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Kevin Spacey was fired from Netflix’s House of Cards after the actor was accused of sexual harassment and assault. He now has to pay over $30 million to the show’s production company MRC over breach of contract. The Wall Street Journal reports that “under the terms of the ruling, MRC was awarded nearly $31 million, comprising $29.5 million in damages and $1.4 million in attorneys’ fees and costs. The arbitrator’s ruling was made in October 2020 and Mr. Spacey’s appeal was denied earlier this month.”

In its claim, MRC said it had to scrap the first two episodes it was filming that featured Mr. Spacey and scramble to rewrite the entire season, which added significant costs to the show. MRC also said it had to reduce the number of episodes it had committed to Netflix to eight from 13, or it would have been unable to meet its deadlines with the streaming service. That greatly reduced the license-fee revenues the company was expecting from Netflix.

Since being fired from House of Cards, Spacey has booked a role in The Man Who Drew God, an Italian film about an blind artist who is wrongly accused of sexually abusing a child, and released a string of bizarre Christmas videos. It’ll be tough for him to top last year’s installment, titled “1-800 XMAS,” but I’m sure he’ll try.

(Via the Wall Street Journal)

In October, Adele revealed that at that point, one of the only people who had heard her then-unreleased album 30 was Drake. It turns out the two are quite close, with Adele going as far as to say that Drake’s friendship is “one of the biggest gifts of my entire career.”

She spoke about Drake and herself with Q‘s Tom Power, noting of their status in the music industry, “We are a dying breed. […] There was like ten of us. You know, I don’t think there will ever be that many of us again, at the top doing it the way we were doing it. We came out before streaming. We came out before all the social media frenzies of, like, you know, ‘You’ve got five seconds to entertain; otherwise, get the f*ck out.’ We existed in the old school.”

She added, “I can say something to him, and he won’t judge me for it, you know? […] So to have access to someone that’s in the same position as [me] is, like, one of the biggest gifts of my entire career.”

Adele also talked about her relationship with fame, saying that it’s complicated: “My hobby became my job. I was unable to differentiate the two. So why do I want to go and do my hobby when my hobby is my job? […] Fame scares me. And, you know, fame comes with my job.”

Amid Sunday’s mid-game skirmish between the Los Angeles Lakers and Detroit Pistons, Russell Westbrook was assessed a technical foul. Apparently, though, the hoopla surrounding the entire ordeal overshadowed that announcement making its way to him while the officials announced LeBron James and Isaiah Stewart were ejected for their roles in the fracas.

When a reporter asked him the officials’ explanation behind that decision post-game, Westbrook was just then learning he earlier received a technical foul and couldn’t believe it.

“Who got a tech?” Westbrook asked.

“You did,” replied a couple of media members.

“I got a tech? Oh, wow,” Westbrook said, staring at a copy of the box score in front of him. “Why’d I get a tech? I didn’t know I got a tech.”

Westbrook continued to scan the box score for a few seconds before reaching a conclusion.

“Wow, that’s interesting. Well, you know, that’s just being Russell, I guess,” he said. “When you’re Russell Westbrook, they just try to do anything, apparently. But, whatever. I don’t know why — I don’t know what I did. But, whatever, they gotta put it on somebody.”

The reasoning, surely, was Westbrook squaring up as Stewart charged towards the Lakers after breaking free from his teammates and security, which was ruled as “escalating” the situation — although some would argue that’s just good preparedness in case Stewart did breach the last line of security.

When both James and Stewart were ejected in the aftermath of the altercation, the Pistons led 78-66 early in the third quarter. Westbrook, with 16 points, seven rebounds, seven assists and two steals, and Anthony Davis keyed a comeback following that moment to snap the Lakers’ three-game losing streak and secure their ninth win of the season.

J.K. Rowling’s controversial comments about trans people (including “if sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased”) has led to years of backlash for the Harry Potter author. The resulting criticism also sourced from franchise star Daniel Radcliffe, who voiced disagreement with Rowling’s outlook. Likewise, Fantastic Beasts actor Eddie Redmayne, followed suit. Rowling’s publisher, Hatchette UK also felt the strain when employees threatened to stop working on a newer Rowling title, and several authors fled Rowling’s agency out of protest against Rowling’s stance against trans rights.

Let’s just say that there are no winners in J.K. Rowling’s ongoing beef with the trans community, and she’s remained unapologetic, even penning a lengthy essay to claim that “accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people” while detailing “five reasons” why “the new trans activism” worries her. Fast forward over a year, and Rowling has come forward to slam activists who posted photos of themselves in front of her family home. Rowling believes that they were “carefully positioning themselves to ensure that our address was visible.”

In a Twitter thread, Rowling thanked Scottish police and Twitter for providing support to her while she worked to get the images removed from the Internet. She further spoke about other women who share her view on trans activism, and Rowling condemns any doxxing action against them. The author claims that these women have been “subject to campaigns of intimidation” that include threats and doxxing, and she adds, “None of these women are protected in the way I am.” Rowling further revealed, “I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out.” She then declared, “Perhaps – and I’m just throwing this out there – the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us.”

You can read Rowling’s Twitter thread below.

Long before it was hailed by NME as “the best live show of all time,” David Byrne’s American Utopia existed just as a series of innocuous programmed drum beats sitting on Brian Eno’s hard drive. Like a jazz drummer, there were some variations here and there, but the groove maintained. During a casual get-together, Eno played the beats for his friend David Byrne, and, in that uncanny and indescribable way that it just happens, an idea was born. “Eno’s drum tracks were so energetic, and exciting sounding, I thought, ‘Man, this would be really great if you could do a live show with a bunch of marching drummers,’” Byrne explains over the phone from his New York City apartment during a short reprieve from signing limited edition copies of his forthcoming book of illustrations.

The project received its title during a moment of euphoria at a 2017 Chance The Rapper concert, which Byrne remembers as “a very positive show, a wonderful feeling in the crowd at that show,” and American Utopia dropped in March of 2018. Listeners latched on quickly, and the album debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, marking the first time that Byrne’s work ever broke the Top 10. With American Utopia finally out in the world, it was time for Byrne to embark on a series of tests and experiments working toward delivering to the stage the unique vision that popped into his head that evening at Brian Eno’s house. Once Byrne and his band eventually hit the road, it wasn’t very long before Broadway producers started to take notice and express interest in bringing the show to the “proper” stage.

After the tour wrapped, Byrne immediately turned his focus to this new adventure. “I said, ‘I want to try that. If it fails, it fails, but at least I’d be trying something new instead of just sticking with exactly what I’m doing.’” He enlisted the help of choreographer Annie-B Parson and Broadway veteran Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge, Oh, Hello! On Broadway) to restructure the set, add some more monologues, and build out a story, all whilst retraining his performing brain for a new type of show. “We’re used to judging how we’re doing by whether people get up and dance. It took a while for us to figure out, ‘Oh, they’re really listening, their heads are moving. If anything, they listen more than a concert audience listens.”

With stellar reviews and numerous awards, including a Grammy for the album and a handful of Emmys for the Spike Lee-directed film adaptation, I have to admit that I feared American Utopia couldn’t possibly live up to the hype it has generated over the last several years. I made a point to not watch the film on HBO Max, knowing full well that I should take advantage of being a New York resident and see the show live when it returned after the COVID-induced Broadway closure. After nearly two years without an indoor concert, I put on two masks and headed to the St. James Theatre, daring David Byrne and American Utopia to prove my doubts wrong.

Geez, was I proven wrong — and quickly, too. My uncertainties were remedied within the opening number, which revealed Byrne alone on the stage sitting at a table in front of a model brain. He then proceeded to detail the parts of the brain that we use to go about our everyday lives, and the parts that help us to derive joy, and I was fully sold. Running just under two hours with no intermission, the show is nothing short of a marvel, quite unlike any live music experience out there. Through the construction of American Utopia, David Byrne has mastered the art of making you feel without telling you how or what you should be feeling. It’s an absolute masterwork in musicianship, an unmatched technological feat, and an all-encompassing product of one of the most important creative minds of our time.

Our conversation with Byrne has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

I’d love to hear a little bit more about the intentionality behind the show’s choreography. When I was watching it, I was thinking, “Why did you move your hand in that certain way?” Or, “Why did the band spin at that time?”

It doesn’t always have a logic to it, but what we discover is that as a viewer, in our brains, we tend to connect things that happen at the same time. If somebody moves a certain way and the music’s doing this, and the words are saying this, your brain puts it all together and it tells you that somehow that movement has some connection with what’s being said. It may not have been originally conceived that way, but it ends up happening. I’m not going to say none of it makes any sense, but there’s not a super logical connection between all the movement and what the songs are saying.

I came away understanding that you were trying to illustrate the beauty of shared human experience and the ways that humans can almost thrive off the kinetic energy of others. How would you say that the pandemic changed the approach to this narrative?

The things we’re talking about, about human connection and being together with other people and stuff like that, everybody’s thinking about that now. We just went through a whole thing where we couldn’t be together and how insane that was. People had mental and psychological issues because they couldn’t be with other people. We all realized how important that is.

It seems like the version of the show that I saw was probably different than what you were performing prior to the closure. Do you consider it to be an ever-evolving piece, or are you just adapting with the times?

Kind of adapting to the times. I knew that coming back after the pandemic, it was the elephant in the room. You couldn’t ignore it, at least in a show like this. If you’re doing Lion King, you’re not going to stop in the middle and say, “Let’s talk about the pandemic. Here in the jungle…” No. But in this show, because I talk directly to the audience, like a standup comedian almost, I can address the world as it changes, which is really nice.

You’ve been doing two shows in a span of just a couple of hours on weekends. How do you keep each show interesting for yourself and the band? Do you do anything to shake it up from performance to performance?

When we’re touring of course, you’re in a different city, so it’s a completely different theater, different audience, everything like that. In this case, just the audience changes, so it’s a little more subtle. A different audience reacts differently. It’s amazing, sometimes some of the lines I say one show will get a laugh, and the next show silence. I can vary the things I say a little bit depending on how an audience is responding. If they respond a lot to one thing, I can push that a little bit further, add a line or two. If they don’t, then I just move on. So I can adapt a little bit.

This show is of course comprised of songs from throughout your career — how did you select specific songs to be included? Did you ever feel like you were fitting a square peg into a round hole to include certain songs? Or alternatively, did you uncover that your songwriting throughout your career has had these inherent thematic threads that hold the show together?

I think more the latter. I have enough of a catalog that I could choose songs that helped create a narrative thread. Of course, some of the songs are well known to the audience, some are not. The good thing for me is, yes, some of the audience reacts instantly to a song that they know, but they’re also paying attention to the other ones too. A song like “Psycho Killer” might be popular with the audience, but it doesn’t belong in the show.

It seems like a lot of your work recently has revolved around reminding people of the beauty of being alive, both with this show and Reasons To Be Cheerful. Do you feel like you have a responsibility to serve as a reminder that things aren’t really so bad?

I feel like I have a responsibility to myself. I’d feel pretty bad if I didn’t cling on to some grain of hope or possibility, whether it’s in the show or with the news stuff that we report. Yeah, I feel like I have to. There’s so much toxic stuff out there and I feel like, for my own sanity, I have to find an antidote to that.

On the other hand, though, you take some of the monologue portions of the show to emphasize, for example, the importance of voting and to remind young people like me that we’re fucked. Or even perform a rendition of Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout.” How do those aspects of the show factor into your mission of maintaining that nice things are, in fact, happening?

We started doing the Janelle song when we were doing the concert tour. I used to end my shows with a cover version of something. It was just this happy, “We all know this song. This’ll be fun.” And I thought, “We’re living in pretty dire times.” And part of our responsibility as citizens is to acknowledge what’s going on in the world and not just escape from it. And so I thought, “We have to acknowledge the reality of the world.” But then, in a certain way, we present an alternative to it.

I was reading your recent Rolling Stone interview with Lorde and you guys talked a bit about the intersection of clarity and mystery in art. I have always found myself simultaneously fascinated and frustrated with someone like, for example, David Lynch, where it’s so clear that in his head he gets what’s going on but I’m just like, “What is happening?”

[Laughs] I don’t blame you. I kind of feel the same way. Sometimes the imagery is really beautiful and mysterious, but sometimes I think this just was a cool image he had in his head and he wanted to put it in.

But I didn’t have that reaction to American Utopia, which you’ve just said yourself is a little bit more random in its visual representation. So how do you figure out how to find the middle path between clarity and mystery in art?

We don’t want to be too obvious in what we’re saying. Give the audience some credit that they can fill in the blanks and figure it out. Maybe not in an extremely literal way, but they can get it from the feeling of the song. Sometimes that understanding is hard to put into words, because it’s not literal storytelling, but I feel like that works and it gives enough wiggle room so that a listener can apply it to their own life. I also never like to be didactic about stuff, never like to tell people what to think.

Ok, I have one big final question for you. What I’ve always loved about your work is the clarity of message and your ability to stay focused on the topical north star. When you sit down to accomplish a creative task, how do you keep yourself organized and motivated to present the thesis in a way that’s both clear and understandable?

Wow. My house is messy, but my thoughts are very organized.

David Byrne’s American Utopia is back on Broadway, and tickets are available here. If you’re not in New York, you can always watch the film on HBO Max.

David Byrne is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group

The infamous Kanye West — aka Ye — doubles that took over New York to promote the deluxe release of the rapper’s new album Donda reappeared recently, this time taking over LA venue Soho Warehouse as captured by a bystander who caught them on camera. In the video below, you can see dozens of Kanyes, dressed once again in the unusual mask he wore while promoting the original Donda in New York earlier this year, mostly just milling about with massive headphones on and gathering around what appears to be a parking or concession booth in the lot outside.

The person filming is apparently unnerved by the sight and posits that there is a music video shoot happening nearby. It wouldn’t be all that unusual for Ye to shoot a guerilla-style music video in LA, or for that music video to prominently feature copies of the principal artist (Eminem famously utilized dozens of lookalikes in the video and performances for his 2000 single “The Real Slim Shady”). It’s clearly unsettling for those encountering the clones without warning, but since Kanye’s whole schtick these days seems to be trying to unsettle people, it’s right in line with what we’ve seen from him over the past few months.

If you’re a Ridley Scott fan, you’re in luck. On top of an upcoming Alien television series and the recently released animated Blade Runner series, Black Lotus, another project set in one of the awe-inspiring worlds brought to life by Scott is coming: a live-action Blade Runner spinoff series. In an interview with the BBC (via IndieWire), the famed sci-fi director revealed the upcoming project and shared some minor details about it — including the fact that the pilot is already written.

“We [have already] written the pilot for Blade Runner,” Scott said. “So, we’re already presenting Blade Runner as a TV show, the first 10 hours.”

However, for as forthcoming as Scott was about the state of the show, he’s keeping a pretty tight lid on the exact details. As of right now, it’s not known where exactly the upcoming series will fall on the Blade Runner timeline. While it might seem natural to assume it’s a follow-up to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, the most recent installment in the dystopian series, it could just as easily be a prequel. For example, Black Lotus takes place between Ridley Scott’s original 1982 Blade Runner and Villeneuve’s sequel. However, regardless of where it falls, rest assured there are people whose entire career is ensuring it’s continuity.

Over at Alcon Entertainment, the production company that owns the entire Blade Runner IP, there are two people whose sole job is making any potential Blade Runner spinoffs make sense both chronologically and thematically. While Alcon Entertainment co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Kosove declined to give their names, he said the job was ones the studio took very seriously, as they know fans have ”invested so much of themselves into the material.”

“We have two people who work for us at Alcon whose — I wouldn’t say it’s their full-time job, [but] it’s the majority of their job. [They take it] really seriously, interweaving the different stories and making sure the timelines, the canon, the character motivations are all seamless and have a logic within the canon,” Kosove said. “Our goal at Alcon, because we’re the keeper of the Blade Runner IP, and therefore we take the canon of the franchise very seriously, because the fans, of which there are so many, have invested so much of themselves in the material.”

Julia Garner has won two Emmys for her work on Netflix’s Ozark. But she also gave award-worthy performances in The Americans, where she played one of Philip’s unknowing assets, and The Assistant, which she deserved an Oscar nomination for. Garner is one of the best actresses out there today (at only 27 years old!), and for her next role, she’ll play real-life grifter Anna Sorokin in Netflix’s Inventing Anna.

Based on the New York magazine article, “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People,” Inventing Anna follows Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born German who committed fraud while pretending to be a wealthy heiress named Anna Delvey. “The thing is, I’m not sorry,” she said after being sentenced to four to 12 years in prison (she’s since been released, although she’s currently under ICE custody for overstaying her visa). “I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.” It’s a fascinating story — and Garner is a fantastic choice to play the modern-day huckster.

Here’s the plot summary:

In Inventing Anna, a journalist (Anna Chlumsky) with a lot to prove investigates the case of Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), the Instagram-legendary German heiress who stole the hearts of New York’s social scene – and stole their money as well. But is Anna New York’s biggest con woman or is she simply the new portrait of the American dream? Anna and the reporter form a dark funny love-hate bond as Anna awaits trial and our reporter fights the clock to answer the biggest question in NYC: who is Anna Delvey?

Created by Shonda Rhimes, Inventing Anna premieres on Netflix on February 11, 2022.

Gunna is over a year removed from his last album — 2020’s well-received Wunna — but his name has been all the buzz in the past few weeks thanks to singers Chloe Bailey and Rihanna. Gunna went viral two separate times in the past month: once, when Rihanna dressed up as him for Halloween, and again, when he and Chloe were photographed at an NBA game, sparking rumors that the two were dating (and a bizarre fascination with Chloe drinking a Dasani water bottle).

On the red carpet at last night’s American Music Awards hosted by Cardi B, Billboard caught up with the YSL rapper to check in and get the scoop on his latest viral moments. Of Rihanna’s Halloween costume, he recalled his reaction to seeing the photos, saying, “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, the GOAT just went in my closet and got dressed.’I couldn’t believe it, but I was very, very flattered and honored. I ain’t know where it came from, you know what I’m saying? Nobody ever dressed like me.”

Meanwhile, he shot down the Chloe dating rumor, explaining that the two are friends and revealing that they’d worked on music, as well. “We’re not dating,” he said. “That was just like a date, though, where you just go to the game and catch a vibe. But she’s my friend. We went to the studio after and locked in, she’s very creative. She’s very talented. And you will be seeing us more… We did two songs, but I think she might want to use it for her album, or I might take it for my album, but who knows? We definitely got new music coming up for sure.”

You can watch the interview below.

Between his work with Blur, Gorillaz, and his solo endeavors, Damon Albarn has been a famed musician since the early ’90s. Consequently, he has had plenty of time to explore the world and indulge in a bunch of new experiences. Some of those were particularly atypical, as Albarn thinks he once accidentally ate monkey meat.

Speaking with UK comedian Alan Carr on his Life’s A Beach podcast (as NME notes), Albarn said, “I might have eaten dog in Korea, but I think I’ve also accidentally eaten monkey in Nigeria. I was given this pepper soup and this little hand kind of floated to the top. I didn’t mean to!”

He also told a story about a time he went to a Chinese restaurant that specialized in frogs: “I think the weirdest thing I was served up was in the middle of China and it was a frog specialty restaurant. A waiter came out with a plastic bowl of live frogs and said choose your frog. […] I put my fingers into the bowl and pulled out this frog and he immediately threw it on the pavement and knocked it out.”

Albarn recorded his latest solo album — The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows — partially in Iceland, and he also noted that while there, he ate seal, cured and roasted ram’s head, and fermented shark that was “buried in the ground, pissed on and left for six months.”

Check out the full Life’s A Beach episode with Albarn here.

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