Helen Holmes

MEGA/GC ImagesIn the first episode of the new season of Hart to Heart, comedian Kevin Hart’s interview show on Peacock, Oscar winner Ben Affleck delves deep into his anxieties surrounding his career, and origins in Hollywood. While Affleck largely skirts his personal life, he does share a few insights into what it’s like to be married to multi-hyphenate mega-star Jennifer Lopez. At the moment, relentless rumors have it that Lopez and Affleck—who famously first got engaged in the aughts before breaking up days before their wedding—are on the brink of divorce. Some have speculated that Lopez’s consistent presence on social media has rankled Affleck in their relationship. In a documentary accompanying Lopez’s self-funded musical film This Is Me... Now: A Love Story, Affleck expressed reluctance to fully embrace his wife’s vision for the film, which involved giving her collaborators access to a trove of love letters exchanged between Affleck and Lopez. Read more at The Daily Beast.

MEGA/GC ImagesIn this weekend’s new episode of the “Painful Lessons” podcast, actor Armie Hammer spoke about the sexual assault and “hilarious” cannibalism accusations that prompted his ousting from the movie business in 2021. “There were things that people were saying about me that just felt so outlandish,” the Call Me By Your Name star said. “People called me a cannibal and everyone believed them. Now I’m able to sort of look at it with a sense of distance and perspective and be like, ‘That’s hilarious.’ They’re like, ‘Yep, that guy ate people.’ You’re just like, ‘What? What are you talking about? Do you know what you have to do to be a cannibal? You have to eat people. How am I going to be a cannibal?’ It was bizarre.”The cannibalism accusations initially stemmed from a series of screenshots allegedly purporting to show messages from Hammer sent to a mistress that were released in 2021. Read more at The Daily Beast.

YouTube/screengrabKevin Spacey admitted to “pushing the boundaries,” being “too handsy” and “touching someone sexually in a way that I didn’t know at the time they didn’t want” in a new sit-down with Piers Morgan, the latest in an attempt at a redemptive press tour that the actor launched in May with his first on-air interview since 2017. Starting that year, Spacey was hit with a series of sexual assault and groping allegations that include being charged with one felony count of indecent assault and battery for allegedly groping a busboy at a Nantucket restaurant. The charges were eventually dropped, and Spacey has, to date, never been convicted of sexual misconduct. “Some people would say that that is criminal, that if you grope people in a sexual way against their wishes, that that is a crime,” Morgan told Spacey in the interview, which streamed live on his YouTube channel Tuesday. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesDuring a recent trip to her native Melbourne, Bianca Censori, Kanye West’s wife of two years, wore a sweater dress to dine out with her parents, according to a source quoted by Page Six. For any other celebrity, such a humdrum detail would hardly justify being repeated so breathlessly. But Censori is an exception.Ever since being romantically linked with West, the 29-year-old architect has become synonymous with nearly-nude garments: completely sheer dresses, lingerie as evening wear, bodysuits sans undergarments, and even props used to cover herself are all part of Censori’s personal style lexicon.It was therefore jarring, the Post’s source said, to see Censori dressed like a civilian: “It was very obvious to us that she was acting like she was off the clock from a job.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and ReutersClose your eyes, hold your breath for a moment and you can almost hear it. Even if your iPhone isn’t hooked up to your Bluetooth speaker, it’s in the ether—the buzzing hum of thousands of podcasters all across the country, breathlessly monologuing into their freestanding microphones.In 2024, podcasts feel more inescapable than ever, and audience statistics reflect this. According to a report this year on podcast consumption in the United States by Edison Research, podcasts now represent 11 percent of daily time spent with audio media.Furthermore, the report said, another piece of data analysis this year found that men are more frequent podcast listeners, but only by a slim margin: 45 percent of women listen to podcasts monthly, and 32 percent of women listen to podcasts weekly. In other words, podcasting is not exactly the bro-centric medium that many believe.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty ImagesOn the latest episode of tech journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast On, wannabe shock jock Bill Maher continued his trend of—in the words of his fellow podcast enthusiast, The 1975 lead singer and Taylor Swift ex-boyfriend Matty Healy—seemingly “saying controversial things just for the hell of it.”Swisher and Maher got into a predictable back-and-forth about cancel culture, prompting Swisher to bring up Louis C.K., who’s evolved over the years from a prominent comedian into a reliable citation in arguments about who deserves to make art in public after admitting to doing horrible things—in his case masturbating in front of several women without their consent. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesBy all accounts, Nicole Brown Simpson endured a deluge of horrible abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, football superstar O.J. Simpson, before she and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered nearly 30 years ago. But a new Lifetime documentary about Nicole’s “life and murder” highlights just how bizarre O.J.’s methods could be when it came to tormenting the mother of his children. The first two episodes of The Life & Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, which premieres this Saturday night, June 1, at 8 p.m. ET, includes interviews with all three of Brown Simpson’s living sisters: Denise, Dominique and Tanya. In Episode One, Denise, Brown Simpson’s eldest sister, describes an incident that she says took place at Christmas 1988, when the entire family decided to go on vacation in Hawaii.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty ImagesComedian Sarah Silverman is opening up about why she abandoned her eponymous, exaggerated sketch comedy character amid former President Donald Trump’s political rise.While appearing on the latest episode of David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast, Silverman said, “It wasn’t really a conscious like, ‘Hey, that stuff doesn’t work, so I’m gonna go a different way.’ I think I just very naturally started changing.” Silverman pointed out that in her first comedy special, 2005’s Jesus Is Magic, she was “totally doing a character, and that character carried on into my Comedy Central show,” The Sarah Silverman Program.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesLast weekend, Saturday Night Live star Colin Jost was forced to take a public potshot at his wife during his season finale joke swap segment with co-anchor Michael Che. “ChatGPT has released a new voice assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in Her,” Jost said on “Weekend Update,” “which I’ve never bothered to watch, because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”The punchline, which got a huge response from the studio audence, left Jost laughing uncomfortably with his head in his hands. One person who apparently didn’t find it funny? Scarlett Johansson. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesLast weekend, Saturday Night Live star Colin Jost was forced to take a public potshot at his wife during his season finale joke swap segment with co-anchor Michael Che. “ChatGPT has released a new voice assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in Her,” Jost said on “Weekend Update,” “which I’ve never bothered to watch, because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”The punchline, which got a huge response from the studio audence, left Jost laughing uncomfortably with his head in his hands. One person who apparently didn’t find it funny? Scarlett Johansson. Read more at The Daily Beast.