NELLY Furtado has silenced body shamers in a curve-hugging strapless red gown, as she was honored with a Hall of Fame award.
The iconic singer, 47, has faced cruel comments about her figure since her return to the spotlight, but defied the haters to accept the coveted achievement.
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Nelly Furtado looked incredible as she was inducted into the Canadian Hall of FameCredit: GettyThe singer looked stunning in her red dress as she made her speechCredit: GettyThe singer wowed on the red carpet at the beginning of the nightCredit: GettyNelly first launched to fame in the early noughtiesCredit: Getty
Nelly looked stunning in her dress, as she was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the 2026 Juno Awards.
The stunning star oozed sex appeal in the incredible dress as she collected her gong.
The Grammy Award winning artist wore her brown locks tied back, and she accessorised with huge earrings.
Nelly beamed and threw her arms in the air as she walked on stage to be inducted into her native country’s Hall of Fame.
Addressing the audience, the thrilled star said: “Honestly, I’m just really proud to be Canadian. I live in Canada.
“I make my music in Canada.
“I work with Canadian musicians, songwriters, producers because I totally believe in the Canadian dream.
“Please believe it, too.”
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It comes after Nelly revealed how she was retiring from performing, after 25 years in the spotlight.
Taking to Instagram last October, the Grammy winner made an emotional post expressing gratitude for her career but that she felt it was time for a change.
Addressing fans, Nelly said: “I have decided to step away from performance for the foreseeable future and pursue some other creative and personal endeavours that I feel would better suit this next phase of my life.
“I have enjoyed my career immensely, and I still love writing music as I have always seen it as a hobby I was lucky enough to make into a career.
Nelly showed off her fabulous curves in her stunning dressCredit: Getty
“I’ll identify as a songwriter forever.”
Nelly shot to fame in 2000 with her debut album Whoa, Nelly!.
The record was a huge success and spawned the single I’m Like A Bird which went was played on radio stations around the world.
The star is also well known for her song Promiscuous as well as her collaboration with singer James Morrison on Broken Strings.
Another huge hit for Nelly was her chart topping song Maneater.
Nelly recently revealed she was retiring from performingCredit: Splash
Victoria Pedretti was fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama when she was cast in Mike Flanagan’s acclaimed 2018 horror series, “The Haunting of Hill House.”
In her breakout role as Nell Crain, the youngest and most sensitive of five adult siblings reckoning with wounds from a childhood summer spent in a cursed home, Pedretti became the undisputed heart of “Hill House,” anchoring the show with a spellbinding performance that christened her as a scream queen. Her subsequent appearances in “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “You” were characterized by a similar dramatic intensity, solidifying her renown in the horror genre.
But in Pedretti’s new “Forbidden Fruits,” a horror-comedy directed by Meredith Alloway making her feature debut and produced by “Jennifer’s Body” screenwriter Diablo Cody, the actor shines in all-new soapy splendor.
Set in a Dallas shopping mall, “Forbidden Fruits” revolves around an elite clique of retail employees who run a witches’ coven out of the basement of their boho boutique Free Eden. Pedretti stars alongside Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung and Alexandra Shipp.
Victoria Pedretti in the movie “Forbidden Fruits.”
(Sabrina Lantos / Independent Film Company and Shudder)
Initially asked to look at both the roles of whimsigoth physics buff Fig and the bubbly yet emotionally complex Cherry, described by Alloway as a “Texas Brigitte Bardot,” Pedretti fell hard for the latter.
“She really popped off the page,” Pedretti, 31, says on a recent Zoom interview she takes while on a sandwich run in L.A. “I entered into this glorious flow state.”
“I can’t say I’ve had any experience quite like it, where I really didn’t spend a lot of time questioning myself,” the actor says. “She kind of took over.”
That confidence was perhaps the product of Pedretti performing in two stage plays before “Forbidden Fruits” — or maybe it was the nighttime filming schedule. Either way, Pedretti says she improvised constantly and always kept swinging until somebody said, “Cut.”
The result: Pedretti in Alloway’s instant cult classic is a laugh-out-loud-funny unending well of charm, packing humor into even her most routine dialogue. In her best quotable moments, she seamlessly infuses her sometimes shrill timbre with a dash of Southern drawl. One of her most iconic facial expressions in the film is already circulating as a reaction meme online.
“I was enjoying being in this character so much, I just wouldn’t stop,” Pedretti says, adding that Alloway, who was sensitive to cast members’ interpretations of their roles, supported experimentation.
Alloway praises the Philadelphia-born Pedretti for nailing Cherry’s comedic moments yet also grounding the character in a traumatic backstory — a balancing act the director knew she was capable of after watching “Hill House.”
“I saw her in that show and I was like, ‘Who is that?’” Alloway says. “She is magnificent and so raw. I didn’t feel like I was watching someone acting. I was worried for her.”
After later watching Pedretti nail her role in “You” as Love Quinn, a wealthy, charismatic chef who hides a psychopathic nature, Alloway was convinced of her star power.
Victoria Pedretti in the movie “You.”
(John P. Fleenor / Netflix)
Cody was most familiar with Pedretti’s performance in “You,” pegging the actor as an “intense brunet” that didn’t square at first with her interpretation of Cherry as an Anna Nicole Smith type.
“Then I see the movie and I’m like, oh my God, she has that fragility,” Cody recalls. “She has that humor. She has that sexuality. She has all of it.
“Victoria brought all of those layers and I’m really blown away by her,” the Oscar-winning “Juno” screenwriter adds.
Cody says she wasn’t surprised that the film drew such talent. From the moment Alloway and Lily Houghton, who wrote the play “Forbidden Fruits” is based on and cowrote the film’s screenplay, brought the material to Cody and her producing partner Mason Novick, she became obsessed.
“It feels spiritually like a film that I would want to be part of my body of work,” Cody says. She remembers being especially delighted by the echoes of “Jennifer’s Body” present in Alloway and Houghton’s screenplay.
“Jennifer’s Body” was widely considered a box-office flop and critical failure upon its release in 2009 — grossing only $31 million worldwide against a $16-million budget — but in recent years has enjoyed a reappraisal as a stealth-feminist essential, reclaimed by superfans.
“I don’t think that the world was ready for these kinds of themes,” Cody says of the movie’s ideas, including the cost of toxic femininity, the nuances of female friendship and the pervasiveness of the male gaze.
When it came to promoting “Jennifer’s Body,” the producer adds, “there was a huge emphasis on trying to market it to straight men, based on Megan [Fox] being attractive, and that was not at all the point of the film, so that was frustrating.” Conversely, “Forbidden Fruits” speaks intimately to the female experience and “doesn’t attempt to pander to any other demographic.”
“The current zeitgeist is a great place for a movie like this,” she says. “This movie is for the girls, gays and theys, as they say.”
Alloway, a trained actor who worked as a film journalist before moving into directing, was struck with a similar feeling when she first discovered Houghton’s play, right around the time she was consuming copious media about women criminals, such as Tori Telfer’s 2017 book “Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History.”
“I was so entrenched in why women commit acts of crime,” Alloway said, adding that she was disappointed to find that revenge films on the subject still often revolved around men.
Picking up Houghton’s script, the director recalls feeling relieved. “Oh, this is just about women,” she says, her face brightening. “This is about women friendships, women being pitted against each other.”
In an early meeting with Houghton, Alloway told the playwright she’d like to bring a genre lens to “turn up the dial on the emotions that you feel reading the play and make them accessible to people who haven’t had these experiences — or validate people who have.”
Outside of the opportunity to work with so many other young women, Pedretti said she was drawn to “Forbidden Fruits” because of its use of style and tone.
“It asks a lot of people to try to step into a world like this one,” the actor says of the unabashedly histrionic screenplay. “And as nerve-racking as it may be to take that big swing, you gotta take the big swing.”
“She has that fragility,” says producer Diablo Cody of Pedretti. “She has that humor. She has that sexuality. She has all of it.”
(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)
And swing she does: Pedretti plays up Cherry’s emotional volatility, giving her a full-bodied form of expression. The actor even did her own onscreen makeup (as did Reinhart) and collaborated heavily with costume designer Sarah Millman on Cherry’s wardrobe and styling. Plus, she performed her first topless scene — in a sequence that doesn’t involve men or even sex.
“I’m really proud of the way we use nudity to show a certain kind of unspoken comfortability among women,” she continues. “I remember always getting such a thrill at the comfort level of a girl being like, ‘We’re going to the bathroom together,’ and to me, that is that moment.”
It’s a perfect example of a scene that doesn’t try to speak to anyone except those it’s specifically written for, and one that you only get with women at the helm of a production.
Reflecting on the agency she had to shape Cherry, Pedretti says she is more inspired to explore directorial projects of her own.
“I am so interested in protecting these spaces to be positive, creative experiences for everyone involved,” she says.
Whenever Pedretti does make her feature debut behind the camera (she’s already made a short or two), perhaps Cody will pick up the phone.
THIS is the moment Justin Timberlake is put in cuffs as the body cam footage of his arrest for drink driving is released.
The pop star, 45, was arrested in Sag Harbor, New York, in June 2024 after he failed to stop at a stop sign and could not stay in his lane.
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This is the moment Justin Timberlake failed a sobriety test during a drink driving arrestCredit: Sag Harbour Police DepartmentThe pop star was arrested in June 2024 for driving while intoxicatedCredit: Sag Harbour Police DepartmentJustin Timberlake’s mugshot following his arrestCredit: Getty
Shortly after leaving The American Hotel following a night out with friends, the singer was pulled over while traveling southbound on Madison Street, a public highway in the Hamptons village.
Cops, often stationed nearby, noticed Justin swerving on the road and blowing through a stop sign.
They later smelled alcohol on his breath and noted that he was unsteady on his feet and also had slowed speech and glassy eyes.
The body cam footage of his arrest was released on Friday after the star’s legal team reportedly tried to previously prevent its release.
In the video, an officer can be seen shining a flashlight in Timberlake’s face at the roadside before the star performs poorly on sobriety tests.
He is asked to walk in a straight line but has difficulty with the instructions, appearing confused.
Timberlake tells them: “Guys, I’m just following my friends back to my house. I’m not doing anything.”
While attempting the sobriety test, he stumbles before apologising and saying ” I’m a little nervous”.
When asked to do the next test, the officers are forced to explain multiple times before Timberlake says “sorry, my heart is racing” while clutching his chest.
Looking unsteady on his feet, the singer is then heard saying: “By the way, these are like, really hard tests.”
After failing the roadside tests, an officer is then seen asking Timberlake “turn around for me please”.
Saying nothing and looking resigned, he slowly turns before he’s put in handcuffs.
A friend appears and is shocked when police tell her Justin is going with them, saying: “You’re arresting Justin Timberlake? Stop it. What?”
She pleads with the officers to speak with him and give him his phone before she takes his car home.
Timberlake was eventually put in handcuffsCredit: Sag Harbor Police DepartmentThe footage was released despite a challenge from his legal teamCredit: Sag Harbor Police Department
She begs: “Can you guys please do me a favour because you loved Bye Bye Bye or Sexy Back, do me one favour. This is insane.”
At the end of the footage, the 10-time Grammy winner can be seen in the back of a cop car behind bars.
He was taken into custody that night and arraigned in Sag Harbor Village Justice Court the following morning.
He was released without bail on his recognizance and was also charged with one count of DWI due to his refusal of the breathalyzer, according to Justin’s lawyer.
Timberlake’s lawyers previously sued the Village of Sag Harbor to prevent the release as it showed him “in an accutely vulnerable state”, reports CBS.
It was later agreed it would be released with redactions.
That September, Timberblake reached a plea deal to bring the case to an end.
The judge sentenced Justin to a $500 fine with a $260 surcharge, and 25 hours of community service at the nonprofit of his choosing.
After the sentencing, Justin said: “Even if you’ve had one drink, don’t get behind the wheel of a car.
“There are so many alternatives. You can call a friend [or] take an Uber.”
He added: “This is a mistake that I made, but I’m hoping that whoever is watching and listening right now can learn from this mistake. I know that I certainly have.”
During the proceedings the star remained standing throughout and gave a statement in which he expressed remorse for his actions.
He was unsteady on his feet when he was asked to walk in a straight lineCredit: Sag Harbor Police Department