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Snoop Dogg recently sparked a bit of controversy after he shared his sentiments on Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP.” In an interview with Central Ave, the Long Beach rapper said that No. 1 song caused some concern for him on how young women would express themselves after hearing it.

“I just don’t want it that fashionable to where young girls express themselves like that without even knowing that that is a jewel that they hold onto until the right person comes around,” he said. Hours after the interview was released, TMZ caught up with Offset and asked him about his opinion on Snoop’s comments regarding his wife’s song.

“I love Snoop, man. [Cardi B is] grown,” Offset said. “I don’t get in females business, so Ima just stay at that. I hate when men do that. I don’t do that. I don’t care if a girl woulda said something bad about me. I just don’t get in females’ business.” The Migos rapper also pointed out that men often rap about the same content that is present on “WAP.” “As [male] rappers, we talk about the same sh*t,” he said. “It’s a lot of woman empowerment. Don’t shoot it down. We never had this many female artists running this shit. They catching up to us, passing us and setting records. That’s two women on one record that’s a very successful record.”

Before concluding his statement, Offset made sure to clarify that he did not have any bad feelings towards Snoop for what he said.

“I really f*ck with Snoop, like, on a personal level. So, I could personally call him and be like, ‘Snoop, come on now.’ I don’t wanna seem like I’m dissing at Snoop, that’s my boy. But, at the same time, all men should stay out of women business,” Offset said. “That’s women business. You ain’t gon’ have no win. Your comments probably looking crazy from just saying stuff like that. Stay outta women business. Women are strong now. We should uplift our women. Don’t say what they can and can’t do.”

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

Netflix’s Queen’s Gambit is now the most popular limited series in Netflix history, ringing up a reported 62 million viewers in the first 28 days. The chess drama is a king-sized hit for Netflix, remaining the top show on Netflix for weeks after its release. It’s a madly addictive show, too, and it works even if you’re a chess idiot.

One of the most compelling elements of the Queen’s Gambit is its phenomenal cast. Let’s look at who we meet in the limited series and where we’ve seen the many familiar faces before Queen’s Gambit came along.

Anya-Taylor Joy (Beth Harmon)

The lead of Queen’s Gambit is getting a lot of attention for her role in the series, but this is far from her first role. Anya-Taylor Joy was in the little-seen X-Men movie, The New Mutants as Illyana Rasputin; she appeared in the most recent season of Peaky Blinders; and her break-out role was in Robert Eggers’ wicked little horror flick, The Witch. Most people, however, recognize her from M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and its sequel Glass, where she played Casey Cooke.

Bill Camp (Mr. Shaibel)

Bill Camp, who played the janitor at Beth’s orphanage, and the man who taught her to play chess, is a character actor who has been working consistently in the industry for 30 years. He was in The Leftovers and in a brilliant HBO miniseries, The Night Of. More recently, however, he was a main cast member in the popular HBO series The Outsider, based on the Stephen King novel.

Marielle Heller (Alma Wheatley)

Heller, who played Beth’s adopted mother, is perhaps the most interesting member of the cast because she’s probably not a familiar face to many people (she had some very small roles in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and the MacGruber movie), but anyone who has seen Tom Hanks’ A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood has seen her work. She directed that movie, as well as the phenomenal Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which elicited Oscar nominations for both Richard E. Grant and Melissa McCarthy. She’s also married to Jorma Taccone, one-third of The Lonely Island, who directed Popstar and MacGruber.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Benny Watts)— Brodie-Sangster is a former child star, and for those of us who know him for his earlier work, it’s often difficult to see him as a grown-up. We know him as the little boy, Sam, in Love Actually, but also as Jojen Reed in Game of Thrones. He’s also the voice of Ferb in the animated series Phineas and Ferb.

Harry Melling (Harry Beltik)

Melling has been acting consistently for the last decade, but most people only know Melling from one thing other than Queen’s Gambit. He played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies. He’s much more likable in the Netflix series!

The charm of SNL is that it lets its hosts show off different sides of themselves. But the show also finds greatness when it just lets a host do their thing. Such is the case with Tiny Horse, a prerecorded sketch from last night’s episode where Beck Bennett, Chloe Fineman, and host Timothée Chalamet commit like hell to the premise of a poor farm family on the cusp of losing everything. Including Chalomet’s cherished tiny horse. Which is just so darn tiny. Tiny Horse, how’d you get so tiny? Look out for the oral history on that in a couple of years, but for now, let’s all bask in how SNL weaponized Timothée Chalamet’s sad-eyed stare.

I haven’t felt this much for a horse since we all sang a song to say goodbye to Lil Sebastian on Parks And Rec. And while Chalemet’s earnest ballad pulls on those same heartstrings, recalling the plot of literally every horse movie ever made, it also sets up a silly punchline that only lands so hard because Chalamet is Chalameting the sh*t out of the scene.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic seeing Timbo piss off Questlove or get really into a sketch about delusional Jets fans (there’s a joke I’m leaving on the table because I honestly think Jets fans dig the pain or else why would they be Jets fans?), but having him metaphorically cry into a fireplace over the big hole in his heart caused by losing his tiny horse is perfection.

Kyrie Irving may not be speaking to the assembled media in Brooklyn right now, which earned him a $25,000 fine late last week that will continue accruing as his silence continues, but he did find a way on Saturday night to talk hoops and life with the masses as he hopped on Instagram Live with Kevin Durant.

The two talked about all manner of topics, but the clip that’s drawn the most interest came in a conversation about how they see the Nets offense working. Irving, of course, famously said he felt that everyone on the Nets was something of a coach after Steve Nash was hired, and while Mike D’Antoni is the assistant in charge of offense (understandably given his history coaching elite offensive units) the stars of the team will surely have their say.

At one point Irving suggested he should go in the post a lot this season because he, like Durant, can get his shot off over most any opposing point guard and create a mismatch in that spot. Durant very kindly explained why he didn’t think that was a good idea and got Irving somewhat on board with scaling back his request, but not fully, leaving KD to eventually just change the subject.

Kyrie: “I just want to be able to be like — in my past life, like I said , I was you. I was you. What you are now, that’s what I’m up here. Same mentality, I’m getting to a spot. I’m raising up. I’m getting to a bucket. My footwork is impeccable. I have length. I’m able to shoot over the top, hold the follow through, and I don’t see people. Do you not feel the same way?”

KD: “I do sometimes, I’m just saying I don’t think that’s good for the continuity of our offense if our point guard always wants to be underneath the rim, you know what I’m saying?”

Kyrie: “You know what, that can come off…”

KD: “You get what I mean?”

Kyrie: “I do, you’re right. That can come off like I’m trying to implement myself — OK, so what about 7 post ups instead of 8.”

KD: “I mean we negotiated, I thought we was gonna do 2.5 postups a game. The half one was like, I throw you the ball in the post and you throw it right back out to me.”

Kyrie: “No, but I’m also saying I feel like every play down I have a mismatch, no matter who’s in front of me. So I think that mentality, mixed with having that post-guard is a great balance for our squad.”

KD: “We’re gonna see though.”

Kyrie: “I know my post-ups are negotiable. But I think four a half works. Like 8, that…what?”

KD: “We’ll see. I got another question.”

The 2.5 postups line from KD is objectively hilarious, and it’s clear that he’s not fully on board with this plan for Irving to postup four times per half and is trying to think of the impact of Kyrie’s role on the team, whereas it seems Irving is a bit more focused on how he can be most effective for himself. That dichotomy is fascinating and certainly presents some of the challenges that are going to come in this partnership and for the Nets in figuring out how to appease both of their stars while also constructing the best possible offensive system that works for the entire roster.

It’s a glimpse behind the curtain of the types of conversation that will surely happen over and over in practices and beyond as the Nets try to find themselves and build something from scratch with two stars that have never played together and a coaching staff that’s never been with them. I think it’s also representative of both Durant and Irving’s experiences to this point. Kyrie saw his chance to be “the guy” taken away in Cleveland by LeBron’s arrival and did his part to play a secondary starring role en route to a title, but left, in part, due to a desire to to be a leader elsewhere. He’s still chasing that a bit even now in Brooklyn after injury issues have derailed progress in Boston and now Brooklyn. Durant, meanwhile, has had to be the one fitting into a culture and a system and understands the difficulty of that from his time in Golden State, and seems much more cognizant of the impact star demands can have on the rest of the team’s psyche and the importance of that to winning.

This is one of the reasons the Nets are heavily intriguing, because it’s clear these are two stars that truly like each other off the floor but have somewhat different approaches on it. They have to navigate that part for the first time with a new coaching staff and it has the potential for greatness but also to be combustible. One thing that’s clear from this video is that, if nothing else, KD has a deft touch when it comes to talking Irving off of some of his requests and deflecting when needed to avoid conflict but also just let something fade away.

Taylor Swift’s 2020 has been full of surprises, all of which started with the release of her eighth album Folklore. She repeated that surprise later in the year with the December arrival of her ninth album Evermore which Taylor labeled as the “sister album” to Folklore.

Now, the singer comes through with a new remix of “Willow” which can be found on her new Evermore album. Swift dropped the “dancing witch” remix of the track as a way to celebrate her 31st birthday on Sunday. She revealed that the remix was done by “bad ass” producer Elvira.

“Not to be all ‘iTs mY BiRtHdAY & I jUsT wAnNa DaNcE’ but… it is and I do,” she said in tweet. “So here’s the willow dancing witch version, remixed by Elvira, a bad ass female producer I really respect.” The new take of the Evermore track surely lives up to Taylor’s description as the dance floor-ready remix would be great for a more open, less pandemic-gripped world.

Swift abruptly announced the Evermore album last week and explained why she returned so quickly with a new project. “To put it plainly, we just couldn’t stop writing songs,” she said. “To try and put it more poetically, it feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in.” She added, “In the past I’ve always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning.”

Press play on the remix in the video above. Evermore is out now via Republic. Get it here.

Saturday Night Live found a new way to make fun of people who still think Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election: showing them how ridiculous they sound in the context of sports. Unfortunately for the hapless New York Jets, they happened to get caught in the crossfire on Saturday.

The Jets are winless this year, most recently keeping their hopes of drafting Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence alive in hilarious fashion thanks to a last-second defeat last week. It was enough to get their defensive coordinator fired after the Cover Zero fiasco, and it also earned the attention of SNL.

In sketch, called “Sportsmax,” introduces the sports version of Trump-loving right wing Newsmax, which many conservatives are turning to in the wake of even Fox News accepting that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in November. The premise of the sketch is that unlike ESPN, Sportsmax has the truth about sports. Starting with the Very Good At Football New York Jets.

“Sportsmax is the network for real Jets fans, giving you the truth about America’s favorite football team,” the ad for the channel said. Two hosts then talked about just how good the winless Jets actually are, despite what the fake news and fake standings will tell you.

“A lot of mainstream sports networks are saying the Jets have not won a single game this year,” a fictional anchor on the network said, while another pointed out that Sportsmax has proof that the Jets have “already won 11 games” this season.

“Now the “experts” will tell you that the Jets lost to the Bills 18-10 back in October,” he said. “Sounds like a done deal, right? No, not so fast. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers.”

Much like many of the wild conspiracy theories about Trump somehow getting the election stolen from him, what follows is complete nonsense. The anchor posits that after the first quarter, which the Jets were leading 3-0, something “very suspicious” started happening and the Bills started getting “all these points out of god knows where.”

“Either the Jets won 3-0 or this whole game is rigged,” the anchor said. Later, two Jets “experts” played by Pete Davidson and show host Timothée Chalamet present sworn written testimony from 500 Jets fans that claim they saw the Jets win, unlike what the NFL says.

It’s a clever way to lampoon people attempting to peddle the fictional election narrative that Joe Biden did not win the election, but that it was somehow taken from Trump in a massive voter fraud scheme that simply makes no sense. Somehow, the election was only stolen and illegitimate because Trump lost, while the other results that held up for Republicans — gaining seats in the House and likely avoiding losing a Senate majority — are valid even though those votes were all cast on the same ballots.

The joke of the sketch is that unlike the hundreds of prominent Republican lawmakers and millions of Trump supporters going along with Trump’s baseless claims of fraud, it’s a lot harder to pull off that kind of thing in sports. Because there’s quite literally a scoreboard, pretending to adhere to a different reality than what’s actually there just looks ridiculous when it gets spelled out for you.

There are a lot of great little moments in the sketch, like Chalamet’s character wearing a “three-peat” shirt implying the Jets won three straight titles in the mid 2010s. There’s even a quick photoshop of Tom Brady in a Jets jersey and some jokes about how Sportsmax will never show an athlete kneeling to protest police brutality and racial inequality. Even the Knicks got some heat from the sketch.

The problem with comparing politics like sports, however, is that there are actual results to lean back on when it comes to things like football. The standings are pretty cut and dry, and the nuance can be argued but ultimately is pretty pointless in the end. These days in politics, even the election results don’t seem to matter anymore if you yell about it enough.

For the first time in six years, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band reunited for this year’s Letter To You. The project debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard albums charts making it Springsteen’s sixth consecutive decade with a top-five album, a feat that only he has been able to accomplish. Making sure that their reunion is a full experience that fans can enjoy, Springsteen and the E Street Band took their talents to Saturday Night Live to perform together for the first time in nearly four years.

Just like many artists have done during their SNL appearances this season, Springsteen and the band performed a pair of songs for the limited audience, starting with “Ghosts” before concluding the night with “I’ll See You In My Dreams.” The exhilarating performances saw The Boss and company fully rocked-out on stage. Unfortunately for their set, the entire E Street Band was not there due to coronavirus restrictions. Earlier this week, Springsteen revealed that founding bassist Garry Tallent and violinist Soozie Tyrell would not appear at the SNL performance because of “restrictions and concerns.” Tallent was replaced by Jack Daley of the Disciples of Soul for their set.

Springsteen’s SNL set comes after he recently explained why he’s never recorded a Christmas album. “The thing is, you only want to do it around Christmas time, but you don’t want to do it then either, because it’s around Christmas time and you don’t feel like working,” he said on a recent The Tonight Show appearance. “Then Christmas time goes away and you gotta do it in the summertime when you just don’t feel like it. So, we haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe one of these days.”

You can watch the SNL performances in the videos above.

Timothée Chalamet is no stranger to Saturday Night Live, though until recently it was simply the cast playing versions of Chalamet for themselves. But as it turns out, the NBC sketch comedy is actually a bit of a family affair. The Little Women actor and New York native hosted for the first time on Saturday, and he used his monologue to play a song about New York with Pete Davidson. He also told a story about his mom, who actually is no stranger to Studio 8H.

As Chalamet explained, his mother was the reason he got into acting in the first place. And she was actually an extra on SNL in the past, back when

“Before I was born my mom was a dance teacher, but occasionally she would do background work on Saturday Night Live,” Chalamet said. They then rolled a clip from a Dana Carvey and Chris Farley sketch from November of 1991 called “Massive Head Wound Harry.”

“Yup, that’s my mom,” Chalamet said. “She almost got spit on by Chris Farley.”

As it turns out, Chalamet brought his mom to the show on Saturday, and they showed her wearing a mask in the crowd and she got a nice ovation. The monologue continued to a classic bit: letting the host pretend to play piano and riff about something. And it was New York he chose to talk about, though it was a bit of an absurdist take on Christmas in the city, including getting his first “New Year’s Eve kiss” from Mr Met’s daughter, Stacey Met.

“I know all the boroughs,” Chalamet said, managing to name one. “Brooklyn, Querns and Boca Raton.”

It helped that Pete Davidson came out to also play along, though his version of Staten Island is likely to make some folks living there as upset as the last time he talked about it on the show. The two New Yorkers actually teamed up on the show several times on Saturday, showing some chemistry in later in a sketch about something Davidson also knows a lot about: white rappers.

The presidential election has been over for more than a month at this point, and SNL’s Weekend Update is still making fun of Donald Trump for losing the election. But at this point it’s his fault the show is still on that horse, as Trump has refused to accept the results and embarked on an embarrassing legal battle across several states to overturn the results by throwing out millions of legally cast ballots.

Last week, however, brought a pair of swift judgements against Trump in the Supreme Court, and with the Electoral College set to vote against Trump on Monday and end the election for good, SNL was ready to roast Trump once more.

“Guys, I gotta be honest,” co-host Colin Jost said to start the show. “I’m beginning to think Donald Trump didn’t win this election.”

Jost joked that the two Supreme Court losses Trump took were dismissed with an “eye roll emoji” by the court, but noted that despite what the media has said about the election and these endless election challenges, Trump will never let it go.

“Nothing is ever over as long as Donald Trump can make money off it,” Jost said. “Even when he dies, his tombstone is just going to have his Venmo info.”
It wasn’t just Trump who was targeted by the program. Later in the segment, Jost described Mike Pence as “a polar bear who went to work,” which was particularly good.

There were also plenty of other jokes about things not in the Trump administration, but as has often been the case the last four years it’s often hard to get away from such an easy target.

“This is the best job I’ve ever had. I would’ve done it for free. Don’t tell my agent,” Ed O’Neill used to say to Christopher Lloyd, the co-creator of Modern Family, the long-running sitcom upon which O’Neill played Jay Pritchett. The role, which lasted for 11 seasons, was a cap on the illustrious career of O’Neill, previously best known for playing Al Bundy in another sitcom that ran for 11 years, Fox’s Married … with Children. The role, however, only landed in O’Neill’s lap because another actor known for a long-running sitcom blew his chance.

As the story is told in Marc Freeman’s book, Modern Family: The Untold Oral History of One of Television’s Groundbreaking Sitcoms, the original offer for the 60-year-old character went out to Craig T. Nelson, the star of the ’90s sitcom Coach. Nelson wasn’t exactly their first choice. When they were doing their casting, they also met with O’Neill, but he had insisted that he didn’t want to do another sitcom. After they sent him the script, anyway, O’Neill had a change of heart after reading it and asked his agent to say yes to the role.

Unfortunately, at the time, there was nothing to say “yes” to. Despite getting on well with Modern Family’s creators, Steve Levitan and Lloyd, O’Neill had not actually been offered the role. In fact, the creators were so torn between O’Neill and Nelson that the casting director eventually flipped a coin and Nelson was offered the role. “Craig T. liked and seemed to understand the character,” Lloyd told Freeman.

However, during negotiations with Craig T. Nelson, he “countered rather aggressively,” according to Levitan.

“He wanted star money, but it wasn’t a star show. It was an ensemble show,” the show’s casting director, Jeff Greenberg added. “I understand from his agent that he regretted his decision. I’m not surprised.”

It wasn’t just the money, however, according to co-creator Steve Levitan. “We had started to hear some rumblings that maybe he was a little bit difficult on set. And then he made this quote bashing people on food stamps and welfare for taking from the government, and it scared us, frankly. There was a lack of self-awareness and compassion that worried us. Meanwhile, all we kept hearing was that Ed O’Neill was the nicest person on the planet, so we pulled the offer and gave it to Ed.”

And that’s how Craig T. Nelson blew his chance to play Jay Pritchett, a well-paid gig on a well-respected, long-running sitcom that — based on the rest of Freeman’s book — sounded like one of the cushiest jobs in the industry. According to Lloyd, however, it wasn’t entirely Nelson’s negatives that led to O’Neill’s casting. “What we had was a first-hand indication that Ed was going to be a blast to work with,” and that proved to be true.

(Via Modern Family: The Untold Oral History of One of Television’s Groundbreaking Sitcoms)