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Brendan Fraser doesn’t just have fans, he has dedicated lovers of his being who unapologetically adore him to the ends of the earth. And I don’t mean in a creepy stalkery way—more like a genuine, wholesome admiration of both his on-screen talents and off-screen awesomeness.

People who love Brendan Fraser LOVE Brendan Fraser. And seeing his reaction to people’s reaction to his comeback, it’s not hard to see why.

Fraser took a hiatus from acting in 2004 after nearly two decades of leading roles and heartthrob status, prompting fans to wonder what happened to him. Though he showed up in some movies and shows after that, he didn’t seem himself, either professionally or personally. And he wasn’t. He experienced a messy divorce, the death of his mother, physical ailments resulting from years of abusing his body to achieve a chiseled physique, and a sexual assault that left him distraught.

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But B.F. fans have never stopped loving him and wishing him the best. His comeback in the “Doom Patrol” TV series has been well-received, and now that he has some big movie projects coming up—including the much-anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon, a Martin Scorcese film costarring Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio—people are eager to welcome him back to the big screen.

TikTok user Lindley (@littlelottiecosplay) got to sit down with Fraser for a two-minute meet and greet online, and it’s so dang wholesome. Fraser said he was feeling a little anxious about working with those renowned actors. And when Lindley told him that the internet was so supportive of him and that people loved him and were rooting for his comeback, his response was so sweet and humble. He appeared to get a bit choked up as he sat back, took a drink, then said, “Shucks, ma’am.”

The video got Fraser’s name trending, and any time that happens, the outpouring of love and appreciation is palpable.

I once sat with Brendan Fraser in his trailer, running lines (that I’d co-written) for a tense scene with Forest Wh… https://t.co/X2aNN0pvOr

— Bob DeRosa (@thembob)
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thankful that as a society we agree: brendan fraser https://t.co/ryCinihXA4

— blakeᴮᴷ (@blakekathryn)
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This is a man who was traumatized by sexual assault and then blacklisted for speaking out about it, sidelined durin… https://t.co/SyQVMjpUCL

— G. Willow Wilson (@GWillowWilson)
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It’s very nice Brendan Fraser is having his comeback, it’s well deserved and I’m sure he’s delighted to be creating… https://t.co/yMHt3lIoNf

— 🍌//emmett hobbes, turtleneck enthusiast// (@EmmettComix)
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Brendan Fraser deserves a huge comeback, not just because he’s super talented, but also because he’s a damn hero an… https://t.co/PkMpNt5PYG

— AKA Lizzie Brooks, Actual Pink Ranger (@PinkRangerLB)
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The Brennaissance is happening, and thankfully, we are here for it.

Getting kids to go from a summer state of mind back to academics is always a big challenge for parents this time of year. But this back-to-school season comes with the added stress of living during a global pandemic that’s sure to make things even more challenging.

Upworthy spoke with Josephine Atluri, a mindfulness expert and mother of seven, to learn some techniques parents and children can use to ease back-to-school stress and improve academic performance throughout the year.

Alturi hosts the popular podcast, “Responding to Life: Talking Health, Fertility, & Parenthood,” and her new book “Mindfulness Journal for Parents” helps caregivers transform and enrich their parent-child relationship.

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Atluri’s age-appropriate mindfulness techniques can help students navigate “big emotions or tough situations” and allow them to “stay present versus worrying about past mistakes or future tasks.”

via Pexels

Mindfulness improves academic performance by enhancing students’ focus and cognition. It can also help them manage their on-campus social lives by enhancing their emotional awareness.

Mindfulness techniques can also give student-athletes a leg up on the competition.

“Sports are typically a fast-paced activity with a lot of things happening at the same time,” Atluri told Upworthy. “Plus, there’s a lot of noise while playing from both the players and the fans watching. When you practice mindfulness, you practice slowing down and getting quiet within, no matter what is happening around you.”

Looking for a “simple proven, no-nonsense” meditation technique? Upworthy has a great one you can learn here.

Alturi has different mindfulness techniques for students of every age group.

Preschool:

Kids at this age engage better with activities that are fun and visual. Two breathing techniques I love to use for little kids are:

Hugging breath: Have your child give themselves a big hug while breathing slowly. The hug gives them physical support which is especially helpful if they don’t have someone around who can comfort them when they have big feelings. The slow breathing tells their brains they are moving from an overwhelmed state to a calmer state of being.

Wolf breath: Have your child pretend they are the wolf from the “Three Little Pigs” blowing down the houses with a long slow breath. The benefit of a slow exhale is that it gives you an opportunity to just let go and blow out your worries whether you realize it or not.

Elementary:

At this age, kids are better able to give meditation and mindfulness a try while also understanding the benefits. You still want to keep it on the shorter side so they feel like it’s an activity that is approachable and the benefits are attainable.

A mindfulness practice that really resonates well with kids is cultivating gratitude. They can sit with their eyes closed and breathe slowly and call to mind a few gratitudes from their day. Plus, they can even cultivate gratitude without sitting in meditation and use the strategy when they feel themselves spiraling into a state of negativity.

Researchers have found that people who focus on gratitude are more optimistic, happier, and healthier.

Teenagers:

Teenagers who are struggling with issues of self-esteem, can improve their sense of self-worth by using a mantra while they are sitting with their eyes closed and breathing intentionally. They can remind themselves of affirmations like: “I am loved.” “I am worthy.” “I am smart.” “I am beautiful.” “I can do hard things.”

Atluri believes that the most important thing parents can do to raise mindful kids is to model the appropriate behavior.

“Our children are always watching what we do as parents and taking it all in whether they realize it or not,” Atluri says. “When they see you put into practice ways for managing stress in a healthy way and on a consistent basis, they’ll begin to learn and see for themselves the benefits of using mindfulness strategies to combat stress, overwhelm, and worry.”

Alabama ranks as the last state in the nation in COVID-19 vaccine rates, but one high school principal in Birmingham is doing everything he can to combat that.

Between February and June Principal of A.H Parker High School, Darrell Hudson, partnered with The University of Alabama at Birmingham to launch a vaccine site.

“It was a great opportunity to launch the site. We’ve always been more than a school in the community,” Hudson tells Upworthy. “We feel good when any of our scholars decide to take the vaccine,” he says. But, he adds that the number of students who’re vaccinated is still quite low.

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To keep the momentum going, two weeks before students returned to campus, Hudson and Parker High joined others in the Birmingham City Schools, in a social media campaign championed by the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH). A TikTok contest was launched for young people ages 13 to 29. Videos are themed “This is why I got vaccinated.,” and on August 13, a panel of judges will announce four winners who will each be awarded a $250 Visa gift card.

The ADPH is hoping campaigns such as the TikTok contest will move the needle in getting the young vaccinated. Hudson says the students at Parker are excited about the contest.

“We’ve got some very creative scholars here and I can’t wait to see what they come up with,” Hudson says.

ADPH Assistant Health Officer Dr. Karen Landers told CNN’s Jake Tapper that it’s Alabamians between the ages of 12 and 49 who are the most adamant about not getting the vaccine.

“That’s really where our problem is, reaching people who perceive that they’re younger, they’re healthier and therefore they don’t need the vaccine, or continuing to buy into misinformation,” Landers said.

Hudson told CNN that although most of his students are already vaccinated, some remain hesitant.

“We tried to educate them, but I’ve learned the best thing is to let them talk with the nurses,” he said. “Let them talk with the scientists from a scientific standpoint.”

“We have had some to come around,” he added. “We do have some that are on the fence. And we have some that are pretty adamant about not going to take the vaccine, but we do try to educate our scholars. We’ve had this conversation with parents and guardians as well…But like I say, I think one of the best methods has been to let them talk with the nurses and individuals who have been doing this for a while, to give the pros and cons.”

Photo by Hakan Nural on

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than half of all Americans age 18 to 39 are fully vaccinated, compared with more than two-thirds of those over 50. And about 58 percent of those ages 12 through 17 have yet to receive a shot at all — even though the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is authorized for most people age 12 and older.

On August 1, the White House enlisted a plethora of more than 50 Twitch streamers, YouTubers, and TikTokers with enormous online audiences to help push a pro-vaccine message and get jabs into the arms of young people.

According to a 2018 study by the marketing agency MuseFind, young people are more likely to trust their favorite social media influencer than a traditional celebrity.

“I know I won’t stop until all my followers are safe and vaccinated,” White House TikTok creator, Ellie Zeiler, 17, from Escondido, California told The New York Times.

Last week, Dave Bautista responded to a fan’s question about why he’s not voicing Drax on Marvel’s What If…?, and the always blunt and open actor didn’t pull any punches. “Let’s start with I was never asked,” Bautista quote tweeted for his 1.4 million followers to see. Not that it needed the help, but the tweet gained even more traction when Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn jumped into the replies to voice his disbelief with a simple “What.”

Gunn’s surprise made sense because Bautista not being asked to join the voice cast didn’t track, and if true, would seem oddly personal. By all accounts, What If…? went out of its way to have every MCU actor reprise their role if possible. (Some had scheduling conflicts, while others like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans were sticking to their Marvel Studios exit.) And according to a new interview with What If…? executive producer Brad Winderbaum, there was an attempt to get Bautista on board. Via Variety:

“It’s my understanding that everybody was asked in some way, shape or form, either through their agents or directly. I don’t know really what happened behind the scenes there, but certainly, we would have loved for him to be in the show. So there’s probably some miscommunication somewhere.”

Of course, Bautista has been making waves about leaving Marvel after Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, so that does add a bit of drama to his What If…? exclusion. However, the show had already started locking down the cast at least two years ago before Bautista started voicing his intentions to leave. At least publicly. The actor isn’t afraid to be candid on Twitter or in interviews, so it’ll be interesting to hear his thoughts on the whole thing being a “miscommunication.”

(Via Variety)

Over the course of her explosive last two years, Megan Thee Stallion went from being a relatively unknown Houston rapper to being one of the biggest stars in hip-hop, and along the way, she naturally made some changes to accommodate her newfound superstar status, incorporating new sounds and experimenting with different styles on projects like Fever, Suga, and Good News. Now, though, she aims to return to her roots as a bars-first veteran freestyler, according to a new cover story for this month’s issue of Essence.

“I feel like this project is definitely something very well thought out,” she says of her next album. “This project is me talking my sh*t, getting back comfortable with myself, getting back to the Megan that was on the come-up.” However, she remains coy on further details to avoid disappointing fans due to last-minute changes or track leaking. She does share what the “Megan that was on the come-up” looks like, though: “I would be in my dorm room finding beats to rap over on YouTube,” she admits. “When I got to go into the studio, I’d lay down eight songs at a time.”

With that kind of work ethic, the prospect of an album chosen from the best tracks of Megan just rapping is sure to leave fans salivating to see what she dreams up next. Check out the full Essence cover story here.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Lorde is gearing up for the release of her highly-anticipated album Solar Power. Though she spent time away from social media over the last several years, Lorde is well aware of her fans’ monumental expectations around her next LP. But despite her career’s success, the singer will never try to replicate the height of her smash-hit debut single “Royals.”

Lorde sat down for an interview with the New York Times to talk about her upcoming release. The conversation eventually turned to her debut track, with the New York Times writing that she “vowed to never again reach for the heights of ‘Royals.’” According to Lorde, attempting for a single to gain a similar popularity is “a lost cause.” “Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion,” she said. “That was a moonshot.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the singer described how she was able to finally kick her addiction to her phone. Lorde set her phone’s screen to grayscale in order to trick her brain into looking at it less. She then deleted the internet browser off her phone and locked herself out of all social media apps. The final step she took involved a coder friend: Lorde asked them to make it impossible to access YouTube from her laptop. “I would see my screen-time go to like, 11 hours and I knew it was just looking at the Daily Mail,” Lorde said. “I remember sitting up in bed and realizing I could get to the end of my life and have done this every day. And it’s up to me to choose, right now. So I just sort of chose.”

Read Lorde’s full New York Times interview here.

Solar Power is out 8/20 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

Tom Cruise can’t do anything halfway. That’s no secret, since he’s dangled from the world’s tallest building (the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) for the sake of cinema, and it seems to barely faze him when he’s hanging off a helicopter. The guy casually perches atop speeding trains and waves to fans like it’s no big thing, so it’s no surprise that Jake Johnson felt intimidated at the thought of joining 2017’s The Mummy and attempting to keep up with the Top Gun: Maverick star. As Johnson recently told The Daily Beast (for its The Last Laugh podcast), he knew that he’d be in for a world of aching muscles and more because of the way Cruise works.

Back when the reboot surfaced in theaters, Johnson intially told The Hollywood Reporter that he was so thrilled “as a kid who was raised in the ‘80s, the idea of doing an action-adventure with Tom Cruise was so great, I was like, ‘Sign me up!’” At the time, Johnson added, “I’ve read all the press about him, he’s legendary with how he does action, he’s becoming a bigger-than-life character. I just wanted to do scenes with him.” Yet things can get a little looser on a podcast than they can during a press junket, soooo yeah. Jake’s clarified take came out to The Last Laugh (via The Independent and THR):

“The reason I was hesitant on The Mummy is Tom Cruise is an intimidating figure… especially because I had to do action sequences with him. I was like, ‘Look, I’ll do action sequences with an actor who likes stunt doubles.’ That’s not him.”

Not only that, but here’s how “intense” Tom gets during these scenes: Johnson has now described how he “landed on my back and told him that something went wrong because I got hurt” after they did a collapsed-building stunt:

“And he said, ‘Injured or hurt?’ I said, ‘What’s the difference?’ And he goes, ‘Can you go again or is something broken?’ And I was like, ‘No, I mean, I can go again.’ Then he goes, ‘So you’re hurt. Of course you’re hurt. You fell off a three-story building.’”

“And I thought, he’s not faking it. When you see him on a horse and he gets thrown off and he tucks and rolls, his back is bruised. When he’s holding onto a side of the plane and it takes off and that wind is hitting his face and it looks like it’s ripping his skin open because it’s ripping his skin open.”

Yikes. I would definitely leave that wild-man act to Tom if placed into that position (which obviously isn’t happening), and it sounds rather miraculous that The Mummy stunts went well despite what sounds like a very clear danger. To each his own, and thank goodness that Jake Johnson made it through those stunts to tell the tale. Listen to more of The Daily Beast’s podcast episode (in which Johnson suggests that he wasn’t at all surprised at Tom’s COVID-protocol rant because “Yeah, he’s an intense guy”) here.

(Via The Daily Beast, The Independent & Hollywood Reporter)

One of the stories of this year in sports has been the return of fans to the stands at stadiums and arenas, which has been a mostly welcome sight but has also brought the return of idiots on the field and what has felt, at least, like a disproportionate number of fights in the stands.

The NBA Playoffs featured fan brawls on a semi-regular basis, leading one Suns fan to briefly become a cult hero in Phoenix for his “Suns in 4” proclamation, and baseball has seen folks run on the field (only to get laid out by a ballgirl) and a number of fan fisticuffs as well. That continued on Wednesday with one of the more vicious fights we’ve seen between two women at a Braves game, who got in a full on MMA style fight in the concourse at Truist Park, with one woman appearing to try and work a triangle choke with the other escaping and putting in some ground and pound before people stepped in to break it up and police arrived to arrest them.

You’ve gotta be a bit impressed with the way the blonde woman on top passes through the guard and gets to ground and pound here. That said, whatever set off this fight couldn’t have been worth getting pinned down and having your arms wrenched backwards by a cop putting you in cuffs.

After four years of dealing with “President” Donald Trump and more than six months of witnessing the fallout from that political disaster, it’s hard to be surprised by anything the former president—or any of his cronies—say and do. But Seth Meyers still made time to be amazed by what has been “a week of consequences for some of the most corrupt people in politics.”

Meyers dedicated Wednesday’s “A Closer Look” segment to “the many weirdos who tried to help Donald Trump overthrow the election [and now] are in major legal and financial trouble.” First up was Rudy Giuliani and his new gig selling the world’s creepiest birthday wishes, and whatever remains of his soul, on Cameo. But Meyers saved the bulk of his energy for crack addict-turned-crackpot Mike Lindell.

The big day of the MyPillow founder’s much ballyhooed-about cyber symposium finally arrived this week, and it was as disastrous as you’d both expect and hope for. You might recall that back in May, Lindell was turned away from a Republican Governors Association event after vowing to confront two of its attendees over the “stolen” election. That may have been months ago, but Lindell hasn’t forgotten, and devoted a fair amount of his stage time discussing this particular incident… which, again, happened months ago. Yet when he started going off about it, someone actually pulled the “we have something to show you backstage” routine to and attempted to oust the man who created the symposium off the stage of his own symposium. Meyers had some thoughts:

“In what way was this a cyber symposium? From what I can tell he spent a lot of the time complaining about getting kicked out of other events. Imagine going to see a man, who admits this is the only room he’s been allowed to stay in. And then imagine if he was also asked to leave that room, and then refused…

Amazing! First he got kicked out of the Republican Governors convention and then they tried to drag him out of his own symposium. Next they’re going to kick him off the board of MyPillow.”

The comeuppance is hardly surprising to Meyers, who noted that Rudy and Mike Lindell are now “finding out what happens when you debase and humiliate yourself in service of a man who never returns any loyalty to the people he demands it from. Every day they embarrass themselves and suffer new indignities on Trump’s behalf.”

You can watch the full segment (the Lindell part starts around the 9:00 mark) above.

After the success that was 2020’s Tickets To My Downfall (which was Kelly’s first No. 1 album), Machine Gun Kelly is pressing on with his rock career: He just announced a new album, Born With Horns, doing so by showing off matching tattoos of the title he got with collaborator Travis Barker. Now Kelly has returned with a Cole Bennett-directed video for the album’s first single, “Papercuts.”

In the clip (which is Bennett’s first ever video for a rock song), we see shots of a bald and scalp-tattooed Kelly walking around Hollywood Boulevard, Kelly playing a gigantic guitar while sporting presumably stilt-enhanced legs and while surrounded by people in various costumes, and Kelly’s black-wigged head in a wall being pelted with black paint balloons.

“Papercuts” is the only song confirmed to appear on Born With Horns so far, as Kelly has yet to share a tracklist for the album… or a release date, cover art, or any other information about it.

Elsewhere, Kelly has been making news recently for his relationship with Megan Fox. He revealed he had a poster of her before they started dating, and Fox recently described a trip she and Kelly took to do ayahuasca in Costa Rica.

Watch the “Papercuts” video above.