Denise Richards’ estranged husband Aaron Phypers must continue to keep his distance from the actor and reality TV star as they move forward in their acrimonious divorce.
A Los Angeles judge on Friday granted the former “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star’s request to make her temporary restraining order against Phypers permanent. Richards was granted a five-year restraining order that restricts Phypers from buying or owning guns, contacting her or abusing her, among other restrictions, according to People. The order will expire Nov. 7, 2030.
Legal representatives for Richards and Phypers did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
The judgment comes after months of contentious hearings that uncovered scathing allegations about their relationship including accusations of infidelity, drug addiction and abuse.
Businessman Phypers, 53, filed to divorce Richards, 54, in July after six years of marriage. He cited irreconcilable differences and requested spousal support. According to court documents, Phypers said he has earned no money since closing down a business last year and estimates “Starship Troopers” actor Richards makes more than $250,000 a month from several business ventures including brand deals, TV and OnlyFans content. Phypers has asked to keep their assets and debts as separate property, including his power tools, motorcycle and sports car, legal documents showed.
Richards and Phypers began dating in 2017 and married in September 2018 in a private ceremony in Malibu. They share no children, though Richards has three: two daughters she shares with ex-husband Charlie Sheen and a teenage daughter she adopted as an infant. Phypers was previously married to “Desperate Housewives” star Nicollette Sheridan from 2015 to 2018.
Weeks after Phypers filed for divorce, Richards fired back and offered a damning account of their marriage. She accused her estranged spouse of abuse, death threats and possession of unregistered weapons in a request for a temporary restraining order that was granted by the Los Angeles County Superior Court in July. Phypers, who denied the allegations, at the time was ordered to stay 100 yards away from Richards and her car, workplace and home, and was told he could not possess firearms or body armor.
“Wild Things” actor Richards referred to abuse that allegedly occurred during their marriage, including between July 4 and July 14, after she had moved out of the family home and into three townhouses that she uses separately as a studio, an office and her residence.
Since July, the pair have fiercely traded barbs in public statements and legal documents. Phypers accused Richards of cheating on him with another man and of scaring his parents when she arrived at their Calabasas home in early August to retrieve her dogs, among other allegations. In court documents, Richards accused Phypers and his family of refusing to vacate that Calabasas abode after allegedly failing repeatedly to pay rent for the property. She also accused the Canadian and his family of trashing the home.
Amid their legal battle, Phypers was arrested in October after a heated courthouse hearing. Law enforcement took Phypers into custody and charged him with two felony counts of injuring a spouse and two felony counts of dissuading a witness by force or threat, according to TMZ. He was swiftly released after posting $200,000 bond.
Times assistant editor Christie D’Zurilla contributed to this report.
“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” slots into summer blockbuster season like a square peg in a round popcorn bucket. Prestige TV director Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”) isn’t inclined to pretzel himself like the flexible Reed Richards to please all four quadrants of the multiplex. His staid superhero movie plays like classic sci-fi in which adults wearing sweater vests solemnly brainstorm how to resolve a crisis. Watching it, I felt as snug as being nestled in the backseat of my grandparents’ car at the drive-in.
This reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise — the third in two decades — is lightyears closer to 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” than it is to the frantic, over-cluttered superhero epics that have come to define modern entertainment. Set on Earth 828, an alternate universe that borrows our own Atomic Age decor, it doesn’t just look old, it moves old. The tone and pace are as sure-footed as globe-gobbling Galactus, this film’s heavy, purposefully marching into alt-world Manhattan. Even its tidy running time is from another epoch. Under two hours? Now that’s vintage chic.
“First Steps” picks up several years after four astronauts — Reed (Pedro Pascal), his wife, Sue (Vanessa Kirby), his brother-in-law Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and his best friend Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — get themselves blasted by cosmic rays that endow them with special powers. You may know the leads better as, respectively, Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing. For mild comic relief, they also pal around with a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., voiced by Matthew Wood.
Skipping their origin story keeps things tight while underlining the idea that these are settled-down grown-ups secure in their abilities to lengthen, disappear, ignite and clobber. Fans might argue they should be a bit more neurotic; screenplay structuralists will grumble they have no narrative arc. The mere mortals of Earth 828 respect the squad for their brains and their brawn — they’re celebrities in a genteel pre-paparazzi time — but these citizens are also prone to despair when they aren’t sure Pascal’s workaholic daddy will save them.
Lore has it Stan Lee was a married, middle-aged father aging out of writing comic books when his beloved spouse, Joan, elbowed him to develop characters who felt personal. The graying, slightly boring Reed was a loose-limbed version of himself: the ultimate wife guy with the ultimate wife.
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But Hollywood has aged-down Lee’s “quaint quartet,” as he called them, at its own peril. Make the Fantastic Four cool (as the movies have repeatedly tried and failed to do) and they come across as desperately lame. This time, Shakman and the script’s four-person writing team of Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer valorize their lameness and restore their dignity. Pascal’s Mr. Fantastic is so buttoned-down that he tucks his tie into his dress shirt.
The scenario is that Sue is readying to give birth to the Richards’ first child just as the herald Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), a.k.a. the Silver Surfer, barrels into the atmosphere to politely inform humanity that her boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) has RSVP-ed yes to her invitation that he devour their planet. In a biologically credible touch, the animators have added tarnish to her cleavage: “I doubt she was naked,” Reed says evenly. “It was probably a stellar polymer.”
Typically, this threat would trigger a madcap fetch-this-gizmo caper (as it did in the original comic). Shakman’s version doesn’t waste its energy or our time on that. Rather, this a lean showdown between self-control and gluttony, between our modest heroes and a greedy titan. It’s at the Venn diagram of a Saturday morning cartoon and a moralistic Greek myth.
The film is all sleek lines, from its themes to its architecture to its images. The visuals by the cinematographer Jess Hall are crisp and impactful: a translucent hand snatching at a womb, a character falling into the pull of a yawning black hole, a torso stretched like chewing gum, a rocket launch that can’t blast off until we get a close-up of everyone buckling their seatbelts. Even in space, the CG isn’t razzle-dazzle busy. Meanwhile, Michael Giacchino’s score soars between bleats of triumph and barbershop-chorus charm, a combination that can sound like an automobile show unveiling the first convertible with tail fins.
There is little brawling and less snark. No one comes off like an aspiring stand-up comic. These characters barely raise their voices and often use their abilities on the mundane: Kirby’s Sue vanishes to avoid awkward conversations, Moss-Bachrach’s Ben, in a nod to his breakout role as the maître d’ on “The Bear,” uses his mighty fists to mash garlic. Johnny, the youngest and most literally hotheaded of the group, is apt to light himself on fire when he can’t be bothered to find a flashlight. He delivers the meanest quip in a respectful movie when he tells Reed, “I take back every single bad thing I’ve been saying about you … to myself, in private.”
Yes, my audience giggled dutifully at the jiggling Jell-O salads and drooled over the groovy conversation pits in the Richards’ living room, the only super lair I’d ever live in. The color palette emphasizes retro shades of blue, green and gold; even the extras have coordinated their outfits to the trim on the Fantasticar. Delightfully, when Moss-Bachrach’s brawny rock monster strolls to the deli to buy black-and-white cookies, he’s wearing a gargantuan pair of penny loafers.
If you want to feel old, the generation of middle schoolers who saw 2008’s “Iron Man” on opening weekend are now beginning to raise their own children. Thirty-seven films later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten so insecure about its own mission that it’s pitching movies at every maturity level. The recent “Thunderbolts*” is for surly teenagers, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is the drunk, divorced uncle at a BBQ, and “First Steps” extends a sympathetic hand to young families who identify with Reed’s frustration that he can’t childproof the entire galaxy.
Here, for a mass audience, Kirby gets to reprise her underwatched Oscar-nominated turn in “Pieces of a Woman,” in which she extended out a 24-minute, single-take labor scene. This karaoke snippet is good (and even a little operatic when the pain makes her dematerialize). I was as impressed by the costumer Alexandra Byrne’s awareness that even super moms won’t immediately snap back into wearing tight spandex. (By contrast, when Jessica Alba played Sue in 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” the director notoriously asked her to be “prettier” when she cried.)
This reboot’s boldest stride toward progress is that it values emotionally credible performances. Otherwise, Pascal aside, you wouldn’t assemble this cast for any audience besides critics and dweebs (myself included) who keep a running list of their favorite not-quite-brand-name talents who are ready to break through to the next level of their career while yelling, “It’s clobbering time!”
Still, this isn’t anyone’s best role, and it’s a great movie only when compared to similarly budgeted dreck. Yet it’s a worthy exercise in creating something that doesn’t feel nostalgic for an era — it feels of an era. Even if the MCU’s take on slow cinema doesn’t sell tickets in our era, I admire the confidence of a movie that sets its own course instead of chasing the common wisdom that audiences want 2½ hours of chaos. Studio executives continuing to insist on that nonsense deserve Marvel’s first family to give them a disappointed talking-to, and send them to back their boardrooms without supper.
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’
Rated: PG-13, for action/violence and some language
Denise Richards has accused estranged husband Aaron Phypers of abuse, death threats and possession of unregistered weapons in a request for a temporary restraining order that was granted Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Phypers, who filed for divorce on July 7 and gave July 4 as the date of separation, has denied abusing Richards.
Richards’ TRO request, reviewed by The Times, refers to abuse that allegedly occurred during their marriage, including between July 4 and July 14, after she had moved out of the family home and into three townhouses that she uses separately as a studio, an office and her residence.
“Throughout our relationship, Aaron would frequently violently choke me, violently squeeze my head with both hands, tightly squeeze my arms, violently slap me in my face and head, aggressively slam my head into the bathroom towel rack, threaten to kill me, hold me down with his knee on my back to the point where I would have to plead with him to get off me so that he would not kill me,” Richards said in her filing.
She added that he “regularly threatened to ‘break my jaw’ and would cry, beg me to stay, and promise to get help — none of which ever happened.”
Richards alleged that Phypers gave her at least three concussions and regularly called her profane and degrading names. She also accused him of downloading her private text messages to her laptop and taking photos of the texts.
“Until now, I have been afraid to report Aaron to the police or file for a restraining order because he has repeatedly threatened to kill himself and me if I reported him to the police,” Richards said in the document, “among his other threats of harm to me and himself if he is reported for his abuse to anyone.”
She said he told her he had eight unregistered guns and some bulletproof vests.
Describing an incident from mid-April, she alleged that she had returned from a business trip and told Phypers he could not stay at the studio townhouse and had to leave. She locked the doors behind him.
While she was unpacking, Richards said in the filing, “Aaron climbed onto the balcony and pushed through the screen and entered the room I was in on the second floor. Once inside, Aaron aggressively approached me and grabbed the back of my head by my hair and pushed me on the ground and put his knee on my back so I could not get up. He would often do this. Aaron then screamed in my face.”
Richards said she told Phypers that she was going to call the police.
“[H]e responded, as he typically did, ‘Watch them try and take me away, they have no idea who they are dealing with and you have no idea who you are dealing with.’ When he refused to leave, I felt unsafe and chose to leave the premises.”
Richards also included photos of herself from January 2022 showing a severe black eye, which she alleged she got when Phypers hit her with “the heel of his palm” during an after-hours incident at his workplace.
There was yelling during the incident, which attracted a police officer who happened to be in the parking lot. After the officer left, Phypers “resumed screaming,” she said, then struck her and used profanity, calling her a derogatory name, she alleged in the filing.
Phypers, born Aaron William Cameron and referred to in the TRO request as Aaron William Cameron Phypers, has denied Richards’ allegations, telling TMZ in a statement Thursday that they are “false and deeply hurtful.” He told the website that he never abused her or anyone else physically or emotionally.
Phypers and actor Nicollette Sheridan of “Desperate Housewives” got married secretly in December 2015, but she filed for divorce six months later. That split wasn’t finalized until August 2018.
He and Richards began their relationship in 2017. They wed a little more than a year later in September 2018, a month after Phypers and Sheridan’s split was finalized, in a private ceremony in Malibu. Richards was previously married to “Two and a Half Men” star Charlie Sheen from 2002 to 2006.
For now, Phypers must stay 100 yards away from Richards and her car, workplace and home and cannot possess firearms or body armor. She requested that he return her laptops and asked for permission to record any phone calls that violate the stay-away order. A hearing on making the restraining order permanent is scheduled for Aug. 8.
Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.
West Indies have been battling with “systemic issues” for 25 years that have left them with players “ill-equipped” to deal with the challenges they faced against Australia, according to Trinidadian commentator Fazeer Mohammed.
“It was almost the perfect storm,” he told BBC Sport.
“You’ve got Mitchell Starc, a world class bowler, deadly in any sort of situation and even deadlier with the pink ball, coming up against players really ill-equipped to deal with those sorts of challenges.
“Everything was set up for something like this to happen. You never really factor in 27 all out but, in the general context of West Indies cricket, this was an accident waiting to happen.”
While Lara has been drafted in to help find a solution to the problems facing the current side, Mohammed believes the iconic left-hander’s heroics were part of the reason a lot of the issues were masked for so long.
“What lies behind it is the failure to address the fundamental challenges in our domestic game – in our regional game,” he added.
“We have many different challenges. Fundamental to those would be costs because we have many different territories – it’s very costly to travel around the Caribbean, to host tournaments.
“There’s an air of resignation about it. People will this morning be arguing amongst themselves and debating about how this can happen, who needs to be fired, who needs to be dropped, who needs to be got rid of.
“It’s the same sort of knee-jerk reaction and then they’ll shrug their shoulders and say ‘well this is how it is now’.”
It is almost two and a half years since West Indies last won a Test series – 1-0 in Zimbabwe – and three years since their last home series victory, 2-0 against Bangladesh.
“I don’t think all is lost by any stretch of the imagination,” Mohammed said.
“It requires at a very fundamental level at the schools, at the under-19, under-23 levels a serious financial investment in growing the quality of the game – male and female.
“But also there has to be, first and foremost, that recognition that Test cricket still means something to us in the Caribbean.”
It seems Denise Richards and husband Aaron Phypers are going their separate ways after six years of marriage.
Phypers filed his petition to divorce actor and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Richards on Monday, The Times has confirmed. The businessman filed his petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court. He cites “irreconcilable differences” for the split and lists July 4 as the date of his separation from Richards.
A representative for Richards did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
“Wild Things” actor Richards, 54, tied the knot with Phypers, 49, in 2018. They do not share children, but Richards has two adult daughters with ex-husband Charlie Sheen. She and the “Two and a Half Men” actor were married from 2002 to 2006. Richards is also the mother to a teenage daughter whom she adopted as an infant.
Phypers was previously married to “Desperate Housewives” star Nicollette Sheridan from 2015 to 2018.
Phypers is reportedly seeking spousal support from his now-estranged wife, according to court documents reviewed by The Times. In his declaration, Phypers says he has made no income since closing down a business last year and estimates Richards makes more than $250,000 a month from several business ventures including brand deals, TV and OnlyFans content. Phypers has asked to keep their assets and debts as separate property, including his power tools, motorcycle and sports car, legal documents show.
The couple began their relationship in 2017 and married a little more than a year later in a private ceremony in Malibu. They wed in September 2018, a month after Phypers finalized his divorce from Sheridan.
Though Richards has not publicly commented on Phypers’ decision to file, she made her thoughts on divorce pretty clear earlier this year. In the debut episode of her Peacock series “Denise Richards & Her Wild Things,” Richards said in a confessional interview, “I’m never getting divorced again. Even if we hate each other, I’m not gonna f— get divorced.”
Phypers responded: “No, we’ll just have different homes or something. But we’re not gonna hate each other.”
