they make it in the playoffs. Others — and this is an important thing to remember in this entire conversation — will have gone nine and a half months without playing a competitive basketball game. It will be unfair, one way or another, to have an offseason that is too short for the best teams or too long for the non-Orlando ones.

The potential solution I would like to propose is stretching out the 2020-21 season as much as possible while making permanent shifts to its calendar so that we’re not rushing to stay within the nominal NBA schedule — think back to 2011-12, when the league played 66 games starting on Christmas, wrapped up the regular season by the end of April, and crowned a champion on June 21. This does not, however, mean that the league has to play a full, 82-game schedule.

Instead, we take a page out of the conversation that consumed the restart discourse this year and play a 70-game season, as to satiate regional sports networks. This would roll into June, with an All-Star Break sometime in April, and with 12 games lopped off the schedule, the league could seriously limit things like back-to-backs and make the workload easier on players. There is, of course, an issue that would need to be sorted out with regards to things like paying stadium workers and gate revenue, along with lost money from games not taking place in arenas during this postseason. Going to 70-games is a suggestion, but it’s also extremely flexible if it is determined that a full, 82-game season is best.

What this does let the NBA do, though, is own the biggest gap in the sports calendar. Football is a monolith that dominates the discourse from September until the first week in February. Currently, the NBA spends nearly four months going head-to-head with the NFL, and with how much air the NFL sucks up, I hypothesize that distancing it from that could help with those pesky television ratings. That’s especially true if the NBA comes back right around Week 16, when football is wrapping up its regular season, and gives the league the chance to iron out wrinkles during the NFL playoffs, when people have their eyes locked on football games, anyway.

But once the Super Bowl wraps up, the NBA, theoretically, is kicking into high gear come February and March. The rust is gone, the kinks are all worked out, and with its only competition being hockey and soccer, there is space for the NBA to more or less flood the airwaves. Major League Baseball, despite the best efforts of its baseball-hating owners, would begin its season in late-March or early-April, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes the NBA would have an easier job boosting its ratings going head-to-head against the NFL than it would against MLB, MLS, and the NHL.

This would roll into the postseason, which would begin in early-June, a time in the sports calendar when there is no football — American or European (save for MLS) — baseball is doing its thing, and the NHL is finishing finding a home for the Stanley Cup. Over the next two months, a generally barren wasteland in the sports world as we wait for football season to get here, the NBA is the biggest show in sports by a mile. For the league that is so completely aware of how it is able to shape the sports discourse, one has to assume that the possibility of being able to hold its postseason largely unopposed in the world of sports from June to August would be an enticing proposition. It could even try to pack the draft and the start of free agency into the window before the NFL kicks off, should that be on the table.

Next year would present a unique hurdle in the form of the Olympics, which are expected to run from July 23 to August 8. This would be a tricky situation once every four years (or three, given the timeline of the 2020 Games) should this alteration to the schedule become permanent, and various international squads could either use European players and/or amateurs, but there is a pride that comes from donning national team gear and competing for international glory. Perhaps the league can load up on back-to-backs during the regular season and go best 3-of-5 in the first round of the playoffs to lop off a few days, or perhaps some players would just have to come to grips with the fact that a deeper postseason run could cost them the chance to go to Tokyo next summer.

All of this is quite tricky to map out. We have no idea what this season will look like when it resumes, we have no idea how the pandemic will ebb and flow in the coming months, and we have no idea what anyone’s priorities will be once conversations ramp up about the next campaign. If the NBA wants, though, the 2020-21 campaign could be the dawn of a new era, one in which the league’s calendar shifts forever.

It’s not often that a 25-tweet thread is worth reading, but trust me, this one, from comedian Kenny DeForrest, is worth it. Back in January 2015, Dave Chappelle was in New York to support his buddy and that week’s SNL host Kevin Hart. DeForrest was doing some hosting of his own, at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, when he reached out to fellow comedian Joyelle Nicole Johnson to see if Chappelle might want to drop by.

“We start the show thinking he MIGHT come,” he tweeted. “A couple comics in, he sneaks in like a boxer with his hood up. We’re in the green room smoking, drinking & joking. The dude is a machine. Every topic that came up, he had something profound for. We bring him up last, the crowd LOSES IT.” Chappelle asked the crowd for “headlines” to riff on, and someone in the audience suggested “police brutality.” This was, as DeForrest pointed out, “days after the cop that choked Eric Garner to death in Staten Island (you know, murder) was not indicted by a grand jury,” so tensions were high:

“Chappelle starts talking about Eric Garner and wathching him get murdered in cold blood on camera and how it makes him scared for his children… He said “I thought body cams would help, but what good is video evidence if y’all don’t care?” A clearly privileged white girl (she had a wide brimmed felt hat for chrissakes) shouts ‘Life’s hard, sorry ‘bout it!’ and it takes the air completely out of the room. A collective gasp. Chappelle zeros in on her. ‘What did you say?’ She repeats it. Chappelle starts going in.

He doesn’t go in by making fun of her hat, however. He enlightens her, and everyone else in attendance, about systemic racism. “He starts educating the crowd on the history of black people and the police. He talked about slave patrols and Rodney King and Watts and Emmett Till and Black Wall Street. He talked about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and he talked about John Crawford III,” and apartheid ending in South Africa due in part to “critical mass,” DeForrest tweeted. Chappelle then told a story about getting pulled over by a cop in Ohio… the same cop who would go on to murder John Crawford III. He got off with a warning, though, because the police officer recognized him; his takeaway: “I shouldn’t have to be Dave Chappelle to survive police encounters.”

After the set, Nicole Johnson told Chappelle that the “dumbass white girl” wanted to talk to him. She and her friend come back to the green room and they’re both “humiliated,” DeForrest wrote. “Hat girl speaks first: “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for what I said and thank you for educating me. I was ignorant before, but I want you to know I learned from you tonight and I won’t say things like that anymore.” Chappelle’s response:

“You’re ok. That’s all we can ask. Know better, do better. I want to thank YOU for hearing me and listening. That’s your role. And now you know. Now you’re part of that critical mass we talked about and next time you hear a friend say some ignorant sh*t like you said, it’s your job to correct them and share with them what you learned tonight. THEN, you’re no longer part of the problem, you’re part of the solution.”

You can read the entire thread below (and follow Joyelle Nicole Johnson here).

Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Music Festival was slated to celebrate its 20th anniversary this year with an eclectic lineup of artists like Kacey Musgraves, The Strokes, Bad Bunny, and even a rare performance from Pavement. But, due to the pandemic, the festival rescheduled twice and organizers were forced to cancel the festival’s debut in LA this summer. To suffice, the festival has decided to begin streaming full sets by some of its notable past performers.

Titled Live & Relive Primavera, the festival will begin streaming Thursday and continue throughout the weekend. Some of the performances airing include Sharon Van Etten’s 2014 set, Angel Olsen’s 2017 appearance, Blur’s 2013 reunion, Jamie xx’s 2017 performance, and Christine And The Queens’ set from last year’s festival.

Sharing the livestream schedule to social media, Primavera Sound said the festival would be taking place this weekend, if not for the pandemic: “Today we should be dancing together in Parc del Forum, so we deserve a celebration!” the festival wrote. “Join us this weekend on PS Life and stream some shows we really love from the history of our festival.”

Primavera Sound’s Live & Relive Primavera livestream arrives shortly after the festival confirmed the first wave of artists for their 2021 iteration. Next year’s lineup so far includes Gorillaz, Tame Impala, 100 Gecs, and more.

Check out Primavera Sound’s full streaming schedule above.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Talib Kweli has likely grown accustomed to being the one asking the questions as the host of People’s Party With Talib Kweli, but on Wednesday night, he was given the opportunity to switch sides and answer a few as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Throughout the ten-minute interview, Kweli addresses the ongoing protests against police brutality, reveals the first instance of racism he experienced as a child, watching his kids join the protests, and his hopes for the future.

When Fallon asked Kweli about protesting with his kids, he beamed, “My kids are wonderful. I love them so much. When Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman, I went to have a meeting with Harry Belafonte… [he] put me in touch with Dream Defenders. They were occupying the state capital in Tallahassee, trying to try to reform and change ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws. When Trayvon was murdered, my son was 17 years old. I took my son down to Florida and we occupied the building with the Dream Defenders. That was me and my son’s first activism together.” He also notes that his daughter is also protesting in his native Brooklyn neighborhood where his bookstore, Nkiru Books, was once located.

After pointing out that the current federal administration is leaning toward fascism, he implores viewers not to forget to stand for equality “when the cameras are off,” name checking The Movement For Black Lives, Black Visions MN, and Black 2 The Future as organizations that “help the marginalized, the poor, and the people that fuel the fire that creates America.”

Watch Talib Kweli’s interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show above.

In just a little over three weeks, the world will arrive at the halfway mark in a year that has felt more like seven. Examining 2020 through a musical lens, one of the year’s highlights has by far been the excellence displayed by the many artists throughout the R&B genre. Delivering his album before crossing the year’s halfway mark, Ro James’ Mantic arrives nearly a half-decade after the New York-based crooner entered the genre with his rugged style.

Almost four years to the date of his debut album Eldorado, Ro James’ sophomore album once again places him under a good light within the genre, years after his Grammy-nominated platinum single, “Permission.” Packaged together with 15 songs and help from Masego, Miguel, and Brandy, Mantic exhibits Ro James’ growth while staying true to himself. Dark and raw, the album finds him putting forth his best efforts to preserve the sensual highs of love in his relationships.

Led by a seductive sample of Usher’s “Can U Handle It,” James attempts to convince a woman that true happiness lies with him and not within her relationship on “Last Time.” A candle-lit affair, he graces the woman with roses of excitement and anticipation all in an attempt to allude her to her true self-worth. “About a million things I could do to make you smile,” he sings. “To me the things he ain’t doing, girl, it ain’t right.” Answering a similar question posed on the Usher sample, Ro James ponders if he can handle the current relationship on the Miguel-featured “Too Much” as the lows begin to outweigh the highs. Attempts to be long-lasting partners fall short as they turn out to be nothing more than on-and-off lovers. Calling her the “prescription to my antidote” early in the song, Ro James later admits “They don’t love me like you do, and that’s a fact, girl” while labeling her as “ain’t sh*t” on the song’s chorus.

Two songs later, James colorfully captures the deep-rooted feelings in his relationship on “Rose.” With promises to water their love and keep it from dying, he emphatically promises that “As long as it’s yours and mine / This love ain’t dying.” Giving listeners a track to groove and two-step to, James and Masego switch up the pace on “Slow Down.” As described by Masego in his verse, their partner’s love of Porsches, Lambos, Teslas, and the other speed demons of the world has her racing to love. Accustomed to this fast life, the R&B talents attempt to slow the rush to love and instead to take in and appreciate the true beauties of love. Showcasing the lust he holds within for his partner, James delivers a bedroom magic ballad on “Baby Blue.” Shedding much of the production elsewhere on the album, James turns into the acoustic lane as he lays a tender touch to his partner moments before sparks fly. “Worthy lover, set me free,” he begs. “I’m falling, won’t you rescue me?”

On his latest body of work, Ro James proves that love excels when one caters to their sensual pleasures as well as that of their lovers. Whether a sense of appreciation, lust, or comfort is desired, Ro James provides it with little to no hesitation. Mantic also highlights that despite being four years removed from his debut album, James’ love ballads have yet to lose their authentic and down-to-earth touch.

Mantic portrays Ro James as the man to be with, the problems exhibited on the album rarely come from his end. The puppetmaster to his love life, James is quite often aware of the lacking elements as well as the ones that appear in excess. As a result, he operates in-sync with the desires of his lover all without surrendering his idea of the perfect relationship. Whether it be the nighttime excitement found within the sheets or the daytime thrill found in a drive with the top down, Ro James brings varying examples of these sensual highs to his relationships and preserves them in hopes of a long-lasting love.

Mantic is out now via Bystorm/RCA. Get it here.

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Frank Grillo’s one of the most prolific action stars working these days, so it’s certainly cool (and different!) to see him pop up on Showtime’s Billions. As artist Nico Tanner, he’s going head-to-head (literally, as of this week’s episode) with Maggie Siff’s Wendy Rhoades. Nico first surfaces as an artist commissioned by Bobby Axelrod, and he’s all kinds of worried about selling out and losing his mojo and his soul, so it’s a blast to watch Frank embody such a personality. Very clearly, this is an unusual role for him, after he’s made a career of tossing punches across screens, both big and small, for decades.

You’ve seen his work. From that adrenaline-fueled elevator scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier before his emergence as Crossbones to The Grey and The Purge movies, along with TV stints on Kingdom and The Shield, this guy can’t stop kicking people’s butts. He’s not simply a tough guy, though, and Frank was gracious enough to speak with us about this latest TV role, along with who he’d like to fight on Billions and some of the most eventful action scenes of his career.

It’s wild that you’re on Billions, not only because most of your roles are action-focused, but because you briefly worked on Wall Street a lifetime ago. How did you get involved with this show?

The guys called my agents and asked if I’d be interested in doing a role that was a little bit of a departure. So, I got on Skype with them and loved them. And they kinda just laid it out, and I thought it’d be great fun to do eight episodes. Just to play something very different than I’m used to doing.

When we first meet Nico Tanner, he’s a sharp-dressed man, other than those paint-spattered shoes. What kind of statement do you think he’s making, other than “Hello, I’m the artist!”

I think that’s exactly the statement. I have a lot of artist friends, and they believe that they’re… better than everyone else? [Laughs] They believe that they’re blessed by God somehow, and maybe some of them are, but I think that’s the statement exactly. It’s “I’m not a conventional person, I live by my own rules, and here’s the paint on my shoes to prove it.”

When Nico talks about needing to feel “special” to gather inspiration, what does that really mean? Does he have imposter syndrome, or is feeling special part of his process?

You know, I think again, having known a lot of artists — and you can consider acting part of the arts because it’s a craft — but I think there’s a lot of fear, and a lot of these guys like to just use this ideology as an excuse. It’s interesting because I’ve kind-of unveiled a lot of the nonsense with my friends who are artists. I’m like, “You’re just as afraid as everybody else. You don’t believe you’re as good as anyone says you are. And you overcompensate for that.”

Well, imposter syndrome is a real thing that plagues so many artists. Do you ever feel it at all at this stage in your career?

I’ll tell ya, I used to all the time. I used to believe that I didn’t know what I was doing. And I come across other people when I’m acting that went to Julliard or the Royal Academy or anything and would always feel that they were better than me. And as time went on, I realized that, in the arts, however you’re there and get there, you’re there. It has nothing to do with what school you went to or how much training you had or hadn’t had. It’s a matter of how honest you are, and so at this point in my life and my career, I don’t have that. I feel like the elder statesmen, and I can get on set with a Mel Gibson or a Liam Neeson or whoever it is that’s been around a long time. And I feel absolutely, 100% a peer, and it’s taken me awhile, but I don’t ever get on set thinking I don’t know what I’m doing, or people think I don’t know what I’m doing.

As an aside, you mentioned Liam Neeson, which reminds me that on Instagram the other day, you jokingly hashtagged #TheGrey2. I actually fell for it for about half a second before realizing that movie would be… not possible.

Right. Not possible! But what a great joke. [Director] Joe Carnahan is my business partner [in the War Party production company]. We get a lot of people who were profoundly moved by that film, and I think it’s Joe’s best film. So many people ask if there’s gonna be The Grey 2. [Laughs] And I say to them, “Did you watch the end of the movie? Nobody made it [out alive].”

I suppose a prequel might be doable, though.

Right, right.

On Billions, Nico has some obvious chemistry with Wendy. Maggie Siff’s so good here, like she was on Sons of Anarchy. What’s she like to work with?

Maggie’s a phenomenal actress, and she’s really cool. Very chill, and it’s funny because, and this was before the pandemic, the whole #MeToo movement has changed our business in many ways. So with our first scene together, it was a very simple kind-of scene, and we both had to talk to these counselors, who were making us feel like we were six-year-olds. And it was really interesting because the counselor has to be on the set, so her and I just said, “We’ll kiss when we want to kiss, and that’s fine.” So we kind-of had this mutual adversary, and it made us closer, and I fell in love with her. She was so much fun to work with, and so easy to work with. Some actresses are not that easy to work with, and we had great chemistry, we really did, and went right into it.

And Nico delivers some exposition about how buildings and empires and relationships come down. Is he an agent of chaos, or maybe full of it?

Hmm, I don’t see him as an agent of chaos. I see him as, as fighters would say, “punching above his weight.” And you’ll see, as this progresses, that he exposes himself a little bit. You’ll see that he’s not quite as confident in exactly what he’s presenting himself to be. As far as the crumbling of empires goes, he’s talking about this world that he’s become part of and how it’s run and who’s in it. And once the rapids start moving, he gets taken away swiftly.

I gotta see that happen. And I realize that you are not just a tough guy, but you’re very much known for fight scenes. If you were to have a Billions fight scene, who would you want to fight?

Ohhhhh, Giamatti.

Would that be a fair battle, though?

We’ve been friends a long time, and believe it or not, Paul Giamatti is a pretty decent boxer. We used to go to the same gym in New York, and I adore him. He’s one of the most talented guys working, and I’d love to fight him.

Out of all your fight scenes on movies and TV, do you have a favorite?

I do. On Kingdom, I had a fight scene at the end after my son [Nick Jonas] was murdered, with Matt Hughes, who was a big-time world champion of the UFC, and we choreographed half of it, and the rest of it, we improvised. It was the most exhausting, amazing thing, and he said it was the most exhausting fight he’d ever had. So it was a lot of fun.

You and Chris Evans got all bruised up during Winter Solder. Are most of these action projects truly grueling to you?

Oh my goodness, always. I still train every day with a boxing trainer and do strength training, but when you’re making a movie where you have a lot of things going on and have a lot of choreography to remember, you do it over and over and over. Your mind gets worn down as well as your body, and you’re exhausted all the time.

You’ve done a lot of variety with these scenes. You threw down in the mud in Beyond Skyline and got grubby with Jason Statham in Homefront. You fought while wearing a suit in one of The Purge movies, so which is the most difficult of those scenarios?

Being out in the elements, I think, is a little bit easier because you have more freedom of movement, but when you’re in a confined space, and the dance is really specific, it’s gotta be that way, because otherwise, somebody’s gonna get hurt. And that’s where the great stunt guys come in and help out on different sides of the camera. But when you’re confined like that, you have to be very specific on how you’re throwing punches. Mel Gibson and I have a movie coming out called Boss Level, and he and I have a fight at the end. It was a simple matter of an elbow to the face, and instead of turning one way, we turned the other way, and my jaw gets dislocated.

Ooooh!

Yeah, and it was my fault because I didn’t turn the right way, but it’s times like that where it gets dangerous, and guys like Mel are strong, big men, so it hurts.

And that movie got pushed back for the pandemic, I take it?

It did, and actually, there will be an announcement very, very soon. It’s gonna be coming out in a different way, and we’re very excited about it. It’s beneficial for the movie, but it’s a great movie. Naomi Watts is in it, and she’s fantastic.

You’ve been nerding out a little in quarantine, building Venom and Spider-Man on Instagram. How else have you been spending your time?

I ride my dirt bikes in the mountains a lot to free my mind. We [at War Party] have two movies that we’re getting to go in Puerto Rico, so we’re on the phone all day, dealing with Doctors Without Borders, creating protocols. I’m with my kids a lot, so I’m busy all day long, it’s just a different way of being busy.

Do you know when production will start up for you guys?

We’re working really hard. Everybody is opening up as far as stages are concerned. The one big thing that seems to be an issue is getting COVID insurance, and you can’t get the movies bonded unless they’re insured, so we’re working really closely with everyone else in town to create the protocol, and it looks like the federal government is gonna pass something that will help backstop any lawsuits that insurance companies won’t cover. So it’s all happening on the daily.

Gathering will be tough. There won’t even be Comic-Con this year, which reminds me of how you once wanted to portray The Punisher. Is that still in your sights, now that Disney+ might start those shows back up one day?

That’s not in my trajectory now. It’s not where my life is taking me anymore, and my friend Jonny Bernthal did an amazing job. My life and what I want to do is much different now, and I think I’m outgrowing that whole kind-of Marvel and superhero thing. Joe and I have a really good little company in War Party, and we’re concentrating on action thrillers that are responsibly budgeted, and we’re very busy, knock wood, and we’ll go down the path of creating our own material and content and having a good time.

You once told Larry King that you wanted to be on a vineyard somewhere in about a decade. Is that still the case?

Yeah, it is. It’s interesting, you know, I’m looking more toward the future and what I want to be doing and how much time I want to spend with my kids. I’m unfortunately a single dad once again, so my time with my kids is not as frequent as it used to be, and I wanna make it count. And I really love producing and I love drinking wine, so I wanna put it all together.

2020 is a really good time to drink a lot of wine.

Oh, I know, I know.

Showtime’s ‘Billions’ airs on Sundays at 9:00pm EST.

Forbes, as they are wont to do, have shared a new ranking of celebrity wealth. Today, they have released “The Celebrity 100,” their list of the world’s highest-paid celebrities of 2020, and when it comes to musicians, Kanye West is king.

Kanye is No. 2 on the list overall with $170 million in earnings, only sitting behind extended family member Kylie Jenner, whose earnings were $590 million. There is an also-large gap between Kanye and the next musician on the list: Elton John, who ranks at No. 13 overall with earnings of $81 million.

Ranking third in terms of musicians is Ariana Grande, who is the highest-placing female musician at No. 17, with earnings of $72 million. Following her are the Jonas Brothers ($68.5 million), The Chainsmokers ($68 million), Ed Sheeran ($64 million), Taylor Swift ($63.5 million), Post Malone ($60 million), The Rolling Stones ($59 million), Marshmello ($56 million), Shawn Mendes ($54.5 million), Jay-Z ($53.5 million), Billie Eilish ($53 million), BTS ($50 million), Drake ($49 million), Jennifer Lopez ($47.5 million), Pink ($47 million), Rihanna ($46 million), Luke Bryan ($45.5 million), Backstreet Boys ($45 million), Phil Collins ($45 million), Blake Shelton ($43.5 million), Celine Dion ($42 million), The Eagles ($41 million), Metallica ($40.5 million), Travis Scott ($39.5 million), Katy Perry ($38.5 million), Lady Gaga ($38 million), Bon Jovi ($38 million), U2 ($38 million), DJ Khaled ($36.5 million), and Kiss ($36.5 million).

Check out the full list here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.