This year's Emmy noms held few surprises, with repeated nods going to all of 2000's five drama nominees and four out of the five comedies — all except for tired Friends, which was deservedly bumped by upstart Malcolm in the Middle. "I think Malcolm is clearly the front runner in the comedy category," says TV Guide critic Matt Roush. "It was clearly a breakout show last year, but it took them a second year to get a best show nomination."
The Emmys author Tom O'Neil shares Roush's enthusiasm. "Malcolm was the one bright, shining light this year," he enthuses. "We had two foretellings of it last year, because we had two upset wins by Malcolm for writing and directing. And c'mon, if this is the best written and directed comedy on TV, it should be up for best show on TV in its comedy class."
Even so, O'Neil adds that Malcolm's nomination still is a "surprise because such young-skewing shows don't ofte
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Julianna Margulies has a newfound respect for Mel Gibson after sword-fighting Saxons in TNT's two-part miniseries, The Mists of Avalon (airing July 15 and 16, 8 pm/ET). The ER alumna tells TV Guide Online that she was in awe of Braveheart "after doing the little bit that I did. It's incredible, but it's hard, and [director Uli Edel] gave me the confidence in myself to know that I could do it."
Thanks to Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn), the 35-year-old actress says that she discovered her inner warrior while playing a Pagan priestess in this feminist retelling of the King Arthur legend (based on Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel). "My first time into battle I unders
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Who says blondes have more fun? Reese Witherspoon suffers for her art in Legally Blonde (opening tomorrow), in which a California sorority girl goes Harvard Law — but doesn't forego her flashy designer dresses and oh-so-high heels as she struts across the school's staid campus. Too bad the actress's fetching footwear cramped her style big-time.
"Seriously, I had a huge podiatrist's bill after making this movie," Witherspoon laughs. "I'm only 25 and I'm at the podiatrist having things shaved off my feet and [getting them] cracked. It was challenging!"
While her film aims to debunk the myth that all fair-haired females are brainless bimbos, Witherspoon admits she's contended with other types of prejudice as well. "I've had to deal with stereotypes just being Southern," the Nashville nativ
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Calling Edward Norton a method actor is a bigger understatement than saying CBS's Big Brother is boring. For his role as a white supremacist in American History X, the two-time Oscar nominee shaved his head and gained 30 pounds of muscle. To prepare for 1998's Rounders, the Yale grad competed in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. And for his latest film, the heist drama The Score (opening Friday), he got friendly with the LAPD to learn about cracking safes.
"I found some guys with the Burglary and Autotheft Unit and shadowed them for a month and a half," explains Norton, who plays Robert De Niro's partner in crime. "I had a little beeper, a
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As a recent TV Guide cover story pointed out, NBC's ER survived its first full season sans both fan faves George Clooney and Julianna Margulies partly on the strength of its formidable roster of female talent. With that said, Ming-Na (who plays the medical drama's Dr. Jing-Mei Chen) looks forward to the added firepower of returning original castmember Sherry Stringfield (as Dr. Susan Lewis).
"I worked with Sherry during the first season, so it's really exciting," Ming-Na tells TV Guide Online. "Her character was so loved... It will be really good for the show."
Ah, but will it be good for Jing-Mei's love life? After all, as some root for romance between the headstrong beauty and Noah Wyle's Dr. Carter, the fact remains that, with leading man Anthony Edwards entering the last year of his contract, Carter seems a logical target for Stringfield's on-screen affections. "A
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Pop quiz: When is a run-of-the-mill heist flick not a run-of-the-mill heist flick? When said movie teams Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro for the first time. Still, Frank Oz — who directed the acting legends in The Score (opening Friday) — admits that he tried not to let the unprecedented casting coup distract him from his work.
"As the director, if you're looking at them saying, 'Oh, this is historic,' you're totally [expletive]," the filmmaker tells TV Guide Online. "Of course, I had a historical sense of the movie when we cast it. But when I actually got on the floor, I couldn't think that way because my job is to help them bring that scene aliv
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Don't call TNT's The Mists of Avalon a chick flick in front of Anjelica Huston. The 50-year-old Oscar winner — who plays high priestess Viviane in the epic miniseries (airing July 15 and July 16, 8 pm/ET) — insists that the two-part female-slanted retelling of the Arthurian legend has "a lot of men, a lot of swords and a lot of sword battles."
Huston goes on to argue that "the men feature pretty strongly in this, so I wouldn't classify it as something that was entirely driven by women." Still, she does concede that the lavish, $20 million production — based on Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel — does put women "in the front seat rather than the back seat for once."
Like co-stars Julianna Margulies and Joan Allen, Huston
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After screening the gross-out fest that is Scary Movie 2 — which grossed a disappointing $20 million during its opening weekend — we just know there's a heap of filth waiting to be scraped off the cutting-room floor and plopped onto an even raunchier DVD. Director Keenen Ivory Wayans cheerfully acknowledges as much, and even hints to TV Guide Online what will and won't make the bonus reel.
To start with, he lays to rest rumors that we'll ever be seeing footage from Marlon Brando's day on the set. (The 77-year-old Oscar winner fell ill and had to be replaced by James Woods in the film's kick-off scene — a slimy spoof of The Exorcist.) "I don't think it's fair to him to put on his performance where he has pneumonia," Wayans insists. "I think that would be disrespectful to him."
The director's reverential sentiments end there, however, as he gears up to unleash other material the MPAA vetoed before approving
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Yes, the movie posters for Made (opening Friday) do scream, 'The Guys from Swingers Are Back!' But Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn — who played the retro L.A. lounge lizards of that 1996 flick — aren't starring in Swingers 2. Seems these cool cats didn't deem a sequel a very "money" idea.
"I think people enjoyed our chemistry a lot in Swingers," Favreau says. "We're counting on people who don't just want to see me or Vince, but want to see us together [again]. The problem with a film like Swingers is... if you try to cover the same ground or do a sequel, you're going to walk into the fire — because you could never live up to that comparison. The best we could hope for was to do a movie that aspires to different things, but would be a good follow-up with similar sensibilities."
In other words, they just wanted to do another buddy movie. Made finds the duo playing two down-on-their-luck boxers who
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Roger Daltrey didn't invent the term "Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll," but as the lead singer of The Who — a band whose outrageous antics are the stuff of rock legend — he certainly helped perpetuate the genre's outlandish image. So it's a bit ironic to hear that he'll be playing, of all things, a man of the cloth on tonight's episode of TNT's new supernatural series Witchblade.
Daltrey guest stars as Father Aloysha Petrosian, a Catholic priest who gets caught in the crossfire over allegations that the Vatican and Nazis might have been allies during WWII. "It's a little controversial," Daltrey tells TV Guide Online. "There's quite a lot of evidence of their alleged knowledge of what the Nazis were doing — and they didn't decry it. It's pretty interesting."
Since making his big-screen debut as Tommy Walker — the deaf, dumb and blind kid who defeated the Pinball Wizard (played by Elton John) in The Who's 1975 rock
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