Nine years ago on Wednesday, the couple tied the knot. And in celebration of their anniversary, DeGeneres, 59, shared a loving tribute to Instagram!
“@PortiadeRossi and I got married 9 years ago today,” the Ellen DeGeneres Show host captioned a smiling, black-and-white photo of the pair on their wedding day. “Being her wife is the greatest thing I am.”
A post shared by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Aug 16, 2017 at 12:46pm PDT
Singer Joshua Radin, who performed at the couple’s wedding, also took to the photo and video-sharing app to celebrate their union.
“Nine years ago today, these two incredible women got married and asked me to sing some of my songs to them while they were celebrating their most special day. It’s still one of the most fun things I’ve ever done,” Radin wrote. “Happy anniversary @theellenshow and @portiaderossi.”
A post shared by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Aug 16, 2017 at 2:35pm PDT
During an interview with Oprah Winfrey, de Rossi recalled about falling for DeGeneres. “We actually met socially and I just felt that immediate draw,” she said. “We did talk a little bit and then over those three years, we saw each other at parties or at various things, but the one time that was the most significant was during a photoshoot actually.”
She continued: “I just walked over to say hello to her, and I couldn’t believe it, but she turned around and it was like an arrow was shot through my heart. I felt weak at the knees and I was overwhelmed with how I felt, but then it took me about 10 months to get the courage up to actually do anything about it.”
In a 2008 episode of her talk show, DeGeneres announced her plans to wed de Rossi; the reveal followed the news that the California Supreme Court had struck down a law banning same-sex marriage. The happy couple later showed off their engagement bling on the Daytime Emmys red carpet that same year.
That August, the couple tied the knot with an intimate ceremony in their L.A. home. (To see more of their cute moments from throughout the years, click here).
“Portia and I constantly say to each other, ‘We are so lucky.’ Sometimes it’s lying in bed at night before I go to sleep, and I just say thank you to whatever, whoever is out there,” DeGeneres told PEOPLE in her 2016 cover story. “I’ve gotten to a place where I really am just settled. Really. I know that I’m not going anywhere. She’s not going anywhere. I’m not saying the relationship took a while; I’m saying in my life, it took a while to find this.”
The 38-year-old joined producer Jermaine Dupri at a recording studio in Hallandale Beach, Florida, and happily smiled way for a snap on social media.
The “Yeah!” singer and the producer previously created two of Usher’s biggest hits, “Confessions Part 1” and “2”, about a man who cheated on his partner.
Dupri posted the photograph of himself leaping in the air as Usher sat on a couch laughing.
The producer drew on lyrics from Usher’s song, “My Boo”, with Alicia Keys for the caption, writing “I don’t know aboutchall [sic].”
The pair was joined by song writer Bryan-Michael Cox.
Despite his happy demeanor, Usher is currently at the center of a legal scandal.
In July, it was revealed Usher paid a female celebrity stylist $1.1 million to settle a 2012 lawsuit that claimed she had contracted herpes from him.
Since then, three more individuals have come forward and are suing Usher — who married his current wife Grace Miguel in 2015 — for allegedly failing to warn them of his reported STD diagnosis.
Earlier this month, Attorney Lisa Bloom filed a lawsuit in California on behalf of fan Quantasia Sharpton and the two other plaintiffs who have only been identified as “Jane Doe” and “John Doe”.
In the filing obtained by PEOPLE, Sharpton and the other female claim they had vaginal sex with the singer while the male plaintiff alleges he had oral sex with the star.
The snowman, the reindeer, the icy palace materializing out of frosty air — you’ll have to conjure up a ticket before you can lay eyes on those bits of stage magic. For now, whet your Frozen appetite with EW’s official first look at the principal foursome who will bring the characters from Disney’s Oscar-winning film to life on Broadway.
Patti Murin, Caissie Levy, Jelani Alladin, and John Riddle star as Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, and Hans in the stage adaptation of Disney’s 2013 double-princess feature, the latest animated title to receive the stage treatment from Disney Theatrical Productions. The musical adaptation will test the (potentially solid) waters with a try-out in Denver from Aug. 17 through Oct. 1, followed thereafter by a Broadway arrival in February 2018.
Set in the wintry, Norwegian-inspired kingdom of Arendelle, Frozen takes its stage cues from both the well-known tenets of the film and the minds of its all-star creative team, which includes Tony-winning director Michael Grandage, choreographer Rob Ashford, and scenic/costume designer Christopher Oram.
“The interesting thing about a movie is that it’s going to be exactly the same tomorrow night, whereas a staged piece is absolutely not, and that’s our greatest asset,” says Grandage, the celebrated British director and namesake of The Michael Grandage Company. “I’m not particularly interested in slavishly replicating a movie onstage, because it won’t challenge anybody. We’ve got so many assets at our disposal where we can take that whole experience further. We can present things in new ways. We’ve got a bigger narrative arc. We’ve got more songs than the movie, and an opportunity to develop storylines in greater depth. But the thing we can do most of all is have real, live, breathing, beating hearts in front of people in the dark. I needed a cast where it wasn’t just going to be people who brilliantly pumped out some famous numbers, because I knew we had a bigger book and a bigger arc to explore and, in places, a really highly emotional journey.”
Among the movie’s many merits (not the least of which is the legacy of — and now expectations for — its record-smashing showstopper “Let It Go”), Frozen was lauded in its theatrical release for painting new lines of emotionality onto the traditional Disney princess realm; on stage, the film’s protagonist sisters, driven apart by the eldest’s uncontrollable cryogenic powers, are played by longtime Broadway ingénues Murin and Levy, who hope to imbue the show with that same sororal sentiment.
“The camaraderie that’s needed between Patti and Caissie, in terms of what goes on onstage, is amplified by the fact that those two, in life and in their work, seem to be very genuinely bonded together,” says Grandage. “They take it seriously, in a good way. They want to present Anna and Elsa in a very beautiful, very meaningful way, and watching that develop in rehearsal has been quite profoundly moving to me because the point about this story is that they get pulled apart early on. Now, how close [the actresses] have become is mirroring what they need to do in the piece, which has been very exciting to me as a director. Similarly, the journey we’re going on with John Riddle as Hans is really interesting because, spoiler alert, we’ve got to reinvent the film’s big revelation for the stage…and then separately to that, we’re creating a very, very important relationship between Kristoff and Sven, working with the way puppets interact and the people in them.”
Sven, played with a prosthetic assist by the dancer Andrew Pirozzi, joins Olaf (Greg Hildreth) in representing the film’s more overtly difficult visual challenges for stage adaptation. But just as Beauty and the Beast made dining utensils tap and The Lion King brought the savannah to Times Square, Frozen has spent its share of time and resources to make the film’s designs and illusions seamless for an audience. Grandage promises surprises even beyond the expected beats: “There are a number of immediate problems to solve when putting something like Frozen on stage, but for every known ‘big deal’ in the narrative, we’ve come up with at least one to match that is going to be new for an audience.”
Beyond the new book and expanded score by the film’s Oscar-winning team of Jennifer Lee, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and Robert Lopez, the onus of reinvention also applies in large part to Oram, Grandage’s partner and long-time creative collaborator, who has taken on dual roles as Frozen’s scenic and costume designer. His style was influenced by a love of sci-fi and Disney animated movies, coupled with a research trip to Norway that exposed him to the timber-based culture’s painterly, rosemaled design aesthetic and the region’s panoramas, all of which have wiggled their way into Frozen in major and miniature ways.
“When you start researching yourself, you realize you’re stumbling across the same images they found when they were making the movie. My hope is that we’ve taken it in another direction, which I hope is a parallel one where people say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s the dress,’ but now it’s on a real body, behaving in a real way,” says Oram. “The film had an actual costume designer… so there was more detail for us to work with here, but we’re ultimately respecting what it is and allowing an audience to then be able to identify the cast. At no point does someone go, ‘You know what? Let’s put Elsa in black. That’ll probably look good, won’t it?’ She’s going to be in a beaded dress and it’s going to be pale blue and it’s going to look absolutely beautiful.”
As evidenced by the first look at the foursome, the gentlemen possess just as dashing fashion choices. “You want people to believe in it, to get that balance between seeing Hans in a very fine, beautifully embroidered jacket and Kristoff in his big chunky mountain gear,” says Oram, whose designs must contend with practical reveals and copious quick changes for the 40-strong cast populating the kingdom of Arendelle and its surrounding mountains. “The thing is, they’re wearing big, heavy, warm clothes, and the one thing it is not on stage is freezing cold. That’s dramatic irony for you.”
Ultimately, based on a recent tabulation before previews began in Denver, Oram’s department had constructed a whopping 363 costumes based on 172 individual designs. “Is that the number? That’s fine by me,” he laughs. “I never stop to count. We’re never going to have as many Swarovski crystals as Aladdin, and we’ve just got to live with that.” Unless Elsa has something to say about it.
To read more from our Fall Movie Preview,pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on stands now, or buy it here. Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.
In Pixar’s new film Coco, a 12-year-old boy finds himself stuck on the wrong side of the afterlife which, it turns out, isn’t too drastically different from our own world — it just happens to have a few more skeletons (and really, who among us hasn’t already encountered one or two lifeless co-workers on this mortal plane?).
The Land of the Dead is the rich setting for the animation studio’s next original feature (in theaters Nov. 22) revolving around an aspiring musician named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) and the accidental act of grave robbery that earns him a one-way trip there. Since Día de los Muertos is the busiest day of the year for the departed, the city is bustling with families heading to the corporeal realm to visit their living relatives — and Miguel, stuck between both worlds, gets a front row seat to the inside operations of the great, grand, glittering world of the deceased.
A lot of Coco’s most stunning imagery can be found in the film’s extravagant Land of the Dead setting, which was heavily inspired by Victorian-era architecture and the work of iconic artist José Guadalupe Posada. “A lot of folk art and images that people are used to seeing associated with the celebration of Día de los Muertos are directly influenced by Posada,” explains director Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3). “We leaned into that Victorian aesthetic that he embraced, creating his art at the turn of the century, and that ended up influencing a lot of the design, costuming, style, and architecture in our world.”
Don’t let the abundance of waistcoats and tweed vests inhibit your ability to connect to the Land of the Dead, though. Designed to feel as familiar as possible, Coco’s underworld fills in the gaps between all its skeletal ribcages with those meaty organs of societal function that mirror the communities and cities we know. It’s our world, just…deader. “You have to think about how this all works,” says Unkrich, whose approach to world-building hinges on a tempered imagination. “We like to find a logic to everything we do and not just make up things to make up things. I find, personally, that the more fantastical people get with world-building and the less relatable it is, you remain kind of emotionally distracted from it. Actually, I would liken the Land of the Dead a bit to what we did in Monsters, Inc., where we created Monstropolis, this familiar but fantastical world of monsters, where there was a lot that’s unique and delightful about it, but it’s also rooted in a world that we know. We did the same thing here in our vision of the afterworld.”
The city of Monsters, Inc., despite its tentacled tenants and energy sources predicated upon the fear of children, populated its wild Monstropolis with very un-wild sushi restaurants and grocery grossery stores. The idea here in Coco is the same — skeletons haven’t lost their human side simply because they’re less human. Unkrich’s team made a key early decision to help keep afloat the bustle of the Land of the Dead. “We had this notion that whatever your job was in life, that’s still your job in the afterlife, for better or worse,” chuckles the director. “There are people that still have to do the same kind of boring, bureaucratic jobs that they did in life.”
Case in point: The Department of Family Reunions, one of Miguel’s first destinations when he encounters his real ancestors in the Land of the Dead. It’s here, where some comings and goings of the afterlife are organized, that Miguel is given an opportunity to return to his living life with a heavily conditioned blessing by his great-great-grandmother Mamá Imelda. (Whether he actually takes that opportunity is another story entirely.) The bureaucracy-happy clerk is played by comedian Gabriel Iglesias.
As familiar as the Land of the Dead may look, though, Unkrich and the filmmakers made another choice that definitively separates Coco’s world from Monstropolis or, say, the pun-loaded city of Zootopia. “In terms of Starbucks and that kind of thing, I made a decision early on that I didn’t want to lean into pop culture references on this film,” Unkrich explains. “It’s an easy gag to do stuff like that, and we try to make films that are timeless. I want people to be watching these films 75 years from now, and who knows what will be out in the world then? We tried to not go for that easy pop culture reference laugh.” Therefore, in the Land of the Dead, don’t expect the cadaverous storefronts to thickly lay on the skeletal wordplay. Maybe next time, Foot Locker.
Bono recently issued an update on the record’s progress, saying that he’d “like” to release the record before “early 2018”, but adding: “Don’t listen to me.”
The Irish Sun now reports that ‘Songs Of Experience’ will be released on World AIDS Day (December 1) in partnership with the Bono co-founded AIDS charity (RED). According to the report, lead single ‘You’re The Best Thing About Me’ will be released on September 8.
Irish radio DJ Dave Fanning told the paper that the record was “definitely out this year”, continuing: “What’s great is new songs mean something to U2. They take their new material seriously, in a way that The Rolling Stones don’t.”
NME has approached press representatives of the band for a comment on the reports.
Following Noel Gallagher’s stint supporting U2 live, Liam told Noisey: “He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. For a geezer who bangs on about how his favourite band is U2? I was in a band with that kid for 20 fuckin’ years. And in those 20 years we had a party every fuckin’ night after pretty much every gig and we had tunes on. I never heard him play one fuckin’ U2 song. And believe you me, I was there at the beginning and the fuckin’ end.”
“He’s full of fuckin’ shit, mate,” Liam added. “I’m just here to fuckin’ shine a light on the fuckin’ fakes, man. And he’s one of them.”
It was a fleeting moment of what could have been after the most gruesome deaths in Walking Dead history. After Glenn and Abraham had their brains bashed in by Negan in the season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead, we saw a brief peek into the future dream scene of an alternate reality in which the two (as well as Spencer) had survived and were enjoying a big Alexandrian feast.
It turns out there was more to that scene that we didn’t see… until now. EW has the exclusive first look at the extended dream sequence that will be included on The Walking Dead season 7 Blu-ray and DVD sets being released on Aug. 22, and it is even more heartbreaking.
See Glenn playing with the child he will never meet on a blanket while also admiring Eugene’s remote controlled car. Witness Abraham and a pregnant Sasha relaxing blissfully on a bench. Watch Maggie tickling her son and kissing Glenn one final time. Everyone looks so damn happy — even Carol, Michonne, and Aaron as they bring food, drink, and firewood to the table. Again… heartbreaking.
Grab some Kleenex and watch the scene for yourself above. And for more goodies like this, make sure to pick up your copy of The Walking Dead: The Complete Seventh Season — which includes a bevy of deleted scenes, featurettes, and commentary tracks — when it arrives Aug. 22 on Blu-ray (plus Digital HD) and DVD. And for more Walking Dead scoop, follow me on Twitter @DaltonRoss.
The studio announced Wednesday it is bringing several of its most popular properties — namely The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Now You See Me — to life when it opens its first outdoor branded park, Lionsgate Movie World, at South Korea’s Jeju Shinhwa World, a major resort and entertainment property set to feature shopping, dining, amusements, and hotels spread over 20 million square feet and set to open in staggered phases in the coming years.
Seven themed lands will comprise the new park, which itself will occupy 1.3 million square feet and feature rides, attractions, cafes, restaurants, and live performances adapted from the aforementioned titles as well as future films, including Otto Bathurst’s upcoming Taron Egerton-starring 2018 epic Robin Hood.
“We’re pleased to partner with our friends at Landing International, one of Asia’s premier developers, on our first branded outdoor theme park and one of our largest and most exciting location-based entertainment destinations,” Lionsgate CEO, Jon Feltheimer, said via statement. “Our partners are creating a world-class resort that will be the perfect home for our theme park. Under the leadership of Tim Palen, Kerry Phelan and Jenefer Brown, and driven by a valuable portfolio of intellectual property, we have built a global location-based entertainment business in just three short years, and Lionsgate Movie World promises to become one of its crown jewels.”
Lionsgate Movie World is expected to open in 2019, with construction on track to commence next year.
When the track first dropped, it was pretty clear the lyrics were referencing some kind of system of injustice, taking aim at “the man.” “It’s the start of us waking up,” the pop star announced in an Instagram caption along with a fist emoji.
Her new video doubles down on the political message with imagery of police cars flashing their lights, helicopters blaring spotlights down on people in the street, and audio of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at the Republican National Convention giving the keynote speech ahead of then-candidate Donald Trump’s appearance. The audio then crossfades into a man saying, “We are going to reject hate! We are going to reject racism!”
Watch the powerful and timely video above. Beautiful Trauma drops Oct. 13.
