Jake Gyllenhaal is winning rave reviews for his kinetic performance in "Nightcrawler" -- he may even break into the Oscar race -- but there's one thing you definitely won't see in the acclaimed new film: Gyllenhaal's character having sex.
Though Gyllenhaal's freelance journalist, Lou Bloom, succeeds in propositioning another character, played by Rene Russo, for some intimacy in "Nightcrawler," the act does not appear on screen. HuffPost Live's Ricky Camilleri asked Gyllenhaal and "Nightcrawler" director Dan Gilroy about the omission during a Monday interview.
Apparently when it comes to Gyllenhaal's creepy character, the mere idea of him in bed is much more interesting than anything the production could have dreamed up.
"I can tell you that there were financiers who wanted to put up the money if we put the sex scene in, and I specifically said no," Gilroy said. "I said, 'There's nothing we could show that would match whatever you're imagining is going on behind closed doors.'"
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After revealing to the magazine that she has gone from 106 to 145 pounds while expecting her baby girl, the "Nashville" star added:
“And the worst part is that my feet are still size five and they're going, 'What's going on with all this weight?’ They're about to snap from underneath me with the strain.”
Panettiere, who confirmed her engagement to boxing champion Klitschko in October 2013, also told Hello! that she won't get married until she gets back to her usual size.
“I’ll tell you one thing for sure, I am not walking down the aisle 40 pounds heavier than usual in a wedding dress with a huge pregnancy belly stitched in. Not happening,” she said.
Panettiere and Klitschko began dating in 2009 and split briefly in 2011 before reuniting again in the spring of 2013.
When Taylor Swift was named New York City’s “global welcome ambassador” last week by the city’s tourism board, Kara Mullins and Osvaldo Jimenez had an idea.
The couple commissioned local graffiti legend Chico (aka Antonio Garcia) -- who they knew through mutual friends -- to paint a memorial for Swift on the gate outside their vintage clothing store, La Petite Mort, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side:
A photo posted by La Petite Mort (@lapetitemortnyc) on
"We here at LPM have nothing but love for Taylor Swift,” Mullins and Jimenez explained in an Instagram post. “Rather, our comment is on the whitewashing and gentrification of New York. While we realize and appreciate that New York is ever changing, when a starving artist once representative of the New York spirit is replaced by the modern 19 million dollar condo owner who drinks lattes we have to shake our heads.”
“While Taylor Swift is alive and well, and we wish her no harm, she did kill off yet another piece of that broken New York spirit,” the post continued. “The idea of her being our spokesperson is DEAD and we expressed that through a true NY artist. RIP TAYLOR SWIFT.”
Chico got his start painting memorials in the LES back in the 1980s, and “RIP Taylor Swift” is a sendup of his own work, Mullins explained to HuffPost on Monday. In other words, “RIP Taylor Swift” really means “RIP New York.”
Even Chico, Mullins added, has been “priced out” of his New York City apartment. He painted the Swift mural last week before leaving the city and moving down to Florida.
Critics, however, have charged that a boutique clothing store in the LES can hardly cry about gentrification. “La Petite Mort sells $550 used Versace dresses where $20 girdle stores used to thrive just a decade ago,” wrote the Daily News’ Linda Stasi.
Mullins said that her store also sells cheap clothing like dresses for under $50, as well as work by local artists for as little as $1. They sell the expensive stuff to pay the ever-rising rent in the neighborhood.
Jimenez, her boyfriend and store co-owner, is a born-and-bred New Yorker from the South Bronx who has lived in the LES for the last two decades. He compared selling expensive vintage clothes to drug-dealing.
“Drug dealers used to just sell crack in the LES until a more upscale clientele moved in,” he said. “And then in order to survive they had to start selling cocaine. This is our coke."
La Petite Mort doubles as an art gallery, and later this month, Mullins and Jimenez said they will host a Chico for a retrospective of his work.
Eva Mendes was spotted in public for the first time on Saturday, Nov. 1, in Los Angeles, since welcoming daughter Esmeralda with boyfriend Ryan Gosling on Sept. 12.
Fresh off the printing press, here's the first poster for Chris Rock's "Top Five." The hilarious new comedy -- which Rock plugged during his stint hosting "Saturday Night Live" this weekend and also in a new profile for The New Yorker -- is set for release on Dec. 12. It stars Rock, who also wrote and directed the film, as Andre Allen, a famous comedian who fears his funny days are behind him. Rosario Dawson, Tracy Morgan, J.B. Smoove, Jay Pharoah, Leslie Jones, Michael Che, Anders Holm, Gabrielle Union, Romany Malco, Kevin Hart and a handful of other really famous faces all co-star. Check out the poster, debuting exclusively here at HuffPost Entertainment, below.
The 31-year-old actress has lived through some cringeworthy moments -- and is aware that she's fully to blame for all of them. She stopped by "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on Monday and decided to rank those moments, which now include crashing a surprise party with her "Interstellar" co-star Matthew McConaughey.
The conversation began as Hathaway told Fallon about honoring McConaughey when he received the 28th American Cinematheque Award last month. She had a whole speech prepared, but started freaking out when she realized that all of the other presenters -- including Kate Hudson, Jennifer Garner and Sandra Bullock -- were telling charming stories about their special times with McConaughey.
"I thought, 'Just get it together, you can do this. You've written a speech, it's not as funny as the other girls', but it's heartfelt, you can do it!' I go to say my first line ... the teleprompter broke," Hathaway explained. "And I was like, 'You got to be kidding me!'"
When Fallon asked her if it was embarrassing, Hathaway nodded her head before explaining. "The thing about me and embarrassment is you have to remember that it all happens on a scale," she said. "And so if you think about the embarrassment scale one to 10: one is just like being a person walking down the street, and 10 is, for me, co-hosting the Oscars with James Franco. Which, by the way, is only tied with being honored to accept an Oscar whilst wearing a dress that I knew made it look like my nipples were erect," she laughed. "So here's the thing, if that's a 10, [the McConaughey speech] was like a 4."
But, according to Hathaway, showing up at McConaughey's house for a party on the wrong day was up there on the list.
"That one was like an eight," she joked, adding that McConaughey was nothing but kind to her and her husband, Adam Shulman, when they arrived at his doorstep. "He invited us in, got us drunk, and we had a great time. And then I crashed a surprise party with him."
As Khloé Kardashian previously explained, there's no "bad blood" between her and French Montana following their recent breakup. In fact, it looks like her family still accepts his as one of their own.
Recently, Shaquille O'Neal and Charles Barkley sat down with Bleacher Report to audition for Season 3 of "True Detective," and it looks like HBO may have just found their new stars. In the audition, the TNT NBA analysts put a basketball twist on the drama and clearly demonstrate how they won their roles in "Kazaam" and "Space Jam."
What would you do if you discovered your significant other was snapping pictures of you while you slept? Would you think it's cute? Think it's creepy? Well, if you ask Jada Pinkett Smith, it's "sexy."
The 43-year-old actress shared an intimate bedroom shot of herself that apparently husband Will Smith had secretly snapped, as explained in a Facebook post on Saturday:
The couple, who have been married since 1997, have two children together: Jaden, 16, and Willow, 14. Perhaps it's little things like this that keep the spark alive.
For every progressive film or TV show made, there are at least a dozen more undoing its positive influence by upholding antique gender stereotypes. The frightening thing is that one can watch an early '60s flick like Lover Come Back and find almost the same character attributes to females in a movie like The Other Woman, released this past April.
Actress, singer and writer Marilyn Monroe was always cast as the dumb blonde even before she made it big. Her cameo in All About Eve" is essentially a prequel to her blockbuster role as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Monroe's characters spend every ounce of energy dumbing themselves down and looking glamorous in search of a rich man to solve all their problems. These roles not only bled past the movies to permanently define Monroe's image and typecast her, but also extended further to uphold twisted cultural norms. Even the starlet's celebrated then-husband Arthur Miller confined Monroe's talent in his 1961 film, The Misfits, her character Roslyn Taber obviously a metaphor for Miller's perception of his wife as the lonely woman who couldn't live without a man.
Even today, A-list actresses spend most of their roles playing the damsel in distress or, if more autonomous, as a highly sexualized figure. According to the study "Gender Bias Without Borders," jointly conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the University of Southern California, The Rockefeller Foundation, and UN Women, only 23.3 percent of films evaluated had a female lead or co-lead driving the plot. Furthermore, female characters were over two times likelier than males to adorn sexually revealing attire or be seen partially or fully naked. The study shows woman characters were also severely underrepresented in highly respected workforces, namely business, law, medicine and academia.
Scarlett Johansson, who, for ambition, status and appearance, is easily comparable to Marilyn Monroe, epitomizes immoveable film stereotypes. Despite her theatrical accolades, Johansson is pushed into roles that don't allow for the utilization of her full potential. In 2014's "Lucy," the actress plays a woman with a vessel to do virtually anything: the ability to utilize 100 percent of her brain capacity. And what does she do with this gift? She uses her sexual prowess to kill bad guys. While necessary for plot development, Lucy getting revenge is largely insignificant compared to the possibilities of what she could do with these powers, such as finding the cure for cancer or solving the Israel/Palestine conflict. As such, the lackluster storyline could support the misperception that women, regardless of intellect, remain the lesser gender, largely meant as sexual beings.
Luckily for us, the solution to the problem of women being underrepresented and highly sexualized in film and TV is both possible and plausible. Women currently account for about seven percent of directors, 19.7 percent of writers, and 22.7 percent of producers, according to the earlier mentioned study. In other words, male persons behind the camera are the majority who produce gender inequality. But, if we encourage more Lena Dunhams and Jenji Kohans to become involved in film, the possibility for more female characters like Girls' Hannah Horvath and OITNB's Piper Chapman could come to life and silence inequality. Or, at the very least, media would benefit from more versatile points of view and creative female minds.
Back in May, Lionsgate announced that it would reboot the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise for an upcoming movie. It's unclear if any of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers will reprise their roles for the upcoming movie, but The Huffington Post felt like it was morphin' time and reached out to early cast members to talk about the putty-fighting days. Ahead, 11 stories from the franchise that will make all fans want to blast the theme song and watch a YouTube video of the original rangers shouting, "Dragonzord! Mastodon! Pterodactyl! Triceratops! Saber-Toothed Tiger! Tyrannosaurus!" Now, Go! Go! (read about) Power Rangers!
Interviews were conducted separately. People interviewed in alphabetical order:
Karan Ashley = Yellow Ranger.David Fielding = Zordon.Walter Jones = Black Ranger.Austin St. John = Red Ranger.David Yost = Blue Ranger.
1. Austin St. John and Walter Jones lived in a Power Rangers party house together. One kegger even had a helicopter come shut them down.
Casts from other popular shows at the time would also make appearances (and apparently an agreement was made long ago to not disclose too much about the craziness that went down in the house), but here is some information on the legendary parties that continued even past the actors' original time with the show.
WJ: We had lots of different parties and there were lots of different people. And the parties were memorable: We had pool tables, we had a trampoline, we had a huge Burmese python that was 12-feet long, and we'd just have a good time. I'd come home sometimes and there were 150 people in our house that we didn't know. I'd be like, "Hey, what's going on" and I guess we're having a party.
ASJ: Oh man, our parties were always outrageous. At the time we were all single, we were all on the prowl. You know, we had a little bit of fame and we had an amazing house that sat on top of a hill in Glendale, California. It had a 360-degree view of the L.A. area. Pasadena. It was gorgeous.
DY: The funniest stories were about Walter's infamous parties. Those were always a good time. It was a frat house. When they'd do parties it was like the party to be at because it was a lot of fun. They know how to throw a good party.
ASJ: We had stunt guys there, some of them were professional dancers, like dancing on major tours. Like Janet Jackson. So when we had parties they would call their dancer friends, these girls, again professional dancers. So we always had these smoking hot girls at the house. We always had amazing guys at the house, too, if that's what the other guys were into. We had some parties that were so big. Multiple kegs. Inevitably somebody would call the police and a helicopter would show up and put a spotlight on the backyard where we had a volleyball net. A big trampoline. A cop would come knock on the door, "Excuse me, could you guys keep it down." That was just business as usual.
KA: Well, they would have a party what seemed like every month. And the funny thing was I didn't know them because they were off the show by the time I got there. So we'd meet briefly, but they had some great parties. Their house was like just the place to be. I met a lot of friends through that house.
2. The Power Rangers were paid as much as someone who "worked the window at McDonalds."
The original cast often talks about the long hours and little pay that was given to the actors. In a previous interview, Austin St. John said that production company Saban Entertainment's idea of treating the actors well was just providing a good food spread. It seemed that even getting Christmas off was unclear, and St. John once called surviving these working conditions "Power Ranger Stress Disorder." They were all grateful to have the job, but it was far from easy.
WJ: To be working on a television show and have a regular job, doing 40 episodes a season, that's not something to sneeze at. But when the show is making billions of dollars, when they made about a billion dollars in the first year off of merchandising, and when we have toys and parks and video games and comic books and all these things with our likeness, it starts to come into reason that this should be at least union, so it'll be fair.
ASJ: We weren't paid a lot, at all. I could have worked the window at McDonalds and probably made the same money the first season. It was disappointing, it was frustrating, it made a lot of us angry. [Haim Saban] just had absolutely zero conscience about making billions using our faces because it was his idea and he owned it. He felt like, screw us. I don't want to put works in his mouth but he could not have cared less about making all this money, because he had this ownership. The hell with everybody else who was helping him make that money. That's the way it's always been.
WJ: Right before the film they decided that we would receive contracts. They were not great contracts. They were all non-union, and for a number of films and another 40 episodes, they just weren't suitable. I figured after two seasons we deserved to be a union show and the conversation basically went that we should all get together and talk to representation and have someone represent us for these contracts as group. And that didn't work out. So three of us ended up negotiating and three of us stayed. And eventually what happened is that we just negotiated out of the contracts and moved on.
KA: We worked so much we didn't have time to hang out. When we first got on the show we were doing six days a week, 12 to 15 hour days. So, you had a Sunday. You missed quite a bit of your life just trying to keep up with the production schedule and keep up with the things we had to fulfill in our contracts. I remember I'd go to set and it'd be dark, I'd leave set and it was dark. You were like a machine. You just kept pushing through. I've never worked that hard in my life. it was like the good the bad and the ugly, we kind of got it all.
ASJ: We had a lot of fun. We worked around the damn clock. We worked long, long hard hours on a non-union show. And we'll just never be paid what we should have been paid. And Saban is never going to have a problem about paying us. It is what it is.
3. Austin St. John had to live in his Jeep after he left.
Immediately following the show, the actors weren't left with much to live off. St. John, in particular, had a rough time. But for what it's worth, the actors do feel like it was a worthwhile learning experience.
ASJ: There was a period where I did OK, while I was doing appearances. But once the appearances were over, I pretty much hit rock bottom. That's when I met the starving actor thing. I had a huge success, at least industry success, but was never paid for it. Then I had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had learned some hard life lessons. I ended up sleeping out of my jeep for awhile with my dog. We found some spots in the Arizona desert while I was bouncing at the time, just bouncing, teaching martial arts. I was sleeping in a riverbed for awhile until a friend of mine took me in and helped me out. Then I slowly had to learn how to be an adult and grow up and handle my responsibilities. Definitely a hard lesson. It was good for me. I hated it at the time, but it was good for me, in retrospect.
4. The Power Rangers would prank each other all the time while on set.
Being a group of young actors forced to hang around each other all day, they'd often try and cut loose and joke around. Jason David Green, the green Power Ranger, was a particularly big prankster on set, tricking David Yost into eating a fly in a sandwich, drawing on Yost's trailer couch and breaking a brush over his head. Walter Jones and Austin St. John's pranks were often more testosterone-fueled.
DY: Well Jason, he and I were like best friends. He had two kids and I often babysat both of his boys so he and his wife could go off and have date night. So, I considered myself their godfather on some level. We were really close and he would prank me all the time. Some of his pranks, they seem extreme, but they are funny. In terms of pranking him back, I don't think I ever did. But he was often the jokester on set for sure.
ASJ: I was definitely the youngest, so I had some foolish teenager moments where I'd be pulling shenanigans. There might have been times i was making noise off set to try and distract them while they were shooting. Other times I'd do something foolish like throw a carrot over the top of the wall into where I knew they were actively shooting and I was just waiting to see what i could disrupt. Walter and I, we pranked one our production assistants by the name of Nick Kellis a lot. We were always getting at one other, somehow somewhere, cracking jokes or beating each other up in the hallway, playfully of course. It was never sinister. It was just a big family so there was a lot of that stuff going on.
WJ: Nick Kellis was a PA that worked on the show. He was just a poor guy trying to do his job coming to get us to take us to the set, and Austin and I would attack him in the hallway. Not to hurt him, just playing. And he was an amazing wrestler, this guy, so there was just a lot of testosterone on the set. We'd just be like punching and little kicks, just tapping, nothing that was going to hurt anybody. He knew anytime he came to pick us up, it was coming. And it became a fun part of our day. Nick was a good sport for always playing a long with it, in fact we're all really good friends to this day.
5. The process to audition for "Power Rangers" was absolutely crazy.
To cast "Power Rangers," Saban held large, open casting calls where thousands of hopeful actors showed up. Members of the winning cast even just showed up on a lark, with Austin St. John, in particular, attending the audition on a dare from a friend. Eventually the actors were whittled down until a few different teams of Power Rangers auditioned against each other. Notably the Black Ranger could have been a "Michael Jackson" type. Moonwalking around putties could have been a possibility. Zordon could have had a crazier voice, although David Fielding's audition was just him versus one other actor. The cast that won originally had a different Yellow Ranger, with actress Audrey Dubois winning the role that would eventually go to Thuy Trang. When Trang left the show along with St. John and Walter Jones, Saban had another huge casting call where they found Karan Ashley.
KA: When I was first auditioning I didn't know much about it. My friend was telling me you got to go audition, so I show up and there are thousands of people at this open call audition. And of course with that, I had to wait in line for quite a few hours. So luckily for me there was a guy who knew all things Power Rangers in line a couple spaces a head of me. And he just basically was so geeked to be there, I just sat and listened to him all day talk about the show. So it gave me a good idea of what the show was.
DF: I had assumed it was going to be just another cattle call like everything else where you go and stand in a line with 500 guys, read a couple lines and then go home and never hear anything. And when I got to the offices of Saban in Burbank, California, I went up to the floor where they were having the audition and it was just me and this other guy in the waiting room. I thought, "Well, this is strange." We got the lines and kind of went to our separate corners and read them. He went in first and did his thing. About 20 to 25 minutes later, he came out and I went in and they had all the original cast and the director and the producers. They had me stand on a table and read the lines. After I had gotten through the lines about handing the kids their powers and stuff, I remember Austin just turning to everybody and going, "I think we found our Zordon." Well, at the time the character was called Zoltar. Then I went home and like an hour and a half later I got a phone call saying I got the part.
And how was standing on that table?
DF: It wasn't awkward. It kind of made sense to me because I got the impression from reading the character description that he was supposed to be a larger than life figure and a mentor to these kids. When I was in the other room going over the lines and overheard the other gentleman practicing his take on the voice, it was crazier than mine. The one that I used, that ended up being used in the show, was much more of a deeper tone. The idea that I had in my head at the time was that he was a very Zeus-like figure, but in a kindly way, not in a vengeful, god-like way. Somebody that was going to be nurturing for these new superheroes.
6. All of Zordon's footage was shot in one day over just a few hours.
DF: For budgetary reasons they never filmed the character again. They just reused the footage over and over. And from a production standpoint, that is great. From an actor's standpoint ... They shaved all my hair off and glued my ears back. And used makeup to make my eyebrows stand out, and then painted the top half of my chest and shoulders green. I sat in front of a green screen while they filmed me because they were just going to use my head and that was it. My recollection is that I was in the chair for three or four hours. Just going over the lines, doing it a number of times and also doing a number of pickups where they would just film my reactions: turning of the head, looking this way, or looking down. And if you watch the character in the show, his movements and his actions seem to be really sort of out of synch with everything. I guess that was sort of their idea -- because the character was trapped in a time warp, in a time bubble, he was trying to communicate with everybody as best as he could.
Top Images: Courtesy of David Fielding. Middle Image: Austin St. John Facebook.
7. The Power Rangers would occasionally go to dance clubs after long days on set. Walter Jones was the best dancer.
Although multiple Power Rangers talked about how exhausted they would be after filming all day and would often have to simply reset at home by watching television and falling asleep, occasionally the cast would go out on the town together.
DY: The first season we'd go out to bars after work on Fridays. Or we'd get dinner on Saturday nights and hang out at whatever the popular dance club was. Walter, hands down, is the best dancer, because he was a professional dancer. Karan could dance, too. I'd probably come in third out of everybody as best dancer.
WJ: If there was dancing to be had, I was probably the best dancer in the group. It's something that I've always done and a passion of mine.
8. Many of the Power Rangers were actually into martial arts and would create their own moves for fight scenes.
All of the actors were chosen for their Power Ranger roles because Saban thought they would be able to fight adequately on screen with little direction. Austin St. John, Jason David Frank and Walter Jones had martial arts backgrounds. To save money, many of the scenes were filmed quickly, which led to little notes as far as fighting and allowed the actors to kind of do their own thing. Walter Jones was given the direction to create a "hip-hop kido" from Saban, but what that meant day to day was mostly up to him.
WJ: It was [Saban's] idea of hip-hop combined with martial arts and dancing. It was something I had to go put some thought to and figure out why I was doing what I was doing and how it would be most effective. Taking a break-dance swipe move -- where you go and you do a flip towards the ground and use your feet to sweep the ground and the air -- is a way to effectively kick two or three people and come to the ground and sweep them. But I'd have to come up with how would this work and how would it be applied. That was one of the funnest parts of the job for me, coming up with new ways to dance and fight at the same time.
The Power Rangers really didn't have much time to figure these fight sequences out.
WJ: It wasn't like a film production where you get two weeks to do a fight and it's choreographed properly. It was like, "OK, so in the script today, you're going to be fighting in the park. Hey, how about you fight on this park bench, can you come up with something?" And so I got 15 minutes, 20 minutes, a half hour, to figure out what I wanted to do. They give me a couple putties. So I put a putty here and I'll do this and he can swing at me and I'll jump down on the seat and do a spin, come back up and punch him. Drop him off, go back up, play like king of the mountain and have another putty come. I'll jump over him, I'll flip over this guy. It was all really improvised and choreographed spontaneously.
9. Why did Zordon want "teenagers with attitude?"
Besides being good fighters, according to the opening sequence, the Power Rangers were supposed to be "teenagers with attitude" as well as "overbearing and over emotional humans." David Fielding explained why he felt Zordon wanted these particular types of people to be chosen for the Power Rangers.
DF: In the opening sequence [the line is something like] "Alpha, teleport to us teenagers with attitude." Then in the actual lines of the show it becomes, "Send me several overbearing and over emotional humans." So he doesn't actually call them teenagers in the lines of the show. But I enjoyed the "teenagers with attitude." It kind of serves as a dual purpose. On one hand, every teenager has an attitude, because they're teenagers; on the other, I think what Zordon was talking about was that he wanted specific personalities to serve as the superheroes. They would be not only capable, but also wouldn't back down. And I think that's an important message for young kids and teenagers: to have somebody who believes in you, and who sees that your attitude can be a strength rather than just something that gets in your way. I think that's what it meant.
10. David Yost was called homophobic slurs on set causing him to eventually quit the show and join a "pray the gay away" program.
David Yost has said that he only missed one day on set over the seasons, but he eventually walked off the show due to years of apparent homophobia from producers and the crew. Eventually, unbeknownst to the other Power Rangers and his close friends, Yost entered a "pray the gay away" program and then checked himself into a hospital.
DY: I was struggling with my sexuality for the majority of my life up to that point. People would say things and there were rumors about my sexuality on set. Or people would make up lies about things I was doing and it would just become upsetting. Because I just wanted to go to work and do my job. I didn't think it was anybody's business what I was doing in my personal life. I can honestly say I wasn't doing anything in my personal life. I wasn't dating anybody or any of that. I do know that a couple of my co-stars were questioned about my sexuality at one point and that was really upsetting to me.
Yost initially tried a religious therapy, but eventually accepted himself.
DY: I had just come to a point where I wasn't in a good place mentally. I just thought it was best that I walk away from the show, because I didn't want to be in an environment anymore that was adding to my stress and adding to me not liking myself. So I left the show and I did try several things to correct being gay, if you will. I tried therapy and that was very unsuccessful and it caused me a lot of emotional stress, more emotional stress than I already had. I ended up having a nervous breakdown and had to check into the hospital for five weeks. After that I started getting my head back together and accepting myself for who I was. Accepting that I was a gay man and that was OK.
11. For the most part, the Power Rangers were there for each other and had each other's backs.
All the Power Rangers I spoke to had fond memories of their cast mates. This was an experience they were happy to get through with each other. Austin St. John and Walter Jones lived in a house together, but they've also said that Jones was sort of a big brother to St. John on the set, and the two would look out for each other if either were acting too foolish. What kinds of foolish things would they get up to?
ASJ: You know, silly stuff, we would just go out and have a couple beers and just be ridiculous. Insanity. Crack jokes, a lot of times at our own expense. Just everybody laughing and having a good time. Sometimes, one of us would get a little too carried away and the other one would be like, "Hey, we should probably reel this in for just a hot second..."
WJ: When he came into the house [St. John] was just turning 18, so he was really young and not experienced and hadn't really acted before. It was kind of a fluke that he got it because i think he came into the audition on a dare. So there was a lot for him to learn and i was a little older than him so i watched his back but he also watched my back. So if either one of us were out of line or just doing a thing that somebody needed to speak about, then we'd take each other to the side.
Karan Ashley has been interviewing people in a series called "Uncensored Talk" and told HuffPost that a video with George Takei is coming soon. What inspired the project? Ashley said, "Luckily for me, I'm meeting all these amazing people at each convention and I'm like, why am I not talking to them."
Random Fact From Interview: "I hoard Aisha barbie dolls."
Random Fact From Interview: After being invited to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the king of Nigeria's reign with other celebrities, the king "gave [them] honorary chieftaincy."
Austin St. John recently returned from working almost four years in Kuwait as a medic. Before that he'd worked as an EMT and fireman in the Washington D.C. area. Lately, he's been re-embracing his connection with the Power Rangers "family."
Random Fact From Interview: On "rare occasions" people he would save as an EMT would ask him if he was Jason and ask, "Holy crap, were you the Red Ranger?"
David Yost has transitioned into producing and was notably a segment producer for "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills." He has also been a proponent of the NOH8 Campaign.
Random Fact From Interview: Despite his character, Billy Cranston, being named after the "Breaking Bad" actor, Bryan Cranston, who provided voices for the show, the two only crossed paths one or twice in the recording studio.
The Huffington Post was able to set up these interviews through Galactic Productions who represent many of the early cast members and manage their convention appearances. Original Power Rangers not spoken to are not members of Galactic Productions. All cast members spoken to are part of the of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, however Karan Ashley joined the cast after the first season. The original Yellow Power Ranger, Thuy Trang, died in a car accident in 2001.
Kim Kardashian shared two photos on Tuesday that -- at first glance -- look like your average Kimstagrams: pouty faces, fellow celebrities, neutral-colored outfits. But when you realize that she bleached her eyebrows, you really can't un-see it. In the photos, Kardashian poses alongside Cara Delevingne and Kanye West at her sister Kendall Jenner's 19th birthday party. The 34-year-old clarified in the caption that the new look was only for a photo shoot, and made sure to tell her 20 million followers, "#DontBeScaredOfMyBleachedBrows." We're trying, Kim, we're trying:
Une photo publiée par Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) le
Kardashian isn't the first one in the family to adopt bleached brows in the name of fashion. Kendall Jenner made headlines when she debuted her shocking look at the Marc Jacobs runway show during New York Fashion Week back in February.
Jennifer Lopez is single now, and for good reason.
On Tuesday, the 45-year-old superstar sat down with Arianna Huffington to discuss her new book, "True Love," during an interview on HuffPost Live. In the book, J.Lo gets honest about the biggest romances in her life, including her engagement to Ben Affleck and seven-year marriage to Marc Anthony. Today, she realizes the greatest love someone can have is self-love.
"It was work for me to finally go, you know, 'Okay, I need to be on my own,'" Lopez told Huffington. "That's not a place that's comfortable for me, but that's something that I need to do so that I know I'm okay on my own, that I can handle this, that I got this. You know what I mean? I got these kids, I got this job, I got this house, I got this."
"I don't need anybody else," she continued. "I want somebody else, that would be nice, but I gotta be happy and whole on my own first. I gotta heal from things. You gotta give yourself time and space ... to grow and to realize things about yourself, to become your own best friend, to love yourself. That's what the book is about. The book is about realizing that one of the biggest keys to life is having love for yourself, love inside of you, knowing that the love inside of you is enough, that you are enough, having that self-worth. And then, once you're okay there, then you can share that. Somebody can add to that happiness that you already have."
When Ben and I split up at the moment when I thought we were committing to each other forever it was my first real heartbreak, it felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest. People do lots of things to anesthetize themselves in moments like these. Some people do drugs, some drink and some go out and party. I sought out comfort in another person, tried to find someone who could make me feel loved and wanted in my loneliest hours. And that was the moment when Marc reappeared in my life.
Check out Jennifer Lopez's full HuffPost Live conversation with Arianna Huffington here, and catch the livestream of her 92nd Street Y conversation with Hoda Kotb here, airing Nov. 6 at 7:30 pm. ET.
Yesterday the 44-year-old single dad was featured on an episode of “Inside Edition” where he dished on an array of topics, including an alleged settlement offered by the former “The View” cohost.
“She offered me a settlement of $150,000, but it was not to have her name on the birth certificate. I can’t do that to my son,” he said before denying reports that he’s a “gold digger.” “There’s no amount of money to ease my worry about my son. If she would just do the right thing and we co-parent... That’s all I want.”
The TV writer-producer also went on to reveal the former couple used a “facial recognition” program to choose their surrogate in an effort to find a donor who resembled Shepherd.
Sally’s interview comes less than a week following Shepherd’s appearance on “The Queen Latifah Show,” where she opened up about life after marriage.
"As long as you can get up and stand up, it's another chance to get things right. And I'm doing really well," she admitted. "Now if he (Lamar Sally) would stop talking about it in public I would be doing better. But I'm doing great. I'm moving. I'm grooving. Everything is good."
Check out more of Lamar Sally’s “Inside Edition” interview in the clip above, and Sherri Shepherd’s appearance on “The Queen Latifah Show” below.
Last week, based on some anecdotes in her memoir Not That Kind of Girl, the National Review accused Lena Dunham of molesting her younger sister when both of them were children. The controversial writer's many critics have taken the bait, and what might have been yet another chapter in the Review's storied history of not being read by anyone has become a full-blown news story.
There are plenty of valid reasons not to be a fan of Dunham's -- for those of us who resent her whitewashing of Brooklyn or her immense privilege, the idea of coming to her defense is less than exciting. But no matter how you feel about the Girls creator, the entertaining idea that she sexually abused a close family member isn't just bad for Lena Dunham.
This isn't a serious accusation: It's a thinly veiled attempt to besmirch an artist for being young, for being a woman, and for having opinions that differ from those of most people who voted for Dick Nixon three times.
Williamson picks out quotes from Not That Kind of Girl that describe a young Lena Dunham bribing her sister for kisses and curiously inspecting her vagina. Williamson reports these incidents with all the grave sensationalism of a To Catch a Predator episode. He even catches Dunham comparing her own behavior to "anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl." For all of this, Williamson insists, "there is no non-horrifying interpretation."
Except for the fact that Dunham was a child when all of this occurred. Young children, for reasons that feel too silly to explain to an audience of adults, don't usually have a firm grasp of the nuances of sexuality and privacy. Far from being one of the most heinous crimes on the planet, these incidents are the consequences of childhood innocence, the kind of innocence you lose after your first sexual experience or, alternatively, writing your first article for the National Review.
But despite the fact that most of Williamson's ideas could be disproven by anyone who's spent more than two hours around actual children, they're starting to catch on. Buzzfeed's report on the controversy features mostly negative tweets about Dunham's book, one of which flatly declares to Lena that "you brought this upon yourself."
Grace Dunham has responded to these accusations by affirming a basic tenet of queer theory: that people should have control over their sexual experiences.
heteronormativity deems certain behaviours harmful, and others "normal"; the state and media are always invested in maintaining that
For those who are less familiar with Grace's terminology, this basically means that the power to determine what constitutes sexual abuse rests entirely with the accuser, not with the National Review or the Twittersphere. It's a doctrine that's meant to give agency to individual victims and not every dude on 4Chan with a keyboard and an opinion.
And it's exactly that agency that Williamson is trying to take away with his malicious excuse for a book review. For those readers who would take any of Williamson's reporting seriously, here's another gem from that piece:
Barry is not a character in a book; he is a real person, one whose life is no doubt being turned upside down by a New York Times No. 1 best-seller containing half-articulated accusations that he raped a woman in college, accusations that are easily connected to him.
Williamson is referring to a chapter in Dunham's book in which she recounts being raped by a fellow student at Oberlin. He calls her decision not to use his real name "gutless and passive-aggressive," arguing that she'd never "face him in a court of law, but she'll lynch him in print." He mocks Dunham's "lifelong fear of being raped" as if that weren't something that women everywhere, regardless of their class privilege, feel every day. He even implies that the use of alcohol and prescription drugs invalidates her whole story.
For someone who's so concerned with victims of sex abuse, Williamson seems to hold the feelings and opinions of those victims with very little regard.
But of course, Williamson isn't really concerned with anything so serious. His accusations are tucked into an article that's really about the entitlement of young people, the emptiness of progressive politics, and his own casual sexism (he quips that Dunham's main hobby is really shopping).
It's not surprising that any of this would find its way into the National Review. What's surprising is how easily that publication has snaked its way into the concerns of people who seriously care about the rights that victims of abuse are entitled to.
For better or for worse, Lena Dunham is a public figure. As self-effacing as she is about her privilege, it's hard not to see her success as inextricably tied to the extremely fortunate position she was born into.
But Dunham is also a victim -- a victim of sexual abuse from men like Barry, a victim of intellectual abuse from men like Williamson. Whether or not they're aware of it, people who are using an argument dredged up by the National Review to fight sex abuse are playing right into the hands of the people who tacitly endorse it every day.
If you don't respect Grace Dunham's opinion on her sister's "abuse," then you can't claim to have respect for the "victim." And if you're looking for a reason to hate Lena Dunham, there are about 10 billion of them that are less harmful than this one.
What would Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams' "Drop It Like It's Hot" music video sound like if they dropped the all the music from the track? Well, now you can find out.
Lisa Kudrow and the cast of "Friends" famously became the highest-paid actors on television in 2002, when they struck a deal that netted them $1 million per episode. That figure popped up again this year as the stars of "The Big Bang Theory" negotiated a similar payday, which Deadline reported put them "in the long-rumored 'Friends' salary territory."
"The rationale is that the show is actually generating an enormous amount of money, and ... it's affordable. It's affordable to whatever entity has to pay it," Kudrow said.
She added that actors are "basically freelance" and because "you never know when your time is up," it's important to get as much compensation as possible while you're in the spotlight.
"Especially actors on shows where they're character-driven and the actors are the characters, they're necessary, and I don't think it's out of line to ask that, you know, 'Make me a partner in this endeavor in some way,'" she said.
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!
In an interview with Arianna Huffington on HuffPost Live Tuesday, the megastar and new author opened up about co-parenting with ex-husband Marc Anthony, whom she split from in 2011 after seven years of marriage.
"Marc and I are very good friends, we're very supportive," Lopez said. "I feel it's my responsibility as a mom when their dad is not there to let them know that their dad loves them very much because that's the doubt that they have when he's not around or they haven't seen him. That's my job to do that the same way it's his job when he's with them to say 'Mommy is working and she loves you.'"
The pair, whose divorce was finalized in June 2014, are parents to 6-year-old twins Max and Emme.
In Lopez' memoir True Love, which hit shelves today, the star says her kids factored into her decision to end the marriage.
We sat down together. "This is not working. You know it's not working. We're not living like a family, and I don't see how things are going to change. Neither of us is happy, and the kids are wondering what's going on. I think we should move on with our lives." Deep down, I still wanted him to put up a fight for our family. But instead, he said, "Okay." On July 15, 2011, we made the public announcement that we were going to divorce. Hardest. Day. Ever.
Watch the clip above to hear more about her divorce and relationship with Anthony, and be sure to pick up Lopez's memoir "True Love," out now.
Check out Jennifer Lopez's full HuffPost Live conversation with Arianna Huffington here, and catch the livestream of her 92nd Street Y conversation with Hoda Kotb here, airing Nov. 6 at 7:30 pm. ET.
When you finally find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, the last thing you're probably thinking about is losing him or her. But that became the reality for former "Apprentice" contestant Omarosa Manigault.
In the middle of planning her dream wedding with actor Michael Clarke Duncan in 2012, Manigault found herself sitting next to her fiancé's hospital bed, unsure whether he would survive a heart attack. Two months later, on July 13, 2012, Duncan died.
Manigault opened up to HuffPost Live's Nancy Redd about the painful ordeal and her grieving process. It wasn't until recently that Manigault was able to move out of the home she shared with Duncan, she said.
"Being surrounded by all those things kind of gave me comfort, but at some point for moving forward, my therapist said, 'You know, you are going to have to figure out what you're going to do with his things, and you can’t keep them around forever,'" Manigault said.
Manigault eventually found a path to recovery, which included her faith and taking on substitute teaching in special education.
"It really helped me with my healing," she said. "Working with children, being a part of that systems that’s helping them grow and learn. But also ... my teaching and preaching has been essential, and my faith has been what gets me through every single day."
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!
