A De-Aged Julia Roberts Was Considered for ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Axed Cold Open: The VFX Bill ‘Would’ve Been as Expensive’ as the Train Stunt

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Cillian Murphy’s decades-long collaboration with Christopher Nolan hit a new peak with “Oppenheimer,” his first leading role in a Nolan feature that has garnered him the best reviews of his career and Oscar buzz for best actor. “Oppenheimer” follows Murphy’s supporting turns in three Batman films, “Inception” and “Interstellar.” Recently asked by The Independent if there were any Christopher Nolan movies not featuring Cillian Murphy that he wished he could’ve starred in, Murphy selected the director’s 2014 space epic “Interstellar.” “I adore ‘Interstellar’ just because I find it so emotional,” Murphy said. “I remember seeing it in the cinema when I had little kids.

Many of the entertainment industry's biggest stars, like Harrison Ford, would rather live a quiet life away from the bright lights and pressures that come from being in a big city. "It's peaceful, and it's a relief," Julia Roberts, who spends a lot of her time in New Mexico, told Oprah Winfrey in 2003. "I always say you can't be in a bad mood here.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Billy Porter revealed in a recent interview with Evening Standard that he has to sell his house amid the ongoing strikes in Hollywood in order to save money. Porter, an Emmy winner for his work on FX’s “Pose,” was speaking to the outlet to promote his music career and stayed clear of discussing any of his film and television work. When the topic of the strikes was brought up, Porter said he’s having to take cost-saving measures in his real life as various projects he was set to work on in September have been tabled.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jamie Dornan admitted in a new “Wired” video interview (via Insider) that he was “quite jealous” of Robert Pattinson during the early days of their career. Dornan, Pattinson and fellow stars such as Eddie Redmayne and Andrew Garfield all came up together as aspiring young actors in England. Pattinson’s career skyrocketed way ahead of his peers when he was cast as Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” franchise.

Supermodel Christy Turlington joined the list of leading Hollywood women who have rejected plastic surgery despite societal pressure to look as young as possible. Turlington, 54, and Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and more A-list stars have spoken out against going under the knife to change one's appearance. "When celebrities go from looking natural to looking like caricatures from bad surgery or bad injections, they lose their humanism, fans and future prospects," Dr.

More Hollywood A-listers are matching Dwayne The Rock” Johnson’s $1 million donation to the SAG-AFTRA fund, more Hollywood A-listers are following suit. 

Tom Cruise's former love interest in "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" almost looked totally different. The movie features a brief flashback to 1989 for a scene that involves Cruise and his character's girlfriend.

Director Christopher McQuarrie previously revealed that a flashback segment that would have de-aged Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One was briefly considered.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Before Christian Bale landed the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, the filmmaker screen-tested his “Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy. Both men have since admitted that Murphy was never a real threat to steal the part from Bale, and Murphy told GQ Magazine UK in a recent interview that it “was for the best” that Bale won the coveted role over him anyway. “Yes, I think it was for the best because we got Christian Bale’s performance, which is a stunning interpretation of that role,” Murphy said.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer There’s an old joke used in show business when events and gatherings lack major celebrity attendance: “Somebody punch me in the face so I can see some stars.” But it’s no joke when it comes to the picket lines of the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes, according to some of the protesters on the ground and select industry players who spoke to Variety. There’s been a “palpable” lack of headliners, said one prominent SAG-AFTRA member, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If our stars were all out there in force advocating for us, we’d know it,” they added. Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Rami Malek all signed a June letter telling union leadership they were prepared to strike, but none of them have surfaced holding signs or chanting at studio gates. Leonardo DiCaprio posted an Instagram story saying he stood “in solidarity with my guild,” but has yet to stand for any in-person protest. On day one of the actor’s strike in mid-July, one protester straddled a median at the drive-on gate at Netflix headquarters holding a sign that read, “Where the fuck is Ben Affleck?” So far, no one’s seen him on the front lines.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Cillian Murphy is earning some of the best reviews of his career for leading Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer, but no praise might be higher than this rave from co-star Robert Downey Jr.: “I have never witnessed a greater sacrifice by a lead actor in my career,” the “Iron Man” star told People magazine about Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer. “He knew it was going to be a behemoth ask when Chris called him,” Downey Jr. added. “But I think he also had the humility that is required to survive playing a role like this. We’d be like, ‘Hey, we got a three-day weekend. Maybe we’ll go antiquing in Santa Fe. What are you going to do?’ ‘Oh, I have to learn 30,000 words of Dutch. Have a nice time.’ But that’s the nature of the ask.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Lawrence Sher, the Oscar-nominated cinematography for “Joker,” revealed on “The Trenches Talk” podcast that he “never even met” Lady Gaga on the set of the sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” because she was presumably in character the whole time (via IndieWire). Gaga stars opposite returning lead Joaquin Phoenix in the 2024 comic book movie, which casts her as Harley Quinn opposite Phoenix’s Joker. Sher said it wasn’t until he started calling Gaga by the name “Lee” (presumably a nod to Harley) that she even warmed up to him. “I didn’t know Stefani at all,” Sher said referring to Gaga’s real name, Stefani Germanotta. “Strangely, I felt like I never even met her, even during the makeup/hair tests. Maybe it was my philosophy of not trying to get in their space. And then I remember for a week, being like, ‘God, I feel like we are disconnecting. Not even connecting. We are like on opposites.’ And I would say to my crew, ‘Jesus, I can’t crack it. She either hates me or we hate each other. There’s something weird going on here.’”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Oppenheimer” marks several firsts for writer-director Christopher Nolan. It’s his first outright biopic, and the first movie to be shot on IMAX cameras using black-and-white film stock. It’s also the first Christopher Nolan movie to feature sex scenes. J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, had a steamy romance with physician Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) before his marriage to Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. His romance to Tatlock continued despite the marriage. “Any time you’re challenging yourself to work in areas you haven’t worked in before, you should be appropriately nervous and appropriately careful and planned and prepared,” Nolan recently told Insider when asked about filming sex scenes for the first time.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Antonio Banderas celebrated the 25th anniversary of “The Mask of Zorro” in a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment. The Martin Campbell-directed adventure movie was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and grossed $250 million at the worldwide box office in 1998. Spielberg was hand during the film’s 1997 production, and Banderas said the Oscar-winning director correctly warned him about the future of practical vs. CGI filmmaking. “Steven Spielberg said to me once when we were shooting, ‘This is probably going to be one of the last Westerns shot in the way the Westerns were shot in the old days, with real scenes with real horses, where everything is real, [real] sword fighting, no CGI,'” Banderas remembered. “Everything was [practical].”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Robert Downey Jr. and Jimmy Fallon crashed a recent episode of “The Howard Stern Show” and revealed they auditioned together for Nancy Meyers’ 2006 romantic-comedy “The Holiday.” Downey Jr. read for the part later played by Jude Law, while Fallon auditioned for Jack Black’s role. Both actors knew they weren’t Meyers’ frontrunner picks at the time, and Downey Jr. was well aware Jude Law was stiff competition. “We both got called in just as seat fillers…[director Nancy Meyers] needed someone to read with the gals and we’re sitting there going, ‘It’s about to happen for us,’” Downey said, adding that he felt he was a “shoe-in” to steal the part away from Law. “And I was like, ‘I’ve got to have a better English accent than Jude Law at this point.’ And Winslet said, ‘That was the worst British accent I’ve ever heard.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll check out now, but I’m taking the gummy bears from the minibar.'”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has already received a handful of strong first reactions, but now comes a huge claim from “Taxi Driver” writer and “The Card Counter” director Paul Schrader. The Oscar nominee attended the New York premiere of Nolan’s atom bomb epic and took to social media afterwards to hail it as “the best, most important film of this century.” “If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer,'” Schrader added in a Facebook post shared widely across social media. “I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.” “Oppenheimer,” based on the 2005 book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, tracks the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II through the eyes of theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy stars in the lead role. The film also features Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and Benny Safdie also star.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Patrick Wilson said in an interview on the “Reelblend” podcast that Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” adaptation helped pave the way for “The Avengers” and the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe to take a much lighter approach to the comic book genre. Snyder’s dark and operatic take on Alan Moore’s graphic novel proved divisive, as the film didn’t even make it past $200 million at the worldwide box office. Wilson revealed “Watchmen” is “the only movie of mine that I have watched front to back since a premiere,” adding, ‘That movie is awesome.” “I just wanted to look at it as an older guy, as a filmmaker,” Wilson added. “I knew Zack was ahead of the curve. It’s weird to say that audiences weren’t ready for it. But you need a movie like that. You need movies to go so dark that then ‘Avengers’ can go so light. I do believe in that…I’d love to do that movie now. It would be so awesome to just do it now.”

Tom Cruise appears ageless in his films. But Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie was close to de-aging Cruise as a gimmick in the new film’s opening sequence.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” almost pulled an “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” by opening with an extended sequence featuring a de-aged version of its main star. “Dial of Destiny” de-aged Harrison Ford to mixed results for a 25-minute opener. “Dead Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie ultimately nixed an idea to de-age Tom Cruise because the technology just isn’t convincing enough yet. “Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989,” McQuarrie told GamesRadar+ and Total Film. “We talked about it as a cold open, we talked about it as flashbacks in the movie, we looked at de-aging.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron and Angel Studios have joined forces to quell a boycott against the exhibition chain over the release of “Sound of Freedom.” Social media users have accused AMC of purposely disrupting “Sound of Freedom” screenings following accusations that the hit movie stokes QAnon conspiracy theories (Rolling Stone, for instance, slammed “Sound of Freedom” as a “QAnon-tinged thriller”). Claims include AMC canceling screenings and disrupting showtimes with technical difficulties and broken air conditioning. “Sadly, conspiracy theorists are so prevalent in America. So much garbage information is spread,” Aron wrote on Twitter. “More than ONE MILLION people have watched ‘Sound of Freedom’ at AMC Theatres. More than at any other theatre chain on the planet. Yet people falsely claim otherwise. It is so bizarre.”