Taron Egerton Sling Time

Has Taron captured your attention? Good, that was my intention. Because I have a review for you to read! Click on over to Pajiba and you can read my thoughts on Apex, the Aussie wilderness thriller that stars Charlize Theron and Taron that just landed on Netflix today. It's good! I liked it! (Also Taron is naked in it! Even better!)

Mount Taron

Taron Egerton has been so generous with us these past couple of years y'all. (Remember his shimmy in a g-string on that fireman show of his last year? Phew.) That slammin' still above is from his thriller Apex that sees him (sexily) terrorizing Charlize Theron, and which hits Netflix next Friday -- I shared the trailer right here. Anyway that photo (which P.S. gets extremely big if you click on it) seemed a nice place to leave us off for the day (or to "[something] us off" anyway) -- yes as forewarned earlier this week this is yet another day of a very busy week where I've got screenings to attend to. Two of them today actually, including some time with that Taron. The other one... well click here if you want to know the other movie I'm seeing today is. Just know that I usually can't manage afternoon screenings given my day-job but I'm so excited about this one that I'm taking time off for it. Anyway giddy show-offery aside I'll be back in full tomorrow, so you and Taron just stay here and wait for me then. I'm sure y'll can find something to do. Bye!

Can You Survive Sexy Taron Egerton?

2026 is, if nothing else good, at least looking like those of us who like looking at Taron Egerton will be fed well -- I already told you about his aptly-titled comedy Everybody Wants To F*ck Me, but I missed the news of the action-thriller called Apex he's in and seen pictured above giving us something to sink our eyes into (via thx). It's a survival thriller that sees him playing the antgonist to Charlize Theron -- it's from Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelandic director of Everest, forever known as the movie that stupidly cut Jake Gyllenhaal's nude scene. Maybe he'll make it up to us this time?

I'm always keeping those fires burning, I am! Anyway this ism out on Netflix on April 24th -- I hope it's good, I hope it's entertaining, I thinkm we all could use a good entertaining action-thriller starring Charlize and Taron right about now. Right? That sounds good. Oh and Eric Bana is in it too, I guess! I just re-watched Hanna last week and man that awesome movie made me miss Eric Bana. (Remember those wet long-johns? JFC.) Let's hope he's more than just the inciting incident of the Charlize's guy who gets killed to prove what a threat Taron is before Charlize kicks his butt. Anyway here's a trailer:

A Little Tom Holland Treat

The first official images from Christopher Nolan's film of The Odyssey have started to land (via the new issue of Empire magazine I believe) and I figured it would be this shot of Tom Holland playing the character of Telemachus that would blow up all y'all skirts the best. This movie's not out until July 17th 2026 so we've got some time to decide whether we give a shit -- well I suppose "we" really equals "me" since I'm the biggest Nolan naysayer around. And yet! And yet I did like Oppenheimer. So maybe I'll like this one even more and Nolan will suddenly become a director I appreciate again, which hasn't really been a thing since Memento. (Okay okay I do mostly like The Dark Knight too.) With a cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway, Mia Goth, Jon Bernthal, Zendaya, Logan Marshall-Green, Lupita Nyong'o and Samantha Morton (among others) there'll certainly be somebody worth staring at most of the time... but then Nolan's always gotten big starry casts which he then usually squanders. I'm trying to be optimistic, really! How are y'all feeling about the prospects on this one? 

Catching Up With Matty

Those of us who worship at the altar of Matthias Schoenaerts are not fed well -- he hasn't been in anything since The Regime with Kate Winslet aired ten and a half lifetimes ago (otherwise known as uhh one year ago) and that's the way it's been for awhile -- one project a year, here and there, sporadically. We cannot surive this way, Matthias! Thanksfully there was some news on the Matty front this morning though -- he's signed in to star in a movie called Le Cowboy which has the super original storyline of a criminal roped into doing "one last job" that involves kidnapping a girl but then the two bond... yeah, we've seen this movie a thousand times before. Whatever. I'll watch him put his spin on it! The writer-director is Shane Atkinson whose film LaRoy Texas starring Steve Zahn and John Magaro played Tribeca last year and left not a huge impression on me, but I remember some people digging it. 

Anyway that spot of new news made me realize that if we're lucky we might be coming to an end on the Schoenaerts drought -- I had completely forgotten for one that he is playing the bad guy in the Supergirl movie that DC hired I Tonya director Craig Gillespie to direct and which has apparently already been filmed. And he's also somehow in The Old Guard 2 even though (spoiler) he died in the first one, and we just got the first image from that movie last week. (See below.) So that must be coming out soon, I guess.

First look at THE OLD GUARD sequel! (And here's to hoping everybody's favorite ancient crime-fighting homosexuals Marwan Kenzari & Luca Marinelli have added Henry Golding into their mix)

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) April 23, 2025 at 12:50 PM

And then of course there's The Way of the Wind, Terrence Malick's now many years in the making movie about Jesus (yes, Christ) that has Matthias playing the disciple Peter.  We first posted about that movie getting started SIX YEARS AGO. With Malick though who knows -- he could take another six years. The names in that stacked cast are endless -- Mark Rylance, John Rhys-Davies, Joseph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, FRANZ ROGOWSKI, Eileen Atkins, Aidan Turner, Mathieu Kassovitz. Also since it's Malick half of those people could end up on the cutting room floor -- it could be three hours of Mark Rylance spinning in a field for all we know. 

ETA an hour after posting this Netflix unloaded some more images from The Old Guard 2 including one very much confirming Matthias' presence therein, and another one of eternal boyfriends Luca Marinelli & Marwan Kenzari, and far be it from me not to add them to this post!

The Old Guard 2 is out on July 2nd.

Oh and here's the trailer too since we're here:

Cosmo Jarvis Three Times

Big day for Cosmo-stans as not only was he featured in that Warfare clip I shared earlier but we've also got news of his next project, and it's a biggun -- he's just joined the vast cast of Chris Nolan's upcoming epic take on The Odyssey (thx Mac). No idea who he's playing in it but he's got a face for skirts and he joins the already announced (the movie is actually already filming) cast of (deep breath) Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, John Leguizamo, Benny Safdie, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Mia Goth, Shiloh Fernandez, Himesh Patel, Elliott Page, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Will Yun Lee and Corey Hawkins. We have of course been in the Cosmo-corner ever since we first saw him opposite Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth -- it took Shōgun for the rest of the world to catch up but that's fine because Shōgun is ace. And I know I should know better than to expect anything homosexual from Nolan but my god with this cast of actors and Ancient Greece as your setting... I mean we all know what Achilles and Patroclus were getting up to dammit!

Happy 51, Patrick Wilson

There is something just right about Patrick Wilson being born on the third of July -- for as long as he's been acting he's been the suburban dream of the American Suburban Dad, for good or evil -- whether it be fighting demons in the Insidious and Conjuring movies or surreptitiously slamming Kate Winslet against the downstairs dryer in Little Children. The latter role was his breakout and with good reason -- something tells me clandestine affairs across the country found some sweaty inspiration from it, even if the movie was, you, know, a bit of a downer (when it wasn't being hot as hell). Anyway thinking about that role always makes me then think about the spin he did on a similar thing five years later in Diablo Cody's viciously funny Young Adult -- those two characters are basically the yin and yang of Suburban Dad-ness. Which brings us to today's birthday poll for the beautiful and talented fella...

online polls

Killed Her Mommy

There's an investigative piece at The Wrap today on what went toes up with Bryan Fuller's reimagining of the Friday the 13th movies with A24 into a series to be called Crystal Lake -- there are all sorts of at-odds sources so it's not the clearest picture of what happened, but knowing some insider info myself lemme just say, listen to the people on the ground working on the show and not the people representing the money. A good rule of thumb that we all should know by now is this -- the money people are not to be trusted. Anyway even though I did indeed know a lot of the background there was one thing I did not know -- Charlize Theron was going to play Pamela Voorhees! WHAT???

Now I'm even more furious that A24 and Universal botched this so spectacularly. There's one tidbit in the piece that really stuck in my craw -- they poured one and a half times as much budget into Park Chan-wook's The Sympathizer than they were willing to pour into Crystal Lake, and I can guarantee to you that the latter would've had a life-span of about ten times as long as the former. And I say that as one of Park Chan-wook's biggest fans. Just dumb dumb dumb suits mucking everything up. Of course Crystal Lake supposedly isn't dead itself -- they might ressurect it with another team. Best of luck with that. Goddammit sometimes I just don't want to know about the awesomeness I'm being denied. Ignorance is bliss!

All Hail King Matty

I actually kept my word for once this past weekend -- in case you weren't sure my word is shit and you should believe maybe about 0.001% of what I say -- and watched the first two (now three) episodes of The Regime, the Max series starring Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts and Andrea Riseborough that I said on Friday that I wanted to get around to watching. Imagine that! Wonders do not not ever stop ceasing or whatever. Anyway I'm enjoying it so far -- on Saturday when I got to the end of the second episode and realized that was all they had dropped so far I was upset to discover there wasn't more; I'd thought it was one of those whole series binge drops. I could've and would've watched the whole thing.

Alas. Anyway I'm not buying the complaints I've seen about the satire of it not being funny enough -- first off that voice Winslet's rocking is enough for ten comdies. But we already have a Veep and a Death of Stalin and that's clearly what those complaining people want from the show. People get very upset when they're not sure how to react to something! But I think it's doing something stranger and more particular tonally than that. I like when I can't nail down a show so easily and The Regime seems to me to be currently hovering in a sweet spot so far between satire and seriousness that keeps surprising me and feels all its own. We'll see anyway -- we are only three episodes in.

That said as you can see here the most important thing of all is that Matthias is doing press for the show! So we're getting new photos of him! Like these ones for Numero Netherlands magazine! There's also a chat -- read it here. Here is a choice bit from the chat, not about The Regime but about what Matty has lined up next:

"There is a movie we shot four years ago with the great Terrence Malick — it’s a project he’s been working on for more than thirty years now, and he’s been editing four years. I’m very curious to see what film comes out of that very intimate process he’s been going through for so long. Hopefully it will come out this year. Then, of course, we have ‘The Old Guard 2’, which is a sequel to the first one since it was very well received. It came out two years ago on Netflix. And then there’s other few future projects on the table that I still have to read, and a few that I had already committed myself to, but they haven’t been announced yet, so I always keep that in silence."

Do we know wtf he's talking about re: the Malick movie? Something he's been working on for 30 years? I'm also surprised to see him mention the sequel to The Old Guard given [spoiler] that his character was killed in the first movie. But please yes bring him back -- I daren't dream they might. Everything's coming up Matty! Including funny enough the photoshoot for this magazine, which I've got the entire lot of after the jump...

The Fall Hunk

There was a pile-up of cool people added to the cast of The Fall Guy movie that is being made over the past few weeks that I saw happening but didn't keep good track of -- yes, it's a big-screen adaptation of the 1980s series that starred Lee Majors and yes that show was one of Little Me's favorites. Anyway the movie stars Ryan Gosling in that lead role but surrounding him will be Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Hannah Waddingham (from Ted Lasso), Stephanie Hsu (the daughter in Everything Everywhere All at Once), and most important to us and today's interests one Aaron Taylor-Johnson....

... who has been photographed (via, thx Paul) on the set looking like this last night. Consider every single person who visits this site's tickets for opening weekend already purchased, Movie! Aaron worked with director David Leitch on his last film (that'd be Bullet Train) and came out looking great (even if I thought the movie was just alright) so I think we've got a new director-actor fave duo. I just hope Leitch gets around to making another Atomic Blonde movie someday... and not just because I am now picture Aaron playing the villain. But I am picturing that. Let's get that done. Hit the jump for all of the photos...

Pic of the Day

Luca Marinelli and Marwan Kenzari, who play the ancient gay lovers Joe and Nicky (I love that they're immortal super-assassins named "Joe" and "Nicky" lol) in The Old Guard movies, were spotted together on the set in Trieste, Italy this week, and there they are (via). They were of course our favorite part of the first film so we're very glad to see them back being hot and gay for the sequel. (Also big props to Marwan on wearing a mask!) This is the second photo of them that we've seen on set, click here for the first. 

Henry Golding Four Times

A few more photos of Henry Golding modeling for David Yurman have been released (via) -- I wouldn't blame you if you forgot the previous three photos since they were dropped five entire months ago, so you can click here for a refresher. They're just more of the same sexy browns and golds... taking his name literally there, ain't they? Anyway career-wise did you see the first picture of Henry Golding on the set of The Old Guard sequel alongside Marwan Kenzari & Luca Marinelli, the immortal homosexuals we all loved so much in the first movie? I guess Henry is filling the hole left by Matthias Schoenaerts and yeah I'm just gonna see myself out after writing that sentence. Hit the jump for three more pics...

Quote of the Day

If you're smart you pre-ordered NYT writer (and friend of MNPP) Kyle Buchanan's book -- titled Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road about, well, the title says what it's about -- the second it was announced way back. But this excerpt that was posted on Variety today (the book's out on the 22nd) will probably push some of you hold-out pervs over the finish line (in more ways than one):

"Near the end of the process, Hardy emerged as a front-runner alongside Jeremy Renner and Armie Hammer. Hardy and Hammer even read together as part of their audition, and when Hardy gnashed his teeth and spat at his scene partner, Hammer told Miller that Hardy needed to be Max more than he did... 

Audition cameraman Todd Matthew Grossman told Buchanan, “Jeremy and Armie were equally wonderful, but there was something about Tom in the room where it felt like that was Max, without a doubt. He had that kind of suppressed emotional dryness that you’d find in a post-apocalypse and, buried underneath it, disdain for the world. There was this intensity that burned through the lens.” Miller added, “I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.”

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Young Adult (2011)

Matt: Look, I don't know what Buddy's doing 

with you or what you think he's doing with you, 

but you need to move on. 

Mavis: You're one to talk. All you care about is

some scuffle that happened 20 years ago.

You lean on that crutch and you lean on excuses

and you and I both know that you use this whole

thing as an excuse to do absolutely nothing with your life.

Matt : Scuffle. You don't know shit about what happened

to me. Okay? Those jocks you used to blow during lunch, 

they shattered my legs, bashed in my brains, mangled my

cock so that I have to piss and cum sideways for the rest

of my life. Then they left me for dead. You know, things

aren't too great down south. I can barely get off by

myself let alone with another person.

Mavis: You know, what's done is done. 

You can't keep dwelling on the past, Matt.

I've felt a little guilty ever since I wrote my (deservedly) scathing Ghostbusters Afterlife takedown last month that I made a nepotism joke about Jason Reitman, because I do think Jason Reitman is talented, and this here movie that's turning 10 years old today is about all the proof I need to exhibit in that claim's defense. If all he'd ever made was Young Adult he'd be a fave. Young Adult is better than anything his father made. Then you add on Juno and Tully and to a lesser extent Thank You For Smoking and he's really one of our great comedy directors -- I guess that's one of the reasons Afterlife annoyed me so much; I really wanted it to be something special and it was decidedly not. Oh well! We'll always have Mavis Gary and her spectacular bullshit!

Quote of the Day

"All my friends are always like, ‘What are you doing?!? Take ... a ... break.' But the roles are too good. I wouldn’t be able to deal with it if I didn’t say yes. I wouldn’t cope. I’d rather just go for it and do my best.”

When I was off-line yesterday a big chat with actress Anya Taylor-Joy popped up in the Los Angeles Times that I recommend checking out, and not only because the photos of her alongside are spectacular, clearly riffing off her upcoming role in Edgar Wright's new giallo Last Night in Soho (if you missed the trailer it's here). Anya speaks the above quote after the interviewer rattles off a list of her forthcoming projects, and if you were getting the chances she's getting you'd keep going to. She's got Soho, she's got Robert Eggers' Viking epic The Northman, she's got David O. Russell's new film and then she's got the Mad Max Fury Road prequel Furiosa which will have her playing a younger version of Charlize Theron's character! 

Oh and the big news out of this interview, and the entire reason I am doing this post -- I mean I do love Anya, but this is the shit worth sharing -- is that she's also listing Robert Eggers' long long delayed and thought-dead-by-me remake of Nosferatu as still in the works! Eggers has been talking about this since 2017, maybe even earlier -- I posted about it here at that time -- but in 2019 I saw him speak at an event for The Lighthouse and he made it sound as if Nosferatu was dead. So to speak. It sounds like there might be like in ye olde buzzard after all, and this makes me happy. I have come to be wholly convinced that Eggers could do pull off a new Nosferatu. That said everything that Anya has lined up for after Furiosa I am sticking a pin in, because we all know how that Fury Road shoot went! I mean the finished product was worth the struggle and insanity, but let's see how George Miller fares this time around -- that shoot could end up being ten years long for all we know.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Babe: Pig in the City (1998)

Zootie: It's a dog-eat-dog world, 

and there's not enough dog to go around.

I have no idea what the context of that quote was, besides it was spoken by a chimpanzee voiced by Glenne Headly. But isn't that enough? I say yes. Hell yes. Has anyone watched the Babe movies lately? I've really been feeling an fancy lately -- I haven't seen them since they came out way way way back when. It's actually  kind of surprising how long ago that was when you run the numbers? Christ I'm old. 

But not as old as the legendary director George Miller, who's turning 76 today, and we wish him a happy. But then George Miller is 76 and about to direct another action-epic with his Furiosa prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the Charlize Theron role (plus Chris Hemsworth cuz why not), not to mention has a film starring Tilda Swinton & Idris Elba coming out later this year, and I'm about to eat a limp lunch salad and stare at my computer screen for another six hours, so who's the real oldie? Oh that would be me, most definitely me. 

This reminds me Chris Hemsworth is set to be in the next MAD MAX movie (the FURIOSA prequel) and if he isn't wearing one of the costumes seen on the right I say WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS FOR pic.twitter.com/2zKOxXlwV3

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 3, 2021

Happiest For Whom

I don't know how to properly introduce this piece at the moment without being super weird about it (I'd probably be better at it if I wasn't trying to do it at 5pm on a Friday when I'm already blown out) but here goes: I have a great big and pretty personal essay that just went live over at Pajiba this evening where I get into why I think the character of Harper in Clea DuVall's Hulu holiday rom-com Happiest Season -- that'd be the one played by Mackenzie Davis -- has been getting too much hate from the internet in the wake of the film's release last week. I know, I know -- Hate is what the internet is good at! Just thought I'd throw my ten cents in on the other side since I felt a lot of her character's pain personally. Feel free to click on over and read it! (Oh and the above pic comes via Interview Magazine, where they have a nice chat with Davis & her Tully co-star Charlize Theron that touches lots of the subjects I broach in my piece.) And now I have to step away from the internet because writing things this personal even just here on MNPP always takes lots out of me but for Pajiba's larger audience I am faintly terrified.

Run a Train on Aaron & Brad

Now here's a tag-team I could sandwich myself between no prob -- Aaron Taylor-Johnson's just joined Brad Pitt's next movie! It's called Bullet Train and it's being directed by Atomic Blonde director David Leitch and it's based on a book about four deadly assassins (is there another kind of assassin?) who find themselves all onboard a you-guessed-it bullet train speeding between Tokyo and Morioka, Japan. The other two assassins are played by actress Joey King and the fantastic-faced action-star Andrew Koji...

... (yes I am asking you to look at his face) who's been previously seen on Peaky Blinders and the show Warrior, among others. Anyway I hope that Brad Pitt gets himself the full "Charlize in Atomic Blonde" action-star treatment from Leitch, and yes I include "bisexual lighting" and "bisexual make-outs" under that heading -- if Brad doesn't make out with either Aaron or Andrew I am gonna toss a fit the likes of which ain't nobody ever seen. That said Aaron, as the "other white male" in the cast, is the bad guy slash immediately more disposable, right? Well I hope he gets to make out with Brad before he dies. That's really all I wish for any of us.

Before the Fury

Big news in the post-apocalyptic landscape today, my dears -- George Miller's officially announced that Fury Road prequel about Charlize Theron's character called Furiosa, which has been chattered about for a bit! And... no, it doesn't have Chris Hemsworth taking over the role for Charlize Theron. I just wanted to use that picture of Chris Hemsworth. Chris Hemsworth is indeed in the cast though, which is new news -- it's not like I'm pulling a Chris Hemsworth photo out of my ass. [Ed. - No comment.] He'll be playing... oh we don't know, some man who'll have dust on his clothes though, I am sure. It won't be a younger Tom Hardy, since that wouldn't make any sense, visually or story-wise. 

Anyway! Getting to the rest of the point -- Anya Taylor-Joy is taking over for Theron as the younger Furiosa, and that's terrific casting, good for her. She'll probably get to have both of her arms even -- will we see the moment she loses her arm? I wouldn't exactly reel with shock if that was a part of the plot. Also joining Miller's world of insanity is Watchmen star Yahya Abdul-Mateen, and y'all know how we feel about him. Hey maybe him and Chris can dare I say play a couple? The Mad Max world could use some queerness that's not just Mel Gibson's ass in leather pants and Tina Turner's slinky-earrings.

I'll admit I'm sad we're not going to see more of Charlize and Tom Hardy but given the nightmare they all endured on that set I can't say I'm surprised. And as wonderful as they both were in the film -- and those are some Class-A-Plus Action Movie star-turns -- the Mad Max movies live and die by their directorial vision and with George Miller there symphonizing the mayhem I am ticket-purchased this very day. What I'm actually most sad about is NO NUX!!!

5 Off My Head: Queen Charlize

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Tomorrow the queen called Charlize will be turning 45 years awesome, and since I won't be online tomorrow -- Summer Fridays dontcha know -- I feel like celebrating her today. I've watched three Charlize movies during quarantine -- a re-watch of Mad Max Fury Road (yup still kicks all kinds of unholy arse) plus first-time viewings of her new Netflix joint The Old Guard (which I totally dug) and last year's political rom-com Long Shot with Seth Rogen, which was far funnier than I anticipated. I should've known those two wouldn't shovel shit in my face and tell me to smile. Anyway I was a little shocked after a cursory glance through our archives told me I've never done this before but there's no time like the present...

My 5 Favorite Charlize Performances

Aileen Wuornos, Monster (2003)

"I always wanted to be in the movies."

Furiosa, Mad Max Fury Road (2015)

"Out here everything hurts."

Marlo, Tully (2018)

"People used to eat flour back then."

Lorraine Broughton, Atomic Blonde (2017)

"I'm my own bitch now!"

Mavis Gary, Young Adult (2011)

"Theater fag is an expression, Buddy."

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What's your fave Charlize?

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