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After a year of canceling all US music festivals, organizers are feeling optimistic about the return of large, in-person events this summer. A handful of music festivals are setting their sights for late summer dates, and Bonnaroo is the latest to unveil their hopeful 2021 lineup. Celebrating their 20th anniversary, Bonnaroo has booked acts like Lizzo, Tame Impala, Megan Thee Stallion, and many more.

The Manchester, Tennessee festival has historically taken place in June, but organizers have opted to push the date back to the weekend of September 2-September 5 to be safe. Along with Lizzo, Tame Impala, and Megan Thee Stallion, Bonnaroo invited countless big-name acts to take the stage. Some of the names include Foo Fighters, Run The Jewels, Janelle Monáe, Glass Animals, Deftones, Young Thug, Jack Harlow, Grace Potter, Orville Peck, Kim Petras, Omar Apollo, Waxahatchee, My Morning Jacket, G-Eazy, Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit, Phoebe Bridgers, Tyler The Creator, Lana Del Rey, Lil Baby, Leon Bridges, Young the Giant, and Brittany Howard.

To celebrate their return, Bonnaroo aims to commemorate their 20th anniversary with exclusive NFT art. They’re selling their original digital 2021 lineup poster as an NFT, marking the first time a festival has dipped their toes into the cryptocurrency art market.

While music fans are getting excited about the idea of festivals returning, Tennessee’s governor shares the same sentiment. “It’s exciting to see Tennessee stages come back to life in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this internationally acclaimed festival,” Gov. Bill Lee said. “Fans are ready to gather together and celebrate their shared love of music once again. We welcome them back for a full Bonnaroo and what is sure to be a truly unforgettable event.”

See Bonnaroo’s full lineup above.

Tickets go on sale 3/31 at 10 am PST. Get them here.

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

Actress Kat Ahn appeared in the season three episode of The Office, “A Benihana Christmas,” as one of the waitresses that Michael (Steve Carell) and Andy (Ed Helms) bring to Dunder Mifflin’s Christmas party. She was initially excited to appear on the NBC sitcom before realizing, as she told the Washington Post about how Hollywood has failed Asian women, that she was “just there to be the joke.” There’s a recurring bit in the episode about how Michael can’t tell the waitresses apart. “Which one is she?” Roy asks Michael after he brags about his date. “It’s… it’s one of those two,” he replies.

Ahn said she was “told to shut up and be grateful. Actors have no power until they become a star.” She previously discussed her experience on TikTok. “I actually understood why BIPOC actors play racist roles. You know, sometimes, you gotta pay your rent. Sometimes you want to join the union. Sometimes you just don’t want your agent to drop you,” she said. “Also, this episode was before, you know, wokeness.”

She continued, “The storyline with myself and the other Asian American actress [played by Kulap Vilaysack] is that we were the ‘uglier’ version of the actresses at the Benihana. Also that all Asian people look alike, we’re one big monolith, and we’re just one big walking stereotype without any personality or individuality. Which is problematic”:

Her experience mirrors the kind of roles actors of Asian descent have been offered for decades in an industry that still suffers from a dearth of opportunity for them. Underrepresentation persists among the decision-makers as well — UCLA’s 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report found that 91 percent of the executives at major and mid-level studios were White, while the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reported that just 3.3 percent of those who directed the 1,300 most popular films released between 2007 and 2019 were of Asian descent.

You can watch one of her TikTok videos about The Office below.

(Via Washington Post)

Earlier this week is was announced that Adam Wingard and his writing partner, Simon Barrett, would be making a Thundercats movie. Wingard is currently promoting Godzilla vs. Kong (which comes out today in theaters and on HBO Max), but it was during post-production on his current film that he decided, “Yeah, I think i can make a Thundercats movie.” And make no mistake, Wingard is obsessed with Thundercats. If there is one human being on Earth who should make a Thundercats movie, it is Adam Wingard. And usually when a director’s new project is announced, in an interview they might say a couple sentences about it. You know, something like, “Well we are really excited but we can’t say too much.” In this case, it actually seems like it would be difficult to get Wingard to stop talking about Thundercats, almost as if he’s trying to will this movie into existence. (Not that I’d want him to stop. The more Thundercats talk in this world, the better.)

Wingard is also working on a sequel to Face/Off, which just sounds crazy but, yeah, let’s do it. Wingard is adamant it’s a sequel, not a reboot. And he has hopes that both Travolta and Cage will be in it, but it’s still in the scriptwriting phase and he gives us an update on that, too, as we talk about what we find “believable” about the first movie and what we do not, which winds up being a lesson in futility.

Okay, so I have a dumb stunt. Are you ready for my dumb stunt?

I’m ready.

Okay, it’s me now placing my Lion-O action figure behind me on a shelf for my Zoom background. There he is. Okay, that was my stunt.

Worth it. It was worth it.

Do you want my Thundercats story? It’s like 20 seconds long.

Oh my God, I’d so love to hear. I’m so ready to hear anything about Thundercats.

Okay. I was 11 years old and it’s that weird age where you kind of want to start acting older. Like, oh, I don’t have toys anymore. Anyway, I’m at Walmart in Missouri with my mom. And I beg my mom to buy me Lion-O and Mumm-Ra. And I remember we’re in line, waiting to pay. And a classmate named Jeremy comes up…

He sees you buying the toys?

Yeah. He looks in the cart and gives me that, “Oh, you’re still doing that?” look. And walks off.

Well, that’s how I felt in high school when I was writing the screenplay. Because, at the time really, honestly, for Thundercats obsession, it kind of passed. But really it sort of had been brought back a new light with Toonami, Cartoon Network. They were airing it. I mean, because I always loved it as a kid. It was always my favorite, but then it kind of went away for a couple of years. And then it was like in middle school, high school that it started re-airing and that just really threw me right into my obsession. And I mean, honestly, every day, I would have my VCR set to record because I think Thundercats came on right when I was just finishing school. And so, it was really important that I got every episode so that I could re-watch and study them and stuff. My obsession was big. I was asking some friends of mine if they remembered it recently. And they’re like, “Yeah, we remember that’s all you were doing.”

I hope this is a trend with you and you keep doing the mid ’80s cartoons. We can get Centurions. We can get Sectaurs.

Well, you know what’s funny, is I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because some of the things I’m most proud of obviously are my standalone films that were created from ground up, with me and Simon Barrett. You’re Next and The Guest are probably two of my films I’m most proud of.

You’re Next, filmed in Columbia, Missouri…

That was, yeah! You mentioned Missouri…

I went to college in Columbia. But that incident with Lion-O and Mumm-Ra happened maybe like 40 miles from there.

I mean, Columbia, Missouri was a really important place for me, because that’s where Simon [Barrett] and I, we did A Horrible Way To Die, VHS and You’re Next there. And so, my roots in filmmaking have really now, weirdly, they’re tied to Columbia. The Thundercats thing is interesting, because, I’d kind of written it off for so long. Because, like I said, as a kid, it just seemed like it was impossible. And so it was only really actually during the pandemic – and I would say during the late phases of the Godzilla vs. Kong post – when I started getting shots in from the Hollow Earth scene. I started looking at it and, honestly, this is how it started. It was literally I was looking at shots of Hollow Earth and I thought, god, this is exactly what a Thundercats movie should look like. And then I thought, wait a minute, I could make the Thundercats movie! And it’s like, this is what it should be. And up until now, I kept hearing that there was always this kind of peripheral, maybe Hollywood’s going to do a live-action Thundercats.

That’s what I was going to ask you. Because I get my hopes up every time, and then it doesn’t happen.

Well, I do too. And I think it’s for the best that it didn’t happen. Because I think that even the script that I read that was developed, which was in a pretty good place, I’m not going to lie: I looked at it and I was like, “This is actually not too bad.” I was not expecting a lot, so there’s a lot of good foundation within that. I’m going to do a lot of different stuff to it. But I think the thing was is that it was clearly designed to be shot live-action. And so, there are certain things that when you read it, it doesn’t feel totally Thundercats because you can tell they were thinking of the limitations of live-action cinema. And anytime I picture the Thundercats live-action it’s basically just putting makeup on people, it just looks ridiculous. It just doesn’t seem right. Because everybody, always, they think, oh, the Thundercats, they have to look like cats. But if you really look at the Thundercats, it’s not like they’re conventionally looking like a cross between cats and humans, they’re different. They’re Thundercats. They’re bigger than that and stranger than that,

And sometimes they walk around naked and it’s not a big deal.

Yeah! That first episode, they walk in, “Should I be watching this?”

It is very strange to watch it, because none of them are wearing clothes, but when they become the hero version, they get clothes.

Yeah, the clothes are somehow associated with that. No, it really is funny. So going back to that kind of a-ha moment when I was making some scenes of Hollow Earth: I looked at that, and I thought the technology’s there. And my experience, not just with the aesthetic of Hollow Earth, but also I felt like making King Kong such a well-rounded CGI character, that was so emotive and believable and filled with limitless possibilities for me as a director, that’s when I was like: I can do a Thundercats movie, and it would actually work. And so that’s when I started kind of pushing in that direction. And honestly, we would have actually been a little bit further ahead, but the pandemic just slowed down the whole process. But now we’re finally in a place where we’re getting started. And I mean, Simon and I are having so much fun on this thing, in a way that we’ve never had before.

We’ve been working together a lot over the pandemic. We wrote a script, which it will be a surprise to people. It is an original script. We have an original that we want to do. Obviously, we’ve been working on Face/Off 2. We’ve been having so much fun on that. But every time we talk about Thundercats, it’s just, we’re not even worried, because the ideas just roll like an avalanche. It’s like, a five-minute jam session with Simon talking about Thundercats and we’re just coming up with insane, crazy set pieces that are just so exciting. So we’re just excited to get it into it, man.

Working on a Godzilla and Kong movie, did you also feel you now had the personal cache as a director to get something like Thundercats made?

Well, that’s exactly it, because I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been working on franchises for the last couple of years. And it’s not because I just want to do that forever, but these are franchises that are really exciting to me and important. But like you said, I’m kind of building my career upwards as well. And I’m finally at a place now where I can build projects from the ground up. And so, there’s a big difference even between what I’m able to do with Godzilla vs. Kong, which is a lot, but it’s a project that already has foundation before I arrived. And even though Thundercats is a rewrite, it’s technically a rewrite, but Simon and I are going to do whatever we want to it. We’re able to start that from the ground up.

The same thing with Face/Off 2. We came in there, there was nothing, and we started from the ground up. And that’s what’s exciting about: this next phase of my career is being able to really utilize the trust that I’m building with the studios and all those kinds of things, and to be able to get these bigger budgets, and to put it into these properties and be able to bring out what excites me about them the most.

Honestly, it’s been kind of scary over the last few years. And it’s not like I would have had trouble making another movie, even if Godzilla vs. Kong was a failure or something, I could have figured out how to get even a lower budget or something. But for me, my ambition is very high, and I have a lot of things that I want to do. And so for me, I look at Blair Witch and Death Note were kind of two strikes against me critically, those movies. I’m proud of them, but they just didn’t quite land the way they should. And so, I had this moment kind of early on Godzilla, where I’m in the concept room early 2018. I’m looking at all this stuff. It looks absolutely incredible. I’m so excited, but I’ll have these little moments where I’d just suddenly think, “There’s a lot at stake here.” People have so much expectation, not just for these characters, but then there’s the added expectation of, does he still got it? Can he get back to that place that everybody loved from The Guest and all that kind of crap? And so for me, it was just like I had to put that out and just push it away and just focus on the movie and just believe in it.

You mentioned Face/Off 2. The one thing that drives me nuts about the original is, at the time, Travolta and Cage do not at all have the same body type. So they aren’t really just switching faces. Somehow, please don’t do that…

There’s always a couple of ways you can approach these kinds of things.

And, yes, it’s weird that I accept the rest of it. But that part I’m like, “I don’t know about this.”

No, we try to address that in this film, because also this is over 20 years later from the first movie. So technology in terms of what in the Face/Off world they can do has advanced, and those kinds of things. So we try to make sure that when the stuff comes up, that we’re checking those boxes and making sure that’s addressed. But at the end of the day, it’s like… Yeah, that’s all I’ll say about that, because it’s one of the things. I don’t want to give anything too much away, too early.

I saw it in theaters. I remember at the end when Archer is still in Nic Cage’s body in the ambulance and takes his wedding ring back, and he puts it on, but it doesn’t anywhere near fit. And I remember the audience just going, “Uhhh.” Groaning like, that doesn’t make sense. And that’s what always stuck with me.

[Laughs] Well, that makes sense. That’s a logical thing to get hung up on, for sure.

Yeah, in a movie like that, it makes a lot of sense to be hung up on these things.

That’s the challenge with a film like Face/Off, because it’s such a heightened kind of film. And, honestly, you deal with that in Godzilla vs. Kong. And sometimes you have to pick your battles. For instance, on Godzilla vs. Kong, you’re having to constantly say, “Does it matter that this makes sense? Is it worth spending time to try to explain this away? Is it always just going to come off like an excuse or scientific mumbo-jumbo?” Sometimes you need a little bit, sometimes you don’t need it at all. And you go through this whole process of trying to always figure out what’s the least amount you have to give and that people even want in general. And we found ourselves trying to cover a lot of bases. It turned out that it just didn’t matter to people. That you show it to people and they’re like, “No, no, I get that. Why are the characters talking about it still? It’s boring.” And you’re just like, all right, cut it out. But on the page, it seems like this is so important, it has to be that way. And I think when I look at Face/Off, the original, the batting record for things they get away with versus what they don’t is probably one of the most impressive of any film I’ve seen.

And I think that’s why we’re actually getting a lot of credit for delivering on Godzilla vs. Kong, because we embraced the fact that’s how people perceive these movies. I mean, that’s how they want to enjoy them. It’s like, could I deliver the most realistic, grounded version of Godzilla vs Kong? Well, I guess I could, but it’s kind of already been done. If you just look at Shin Godzilla, they’ve done a meeting where it’s literally characters in boardrooms, discussing what they’re going to do, down to every detail and realistic thing. It’s a great movie, but it’s already out there. And it’s like, what I think that American audiences, and I think worldwide audiences want to see when they hear a movie called Godzilla vs. Kong, is they want to see King Kong punch Godzilla on top of an aircraft carrier.

And they will see that.

It’s like, does that totally make sense? Does the weight logic make sense? I mean, maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Just let them fight.

‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ opens in theaters and via HBO Max this weekend. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

A month ago, Dinosaur Jr. announced a new album, Sweep It Into Space, which is set for April 23. They accompanied that announcement with “I Ran Away,” and now they’re back with another preview of the album via a video for “Garden.”

The band’s Lou Barlow, who wrote the song, says of it and the accompanying video:

Everyone seemed to want a disruption in the order of American life, it seemed necessary. Then it happened. It began as a bitter lamentation but as I was finishing the lyrics, singing over the instrumental version of the song while driving to J [Mascis]’s through the miles of farmland that separate his studio in Amherst and my home in Greenfield (Massachusetts), I saw a sign on a shed: Back To The Garden. I was looking for a resolution, where do we go when faced with such dramatic confusion? Back to basics, back home, back to the garden. Luckily I was able to complete the vocals and instrumentation for the song just before the quarantine.

There wasn’t a video planned for the song but since my wife Adelle and I had started making holiday ‘specials’ for my YouTube channel this past December, we thought we could knock one out for Garden. I wanted to capture the two of us holding hands on a levy overlooking a scenic bend in the Connecticut River (very close to where the first Dinosaur video, ‘Little Fury Things,’ was filmed!). Adelle thought we should incorporate the whimsical paintings of Dinosaur Jr’s tour manager John Moloney. He routinely dashes off caricatures of J, Murph and I when we travel. I told John about our ideas and he thought it would be easy to video the band playing the song. So, John and Adelle quickly captured the band playing the song on their iPhones on a cold February afternoon and I edited it all together in iMovie. Then we had Chloe, the real vid expert at Jagjaguwar, put the paintings by John and Adelle into the mix, and that’s it! Thanks for watching.

Mascis also previously said of working on with Kurt Vile (who co-produced the album), “[I] ended up just mimicking a few things he’d done. I was listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy, so I was trying to get some of that dueling twin lead sound. But the recording session was pretty well finished by the time things really hit the fan. When the lockdown happened in March, that meant I was on my own. But it was cool.”

Watch the video for “Garden” above.

Sweep It Into Space is out 4/23 via Jagjaguwar. Pre-order it here.

Needles are terrifying. It’s not uncommon for people to have a phobia related to them, which is a tough (pun absolutely intended) needle to thread as folks are getting the COVID-19 vaccine worldwide.

So when a picture showed up of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander having his hand held by Oklahoma City Thunder teammate, Lu Dort, as he received the COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday, it was extremely relatable. It’s just a picture, so we don’t know if SGA is afraid of needles, but this very much is similar to how many of us feel when we receive a shot of any kind.

Studies show that at least 20 percent of people have some fear of needles, while another 10 percent have it fall under phobia status. It’s clear that needles are a huge issue for a lot of people.

Knowing this, that picture of SGA and Lu Dort is even better, because people who are afraid of needles may be hesitant to receive the vaccine. Hopefully seeing a picture of someone as prominent as the Thunder’s young star receiving the vaccine will give another person the confidence to go get it even with a fear of needles. And as one of our editors who received his second shot on Tuesday says, as long as your arm is at your side and you don’t tense up your shoulder, you can barely feel the jab.

Gruesome horror movie imagery has always permeated 21 Savage’s music, so it’s only right that the Slaughter Gang head honcho takes his penchant for making murderous music on his first foray into Hollywood. Variety reports that the UK-born, Atlanta-bred Grammy winner has been tasked with executive producing the music for the upcoming Saw spinoff, Spiral: From The Book Of Saw. 21 also crafted his new single “Spiral” as the film’s theme song, which can be heard throughout the newly released trailer.

The film, which is produced by and stars Chris Rock, also features Samuel L. Jackson, as the two veteran actors portray a father-and-son police duo confronted by a Jigsaw copycat killer. 21 Savage’s ear for ominous beats and mayhem-inspired rhymes seems like the perfect match for the sadistic on-screen action.

However, as ominous as his taste would appear to be from his output, it’s also omnivorous. The lanky rapper has been known to post social media videos singing along to his favorite R&B tunes, as he did during the recent Verzuz show with Ashanti and Keyshia Cole. That versatility could also serve him well in his capacity as the soundtrack’s executive producer, as he could use lighter fare to set up the bigger scares — or completely invert fan-favorites as the trailers for Jordan Peele’s haunting thrillers Us and Candyman (which he produced, not directed) have done in the past.

Watch the trailer for Spiral: From The Book Of Saw above. The film premieres May 14, 2021.

Kyle Brandt is happy to try just about anything. The host of Spotify’s “10 Questions” and the NFL Network’s Good Morning Football is a mainstay on all sports fans’ screens these days, but despite openly admitting the luck involved with landing those gigs, Brandt wants to keep taking risks.

The taste for trying stuff began as early as college, when as a student at Princeton, Brandt actively fought back against the path expected of him as an Ivy League grad. As the other guys around him took flashy Wall Street gigs with lucrative signing bonuses straight out of school, Brandt was determined to become an actor, filling in theater classes around his football schedule and doing his best to skirt the draw of Manhattan that reels in so many northeasterners.

“It kind of rattled me, but I stayed focused,” Brandt says. “I never was going to be that person who was like well, I should go get a job as a consultant. I was just never going to do that.”

But during his senior year at Princeton, the Real World did a casting call steps away from his bachelor pad, and Brandt was cast for Season 10. The experience was surreal after growing up watching the show as a teenager, but added once again to the perception he held with producers. Tall, handsome, and smart, Brandt had to again push back on being stereotyped.

“There was a pipeline from every reality show to L.A. to become actors, so that put that stamp on me where they were like, oh here’s another guy, a bachelor, a Joe Millionaire, who wants to be a movie star,” Brandt remembers. “Maybe I was, but I was like, I’ve been learning my lines, doing theatre, I’m really into this thing. Most people didn’t want to hear it.”

Eventually, his career took him through Days of Our Lives on NBC to a gig on the “Jim Rome Show,” a turn that put him back in the sports. Brandt took some time earlier this week to talk with Uproxx about the similarities between soap operas and a morning sports show, who his dream guests are on “10 Questions,” and why he’d like to be the next host of Jeopardy!

Your Twitter bio has a line that says “My resume is weirder than yours.” Do you see your journey in the industry as a point of pride?

Oh yeah, definitely. I scream that from the rooftops. But I have to clarify, I don’t think my resume is better than anybody’s, and it’s definitely worse than a lot of people’s. But no one’s is weirder. More than a point of pride, it’s a challenge. It’s a callout. Sometimes I’ll have people who will either tweet me or even stop me in person and throw down the gauntlet and say, “I used to work at a karaoke bar and now I’m a United States Senator,” or whatever the hell they say.

They think they can beat mine, and maybe some of them can, but I have never heard one that is as unusual, comical, eccentric, and unpredictable as mine. So I am proud of it, yeah, and the challenge is safe to this day.

When I hear you talk about Days of our Lives, I see a similarity to Good Morning Football in terms of the grind. Are they similar, and what is hosting GMF like?

There was a sense of “what am I doing here?” when the show started. I’m not an ex-NFL player, I’m not an insider consulting my sources, and I’m on the same network as Deion Sanders and LaDainian Tomlinson and Kurt Warner. These are walk-in Hall of Famers, and I played some college football back in the early 2000s. I have to justify myself really quickly.

I was the last person cast on the show. It was Nate (Burleson) and Peter (Schrager) and Kay (Adams) and then what if we had this fourth guy? He doesn’t really fit any of the molds, he doesn’t have a ton of experience on TV, but we think he brings a different energy and it might work. The NFL is usually risk-averse, and this was a huge shot that they took on me, so I felt like I got there and had to be immediately like, ‘Here’s why I’m here.’ I have to be really energetic and really creative.

To do that every day, waking up at 4 in the morning and going into Manhattan, leaving your wife and two babies in the dark to come up with something original to say about Dak Prescott, it’s really, really hard. But somehow, I was able to make them keep me.

It sounds like you get energized by the riskiness of that. But there are some people who would get nervous or scared. How do you think of the NFL Network gig as an opportunity rather than, ‘Oh crap, I might completely lose this’?

It was really high stakes, even more than you know. My wife and our kids moved from Southern California to New York at the drop of a hat, with very short notice. We had a 2-year-old and a three-week-old when we moved, which was a nuclear move.

We had this sense that we’re going to try a new morning show, which the NFL Network has tried many of over the years to varying successes. This is a thing in New York with an outside producer. There’s four hosts that don’t know each other at all and aren’t very experienced. This could be a total disaster.

It would have been a real difficult blow if Good Morning Football had (fallen) on its face and we had to move back to Southern California and start all over. It would have been bad. But it wasn’t. Somehow, we made it work, and people liked it, and we found an audience. If I look back at some of those first shows, I don’t really recognize myself, but thank god that the NFL took a chance on us and especially on me.

How do you feel that your Ivy League education, show biz experience and now sports hosting experience combine when it comes to your work as an interviewer on a show like “10 Questions?” Does it make you a better or different interviewer than others might be?

I don’t know about better, but I try to be unique. I just like the variety. I take a lot of pride in two things about that. One, our contestant list for the show is as unique as my resume. It’s not just a bunch of football players or a bunch of actors or comedians. There’s everything. Within the space of a few weeks, we will have Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortenson on the heels of Guy Fieri, and that’s after NFL reporter Erin Andrews.

From contestant to contestant, there’s a lot of variety, and also even from question to question. I love taking them on that roller coaster where the first question is going to be really bizarre, about something like Snow White, then the second one will be about cooking … as random as we can possibly go.

There’s a moment in every episode where the contestant goes, ‘What the hell is this show?’ And I think that’s when they start liking it, because so many of these people need so many shows, and even if the person conducting the interview is talented and well-researched, they do kind of become paper dolls. So I try as hard as I can to cut that out.

Was that idea of mixing it up the basis behind “10 Questions?” What was the base level of what you wanted the show to be?

The base level was a conversation where you keep score. This podcast hosting, they’re everywhere, ubiquitous. I had to do something to punctuate the format, and I just said, I’m going to keep score, I’m going to come up with a game. It’s an extensive, deep-dive interview about this person’s life and career, but there’s going to be a setup where we keep score and we’re going to make it a competition.

I have found that interviewing so many athletes and now actors, that they’re unbelievably and almost disarmingly competitive. So if you sit them down and ask about themselves, they’re going to do it, but if you let them know not only I am I keeping score and keeping track of your answers, but you are competing against all these other contestants who came before, and for the next several weeks, we’re going to say your score and people are going to try to beat it, you can see them sit up straighter in their chair and get focused.

Who’s your dream guest on the show?

The ones that I really get off on are the ones who don’t do things, they don’t do a lot of publicity, certainly not sitting down for an hour on a podcast. There’s a couple I look at. I’ve always wanted to do something with Keanu Reeves, not only because he’s so accomplished and the body of work is obvious, but you also just don’t hear a lot of interviews with Keanu Reeves. I also think in the podcast format, if you have a recognizable voice, the second you start speaking, it’s already a win. I feel the same way about Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The total pie in the sky, the one in a million chance, is Leonardo DiCaprio. He doesn’t do interviews, and that’s part of the intrigue about him, so I would put him on the list, too.

Would you ever have politicians on?

Absolutely. I’m not afraid of it. We had Jemele Hill on, and at the end of every episode, the contestant does a call out to challenge someone to come beat their score, and sometimes then we book the person and have them come on. But at the end of Jemele’s episode, she called out AOC and we reached out to her to see if she’ll do it.

Who is your favorite interviewer ever?

Howard Stern. What I like about Howard is not only is it longform, but it’s immediately disarming. He has the same thing where there are some stakes involved. When people go on Howard, they are a little bit nervous and they know all the people that have gone on before them and they want to do really well. Howard doesn’t have a scorekeeping system like I do, but he has that set of stakes.

The way he does it and follows them, not every question comes from journalist school, but he just has the natural talent to do it. I think he’s the best in the game right now.

What do you see down the line for your own career? It seems like you could go any number of directions.

If you asked me right now, I want to host Jeopardy!, and I mean that sincerely. There was a piece that was written about 10 Questions a few months ago and it was really complimentary, and he said that “10 Questions” was ‘a spiritual successor to Jeopardy’ and I agree with him in that it’s kind of old-fashioned like a quiz show that goes back to the 1950s with Tell The Truth and Quiz Show the movie.

What do you think you would bring to Jeopardy!?

It’s challenging, because some of the people who have done it in the past couple weeks get caught doing (Alex) Trebek impressions, which is really tricky, and nobody’s ever going to be able to do that.

The best part of the show and the hosting are two things. It’s the moment when you interact with each contestant on contestant row, and it’s very tricky because you have to be very quick and very quirky but fast and efficient. Trebek had such an efficiency of words that he’s tough to follow. Then at the end of every segment, he’s standing at the dais and looks right into his camera and that is the control of the show. It’s not reading the clues, it’s him when he looks in the camera.

I think that I would bring a relatability. I’m the person who sits at home with my wife, watching and shouting out the clues like everyone else. To be that type of person to go and know what that’s like is like Charlie going to the Chocolate Factory. They were looking for the person who understands it and won’t try to take it over. I’ve been that person on the couch, I know how to work on TV, and I could probably do the French accents if I had time to work on them, for those clues.

It was announced at the top of 2021 that Glastonbury will not be hosting a festival this year (for the second year in a row) due to the pandemic. So, while thousands of people won’t be taking to the festival grounds this summer, they can enjoy a newly announced livestream concert that organizers are hosting.

“Live At Worthy Farm” is a ticketed livestream event that is set for May 22. As the name suggests, the show will take place at Worthy Farm and will feature Coldplay, Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn, Haim, Idles, Wolf Alice, Jorja Smith, Kano, Michael Kiwanuka, DJ Honey Dijon, and other currently unannounced performers.

This news shouldn’t surprise fans who have been following Glastonbury’s goings-on in recent months. In January, festival founder Michael Eavis said he wanted to do something to mark the festival’s anniversary: I would like to do something smaller somewhere around the anniversary date of when we started, which was the 18th of September 1970. I would like to consider possibly doing something around that time.” In December, Emily Eavis also noted, “We’re actually looking into the possibility of streaming some things from here if we can’t run the full show next year. We really want to get busy with planning some gigs — even if they’re to be streamed!”

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

Freddie Gibbs’ irreverent sense of humor is well-known, but not always appreciated. His penchant for ribaldry got him banned from Instagram last year, but that hasn’t stopped him from participating in the discourse — he just moved to a not-so-secret fake account, which he admitted to Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year. Now, in a new profile in GQ, he confesses that he may have more accounts that he uses to mock other rappers, who he sees as competitors in the sport of rhyming.

“You’re never too old to learn,” he allows, explaining why he spends so much time online studying his peers. “N****s become irrelevant because they stop learning and being sponges to the game. I eat, sleep, and breathe this shit, every day. I’m looking at what everybody’s doing. I’m getting on fake Instagram pages leaving comments like, ‘That sh*t is wack.’ I’m doing all kinds of bullsh*t, taunting people.”

At 38 years old, Freddie Gibbs is experiencing the most successful year of his career, receiving a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album for Alfredo, his collaborative album with veteran producer The Alchemist, and preparing to make his film debut. He didn’t win, but in typical Gibbs fashion, he was all jokes at the party he threw on Grammy night.

Read GQ‘s full profile here.

Freddie Gibbs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is easily one of the biggest Avatar fans on the planet. The self-proclaimed “spiritual thought leader” has been a long-time champion of the film and has gone so far as to say director James Cameron deserves a Nobel Prize for the film. While Williamson has repeatedly championed the film’s environmental and spiritual message, and even once tweeted “If you want a simple explanation for what’s happening in America, watch ‘Avatar’ again,” she took her obsession with the sci-fi film to a whole new level during a two hour interview with Cameron on a special episode of The Marianne Williamson Podcast.

During the lengthy conversation delving into Avatar‘s themes of “spiritualism, capitalism and imperialism, colonialization, human rights abuses,” Williamson claimed that she cited the film while visiting the Middle East, and her words had a profound effect on her audience of… Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers. Yup:

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: I was in Israel and I was talking to some Israeli Palestinian peacemakers. And I said, and I’m telling you the truth, I said, “Well, you know, the Great Mother doesn’t choose sides. According to Avatar, the Great Mother doesn’t choose sides. She’s there to protect the balance.”

JAMES CAMERON: Yes.

WILLIAMSON: She doesn’t pick a winner. She protects balance. And do you know the Israeli and the Palestinian in the room, do you know their reaction?

CAMERON: What’d they say?

WILLIAMSON: (mimes nodding her head in thought)

CAMERON: They thought about it. That’s good.

WILLIAMSON: They nodded. And I think it was because some of them had seen Avatar.

Despite the episode being two weeks old, the clip of Williamson citing Avatar to broker Middle East peace talks only recently went viral, which prompted her to respond on Twitter on Tuesday night. While calling her detractors “pseudo-intellectuals” who are “having a hoot,” Williamson defended referencing the film in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Our political establishment has not solved the problem, and it will not be solved on the level of the green line or traditional diplomacy or military action. It will only be solved on the level of the heart,” Williamson tweeted. “I do not apologize for telling that story. It’s not ridiculous; it’s important.”

You can see the full thread below:

(Via Sam Thielman on Twitter)