A third “Gremlins” movie is officially in the works and eyeing a theatrical release ahead of the 2027 holiday season, Warner Bros. Discovery President and Chief Executive David Zaslav announced Thursday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. The upcoming project is set to hit theaters Nov. 19, 2027, and will reunite original “Gremlins” scribe Chris Columbus with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, which produced the first two “Gremlins” films.
Columbus will direct and produce the film and Spielberg returns as an executive producer, Zaslav said. The new “Gremlins” film will be franchise’s first movie in more than 30 years. Columbus will write the script with “Final Destination Bloodlines” directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein.
Oscar nominee Columbus introduced audiences to the mysterious and maniacal ways of the Mogwai — furry, wide-eyed bipeds with giant ears — with the release of “Gremlins” in 1984. The first film, directed by Joe Dante, established the three nonnegotiables of Mogwai care: Don’t get them wet, don’t feed them after midnight and don’t expose them to bright light. Both the 1984 release and its 1990 sequel, also directed by Dante but written by Charles S. Haas, tracks the havoc that arises when the first two rules are ignored, from unstoppable spawning to unruly mutation into Gremlins.
The “Gremlins” films starred Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Howie Mandel as the voice of two-toned Mogwai Gizmo and Frank Welker as the voices of the films’ antagonists.
Though it has been decades since the last “Gremlins” movie hit the big screen, the furballs got their own spotlight in the 2023 animated prequel TV series “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.”
The series, from showrunner and executive producer Tze Chun, took a deep look into its namesake creatures’ origins, briefly hinted at in the first film by shopkeeper Mr. Wing (played by the Chinese American actor Keye Luke). “Secrets of the Mogwai” zooms in on Mr. Wing’s relationship with Gizmo, who became a through line in the “Gremlins” movies.
Series executive producer Brendan Hay told The Times in 2023 that setting “Secrets of the Mogwai” in 1920s China was “a chance to own the somewhat throwaway origin that the Mogwai have in the films.”
“In the films, it’s clear that they’re of Chinese origin, but it’s not that developed,” Hay said. “This is our chance to tell that story and really embrace it [by] actually try[ing] to find a place for Mogwai that fits into Chinese mythology, or at least builds off of existing Chinese mythology, and have fun in that world.”
Galligan hinted this summer that a new “Gremlins” movie was in the works while appearing at Comic-Con Manchester. According to a TikTok, the actor said “they’ve come up with a script” and that Warner Bros. was “incredibly interested in doing it, apparently it’s waiting upon Mr. Spielberg to read it and approve it.”
REMEMBER those big rectangular pre-digital VHS tapes?
Well, Shooter Jennings, son of late country music great Waylon, has held on to a few of them.
Sign up for the Showbiz newsletter
Thank you!
Waylon Jennings is remembered as a pioneer of the ‘Outlaw’ country sceneCredit: HandoutWaylon with The Dukes Of Hazzard stars Tom Wopat and John Schneider in 1984Credit: AlamyWaylon’s son Shooter Jennings
Now I’ll explain why they’re so precious to him.
They contain episodes of a TV show almost as popular as Dallas in the early Eighties — The Dukes Of Hazzard.
As the opening credits roll, you see “The General Lee”, a souped-up 1969 orange Dodge Charger, careering into view.
Inside are outlaw cousins Bo and Luke Duke, on the run from crooked officials, Boss Hogg and Sheriff Rosco P Coltrane.
You hear the rollicking theme tune, Good Ol’ Boys, being sung in commanding, if tongue-in-cheek fashion by — you might have guessed — Waylon Jennings.
He also serves as the show’s laidback narrator, The Balladeer, and one of his pearls of wisdom is about poster girl Daisy Duke, remembered for her skimpy denim shorts.
“She drives like [stock car racer] Richard Petty, shoots like Annie Oakley, and knows the words to all of Dolly Parton’s songs.”
But he doesn’t appear on screen until season seven when, after demands from fans, he is presented as an old friend of the Dukes in an episode titled Welcome, Waylon Jennings.
‘A massive cultural moment’
“Just last night, my wife and I were watching some episodes,” Shooter tells me via Zoom from America’s West Coast as we discuss a fabulous new project involving his father’s previously unreleased music.
“It made me think what a massive cultural moment the show was,” he continues. “Just how perfect my father’s voice was for it.
“I think he loved doing those shows and it wasn’t a lot of work for him. He’d be on the road and just stop by a studio and do the voiceovers.
“There’s real humility about them. He seems to be making fun of himself the whole time. It’s really funny to hear.”
Waylon is remembered as a pioneer of the “Outlaw” country scene, a singer who wrestled the Nashville music-making machine and won control over his recorded output.
Hellraiser, maverick and bearer of a rich baritone, he was an obvious choice to join fellow renegades Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in Eighties supergroup The Highwaymen.
Born in Littlefield, Texas, in 1937, he was consumed by music at an early age and, in 1958, came under the wing of Buddy Holly, who arranged his first recording session.
Shooter says: “If my dad had got on the plane, the music world would be quite different. I often think what it must have been like for him to have survived that.
“Throughout his life, Buddy was huge to him and he used to talk about him all the time.
“A lot of his spirit and energy came from rock and roll, from Buddy, who gave him little lessons in songwriting.
“But he also loved country music, the beauty and sentiment of it, and his voice was just so vulnerable and awesome.”
From the mid-Sixties onwards, Waylon would become a fixture at the top of the country charts but his best work appeared after he gained creative control from RCA Records in 1973.
He delivered a string of fine unvarnished albums including Lonesome, On’ry And Mean, Honky Tonk Heroes, Dreaming My Dreams and Are You Ready For The Country.
In 1979, he and fourth wife Jessi Colter, a fellow “Outlaw” country singer, had their only child together, Waylon Albright “Shooter” Jennings.
The Albright comes from Richie Albright, Waylon Snr’s right- hand man and drummer in The Waylors.
And the main reason I’m talking to Shooter is because he has unearthed a goldmine of unreleased Waylon recordings, taped between 1973 and 1984.
This has resulted in the appearance of Songbird, the first of three albums culled from the material and lovingly restored by him with the help of surviving members of his dad’s band, along with younger musicians and backing singers.
‘Passion and soul alive today’
“It’s been surreal,” says Shooter, a singer in his own right and in-demand producer. “Everything has lined up for me to have this purpose.
“This project has given me an entirely new chapter in my relationship with my father and working on this music has brought a whole new understanding about how, when and why my dad made music.
“The hard work is there on the tapes and the passion and the soul within is as alive today as it was the day it was recorded.”
I guess the reason The Dukes Of Hazzard cropped up in our chat is because much of the Songbird album’s music was recorded around the same time as the show aired.
Then I just kept finding these hidden albums,” he says. “It didn’t feel like stuff that was not meant to be released and there were songs I never knew he’d attempted.
Shooter Jennings
Shooter became aware of Waylon’s buried treasure in 2008, “about six years after he died” aged 64 from complications of diabetes.
But the project only began in earnest last summer when he started sorting through hundreds of high-resolution multitrack transfers of his father’s personal studio recordings.
What Shooter discovered blew his mind.
Listening to his dad performing with his ace band became “a wild adventure”. When Shooter heard their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours track Songbird, written by Christine McVie, he realised he was on to something “really exciting”.
“Then I just kept finding these hidden albums,” he says. “It didn’t feel like stuff that was not meant to be released and there were songs I never knew he’d attempted.”
Shooter says that much of the material was “professional cuts with a lot of attention to detail, much more than sketches”.
“My mom told me that my dad always said that every song he recorded should be good enough to be a single when it was done. He had a great work ethic.”
Hellraiser, maverick and bearer of a rich baritone, he was an obvious choice to join fellow renegades Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in Eighties supergroup The HighwaymenCredit: RedfernsShooter Jennings discovered his late father Waylon’s haunting cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird while restoring hundreds of lost studio tapes — inspiring a new album that brings the legend’s voice back to lifeCredit: Getty
Shooter settled on Songbird as the opening track and album title because he realised that Waylon “was a kind of songbird”.
“I wanted to hit home how good a song interpreter he was and how he could make a song his own,” he says. “And I wanted to bring him back with an emotional song, one that’s going to make you cry.
“Every time I play it for anyone, they tear up at the bit which goes, ‘And I feel that when I’m with you, it’s all right’.
“It’s such a beautiful take that people are shocked they haven’t heard it before.”
In order to take Songbird to even greater heights, Shooter enlisted contemporary country singers Ashley Monroe and Elizabeth Cook to provide backing vocals.
‘Obsessed with Hank Williams’
“They’re the funniest people, like a duo, and they’re hillbillies like me,” he says.
“Elizabeth and I have been really good friends for 15 years plus and she brought Ashley to my studio around the time I was going through this.
“And they were so moved by Songbird. I realised their airy, birdlike voices could elevate it to some fantasy realm.
“So I asked them to come back and do some background vocals and they really killed it.”
Also adding finishing flourishes to the album’s ten tracks are some surviving Waylors including guitarist Gordon Payne, bassist Jerry Bridges, keyboardist Barny Robertson, and backing vocalist Carter Robertson.
The second song The Cowboy (Small Texas Town) is credited to Johnny Rodriguez but Shooter suspects his father had a hand in writing it.
These telling lines back up that theory: “My long shaggy hair, and the clothes that I wear/Ain’t fit for no big fancy ball.”
The song fits with Waylon’s image of staying true to his humble origins — a quality Shooter sees in today’s stars such as Charley Crockett, Tyler Childers and Benjamin Tod.
He credits his father with blazing a trail for these independent spirits thanks to his battle with RCA Records. “My dad really opened it up. And even though Nashville got their grip back on it for a little while, they’ve been blown apart now.
“They’re just scrambling to find anyone who’s like one of these guys.”
I ask Shooter what Waylon used to tell him about growing up in Littlefield, Texas.
“He would tell me how poor they were, for sure, that they had dirt floors, that his mom would put him in places the rats wouldn’t get to.”
When Waylon became famous, the town would hold a Waylon Jennings Day and their favourite son “would go back there and do a show”.
Shooter adds: “I loved my dad’s family, his brothers and his mom. I got to know all of them and his brother James is still around and runs this little gas station there.”
Unbeknown to the residents of Littlefield in 2025, Shooter decided to put up billboards around town featuring lyrics to some of the Songbird songs.
He and Johnny [Cash] came from the exact same background. They both picked cotton. They both listened to Hank Williams on the radio and both journeyed to Mecca [Nashville] to make music.
Shooter Jennings
“I didn’t even tell them. But when we put out that song, The Cowboy, I really wanted to put the focus on Littlefield.”
We’ve heard about Buddy Holly but I’m keen to find out from Shooter who else was his father’s music hero. He instantly mentions country music’s first superstar — Hank Williams, who lived fast and died young.
“My father was obsessed with Hank Williams. He was similar in a way because of the vision he had for his songs.”
As for Waylon’s reputation as a hellraiser, Shooter has this to say: “It’s funny, he didn’t drink. People always get that wrong.
“He only did the uppers but we had an empty alcohol cabinet in our house because he just didn’t get any.”
And what does Waylon’s recently remarried widow Jessi Colter, Shooter’s mother, think of the Songbird project?
“She has helped us,” he replies. “I had to borrow money from her to do it because I didn’t want to get a label involved.
“She was also a great emotional support to me, even if she wasn’t emotionally tied up in the project.”
Hearing Waylon sing “didn’t make her sad but she loved it. She’d say something like, ‘They sound like they were having a good time that day.’ ”
Before we go our separate ways, Shooter opens up about Waylon’s famous friends, notably his Highwaymen buddies Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, still touring and making records at 94.
Waylon and Cash shared an apartment in Nashville in the mid-Sixties and had a strong, if sometimes tempestuous bond.
“They loved each other,” says Shooter. “Just like anybody else, they would have little bicker fights and not talk for a couple of weeks here or there.
“But he had a great relationship with Johnny and June [Carter Cash].
“He and Johnny came from the exact same background. They both picked cotton. They both listened to Hank Williams on the radio and both journeyed to Mecca [Nashville] to make music.”
Shooter continues: “And I loved Cash. We used to go to his house when I was little. He was always very nice to me.”
Shooter in the studio with his father in 1995Credit: Beth Gwinn1995
He also remembers hanging out with Nelson’s daughters Amy and Paula. “We were all around the same age and together on the road during the Waylon and Willie tours.
“And then The Highwaymen happened and I was around Kristofferson’s kids because they lived in Tennessee.
California voters delivered a major victory for Democrats nationwide Tuesday — and possibly for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political ambitions — by passing a redistricting plan that could help the party seize as many as five congressional seats in the 2026 midterm elections.
The ballot measure was seen as a searing denunciation of President Trump and his administration’s policies, which have included divisive immigration raids, steep tariffs, cuts to healthcare and a military occupation of Los Angeles.
Proposition 50 was launched at warp speed in August in an attempt to counter President Trump’s successful attempt to pressure Republican-led states, most notably Texas, to gerrymander their own states to keep Democrats from gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. If Democrats gain power they could imperil his agenda and launch investigations into his administration.
“After poking the bear, this bear roared,” Newsom said Tuesday night shortly after the polls closed and the Associated Press determined Proposition 50 had passed.
Newsom said he was proud of California for standing up to Trump and called on other states with Democrat-controlled legislatures to pass their own redistricting plans.
“I hope it’s dawning on people, the sobriety of this moment,” he said.
The president, meanwhile, in a post Tuesday morning on his social media site called the vote “A GIANT SCAM” and “RIGGED” and said it is “under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!” The White House did not explain what he meant by “serious legal and criminal review.” After the polls closed, Trump again posted, writing enigmatically: “…AND SO IT BEGINS.”
Newsom early Tuesday dismissed Trump’s threats as “the ramblings of an old man that knows he’s about to LOSE.”
Proposition 50 will change how California determines the boundaries of congressional districts. The measure asked voters to approve new congressional district lines designed to favor Democrats for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections, overriding the map drawn by the state’s nonpartisan, independent redistricting commission.
The measure, placed by the ballot by the Democratic-led state Legislature and pushed by Newsom, reconfigured the state’s congressional districts in favor of Democrats, shifting five more House districts into competitive or easily winnable territory for Democrats. California has 43 Democrats and nine Republicans in the House; now the number of GOP members could be cut in half.
While Newsom and Democratic partisans framed the passage of Proposition 50 — which they had dubbed the Election Rigging Response Act — as a major blow against Trump’s iron grip on the federal government, it is far from guaranteed to flip the balance of power in the U.S. House, where Republicans hold a slim majority.
For one, spurred on by Trump, Republican-led states are busy pursuing their own redistricting plans. Several Republican-controlled states including North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri are moving ahead.
What’s more, California voters in the fall of 2026 would then have to be convinced to choose Democratic challengers over incumbent Republicans in those newly crafted districts — and many current GOP members of Congress have said they don’t plan to go quietly.
“Here’s something Newsom and his cronies don’t know: It won’t work,” said Congressman Darrell Issa, a San Diego-area Republican whose seat was targeted by the newly redrawn maps. “The worst gerrymander in history has a fatal flaw. Voters get to pick their representatives. Not the other way around. I’m not going anywhere.”
Congressman Doug LaMalfa whose Northern California district was carved up and diluted with left-leaning coastal voters, said he was “standing in the fight. They’re not going to kidnap my district here without a battle.”
What is sure, however, is that Proposition 50 is a big win for Newsom, who has propelled his fight with Trump onto the national political stage as one of the loudest voices standing against the new administration.
Campaigning for Proposition 50, Newsom mocked Trump on the social media site X with sarcastic, Trumpesque all-caps media posts. The governor won viral fame, guest spots on late-night shows and millions of dollars from Democratic donors around the country delighted to see someone jousting with the president. In recent days, Newsom has begun talking openly about a possible run for president in 2028, after telling CBS last month that he would be lying if he tried to pretend he wasn’t considering it.
The new congressional districts also are expected to set off a mad scramble among ambitious Democratic politicians.
Already, Audrey Denney, a strategist and education director, has announced she will once again mount a campaign against LaMalfa, who represents an area that has been split into two districts saturated with Democratic voters. Former state Sen. Richard Pan, meanwhile, has indicated he intends to target Congressman Kevin Kiley, who saw his hometown of Rocklin yanked out of his district and replaced with parts of more-Democratic Sacramento.
One of the biggest effects of the measure may be the way it has enraged many of the state’s rural voters, and left even those who are registered Democrats feeling as though state leaders don’t care about their needs.
“They think our voices are so small that we don’t count, and because we’re red,” fumed Monica Rossman, the chairwoman of the Glenn County Board of Supervisors in rural Northern California. “This is just one more way of them squeezing us rural people.”
Rossman described Newsom in obscene terms this week and added that “people from urban areas, they don’t realize that us people from One-Taco-Bell-Towns don’t know what it’s like to drive by a dealership and see nothing but battery-operated vehicles. By traffic, we mean Ted’s cows are out again and we have to wait for them to get out of the way. We’re going to have people making decisions about areas they know nothing about.”
But as they headed to polling places across the state, many voters said the Trump administration’s actions in California — from funding cuts to the prolonged immigration raids —convinced them that radical measures were necessary.
Adee Renteria, who came to vote at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in East Los Angeles decked out from head to toe in celebratory Dodgers gear, said she was voting yes on Proposition 50 because “I want a fricking voice.”
“I want our people to be able to walk the streets without getting kidnapped,” she said, adding that she believed the measure would allow Democrats a chance at fighting back against policies that she said had sown terror in her community.
In Buena Park, Guarav Jain, 33, said he had braved long lines to cast his ballot “to prove that we can fight back on the crazy things Trump says.”
“This is the first chance to make our voice heard since the [presidential] election last November,” he added.
The path to Proposition 50, which ranks as the fourth most expensive ballot measure in California history, began in June. That was when Trump’s political team began pushing Texas Republicans to redraw the lines for that state’s 38 congressional districts to gain five Republican seats and give his party a better shot at holding the House after the midterm elections.
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed on to the idea, Newsom jumped in to announce that California, which has 52 representatives, would counter by redrawing its own districts to try to pick up as many as five seats for Democrats.
“We’re giving the American people a fair chance,” Newsom said in August, adding that California was “responding to what occurred in Texas.”
The move outraged California Republicans and also angered some people, such as former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are no fans of Trump. Some opponents argued that it was an affront to an independent congressional redistricting commission that California voters created in 2010 with the passage of Proposition 20 — an effort to provide fair representation to all Californians.
“They are trying to fight for democracy by getting rid of the democratic principles of California.… It is insane to let that happen,” Schwarzenegger said at an event at USC in September. “Doesn’t make any sense to me — that because we have to fight Trump, to become Trump.”
But Schwarzenegger didn’t do much to actively campaign against the measure and the No side was far outgunned financially. Proponents raised more than $100 million, according to campaign finance reports, while the No side raised about $43.7 million.
A star-studded cast of Democratic leaders also flooded the airwaves to support the measure, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. President Obama spoke on the issue in ads that aired during the World Series. “Democracy is on the ballot Nov. 4,” the former president said.
The new congressional district maps are only temporary. They will be in place for elections next year and in 2028 and 2030. After that, California’s independent redistricting commission will resume its duties in drawing the maps.
What may be longer lasting, some rural representatives said, is a sense among many in California’s heartland that their voices don’t count.
LaMalfa, the congressman who saw his deep red district divided into two blue urban areas, said many of his constituents — who work in farming, timber and ranching — believe many state policies are “stacked against them and they have nowhere to go.”
“What they do have is a voice that understands their plight and is willing to speak for them. I am one of the people who does that,” he said. “You don’t have that anymore if you have taken all those folks and just drawn them into urban voters districts.”
Times staff writers Sonja Sharp, Katie King and Katerina Portela contributed to this report.
British actor Samantha Eggar, the Oscar-nominated star of films including “The Collector,” “Doctor Dolittle” and David Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” has died. She was 86.
Eggar died Wednesday evening, her daughter Jenna Stern announced Friday on Instagram. Stern said her mother died “peacefully and quietly surrounded by family” and recalled being by the actor’s side “telling her how much she was loved.” A cause of death was not revealed.
Stern described her mother, who was also a prolific TV actor, as “beautiful, intelligent, and tough enough to be fascinatingly vulnerable.”
Eggar pursued a film career that spanned the 1960s to the 1990s and was most celebrated for her work in “The Collector,” directed by William Wyler. The psychological horror movie, based on John Fowles’ novel of the same name, featured Eggar as the youthful art student abducted by a reclusive young man portrayed by Terence Stamp. For the thriller, Eggar collected the Cannes Film Festival‘s actress prize plus a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.
After the film’s release, Eggar secured numerous roles, notably in the 1967 iteration of “Doctor Dolittle” opposite Rex Harrison, “Walk, Don’t Run” with Cary Grant, “The Molly Maguires” and “The Walking Stick.”
One of Eggar’s most memorable roles was in Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” released in 1979. She starred as Nola Carveth, a mental patient receiving radical psychotherapy treatment amid a series of mysterious murders. The film also starred Oliver Reed and Art Hindle.
Throughout her film career, Eggar also appeared in scores of television series ranging from “Anna and the King” (opposite “The King and I” star Yul Brynner), “Starsky & Hutch,” “The Love Boat” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Her more substantial TV roles included a voice-acting part in the animated series “The Legend of Prince Valiant,” which ran for two seasons, and a stint as Charlotte Devane on the daytime drama “All My Children.”
The actor also lent her voice as Hera in Disney’s “Hercules,” then reprised the role in the animated classic’s spinoff video game and TV series.
Eggar was born March 5, 1939, in Hampstead, London. Her father was a British Army brigadier and her mother served as an ambulance driver during World War II. She studied art and fashion at the Thanet School of Art and pursed acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, according to a statement her daughter shared. Later in life, Eggar returned to the stage, performing “The Lonely Road” at the Old Vic and “The Seagull” at Oxford Playhouse and Theatre Royal, Bath.
She also brought her talents to radio, lending her voice to more than 40 productions for the California Artists Radio Theatre. Eggar was an animal enthusiast and supporter of several environment and health causes.
“Samantha Eggar will be remembered not only for her unforgettable performances but for her generosity, wit, and love of life,” the statement said.
Eggar is survived by her children Nicolas and Jenna, grandchildren Isabel, Charlie and Calla; and sisters Margaret Barron, Toni Maricic, and Vivien Thursby.
Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami went up, up, up for their “Golden” moment on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”
The trio, who provide the singing voices for the animated “KPop Demon Hunters” central girl group Huntr/x, hit the late-night TV show Tuesday to perform the Netflix movie’s signature song. It marks the first time they have hit the stage together for a live, full-length performance of “Golden,” and even Fallon could not contain his excitement.
The first No. 1 female K-pop song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, “Golden” has helped propel the “KPop Demon Hunters” soundtrack to its newest accolade. Fallon informed Ejae, Nuna and Ami during the show that the record had gone platinum.
When asked about their experiences around the massive popularity of “KPop Demon Hunters,” the trio offered words including “surreal,” “scrumptious” “delicious,” “stunning” and “bonkers.”
“We try to come up with new adjectives every time,” said Nuna, who provides the singing voice for Mira.
Their “Tonight Show” appearance follows their brief cameo on the Season 51 premiere of “Saturday Night Live.” During their sitdown interview with Fallon, both Nuna and Ami (the singing voice of Zoey) recounted real-life encounters with “Golden” that drove home the magnitude of “KPop Demon Hunters’” impact.
For Nuna this happened on a trip to Korea when she saw an elderly street performer playing “Golden” on a traditional Korean instrument.
“I had to do a double take because in Korean culture, it’s especially impressive if an elderly person is impressed with you,” said Nuna, who explained that Korean elders rarely bat an eye at accomplishments like attending an Ivy League college or graduating top of your class. “It’s really hard [to impress them]. They have high standards. So for the older generation to embrace it, it’s something different.”
Ami’s encounter was with a much younger fan. She recalled a trip to an H Mart where she saw a young boy singing “Golden” at the top of his lungs while holding hands with his mother.
“I think it’s one thing to hear our song on the radio, but to hear it come out of a child, live?” Ami said. “In H Mart, my favorite place? … I just cried at HMart.”
Ejae, meanwhile, offered an anecdote that suggests “Golden’s” success may have been preordained.
Prompted by Fallon, the co-writer of “Golden” shared that while recording her part of the song at the studio, she saw a brief glimpse of “a grunge ghost.”
It was “a tall dude with a flannel … and blue jeans,” Ejae said. And this brief encounter may have been auspicious.
“My mom reminded me later [that] there’s a myth in Korea in the music [business], if you see a ghost or any paranormal activity while recording a song, it’s a hit,” she said.
The first time Angel “Angel Baby” Rodriguez heard Art Laboe on the radio, he was 13, in his father’s garage in the City of Industry. Laboe was introducing “Nite Owl” (1955) by Tony Allen and the Champs. “His voice caught me first,” Rodriguez told me, “that very distinctive tone, and then I heard the listeners calling in. The rawness of connecting with a listener, of spinning the record, it was something.”
Rodriguez became a DJ himself, in the mold of Laboe, at first playing records for Radio Aztlan, the late-slot Friday program at KUCR in Riverside. “I didn’t sleep on a Friday night for over 20 years, from my 20s into my 40s,” he told me. Now he hosts “The Art Laboe Love Zone,” keeping alive his hero’s legacy — three hours of live radio, emanating five nights a week from a studio in Palm Springs, that bring “the music to someone,” in Angel Baby’s words.
I am one of those someones. I was a teenager when I first started listening to Laboe in the 1970s. I spent nights with him on the radio for the rest of his life, until he died Oct. 7, 2022. By then I’d already discovered Rodriguez, who took over the Laboe tribute broadcast in 2023, with his own old school “radio voice” and an oldies playlist suitable for dance parties, house parties, long-haul travel and anyone burning the candle at both ends.
Now, with algorithms curating Spotify and Sirius, with fewer live DJ voices anywhere, terrestrial American radio is said to be dying. But not Art Laboe’s voice.
The most beloved man I’ve ever met, hands down, was Laboe. He stood just over 5 feet but commanded theaters filled with thousands of people, standing onstage in shimmering sapphire or gold lamé suits, while four generations of fans screamed his name.
Born to an Armenian family in Utah, Laboe was always fascinated with radios and broadcasting. At the age of 9, he took a bus, alone, to Los Angeles to see his older sister, and eventually moved to California, attending Stanford, serving in the Navy and becoming a DJ on KRLA, the oldies station. His 1950s live music revues, at the El Monte Legion Stadium, were the first integrated dance concerts in California. He DJ’d on live radio continuously for 79 years, and emceed legendary music revues almost that long.
If Laboe didn’t invent the song dedication, he perfected it. Starting in 1943 on KSAN in San Francisco, Laboe read out dedications to loved ones sent to him by letter from wives missing husbands in World War II, and then later from call-ins sending songs to a lover lying next to them in bed, or sitting alone in the dark, separated by migrant labor, military service, a prison sentence or work.
DJ Angel Rodriguez, who carries on a tribute to Art Laboe, and a longtime fan, Proxie Aguirre, 82.
(Oscar Aguila for The Times)
Laboe’s resonant voice echoed through the Riverside neighborhoods where I grew up, from passing cars and open windows, a staple of la cultura in particular — the Chicano culture of lowriders, Pendletons and khakis. Even now, my neighbor Lydia Orta, 75, talks about going to his concerts in El Monte when she was 9, with her grandmother, while her son Johnny, 45, plays archived Laboe broadcasts through speakers in their yard.
On Aug. 9, at the Farmhouse Collective in Riverside, more than 500 Laboe fans from all over the Southland gathered to celebrate the man, two days after what would have been his 100th birthday. Onstage, Rodriguez, hosted in his own signature style — no gold lamé, but a fedora, black sunglasses and a white guayabera shirt. His handle, Angel Baby, derives from the iconic song of the same name recorded in 1960 by Rosie and the Originals, when Rosie Hamlin was just 15 years old, still a student at Mission Bay High School in San Diego, writing poetry about her boyfriend. Rodriguez is the Prince of Oldies now — Laboe is still the King — keeping la cultura, with its intense devotion to music and community, alive.
At the concert, I met Mary Silva, 73, who drove in with her daughter. “I grew up in East L.A.,” she told me, “and there were 14 siblings before I came. … We listened to Art Laboe in Florence. I still listen every night, on 104.7.” Her favorite song? “‘Tell It Like It Is,’ ‘cause I always tell it like it is.” The classic is by Aaron Neville.
Just at the stage edge were Elizabeth Rivas, 72, from San Bernardino, and her grandchildren Rene Velaquez, 34, and Raymond Velasquez, 16. Rivas has listened to Laboe and now Rodriguez for decades, and her favorite song is “Tonight,” by Sly, Slick and Wicked. Granddaughter Rene said, “She taught us to listen.” Rene’s pick was another by Sly, Slick and Wicked: “Confessin’ a Feeling.”
Near them was Henry Sanchez, 54, from my old neighborhood in Riverside, who grew up listening to Laboe on 99.1. His favorite? Brenton Wood’s “Take a Chance.” And Sal Gomez, 49, also from Riverside, loves Wood’s “Baby You Got It,” which he remembered from KRLA.
Onstage, Rodriguez — introduced by Joanna Morones, Laboe’s longtime radio producer — took the microphone and said, “Gracias a Dios that I am honored to be sitting in Art’s chair five nights a week, taking phone calls and dedications from all the listeners. It gives me chills to sit there.”
When Sly, Slick and Wicked took the stage, resplendent in three-piece suits and fedoras, their dance moves crisp and perfect, the lead singer told the crowd, “Art Laboe used to say ‘Confessin’ a Feeling’ was his most requested song at night, and for 50 years you all have kept us singing.” The audience joined in: “Baby, my love is real.” Time passes, love changes, but the song remains the same.
And yet these big gatherings are not where I hear the devotion. It threads through the dark, tracing the melancholy of separation and the intimacy of the night, as the voices of Angel Baby and Art Laboe come through radio speakers.
The Monday after the celebration, I listened from 9 p.m. to midnight, as always. At least eight terrestrial radio stations carry “The Art Laboe Love Zone,” and thousands of fans stream it in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and overseas.
Rodriguez, who drives the 110-mile round trip from Riverside to Palm Springs each weeknight after working as the head street sign maker for Riverside County, had gone through snail mail and DMs on Instagram and Facebook, collecting the dedications he’d read. Morones had chosen the recordings of Laboe for the night. From out of the past, Laboe spoke to a woman who wanted him to blow a kiss through the radio to a man far away.
Rodriguez read a letter from Papa Lito, from Wilmington, now in Delano. And then a dedication from Proxie Aguirre, who’d made an appearance at the birthday celebration. Aguirre is 83 now, a Laboe fan since she was 15. She was pictured on the cover of a Laboe compilation album, eyes sparkling, forever young. She was driven from Venice to Riverside by her sister-in-law.
“This is from the all-new Proxie, for her husband of 35 years, Eddie,” Angel Baby’s dulcet voice intoned. “She says, ‘Eddie, I love you mucho.’”
Then: “Let’s drop the needle on the record, baby bubba.”
Susan Straight’s 10th novel, “Sacrament,” will be published in October. It features a lowrider funeral in San Bernardino and a nurse who sings like Mary Wells.
Anne Thompson handicaps the race so far thus: Noting that several countries still haven’t chosen their submissions, “Cannes prizewinners have an increased profile with the international committee, including Norway’s ‘Sentimental Value’ and Brazil’s ‘Secret Agent.’ ”
But several other official submissions have our panel over the moon.
“I’ll call it right now,” declares Glenn Whipp: “The thrilling ‘Sirât,’ from Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, is going to be named best picture by either the Los Angeles or New York film critics … then it’ll be off to the races for this film, a ‘Sorcerer’ for the 21st century.”
Robert Daniels’ description of “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is harrowing: “The real-life story of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl whose final hours trapped in a car under intense fire from an IDF tank were spent pleading to be saved … a candid dramatization of her emergency phone calls.”
1. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 2. “It Was Just an Accident” (France) 3. “The Secret Agent” (Brazil) 4. “No Other Choice” (South Korea) 5. “Sirât” (Spain) 6. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” (Tunisia) T7. “Calle Málaga” (Morocco) T7. “The President’s Cake” (Iraq) T7. “A Useful Ghost” (Thailand)
RogerEbert.com
Robert Daniels
1. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” (Tunisia) 2. “It Was Just an Accident” (France) 3. “Calle Málaga” (Morocco) 4. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 5. “No Other Choice” (South Korea)
“Venice’s harrowing grand jury prize winner, Tunisia’s ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab,’ has already built early momentum. The film tells the real-life story of Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl whose final hours trapped in a car under intense fire from an IDF tank were spent pleading to be saved. A distressing docufiction, the film is a candid dramatization of her emergency phone calls.”
Turner Classic Movies
Dave Karger
1. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 2. “It Was Just an Accident” (France) 3. “The Secret Agent” (Brazil) 4. “No Other Choice” (South Korea) 5. “Left-Handed Girl” (Taiwan)
“Three films that are also overall contenders this year stand to dominate this race: Norway’s ‘Sentimental Value,’ Brazil’s ‘The Secret Agent’ and France’s ‘It Was Just an Accident.’ The bigger question will be which films are able to snag the final two slots.”
Los Angeles Times
Amy Nicholson
1. “The Secret Agent” (Brazil) 2. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 3. “A Useful Ghost” (Thailand) 4. “2000 Meters to Andriivka” (Ukraine) 5. “It Was Just an Accident” (France)
“Can Brazil get back-to-back wins for international feature? Possivelmente! ‘The Secret Agent,’ another political thriller set during the dictatorship, was one of the buzziest movies at Cannes, where it scooped up best actor for star Wagner Moura and best director for Kleber Mendonça Filho (of the weirdo western ‘Bacarau’).”
IndieWire
Anne Thompson
1. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 2. “The Secret Agent” (Brazil) 3. “The President’s Cake” (Iraq) 4. “No Other Choice” (South Korea) 5. “Left-Handed Girl” (Taiwan)
“It’s too early, as [several countries] haven’t submitted yet. But Cannes prizewinners have an increased profile with the international committee, including Norway’s ‘Sentimental Value’ and Brazil’s ‘Secret Agent.’ ”
Tribune News Service
Katie Walsh
1. “It Was Just an Accident” (France) 2. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 3. “The Secret Agent” 4. “Sirât” (Spain) 5. “No Other Choice” (South Korea)
“Based on Cannes, I think ‘It Was Just an Accident’ (France), ‘The Secret Agent’ (Brazil), ‘Sirât’ (Spain) and ‘Sentimental Value’ (Norway) could be considered as good as nominated. But who will emerge triumphant in the fifth spot?”
Los Angeles Times
Glenn Whipp
1. “Sirât” (Spain) 2. “Sentimental Value” (Norway) 3. “It Was Just an Accident” (France) 4. “No Other Choice” (South Korea) 5. “The Secret Agent” (Brazil)
“I’ll call it right now. The thrilling ‘Sirât,’ from Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, is going to be named best picture by either the Los Angeles or New York film critics. Who knows? Maybe both. And then it’ll be off to the races for this film, a ‘Sorcerer’ for the 21st century.”
Sarah McLachlan’s singing voice is one of the wonders of the pop music world.
It has alternately belted out and whispered hit songs (“Adia,” “Building a Mystery”) as well as the most devastating Disney song of all time (Randy Newman’s “When She Loved Me” from “Toy Story 2”) and is a pristine musical instrument. It can elegantly vault octaves, scoop notes without a croaky glottal fry and crack words into multi-note, velvety yodels. It can be breathy and ethereal or a searing flamethrower — and she transforms into an angelic chorus of one when she tracks layers of her own harmonies.
So it was downright terrifying when McLachlan almost lost this voice last November, when a viral infection silenced it while she was preparing for the Canadian leg of her “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” anniversary tour. She had already finished recording the vocals for her new album, “Better Broken” — out Friday — and she was uncharacteristically proud of the results.
“It was this whole last winter of, like, ‘OK, I love this record so much, and I might not be able to sing it,’” says McLachlan, 57. “I might never be able to sing like that again.”
“Better Broken” is McLachlan’s first record of new songs in 11 years. She’s spent the past decade, not in exile, but just living a normal life in West Vancouver, raising her two daughters; India is 23, Taja is 18. “I was a very busy parent,” she says. “My little one is a big dancer, so I was full-on dance mom.”
Sitting casually in an office space in Century City, the veteran songstress had just dropped her youngest at college 24 hours earlier. (“I’m still OK,” she insists. “When I have to fly home, I’m gonna be a mess — but right now I’m good.”)
The two girls are “wildly different, they’re night and day,” McLachlan says. Both sing with her on a fiery feminist anthem, “One in a Long Line,” on the new record. “They’re both beautiful and strong and fierce in their own ways, and I’m still amazed that they came out as well as they did. I tried so hard to be the opposite of my mother. And it turns out I was a lot like her in so many ways, in the end.”
She has also been busy as a maternal figure (and until recently, principal fundraiser) for the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, a free after-school program with three locations in Canada. She launched the foundation that begat her school in 2002 with some of the funds she earned from Lilith Fair — the all-female music festival, also her brainchild — as a way to keep the spirit of that phenomenon going.
McLachlan had already donated much of the profits of Lilith Fair to women’s charities, and “I wanted that energy to be transferred to something,” she says, “and to be able to create that same kind of safe space where everybody has a voice, everybody is seen, heard and valued, and they all have agency in what they’re doing and how they’re creating.”
A new Hulu documentary, “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,” will premiere Sept. 21. McLachlan was interviewed alongside Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Natalie Merchant and many others who were involved or inspired by the late ’90s movement — which was somewhat rebuked in the early 2000s by a wave of plasticky, image-based corporate pop, but which more or less prophesied our current musical moment dominated by soul-baring women singer-songwriters.
McLachlan is an admitted Swiftie (“Folklore” and “Evermore” are her favorites), and it’s impossible not to see her own influence on the likes of Swift, Brandi Carlile, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish. When I interviewed Eilish about her song “What Was I Made For” in 2023, I suggested that her gossamer vocals reminded me of McLachlan’s.
“I love, love, love Sarah McLachlan,” Eilish said, beaming. “I always have.”
So, plenty of talented acolytes filled the void McLachlan left during her lengthy hiatus, and “it was really an easy shift for me to step out of the limelight,” she admits. “I’ve never liked being famous.”
Sarah McLaughlin.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Growing up in Nova Scotia, the third child (all adopted) of an unhappy marriage, McLachlan found her voice and her confidence in music. Her mother was a voice of discouragement and defeatism, and McLachlan feels she was “raised by wolves”: “I left the house at 9 a.m. and didn’t come home until I absolutely had to, and I was on my own. I had to pick myself up and figure out how to soothe myself — and thank god for music, because that was the thing that got me through. Music was my mother, really.”
Throughout her childhood, she formally studied piano and guitar and had years of classical voice training. But “honestly, I just faked it,” she says of the voice lessons. “I could pretend to sing opera. I can mimic anything.” She didn’t much care for classical vocal music, but her golden voice won her a record contract at 19, which took her out to Vancouver. During those early album sessions, where she was also learning how to write songs, she kept blowing out her voice “because I didn’t really know how to control it.”
She contacted a local singing coach, who told McLachlan to run around the block as fast as she could. “I came back panting, and she goes, ‘Lie on the floor. Now breathe for me. Do you recognize that feeling? That’s your diaphragm actually working. Now sing me something with that feeling in mind.’”
Initially, McLachlan styled her singing after Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, which most reviews of her debut album (1988’s “Touch”) pointed out. With her sophomore album, “Solace,” she “purposely made a concerted effort to move away from that,” McLachlan says, “because I wanted to know what I sounded like.”
She gives credit to her longtime Canadian producer, Pierre Marchand, “who was instrumental in creating that foundation for me. Because at the beginning of the second record, he’s like, ‘I know you can do all that flowery stuff. I want to hear what you sound like. I want you to sing low.’ So he forced me to sing way lower than I normally do, and that’s kind of where my natural register came up.”
With Marchand, McLachlan climbed the charts of ’90s pop; “Aida” and “Angel” were top 10 mainstays, and the albums “Surfacing” (1997) and “Afterglow” (2003) both went platinum.
“Afterglow” — which featured such addictive bops as “World on Fire” and “Train Wreck” — was made right as she started her journey as a mother. “I tried to get as much of it done while I was pregnant,” she says, “knowing that life was going to completely change.” Nine months after giving birth and “starting to feel human again,” she returned to a studio in Los Feliz to finish it, while renting Dan Aykroyd’s house in the Hollywood Hills — “and punctuated by, you know, I have to go home and breastfeed.”
“Better Broken” is a bookend to that moment, coming out right as her children are emptying the nest. It, too, was made in Los Angeles — but this time without Marchand.
“I wanted to be put out of my comfort zone,” she says. “I wanted to be challenged. Pierre and I worked beautifully together, but we have our complacencies and our habits, and I wanted to be pushed out of that, and try something new. It’s like dating! I felt a little bit like I was cheating on him … but he gave me his blessing.”
She turned to Tony Berg and Will Maclellan, two California-based producers who have shaped albums by Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, boygenius and other young stars.
“I went in with a ton of trepidation,” she says, “and a ton of, not insecurity, but just like: Well, I think these are really good songs, but it’s been so long since I made a record…”
“Three days in, I’m like: Oh, this is going to be great.”
And she has discovered new parts of herself.
The years away from making new music and the experiences of life, both joyful and scarring, have refined her voice like a barrel-aged wine. The new songs are diary entries about an unpleasant breakup (“Wilderness”), loving a teenage daughter who is filled with rage (“Gravity”) and surrendering at the apocalypse (“If This is the End…”). Berg and company wrapped lo-fi textures, warm and wobbly, around McLachlan’s vocals (and piano, and guitar) in a way that simultaneously feels very much like 2025 and an old, unearthed vinyl.
The title track, which McLachlan started writing 13 years ago, is an instantly unforgettable melody; the chorus (“Let it be / all it is / small and still…”) has her incrementally climbing, climbing — then athletically pirouetting in midair on the line “and better left alone.”
She says she writes her songs through exploration, just playing piano and making sounds with her voice: “And because I have a relatively versatile instrument in my voice, I just try things and see where it goes. Melodies often appear with a couple of chord progressions, and that’s usually the start of things. It’s melody long before lyrics — you sort of say random things, and it’s about how vowels and consonants roll off your tongue.”
“I don’t know how to be any other way,” she adds. “I like to see what my voice can do and where it can go, and push it to the edges of pretty, and make it sound gruff and unpleasant and ‘how ugly can I make that with it still sounding kind of cool?’”
Leaving the limelight, getting broken and finding new love — and then almost losing her voice — Sarah McLachlan found new depths and heights in her priceless voice. It was worth the wait.
The Voice UK has been a hit with viewers since it first aired in 2012
Sir Tom Jones has been a staple on The Voice UK since 2012(Image: ITV)
The Voice UK first graced our screens in 2012 and has been a hit ever since, now filming its 14th series.
The popular show features blind auditions, where the star-studded coaches hit a button to turn their chair if they like what they hear, seeing the performer for the first time.
If more than one coach turns, the artist chooses a mentor for their journey on the show. After the blind auditions, the contestants are divided into four teams, each mentored by a coach who selects songs for their artists to perform in a series of battles until a winner is crowned.
The Voice UK has welcomed many musical talents to the coveted coach chair, but one constant presence since the beginning is Sir Tom Jones.
Sir Tom, 85, was part of the original panel alongside will.i.am, Jessie J and Danny O’Donoghue. However, as filming for series 14 commences, only Sir Tom and will.i.am remain from the original line-up, reports Wales Online. For series 14, they’re joined by Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones sharing coaching duties, and Kelly Rowland.
Sir Tom Jones on The Voice UK(Image: BBC)
A familiar face behind the scenes of The Voice UK is executive producer, Moira Ross, who has produced five seasons of the successful singing series.
Speaking in an exclusive interview to discuss her new series KPOPPED, Moira, whose work also includes Strictly Come Dancing, The Masked Singer and Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas, told us: “It’s some time ago now but I made five seasons of The Voice when it first launched in the UK.
“That was my sort of insight into A-list superstar music talent. That was a big learning curve, you know, to understand firsthand just how hard these people work.”
Talking about working with Sir Tom, Moira added: “Tom is the ultimate professional and it was always a privilege to hear him sing. Even in rehearsals, it was just an absolute privilege so it never felt like a job that show.
“It was a really fun time, actually, for those five years and hanging out with the likes of will.i.am. He’s a lot of fun, Will, he’s got endless bags of ideas!”
Moira has been able to utilise her experience on The Voice UK for her latest project Apple TV+’s KPOPPED, where she worked as an executive producer.
The Voice UK has welcomed many musical talents to the coveted coach chair(Image: ITV/Rachel Joseph/REX/Shutterstock)
The eight-part programme, from executive producers Lionel Richie and Miky Lee, sees each episode presented by Soojeong Son and it showcases two Western music legends – from Patti LaBelle to Boy George, Kesha to J Balvin and Megan Thee Stallion to some members of the Spice Girls – teamed up with a premier K-pop act, including ITZY, Billlie, BLACKSWAN, and STAYC. The K-pop group splits into two units, each teaming up with one of the guest artists.
They have just hours to reinvent a global hit, whilst also working on choreography, vocals, and visuals to wow the audience during their live stage performance. K-pop fans are then asked to choose the winning collaboration.
Discussing the filming process, Moira confessed it’s the “fastest turnaround” she’s ever experienced in her impressive career.
She said: “The Western stars would arrive and we would have approximately 48 hours! They’d arrive, they’d maybe get their bearings, they’d get to rehearsals and they were straight into work with the K-pop bands.
“There would be some sort of relief in terms of that experience of seeing some of the sights of Seoul and the cultural exchange. Then we’d rehearse again and next day we’re in studio, so rehearsing on set and they’re in front of that live audience of very excited K-pop fans.”
Moira added: “It’s the fastest turnaround I’ve ever done in terms of these entertainment productions but because of their level of stardom and professional capacity, they could pick it up like that and they all work so hard so it all fell into place.”
WASHINGTON — The agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters is eliminating more than 500 employees, the Trump administration has announced, a move that could ratchet up a months-long legal challenge over the news outlets’ fate.
Kari Lake, acting chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s oversight agency, announced the latest round of job cuts late Friday, one day after a federal judge blocked her from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA director.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth had ruled separately that the Trump administration had failed to show how it was complying with his orders to restore VOA’s operations. His order Monday gave the administration “one final opportunity, short of a contempt trial,” to demonstrate its compliance. He ordered Lake to sit for a deposition by lawyers for agency employees by Sept. 15.
On Thursday, Lamberth said Abramowitz could not be removed without the approval of the majority of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Firing Abramowitz would be “plainly contrary to law,” according to Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by President Reagan.
Lake posted a statement on social media that said her agency had initiated a reduction in force, or RIF, eliminating 532 jobs for full-time government employees. She said the agency “will continue to fulfill its statutory mission after this RIF — and will likely improve its ability to function.”
“I look forward to taking additional steps in the coming months to improve the functioning of a very broken agency and make sure America’s voice is heard abroad where it matters most,” she wrote.
A group of agency employees who sued to block VOA’s elimination said Lake’s move would give their colleagues 30 days until their pay and benefits end.
“We find Lake’s continued attacks on our agency abhorrent,” they said in a statement. “We are looking forward to her deposition to hear whether her plan to dismantle VOA was done with the rigorous review process that Congress requires. So far we have not seen any evidence of that.”
In June, layoff notices were sent to more than 600 agency employees. Abramowitz was placed on administrative leave along with almost the entire VOA staff. He was told he would be fired effective Aug. 31.
The administration said in a court filing Thursday that it planned to send RIF notices to 486 employees of Voice of America and 46 other agency employees but intended to retain 158 agency employees and 108 VOA employees. The filing said the global media agency had 137 “active employees” and 62 other employees on administrative leave, while VOA had 86 active employees and 512 others on administrative leave.
Lake’s agency also oversees Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Marti, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. The networks, which together reach an estimated 427 million people, date to the Cold War and are part of a network of government-funded organizations designed to extend U.S. influence and combat authoritarianism.
The Trump administration has moved to lay off more than 500 employees who work for the federally funded network Voice of America, which provides global reporting in places with restricted press freedom.
In March, Trump officials first attempted to close down some of the organization’s newsrooms. But Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called for the network’s restoration last April, citing a law that requires the Voice of America broadcast to be continued.
Despite the ruling, Kari Lake, the acting chief executive of Voice of America’s oversight agency, posted on social media on Friday evening that 532 government positions were eliminated.
Before the downsizing, Voice of America was responsible for broadcasting news in 49 languages to 360 million people every week, including in Russia and China. Now, the network only airs programming in four languages: Persian, Mandarin, Dari and Pashto.
The layoffs “will likely improve [the agency’s] ability to function and provide the truth to people across the world who live under murderous Communist governments and other tyrannical regimes,” wrote Lake on X.
Most of the 1,300 Voice of America journalists had already been fired or remained on paid leave prior to these layoffs. Only 100 journalists and other staff members remain employed by the organization.
After being asked by the remaining employees to ensure the administration was in line with his April ruling, Lamberth found that they appeared to be noncompliant.
Earlier this week, he ordered Lake to provide sworn testimony at a deposition and threatened to hold her in contempt for going against court orders. He also blocked the administration from firing Voice of America’s Director Michael Abramowitz, the day before these layoffs were announced.
Melbourne, Australia – Lee Little recalls the phone call with her daughter in December 2017; it was just minutes before Alicia was killed.
“I spoke to her 15 minutes before she died,” Little told Al Jazeera.
“I asked her, was she OK? Did you want us to come up to pick you up? And she said, ‘No, I’ve got my car. I’m right, Mum, everything’s packed.’”
Alicia Little was on the verge of finally leaving an abusive four-and-a-half-year relationship.
Not only had Alicia rung her mother, but she had also called the police emergency hotline for assistance, as her fiance Charles Evans fell into a drunken rage.
Alicia knew what to expect from her partner: extreme violence.
Evans had a history of abuse towards Alicia, with her mother recounting to Al Jazeera the first time it occurred.
“The first time he actually bashed her, she was on the phone to me. And the next minute, I heard him come across and try to grab her phone,” Little said.
“I heard her say, ‘Get your hands off my throat. I can’t breathe.’ And the next minute, you hear him say, ‘You’re better off dead.’”
Little told how she had taken photos of her daughter’s terrible injuries.
“She had broken ribs. She had a broken cheekbone, broken jaw, black eyes, and where he’d had her around the throat, you could see his finger marks. It was a bruise, and where he’d give her a kick, and right down the side, you could see his foot marks.”
Like many abusive relationships, a pattern would emerge, whereby Alicia would leave temporarily, only to return after Evans promised to change his behaviour.
“This went on and off for the four and a half years,” Little said.
“He’d bash her, she’d come home, and then she’d say to me, ‘Mum, he’s told me that he’s gone and got help.’”
Yet the violence only escalated.
Lee Little with a photograph of her daughter, Alicia Little, who was killed by her partner in 2017. Alicia’s killer served only two years and eight months in jail for the crime [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]
On the night Alicia decided to leave for good, Evans drove his four-wheel-drive at her, pinning her between the front of the vehicle and a water tank.
Alicia Little, aged 41 and a mother of two boys, died within minutes before the police she had called could arrive.
As she lay drawing her final breaths, security camera footage would later show her killer drinking beer at the local pub, where he drove to after running Alicia down.
Evans was arrested, and after initially being charged with murder, had his charges downgraded to dangerous driving causing death and failing to render assistance after a motor vehicle accident.
He would walk free from jail after only two years and eight months.
The statistics
Alicia Little is just one of the many women in Australia killed every year, in what activists such as The Red Heart Campaign’s Sherele Moody are saying is so prevalent that it amounts to a “femicide”: the targeted killing of women by men.
Moody, who documents the killings, contests those statistics, telling Al Jazeera they do not represent the true scale of deadly attacks on women in the country.
Government data records “domestic homicide”; women killed resulting in a conviction of murder or manslaughter.
As in the case of Alicia Little, the lesser charges her killer was convicted on related to motoring offences and do not amount to a domestic homicide under government reporting and are not reflected in the statistics.
“One of the key weapons that perpetrators use against women in Australia is vehicles,” Moody told Al Jazeera.
“They almost always get charged with dangerous driving, causing death. That is not a homicide charge. It doesn’t get counted despite it being a domestic violence act, an act of domestic violence perpetrated by a partner,” Moody said.
“The government underrepresents the epidemic of violence. And in the end, the numbers that they’re using influence their policy. It influences their funding decisions. It influences how they speak to us as a community about violence against women,” she said.
Moody said that between January 2024 and June this year, she had documented 136 killings of women; many – like Alicia Little – by their partners. “Ninety-six percent of the deaths I record are perpetrated by men.”
“Around 60 percent of the deaths are the result of domestic and family violence,” she said.
Sherele Moody, from The Red Heart Campaign, speaks with the media at a Stop Killing Women protest earlier this year in Melbourne, Australia. Moody says the official government data underrepresents the true scale of ‘femicide’ in Australia [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]
While much focus is on women’s safety in public spaces – for example, walking home alone at night – Moody said the least safe place for a woman is actually in her own home.
“The reality is that if you’re going to be killed, whether you’re a man or woman or a child, you’re going to be killed by someone you know,” she said.
Data shows that only about 10 percent of female victims are killed by strangers, deaths often sensationally covered by the media and prompting public debate about women’s safety.
“Yes, stranger killings do happen, and when they do, they get a lot of focus and a lot of attention, and it lulls people into a false sense of security about who is perpetrating the violence,” Moody said.
Male violence in Australia
Patty Kinnersly, CEO of Our Watch, a national task force to prevent violence against women, said attacks on women are the “most extreme outcome of broader patterns of gendered violence and inequality”.
“When we refer to the gendered drivers of violence, we are talking about the social conditions and power imbalances that create the environment where this violence occurs,” Kinnersly said.
“These include condoning or excusing violence against women, men’s control of decision-making, rigid gender stereotypes and dominant forms of masculinity, and male peer relations that promote aggression and disrespect towards women,” she said.
“Addressing the gendered drivers is vital because violence against women is not random; it reflects deeply entrenched inequalities and norms in society. If we do not address these root causes, we cannot achieve long-term prevention,” she added.
Patterns of male violence are deeply rooted in Australia’s colonial history, in which men are told they need to be physically and mentally tough, normalising male aggression, write authors Alana Piper and Ana Stevenson.
“For much of the 19th century, men far outnumbered women within the European population of the Australian colonies. This produced a culture that prized hyper-masculinity as a national ideal,” they write.
Colonial male aggression also resulted in extreme violence perpetrated on Indigenous women during the frontier times, through rape and massacres.
Misogyny and racism were also promoted in Australia’s parliament during the 20th century, as legislators crafted assimilationist laws aimed at controlling the lives of Indigenous women and removing their children as part of what has become known as the “Stolen Generations”.
Up to a third of Indigenous children were removed from their families as part of a suite of government policies between 1910 and 1970, resulting in widespread cultural genocide and intergenerational social, economic and health disparities.
This legacy of colonial racism and discrimination continues to play out in vast socioeconomic inequalities experienced by Indigenous people in the present day, including violence against women, activists say.
Recent government data shows that Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised due to violence than non-Indigenous women in Australia and six times more likely to die as a result of family violence.
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are among the most at-risk groups for family violence and intimate partner homicide in Australia,” First Nations Advocates Against Family Violence (FNAAFV) Chief Executive Officer Kerry Staines told Al Jazeera.
“These disproportionately high rates are the result of historical injustice and ongoing systemic failure,” Staines said, including forced displacement of Indigenous communities, child removals and the breakdown of family structures.
“Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have been affected by multigenerational trauma caused by institutional abuse, incarceration and marginalisation. When trauma is left unaddressed, and support services are inadequate or culturally unsafe, the risk of violence, including within relationships, increases,” she said.
Indigenous women are also the fastest-growing prison cohort in Australia.
On any given night, four out of 10 women in prison are Indigenous women, despite making up only 2.5 per cent of the adult female population.
Staines said there is a nexus between domestic violence and incarceration.
“There is a clear and well-documented relationship between the hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the high rates of family violence experienced in our communities,” she said.
“The removal of parents and caregivers from families due to imprisonment increases the likelihood of child protection involvement, housing instability and intergenerational trauma, all of which are risk factors for both perpetration and victimisation of family violence.”
‘Toxic culture’
While Australia was one of the first Western countries to grant women voting rights, deeply rooted inequalities persisted through much of the 20th century, with women being excluded from much of public and civic life, including employment in the government sector and the ability to sit on juries, until the 1970s.
This exclusion from positions of authority – including the judicial system – allowed a culture of “victim blaming” to develop, particularly in instances of domestic abuse and sexual assault, activists say.
Rather than holding male perpetrators to account and addressing violence, focus remained on the actions of female victims: what they may have been wearing, where they had been, and prior sexual histories as a basis for apportioning blame to those who had suffered the consequences of gender-based violence.
Such was the case with Isla Bell, a 19-year-old woman from Melbourne, who police allege was beaten to death in October 2024.
A missing poster for Isla Bell, who was beaten to death in October 2024 [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]
Media reporting on Isla’s death focused largely on her personal life and provided graphic details about her death, while little attention was given to the two men who were charged with Isla’s alleged murder.
Isla’s mother, Justine Spokes, said the reporting “felt really abusive”.
“The way in which my daughter’s murder was reported on just highlights the pervasive toxic culture that is systemic in Australia,” said Spokes, describing a “victim-blaming narrative” around the killing of her daughter.
“It was written in a really biased way that felt really disrespectful, devaluing and dehumanising,” she said, adding that society had become desensitised to male violence against women in Australia.
“It’s just become so normalised, which I think is actually a sign of trauma, that we’re numb to it. It’s been pervasive for that long. If that’s the mainstream psyche in Australia, it’s just so dangerous,” she said.
“I really think that this pervasive, toxic, misogynistic culture, it’s definitely written into our law. It’s very colonial,” she added.
The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has committed to the ambitious task of tackling violence against women within a generation.
A spokesperson from the Department of Social Services told Al Jazeera the government has invested 4 billion Australian dollars ($2.59bn) to deliver on the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-2032.
“The Australian Government acknowledges the significant levels of violence against women and children including intimate partner homicides,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“Ending gender-based violence remains a national priority for the Australian Government. Our efforts to end gender based violence in one generation are not set-and-forget – we are rigorously tracking, measuring and assessing our efforts, and making change where we must,” the spokesperson added.
A petition that documents women killed in Australia since 2008 at a Stop Killing Women protest in Melbourne, Australia [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]
Yet for Lee Little, mother of Alicia Little who was killed in 2017, not enough is being done, and she does not feel justice was served in the case of her daughter, describing the killer’s light sentence as “gut-wrenching”.
Little is now petitioning for a national domestic violence database in a bid to hold perpetrators accountable and allow women to gain access to information regarding prior convictions.
“Our family would love a national database, because perpetrators, at this moment, anywhere in Australia, can do a crime in one state and move to another, and they’re not recognised” as offenders in their new location, she said.
Little said public transparency around prior convictions would protect women from entering into potentially abusive relationships in the first place.
Yet the Australian federal government has yet to implement such a database, in part due to the complexities of state jurisdictions.
The federal attorney-general’s office told Al Jazeera that “primary responsibility for family violence and criminal matters rests with the states and territories, with each managing their own law enforcement and justice systems”.
“Creation of a publicly accessible national register of perpetrators of family violence could only be implemented with the support of state and territory governments, who manage the requisite data and legislation.”
Despite the apparent intransigence in law, Little remains committed to calling out violence against women wherever she sees it.
“I’ve been to supermarkets where there’s been abuse in front of me, and I’ve stepped in,” she said.
“I will be a voice for Alicia and for a national database till my last breath,” she added.
Kellie Carter-Bell, a survivor of domestic violence and speaker at the Stop Killing Women protest in Melbourne, told Al Jazeera: ‘I had my first black eye at 13. I had my last black eye at 36. My mission in being here today is teaching women that you can get out safely and live a successful life.’ [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]
The summer rain in Mexico City has been driving Meme del Real crazy. “This season of permanent torrential downpour gets to a point where you’re like, ‘Enough,’ he says with a sigh. “There’s people who really enjoy it, but I’m done. It’s too much introspection to be in here all day, to not be able to go outside. It forces you to try other things, to find a conversation within that rather than a resistance.”
Surrender has been a big theme lately in the life of the longtime vocalist and keyboardist of legendary Mexican alt-rock group Café Tacvba. Del Real — a Swiss Army Knife of a musician who has produced for the likes of Julieta Venegas and Natalia Lafourcade, among others — has been unpacking his life after a recent move back to the Mexican capital, after five years in the idyllic Valle de Bravo. About two hours away from CDMX, the lakeside town became his district of solitude.
It was in this escape from city life that the singer-songwriter was able to be quiet enough to tap into something beyond himself. With his own studio, a broad space overlooking a forest, he had the mental space to look inward. Perhaps more importantly, he gave himself permission to welcome the inspiration that arrived without him seeking it.
“It’s not that I went to this place and said, ‘OK, now I’m going to find inspiration.’ It was more of a tension within myself that naturally unraveled,” says Meme of his “Walden” moment. “From that exercise of exploring old songs and ideas in process, something started to bloom within me in a way that had never happened before. It was a moment that invited me into a solitary process that I hadn’t undertaken with any formality or intention. If these songs have anything to do with where I was physically at the time, I do think that distance I had from everything manifested itself as music.”
The songs on Del Real’s first solo album — the title yet to be revealed — plumb the depths of silence and sonic expansion. He is unpretentious in his experiments and unafraid to get playful. “Tumbos” is a warbling electronic love song intercepted at times by plinking bachata strings. Del Real swelters on futuristic bolero “Incomprensible,” which takes the old-school Cuban torch-song genre and pitches its emblematic guitar to psychedelic new heights. Atmosphere is everything here: Two of the soon-to-be-released tracks border on ambient, zeroing in on the sounds of church bells and chirping birds and the expansive feeling of mushrooms blooming across a forest floor.
These little mountains of fire blaze with a gentle heat emanating from Del Real’s voice. Die-hards and casual fans of Café Tacvba have heard “Eres” at least in passing, a smash from the group’s 2003 album, “Cuatro Caminos,” that features Del Real on lead vocals. He’s still singing about love: Careening norteña-inspired “Embeces” sees Del Real’s voice soar over warbled trumpets, and lead single “Princesa” layers cinematic orchestration with trip-hop beats and sweltering lyrics about failed promises and proclamations of loyalty.
For those who can’t get enough, Del Real is set to preview some of the new music with a special performance on Sept. 2 at the Grammy Museum.
“These songs arrived, and I couldn’t look the other way. It was an instinct that was stronger than me, a now-or-never moment,” says Del Real. “I’ve found that every unknown and every challenge has left me with a lesson. When I’m onstage [with Café Tacvba], I play and sing, but I also love to dance and express myself with my body. Before we can play, when we’re children, we hear a rhythm and dance. It doesn’t matter if you look ridiculous, but you made something. It’s better to make a fool of yourself and experiment rather than not live what you’re feeling.”
De Los spoke with Del Real over Zoom from Mexico City as he’s settling into a number of beginnings: a new home, a new daily rhythm and his first solo project, which is out next month.
There are so many places where artists go to isolate and channel, but you weren’t looking for that at all. Listening to the album, I heard the parallels between the songs and the space that natural environments bring. There are two tracks that border on ambient, focusing on the sounds of a church bell and a small sound that grows into an encompassing roar. The creative act is intuitive and spontaneous, and I think it makes a symmetry with the cycles and forms of nature. Having such a tangible way to witness creation left a deep impression on me, to be in such an exuberant forest coexisting with so much.
How was making this solo record different from making a Café Tacvba record? I have a certain experience of creation with the band — of making an album, a project, a video, a tour, a spectacle — but these songs manifested themselves almost like they rose out of the floor to meet me. At my old house, the studio I made was surrounded by a massive forest. I really felt like I was yet another element of nature in that cycle of life that I had to live there. Something bloomed in that moment for me. More than the result, the experience itself for me was its own project, and it’s been so personally valuable to me that anything that comes of that is a consequence, an extra gift. The process was transformative, like nature itself, something that couldn’t be controlled or manipulated.
I love that you describe the songs as arriving; that’s very different than creating with the intention of connecting to a muse. To your point about movement, there’s so much of it here: bachata, cumbia, electronic music … so much to dance to. Everything you describe came about very organically. My dad was a musician, and he devoted his life to music. At home, my mom and dad and siblings and I all grew up hearing a lot of music across genres. I got very familiar. Watching my dad [on the trumpet] with his orchestra play at parties, specifically all of these formal Latin American genres to dance to …
When I started making the songs, the genres rose out pretty organically. If it came out sounding like Ministry or a norteña or a bolero or disco or punk, then that’s what it was. If creating doesn’t have that playful factor, if it doesn’t translate honesty, then it becomes so intellectualized. I think it’s a balance between spontaneity, a game between the organic, the intellectual, the conceptual. When I listened to all the songs, I really didn’t know if it was an album. I approached Gustavo Santaolalla [Godfather of Latin rock] to get his feedback, and that’s when it became clear to me that something was happening.
The songs were there, as I built them there in this place I described to you, like beyond just composing on guitar, piano and making a demo, it was like, “Well, what if I add something else?” I started experimenting, and before I knew it, there were already quite robust and complex arrangements in most of them. But another thing is that, when I [would] bring a demo to [Café Tacvba], I [would] sing it, and that [was] it. But in this case, the same thing. Gustavo told me, “Hey, one of the things that’s interesting is the way you’re singing … What’s happening on a vocal level, that seems to me to be revealing a very clear picture of you at this moment.” So, nothing, it stayed that way.
When I was trying to find the throughline here, I was thinking about the subject matter: There’s a lot of love and yearning here. Would you consider yourself a romantic? Based on some interviews I’ve been doing, they haven’t asked me this question, but the term “romantic” has come up. And it’s not that I’ve thought about it or assumed it, but I think that if romantic means, in my case, finding a translation of what I feel and what I reflect on and resonating well with it, then yes.
I’ve also found myself — who hasn’t in these times? — being attentive and reflecting on the issues that are happening around the world, all the horrors of certain situations and in certain regions. But I definitely find that there is beauty in human relationships or in personal relationships, in relationships with your personal, universal, cosmic or internal ecosystem, with paradoxes, with what is opposed. I don’t know if that’s romantic, but that’s it. Even at the end of the world, in the midst of so much horror, love and beauty are the things that give us the desire to want to go on, right?
This album is so sonically forward-thinking, and I’d say it’s aligned to the current zeitgeist of genre mixing. Where do you situate it? I am also very attracted to the way in which I don’t understand much of what is happening with these new generations and all the music, all the art and creation that is taking place. It seems that, as in other eras, attention was focused on the situations that were happening around them, socially and politically, and there was a lot of talk about it and criticism was made. Today, it seems that this generation is not observing that, but I have discovered in my theory that discourse is more powerful precisely because it is not talked about directly, but rather it is talked about as, “I am going to have a good time and enjoy it because this is coming to an end … I have no choice but to take what I have and what I can do and what I can experience with my gang, with my people, and with this global digital community.”
I find that very powerful and very sad at the same time. I mean, it’s very sad to think that there is a generation that sees the world as ending. That’s my take on it — that there’s little hope, that everything is so complex that it’s better not to look at that. “Just look at what’s in front of me, because I’m young and because if I don’t take advantage of my youth to have a good time right now, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the next stage. Or I don’t see how.”
In our time, at least in my time, I think there was more. The outlook was clearer. You could see further ahead.
This interview was conducted in Spanish, translated, edited and condensed for clarity.
V from BTS got to be the devoted fanboy for once Monday night at Dodger Stadium, where he was lucky enough to share an embrace with Shohei Ohtani and give a deep bow on the field to Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
The K-pop heartthrob posed for photos in the dugout with three-time MVP Ohtani, who returned to the mound this season in addition to continuing as the Dodgers’ designated hitter, and more pics on the field with pitching ace Yamamoto, who helped the team beat the Padres in San Diego on Sunday. Dude even spent a few minutes chatting up the legendary Clayton Kershaw.
Seems V — real name Kim Taehyung — might be a fan of pitching in general?
That’s a good thing, if true, because the K-pop star was at Chavez Ravine to deliver the ceremonial first pitch before the Dodgers shut out the Cincinnati Reds 7-0. BTS fans were definitely there in the crowd to support him.
The seven members of BTS — Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, Jung Kook and V — surfaced on social media in July after a long hiatus to announce that a new album would be coming in spring 2026, now that they all completed their mandatory 18-month South Korean military service.
Announcer Todd Leitz referenced the band’s “highly anticipated” reunion over the stadium PA system Monday. “NO more waiting now, V. The mound is yours!” he said.
Taking the mound, V delivered a strike to Yamamoto, who was crouched down as the honorary catcher. The pop star earned a “wow, what a pitch” from Leitz and screams from the fans in the stands.
“He’s been on the field for 30 minutes. We finally hit the crescendo with the first pitch tonight for V from BTS,” a voice is heard saying in a video chronicling the moment.
“Yeah, and he dotted up a strike, man,” another voice adds. “Good for him. He’s been out here practicing every 13 seconds. We got the crowd going nuts, we don’t know why. He’s over there playing catch, throwing halfway down the left field line. And you put the guy on the mound, turns into a pretty good strike thrower.”
After the pitch, V also got to speak the five legendary words that open every home game for the boys in blue: “It’s time for Dodger baseball.”
“Starting in July, all seven of us will begin working closely together on new music,” the band said in a statement July 1. “Since it will be a group album, it will reflect each member’s thoughts and ideas. We’re approaching the album with the same mindset we had when we first started.”
BTS last released an album, “Proof,” in June 2022 and performed live together later that year in their home country. Each member has released solo material since then, including Jung Kook’s song “Seven,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2023, and RM’s “Right Place, Wrong Person,” which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s album chart last year.
Times pop music critic Mikael Wood contributed to this report.
Motorists are flocking to Amazon to get their hands on a smart bit of car kit that’s seen a dramatic tumble in price.
The gadget is the second-generation Echo Auto, and it’s been picking up some proper rave reviews from blokes and lasses who have snapped it up.
1
The Echo Auto will introduce hands-free Alexa control to your car
Amazon Echo Auto (2nd gen), £19.99 (was £59.99)
Originally fetching a hefty £59.99, the nifty Echo Auto is currently on sale for just £19.99 on Amazon.
That’s a cracking deal and a perfect time for anyone looking to introduce some smart tech into their motor – and crucially, without splashing out a fortune.
This little gizmo is designed to be your co-pilot, letting you command Alexa while you’re busy at the wheel.
Hands-free control: You can talk to Alexa to play music, make calls, or set reminders without ever touching your phone.
Navigation: Get directions from apps like Google Maps just by asking Alexa where you want to go.
Play music: Listen to your favourite songs and podcasts from services like Spotify or Amazon Music.
Smart home control: You can ask Alexa to turn on your house lights or adjust the heat while you are driving home.
Hear your voice: It has special microphones that can hear you clearly over car noise, like the radio or air conditioner.
The 2nd-gen Echo Auto is a small and discreet piece of kit that slots right into your car.
It hooks up to your phone and your car’s speakers to bring a whole new level of voice control to your ride.
Getting it all set up is a doddle too. You just plug it into a spare USB slot, link it to your phone’s Alexa app, and you’re sorted.
This brilliant bit of kit has an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with thousands of happy drivers raving about how it’s transformed their motors.
One buzzing punter, who slapped a 5-star rating on it, wrote: “Highly recommend this. Works in my 23-year-old Nissan Micra.
“Voice activated, can listen to a music playlist or podcasts, can make hands-free calls, listen to LBC, etc. Works brilliantly.”
Another shopper commented: “Works seamlessly… very useful as just a Bluetooth pass through to car speakers.”
Another chuffed buyer said: “Great piece of tech, [I] love Alexa at home.
“Now she comes on the road with us and, unlike my phone, she hears very well and plays whatever I want. Terrific.”
A proper ringing endorsement came from a verified customer who simply put: “This is an amazing piece of kit, highly recommend.”
Whether you want to listen to tunes, get directions, or just stay connected on the go, the Auto is a simple and cheap way to do it.
At that sale price, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.
Amazon Echo Auto (2nd gen), £19.99 (was £59.99)
For more savings on other smart gadgets, head to our Amazon device deals round-up.
A hoarse voice for more than three weeks can be a key symptom, and should be investigated by a GP.
Using AI for diagnosis could spell the end of uncomfortable tests currently used, such as a biopsy or nasendoscopy, in which a thin tube with a video camera is passed through the nose down the back of the throat.
The American team, part of the ‘Bridge2AI-Voice’ project, gathered voice recordings of 300 patients, some of whom had voice box cancer.
They studied at least six features of voice acoustics: the mean fundamental frequency (pitch); jitter, variation in pitch within speech; shimmer, variation of the amplitude; and the harmonic-to-noise ratio.
There were “marked” differences between men with and without cancer or a voice box disorder, such as nodules or polyps, specifically the harmonic-to-noise ratio, according to the findings published in the journal Frontiers in Digital Health.
It’s possible the same will be found for women with a larger dataset.
One of the study’s authors, Dr Phillip Jenkins, of Oregon Health & Science University, said: “To move from this study to an AI tool that recognises vocal fold lesions, we would train models using an even larger dataset of voice recordings, labelled by professionals.
“We then need to test the system to make sure it works equally well for women and men.
BBC Gardeners world fans in tears as star reveals terminal cancer diagnosis during show
“Voice-based health tools are already being piloted.
“I estimate that with larger datasets and clinical validation, similar tools to detect vocal fold lesions might enter pilot testing in the next couple of years.”
2
Voice box cancer, or laryngeal cancer, causes voice hoarseness, pain swallowing, or difficulty swallowing, shortness of breath and weight lossCredit: Getty
The symptoms of voice box cancer
Cancer Research UK have said there are four key symptoms of laryngeal cancer to look out for:
1. Hoarseness or a change in your voice
If you have a hoarse voice for more than 3 weeks, it could be a sign of laryngeal cancer, says Cancer Research UK.
It’s worth seeing a doctor for a full check up and diagnosis, as inflammation of the larynx can also be caused by a cold, a chest infection and overuse of the voice, like singing.
2. Pain or difficulty swallowing
If you’re experiencing pain or having difficulty swallowing, it might be an indicator something is wrong.
Visit your GP if for three weeks or more, you feel:
that there is something small stuck in your throat
you are struggling to swallow food
some pain or a burning sensation when swallowing food
that your food is sticking in your throat
3. Shortness of breath
Experiencing shortness of breath is a symptom that should trigger an urgent response.
Call 999 if you suddenly experience shortness of breath or are struggling to breathe.
Some people may also find they have a cough that doesn’t go away, they find it difficult to breath or when they inhale it’s become noisy (stridor).
4. Weight loss
Sudden or dramatic weight loss is a key sign of cancer, including laryngeal.
Usually it will happen alongside other symptoms and the body’s way of communicating that there is a problem.
It may also happen because you’re eating less due to pain or because you’re having difficulty swallowing.
You should see your doctor if you have lost 4 to 5 kg (10lbs) or more in a short time.
Are YOU at risk of voice box cancer?
In the UK, there are more than 2,000 new cases of laryngeal cancer each year.
The NHS says it is more common in people over the age of 60, and men.
It’s not clear exactly what causes laryngeal cancer, but your risk of getting the condition is increased by:
smoking tobacco
regularly drinking large amounts of alcohol
having family members (such as a parent, brother, sister or child) who have had laryngeal cancer
having an unhealthy diet low in fruit and vegetables
exposure to certain chemicals and substances, such as asbestos and coal dust
You can significantly reduce your chances of developing laryngeal cancer by adopting a healthy lifestyle.
Short, pained lives marked by achievement and promise and then abruptly gone leave a restless afterglow. Youth is supposed to fade away, not become one’s permanent state. And regarding the late musician Jeff Buckley — a roiling romantic with piercing good looks whose singing could rattle bones and raise hairs — that loss in 1997, at the age of 30 from drowning, burns anew with every revisiting of his sparse legacy of recorded material.
Lives are more complicated than what your busted heart may want to read from a voice that conjured heaven and the abyss. So one of the appealing takeaways from the biodoc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is a repudiating of the typical narrative of inescapable fate, instead pursuing the richness of a gifted artist’s ups and downs. Director Amy Berg would rather us see Buckley as he was in the world instead of some conveniently doom-laden figure.
The result is loving, spirited and honest: an opportunity for us to get to know the talented, turbulent Buckley through the people who genuinely knew him and cared about him. But also, in clips, copious writings and snatches of voice recordings, we meet someone empathetic yet evasive, ambitious yet self-critical, a son and his own man, especially when sudden stardom proved to be the wrong prism through which to find answers.
With archival material often superimposed over a faint, scratchy-film background, we feel the sensitivity and chaos of Buckley’s single-mom upbringing in Anaheim, the devastating distance of his absentee dad, folk-poet icon Tim Buckley (you’ll never forget the matchbook Jeff saved), and the creative blossoming that happened in New York’s East Village. There, his long-standing influences, from Nina Simone and Edith Piaf to Led Zeppelin and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, coalesced into a post-grunge emotionalism anchored by those unbelievable pipes.
Even after Buckley’s record-label discovery leads to the usual music-doc trappings — tour montages, media coverage, performance morsels — Berg wisely keeps the contours of his interior life in the foreground, intimately related by key figures, most prominently Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, romantic confidantes such as artist Rebecca Moore and musician Joan Wasser, and bandmates like Michael Tighe. Berg keeps these interviewees close to her camera, too, so we can appreciate their memories as personal gifts, still raw after so many years.
Fans might yearn for more granular unpacking of the music, but it somehow doesn’t feel like an oversight when so much ink on it already exists and so little else has been colored in. The same goes for the blessed absence of boilerplate A-list praise. The global acclaim for his sole album, 1994’s “Grace,” which includes his all-timer rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” certainly put admiring superstars (Dylan, Bowie, McCartney) in Buckley’s path, including one of his idols, Robert Plant. But Berg stays true to a viewpoint rooted in Buckley’s conflicting feelings about the pressures and absurdities of fame, and why it ultimately drove him to Memphis to seek the solace to start a second album that was never completed.
The last chapter is thoughtfully handled. Berg makes sure that we understand that his loved ones view his death as an accident, not a suicide, and the movie’s details are convincing. That doesn’t make the circumstances any less heartbreaking, of course. As warmer spotlights go, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” may never fully expunge what maddens and mystifies about the untimely end of troubled souls. But it candidly dimensionalizes a one-album wonder, virtually ensuring the kind of relistening likely to deepen those echoes.
The association also claims the governance of snooker “should factor in more of the views of the players”.
It has vowed to foster a “collaborative relationship” with the sport’s authorities, including the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), the existing WPBSA Players’ Board, and World Snooker Tour “to enhance the sport’s future, while safeguarding player welfare and commercial interests”.
The PSPA says it has established a players board comprising of Judd Trump, Kyren Wilson, Mark Selby, Barry Hawkins, Shaun Murphy, Ali Carter, Gary Wilson, Stuart Bingham, Jack Lisowski, Stephen Maguire, Mark Allen, Ryan Day and Joe Perry. Another player – Matthew Selt – has been appointed a director, alongside lawyers Ben Rees and Mark Kenkre.
The association also claims that seven-time world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan has agreed to become a member, along with Chinese stars Ding Junhui and Xiao Guodong.
“I’ve had lots of discussions with Ronnie” said Higgins. “He’s really excited about it, so it’s full steam ahead.”
The fact so many of the top players are behind the new body suggests some feel they do not have enough say in the running of the World Snooker Tour (WST), particularly the commercial side.
During the 2024 World Championship, the headlines at the Crucible were dominated by talk of a potential breakaway tour. This came after the game’s top players were approached to play in lucrative events in China and North America as part of a potential breakaway circuit.
Professional players sign a contract which does not allow them to compete in any outside events while WST tournaments are being played, unless they are events sanctioned by the WST, although players have recently negotiated more flexibility.
However, the WST has been increasing the amount of prize money in the game, and is preparing to stage the sport’s “fourth major” in Saudi Arabia with a prize pot of more than £2m. The second Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters will take place later this week in Jeddah.
The WPBSA’s own players’ body was formed in 2020, and the governing body says it has “a specific mandate to act in the collective best interest of members in relation to welfare and issues affecting the professional game.”
It says that it “acts as a channel for member concerns and provides a platform whereby issues surrounding their wellbeing can be raised at the highest levels by the WPBSA Players Board.”
The PSPA says it has been formed with expert guidance from leading sports law professionals, and that its key objectives include legal and commercial support to protect players’ rights in sponsorship, broadcasting, and contractual matters.
For filmmaker Scott Mann, three dozen F-bombs had the makings of a million-dollar headache.
When Mann wrapped “Fall,” a 2022 thriller about two women stranded atop a 2,000-foot radio tower, he figured the hard part was over. Shot in the Mojave Desert on a $3-million budget, the film didn’t have money to burn and seemed on course. But Lionsgate wanted a PG-13 rating and, with 35 expletives, “Fall” was headed for an R. Reshoots would cost more than $1 million — far beyond what the production could afford.
In the past, a director might have taken out a second mortgage or thrown themselves at the mercy of the ratings board. Mann instead turned to AI.
A few years earlier, he had been dismayed by how a German dub of his 2015 thriller “Heist” flattened the performances, including a key scene with Robert De Niro, to match stiff, mistranslated dialogue. That frustration led Mann to co-found Flawless, an AI startup aimed at preserving the integrity of an actor’s performance across languages. As a proof of concept, he used the company’s tech to subtly reshape De Niro’s mouth movements and restore the emotional nuance of the original scene.
On “Fall,” Mann applied that same technology to clean up the profanity without reshoots, digitally modifying the actors’ mouths to match PG-13-friendly lines like “freaking” — at a fraction of the cost.
A series on how the AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood — from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.
As AI stirs both hype and anxiety in Hollywood, Mann understands why even such subtle digital tweaks can feel like a violation. That tension came to a head during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, in which AI became the defining flash point in the fight over acting’s future.
“Ours is a rights-based industry,” says Mann, 45, who helped develop a digital rights management platform at Flawless to ensure performers approve any changes to their work. “It’s built on protecting human creativity, the contributions of actors, directors, editors, and if those rights aren’t protected, that value gets lost.”
Mann at his office in Santa Monica.
(Brian Feinzimer / For The Times)
Still, Mann doesn’t see AI as a threat so much as a misunderstood tool — one that, used carefully, can support the artists it’s accused of replacing. Flawless’ DeepEditor, for example, lets directors transfer facial expressions from one take to another, even when the camera angle or lighting changes, helping actors preserve their strongest moments without breaking continuity.
“Plenty of actors I’ve worked with have had that moment where they see what’s possible and realize, ‘Oh my God, this is so much better,’” Mann says. “It frees them up, takes off the pressure and helps them do a better job. Shutting AI out is naive and a way to end up on the wrong side of history. Done right, this will make the industry grow and thrive.”
AI isn’t hovering at the edges of acting anymore — it’s already on soundstages and in editing bays. Studios have used digital tools to de-age Harrison Ford in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” resurrect Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin in “Rogue One” and clone Val Kilmer’s voice in “Top Gun: Maverick” after throat cancer left him unable to speak. The technology has reshaped faces, smoothed dialogue and fast-tracked everything from dubbing to reshoots. And its reach is growing: Studios can now revive long-dead stars, conjure stunt doubles who never get hurt and rewrite performances long after wrap.
But should they?
Actors outside Paramount Studios during a SAG-AFTRA solidarity rally in September 2023.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
As the tools grow more sophisticated, the threat to actors goes beyond creative disruption. In an industry where steady work is already elusive and the middle class of working actors is vanishing, AI raises the prospect of fewer jobs, lower pay and, in a dystopian twist, a future in which your disembodied face and voice might get work without you.
Background actors were among the first to sound the alarm during the 2023 strike, protesting studio proposals to scan them once and reuse their likenesses indefinitely. That scenario is already beginning to unfold: In China, a state-backed initiative will use AI to reimagine 100 kung fu classics, including films starring Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, through animation and other digital enhancements. Lee’s estate said it was unaware of the project, raising questions about how these actors’ likenesses might be used, decades after filming.
If the soul of acting is a human presence, what remains when even that can be simulated?
“You want to feel breath — you want to feel life,” said actor and director Ethan Hawke during a panel at 2023’s Telluride Film Festival, where strike-era unease over AI was palpable. “When we see a great painting, we feel a human being’s blood, sweat and tears. That’s what we’re all looking for, that connection with the present moment. And AI can’t do that.”
Who’s in control?
Justine Bateman may seem like an unlikely crusader in Hollywood’s fight against AI. Launched to fame as Mallory Keaton on the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties,” she later became a filmmaker and earned a computer science degree from UCLA. Now, as founder of the advocacy group CREDO23, Bateman has become one of the industry’s fiercest voices urging filmmakers to reject AI-generated content and defend the integrity of human-made work. Loosely modeled on Dogme 95, CREDO23 offers a certification of films made without AI, using minimal VFX and union crews. It’s a pledge backed by a council including “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, “The Handmaid’s Tale” director Reed Morano and actor Juliette Lewis.
The 2023 SAG-AFTRA contract set new guardrails: Studios must get actors’ consent to create or use digital replicas of their likenesses, and those replicas can’t generate new performances without a separate deal. Actors must also be compensated and credited when their digital likeness is used.
But to Bateman, a former SAG-AFTRA board member and negotiating committee rep, those protections are little more than sandbags against an inevitable AI flood: hard-won but already straining to keep the technology at bay.
“The allowances in the contract are pretty astounding,” Bateman says by phone, her voice tight with exasperation. “If you can picture the Teamsters allowing self-driving trucks in their contract — that’s on par with what SAG did. If you’re not making sure human roles are played by human actors, I’m not sure what the union is for.”
Justine Bateman, photographed by The Times in 2022.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
To Bateman, the idea that AI expands access to filmmaking — a central tenet of its utopian sales pitch — is a dangerous myth, one that obscures deeper questions about authorship and the value of creative labor.
“Anyone can make a film — my last two, I shot on an iPhone,” Bateman says. “The idea that AI is ‘democratizing film’ doesn’t even make sense. What it really does is remove the barrier of skill. It lets people pretend they’re filmmakers when they’re not, by prompting software that wouldn’t even function without having stolen a hundred years of film and TV production made by real filmmakers.”
Bateman’s opposition to AI is rooted in a deep distrust of Silicon Valley’s expanding influence over the creative process and a belief that filmmaking should be driven by artists, not algorithms. “The tech bro business completely jumped the shark with generative AI,” she says. “Is it solving plastics in the ocean? Homelessness? L.A. traffic? Not that I’m aware of.”
She scoffs at the supposed efficiencies AI brings to the filmmaking process: “It’s like saying, whatever somebody enjoys — sex or an ice cream sundae — ‘Hey, now you can do it in a quarter of the time.’ OK, but then what do you think life is for?“
To Bateman, an actor’s voice, face, movements or even their choice of costume is not raw material to be reshaped but an expression of authorship. AI, in her view, erases those choices and the intent behind them. “I’m deeply against changing what the actor did,” she says. “It’s not right to have the actor doing things or saying things they didn’t do — or to alter their hair, makeup or clothes in postproduction using AI. The actor knows what they did.”
While Bateman has been public and unwavering in her stance, many actors remain unsure whether to raise their voices. In the wake of the strikes, much of the conversation around AI has moved behind closed doors, leaving those who do speak out feeling at times exposed and alone.
Scarlett Johansson, who lent her smoky, hypnotic voice to the fictional AI in Spike Jonze’s Oscar-winning 2013 film “Her,” now finds herself in a uniquely uncomfortable position: She’s both a symbol of our collective fascination with artificial performance and a real-world example of what’s at stake when that line is crossed. Last year, she accused OpenAI of using a chatbot voice that sounded “eerily similar” to hers, months after she declined to license it. OpenAI denied the claim and pulled the voice, but the incident reignited concern over consent and control.
Johansson has long spoken out against the unauthorized use of her image, including her appearance in deepfake pornography, and has pushed for stronger safeguards against digital impersonation. To date, though, she is one of the few major stars to publicly push back against the creeping mimicry enabled by AI — and she’s frustrated that more haven’t joined her. “There has to be some agreed-upon set of boundaries in order for [AI] to not be detrimental,” she told Vanity Fair in May. “I wish more people in the public eye would support and speak out about that. I don’t know why that’s not the case.”
Lights, camera, replication
Ed Ulbrich, 60, a pioneering visual effects producer and co-founder of Digital Domain, has spent his career helping actors do the impossible, one pixel at a time.
In 2008’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” he led the team of more than 150 artists in building a fully digital version of Brad Pitt’s face so the actor could convincingly age in reverse — a two-year effort that earned Ulbrich and three colleagues an Oscar for visual effects and set a new benchmark for digital performance. (Nearly two decades later, the achievement is still impressive, although some scenes, especially those with Pitt’s aged face composited on a child’s body, now show their digital seams.) For 2010’s “Tron: Legacy,” Ulbrich helped digitally transform Jeff Bridges into his 1982 self using motion capture and CGI.
Working on last year’s “Here” — Robert Zemeckis’ technically daring drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as a couple whose lives play out across decades in a single New Jersey living room — showed Ulbrich just how far things have come. For someone who jokes he has “real estate in the uncanny valley,” it wasn’t just the AI-enabled realism that floored him. It was the immediacy. On set, AI wasn’t enhancing footage after the fact; it was visually reshaping the performance in real time.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in the movie “Here.”
(Sony Pictures Ent.)
“You look up and see 67-year-old Tom Hanks. You look down at the monitor — he’s 20, and it looks better than the best CGI,” Ulbrich says. “In my world, the human face is the holy grail. That is the most complicated thing you can do. And now it’s getting done in near real time before your eyes. The actor can come back and look at the monitor and get new ideas, because they’re seeing a different version of themselves: younger, older, as an alien or whatever.”
This kind of seamless AI-driven alteration marks a new frontier in postproduction. Modern AI systems can now “beautify” actors’ faces, like some would with a Instagram or Zoom filter: smooth out wrinkles, alter skin tone, sharpen jawlines, subtly nudge eye position to better match a desired gaze. What once required painstaking VFX can now be handled by fast, flexible AI tools, often with results invisible to audiences.
Once limited to only big-budget sci-fi and fantasy productions, this digital touch-up capability is expanding into rom-coms, prestige dramas, high-end TV and even some indie films. Dialogue can be rewritten and re-lipped in post. Facial expressions can be smoothed or swapped without reshoots. More and more, viewers may have no way of knowing what’s real and what’s been subtly adjusted.
“Here” was largely rejected by both audiences and critics, with some deeming its digitally de-aged performances more unsettling than moving. But Ulbrich says digitally enhanced performance is already well underway.
Talent agency CAA has built a vault of client scans, a kind of biometric asset library for future productions. Some stars now negotiate contracts that reduce their time on set, skipping hours in the makeup chair or performance-capture gear, knowing AI can fill in the gaps.
“Robert Downey, Brad Pitt, Will Smith — they’ve all been scanned many times,” says Ulbrich, who recently joined the AI-driven media company Moonvalley, which pitches itself as a more ethical, artist-centered player in the space. “If you’ve done a studio tentpole, you’ve been scanned.
“There is a lot of fear around AI and it’s founded,” he adds. “Unless you do something about it, you can just get run over. But there are people out there that are harnessing this. At this point, fighting AI is like fighting against electricity.”
While many in Hollywood wrestle with what AI means for the oldest component of moviemaking, others take a more pragmatic view, treating it as a tool to solve problems and keep productions on track. Jerry Bruckheimer, the powerhouse producer behind “Top Gun,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and this summer’s “F1,” is among those embracing its utility.
“AI is not going anywhere and it’s only going to get more useful for people in our business,” he said in a recent interview with The Times.
He recalled one such moment during post-production on his new Brad Pitt–led Formula One drama, a logistical feat filmed during actual Formula One races across Europe and the Middle East, with a budget north of $200 million.
“Brad was in the wilds of New Zealand, and we had test screenings coming up,” Bruckheimer says. “We couldn’t get his voice to do some looping, so we used an app that could mimic Brad Pitt. I’m sure the union will come after me if you write that, but it wasn’t used in the movie because he became available.”
While he’s skeptical of AI’s ability to generate truly original ideas — “We’re always going to need writers,” he says — Bruckheimer, whose films have grossed more than $16 billion worldwide, sees AI as a powerful tool for global reach.
“They can take Brad’s voice from the movie and turn it into other languages so it’s actually his voice, rather than another actor,” he says. “If it’s not available yet, it will be.”
The debate over AI in performance flared earlier this year with “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s award-winning drama about a Hungarian architect. After the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that AI voice-cloning software had been used to subtly modify the Hungarian accents of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, the backlash followed swiftly.
Some critics accused the film of using AI to smooth over performances while presenting itself as handcrafted, a move one viral post derided as trying to “cheap out without soul.” Corbet later clarified that AI was used sparingly, only to adjust vowel sounds, but the decision left some viewers uneasy — even as Brody went on to win the Oscar for lead actor.
If the controversy over “The Brutalist” struck some as a moral crisis, David Cronenberg found the whole thing overblown. Few filmmakers have probed the entanglement of flesh, identity and technology as relentlessly as the director of “Videodrome,” “The Fly” and last year’s “The Shrouds,” so he’s not particularly rattled by the rise of AI-assisted performances.
“All directors have always messed around with actors’ performances — that’s what editing is,” Cronenberg told The Times in April. “Filmmaking isn’t theater. It’s not sacred. We’ve been using versions of this for years. It’s another tool in the toolbox. And it’s not controlling you — you can choose not to use it.”
Long before digital tools, Cronenberg recalls adjusting actor John Lone’s vocal pitch in his 1993 film “M. Butterfly,” in which Lone played a Chinese opera singer and spy who presents as a woman to seduce a French diplomat. The director raised the pitch when the character appeared as a woman and lowered it when he didn’t — a subtle manipulation to reinforce the illusion.
David Cronenberg, photographed at his home in Toronto, Canada, in April.
(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)
Far from alarmed, Cronenberg is intrigued by AI’s creative potential as a way of reshaping authorship itself. With new platforms like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 now capable of generating increasingly photorealistic clips from simple text prompts, an entire performance could conceivably be conjured from a writer’s keyboard.
“Suddenly you can write a scene — a woman is walking down the street, she looks like this, she’s wearing that, it’s raining, whatever — and AI can create a video for you,” Cronenberg says. “To me, this is all exciting. It absolutely can threaten all kinds of jobs and that has to be dealt with, but every technological advance has done that and we just have to adapt and figure it out.”
Ghosts in the frame
In the Hollywood of the late 1970s, there was no AI to tweak an actor’s face. So when “Star Wars” star Mark Hamill fractured his nose and left cheekbone in a serious car crash between shooting the first and second films, the solution was to tweak the story. The 1980 sequel “The Empire Strikes Back” opened with Luke Skywalker being attacked by a nine-foot-tall snow beast called a wampa on the ice planet Hoth, partly to account for the change in his appearance.
Decades later, when Hamill was invited to return as a younger version of himself in the 2020 Season 2 finale of “The Mandalorian,” the chance to show Luke “at the height of his powers was irresistible,” he says.
But the reality left him feeling oddly detached from the character that made him famous. Hamill shared the role with a younger body double, and digital de-aging tools recreated his face from decades earlier. The character’s voice, meanwhile, was synthesized using Respeecher, a neural network trained on old recordings of Hamill to mimic his speech from the original trilogy era.
“I didn’t have that much dialogue: ‘Are you Luke Skywalker?’ ‘I am,’” Hamill recalled in an interview with The Times earlier this year. “I don’t know what they do when they take it away, in terms of tweaking it and making your voice go up in pitch or whatever.”
When fans speculated online that he hadn’t participated at all, Hamill declined to correct the record.
“My agent said, ‘Do you want me to put out a statement or something?’” Hamill recalls. “I said, ‘Eh, people are going to say what they want to say.’ Maybe if you deny it, they say, ‘See? That proves it — he’s denying it.’”
A digitally de-aged Mark Hamill as the young Luke Skywalker in a 2020 episode of “The Mandalorian.”
(Lucasfilm Ltd.)
When Luke returned again in a 2022 episode of “The Book of Boba Fett,” the process was even more synthetic: Hamill was minimally involved on camera and the character was built almost entirely from digital parts: a de-aged face mapped onto a body double with an AI-generated voice delivering his lines. Hamill was credited and compensated, though the exact terms of the arrangement haven’t been made public.
The visual effect was notably improved from earlier efforts, thanks in part to a viral deepfake artist known as Shamook, whose YouTube video improving the VFX in “The Mandalorian” finale had racked up millions of views. He was soon hired by Industrial Light & Magic — a rare case of fan-made tech critique turning into a studio job.
“In essence, yes, I did participate,” Hamill says.
It’s one thing to be digitally altered while you’re still alive. It’s another to keep performing after you’re gone.
Before his death last year, James Earl Jones — whose resonant baritone helped define Darth Vader for generations — gave Lucasfilm permission to recreate his voice using AI. In a recent collaboration with Disney, Epic Games deployed that digital voice in Fortnite, allowing players to team up with Vader and hear new lines delivered in Jones’ unmistakable tones, scripted by Google’s Gemini AI.
In May, SAG-AFTRA later filed a labor charge, saying the use of Jones’ voice hadn’t been cleared with the union.
Last year’s “Alien: Romulus” sparked similar backlash over the digital resurrection of Ian Holm’s android character Ash nearly a decade after Holm’s death. Reconstructed using a blend of AI and archival footage, the scenes were slammed by some fans as a form of “digital necromancy.” For the film’s home video release, director Fede Álvarez quietly issued an alternate cut that relied more heavily on practical effects, including an animatronic head modeled from a preexisting cast of Holm’s face.
For Hollywood, AI allows nostalgia to become a renewable resource, endlessly reprocessed and resold. Familiar faces can be altered, repurposed and inserted into entirely new stories. The audience never has to say goodbye and the industry never has to take the risk of introducing someone new.
Hamill, for his part, seems ready to let go of Luke. After his final arc in 2017’s “The Last Jedi,” he says he feels a sense of closure.
“I don’t know the full impact AI will have but I find it very ominous,“ he says. “I’m fine. I had my time. Now the spotlight should be on the current and future actors and I hope they enjoy it as much as I did.”
Actors, not avatars
Actor and AI startup Wonder Dynamics co-founder Tye Sheridan, photographed by The Times in 2021.
(Michael Nagle / For The Times)
Actor Tye Sheridan knows how dark an AI future could get. After all, he starred in Steven Spielberg’s 2018 “Ready Player One,” a sci-fi thriller set inside a corporate-controlled world of digital avatars. But Sheridan isn’t trying to escape into that world — he’s trying to shape the one ahead.
With VFX supervisor Nikola Todorovic, Sheridan co-founded Wonder Dynamics in 2017 to explore how AI can expand what’s possible on screen. Their platform uses AI to insert digital characters into live-action scenes without green screens or motion-capture suits, making high-end VFX more accessible to low-budget filmmakers. Backed by Spielberg and “Avengers” co-director Joe Russo, Wonder Dynamics was acquired last year by Autodesk, the software firm behind many animation and design tools.
“Since the advent of the camera, technology has been pushing this industry forward,” Sheridan, 28, says on a video call. “AI is just another part of that path. It can make filmmaking more accessible, help discover new voices. Maybe the next James Cameron will find their way into the industry through some AI avenue. I think that’s really exciting.”
With production costs spiraling, Todorovic sees AI as a way to lower the barrier to entry and make riskier, more ambitious projects possible. “We really see AI going in that direction, where you can get those A24-grounded stories with Marvel visuals,” he says. “That’s what younger audiences are hungry for.”
The shift, Todorovic argues, could lead to more films overall and more opportunities for actors. “Maybe instead of 10,000 people making five movies, it’ll be 1,000 people making 50,” he says.
Still, Todorovic sees a threshold approaching, one where synthetic actors could, in theory, carry a film. “I do think technically it is going to get solved,” Todorovic says. “But the question remains — is that what we really want? Do we really want the top five movies of the year to star humans who don’t exist? I sure hope not.”
For him, the boundary isn’t just about realism. It’s about human truth.
“You can’t prompt a performance,” he says. “You can’t explain certain movements of the body and it’s very hard to describe emotions. Acting is all about reacting. That’s why when you make a movie, you do five takes — or 40. Because it’s hard to communicate.”
Sheridan, who has appeared in the “X-Men” franchise as well as smaller dramas like “The Card Counter” and “The Tender Bar,” understands that instinctively and personally. “I started acting in films when I was 11 years old,” he says. “I wouldn’t ever want to build something that put me out of a job. That’s the fun part — performing, exploring, discovering the nuances. That’s why we fall in love with certain artists: their unique sensibility, the way they do what no one else can.”
He knows that may sound contradictory coming from the co-founder of an AI company. That’s exactly why he believes it’s critical that artists, not Silicon Valley CEOs, are the ones shaping how the technology is used.
“We should be skeptical of AI and its bad uses,” he says. “It’s a tool that can be used for good or bad. How are we going to apply it to create more access and opportunity in this industry and have more voices heard? We’re focused on keeping the artist as an essential part of the process, not replacing them.”
For now, Sheridan lives inside that paradox, navigating a technology that could both elevate and imperil the stories he cares most about.
His next acting gig? “The Housewife,” a psychological drama co-starring Naomi Watts and Michael Imperioli, in which he plays a 1960s New York Times reporter investigating a suspected Nazi hiding in Queens. No AI. No doubles. Just people pretending to be other people the old way, while it lasts.
Alan Tudyk was nearly 50 when he scored his first starring role in a TV series as the titular extraterrestrial Harry Vanderspeigle in Syfy’s “Resident Alien.” It’s not that he was underemployed or little known — he’s been celebrated in genre circles since “Firefly,” the 2002 single-season western-themed space opera in which he played the sweet, comical pilot of a spaceship captained by smuggler Mal, played by Nathan Fillion, with whom he has since been linked in the interested public mind, like Hope and Crosby, or Fey and Poehler. His own 2015 web series “Con Man” (currently available on Prime Video), based on his experiences at sci-fi conventions, in which he and Fillion play inverted versions of themselves, was funded by an enormously successful crowd-sourced campaign, which raised $3,156,178 from 46,992 backers; clearly the people love him.
You can’t exactly call “Resident Alien” career-making, given how much Tudyk has worked, going back to onscreen roles in the late 20th century and on stage in New York, but it has made him especially visible over a long period in a marvelous show in a part for which he seems to have been fashioned. He has, indeed, often been invisible, with a parallel career as a voice artist, beginning with small parts in “Ice Age” in 2002; since channeling Ed Wynn for King Candy in Disney’s 2012 “Wreck-It Ralph” (which won him an Annie Award), the studio has used him regularly, like a good luck charm. You can hear him in “Frozen” (Duke of Weselton), “Big Hero 6” (Alistair Krei), “Zootopia” (Duke Weaselton), “Moana” (Hei Hei), “Encanto” (Pico) and “Wish” (Valentino). He played the Joker on “Harley Quinn” and voices Optimus Prime in “Transformers: EarthSpark.” Performing motion capture and voice-over, he was Sonny the emotional android in “I, Robot” and the dry droid K-2SO in both “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and again in “Andor.” (He’s a robot again in the new “Superman” film.) This is a partial, one could even say fractional, list. Among animation and sci-fi fans, being the well-informed sorts they are, Tudyk is known and honored for this body of work as well.
Alan Tudyk at his home in Los Angeles last year. The actor has been in a variety of roles onscreen, on stage and as a voice actor.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
“Resident Alien,” whose fourth season is underway on Syfy, USA and Peacock (earlier seasons are available on Netflix, which has raised the show’s profile considerably), is a small town comedy with apocalyptic overtones. It sees Tudyk’s alien, whose natural form is of a giant, big-eyed, noseless humanoid with octopus DNA, imperfectly disguised as the new local doctor, whom he kills in the first episode. (We will learn that the doctor was, in fact, an assassin, which makes it sort of … all right?) Learning English from reruns of “Law & Order,” the being now called Harry will preposterously succeed in his masquerade, and in doing so, join a community that will ultimately improve him. (By local standards, at least.) It’s a fish way, way out of water story, with the difference that the fish has been sent to kill all the Earth fish — I am being metaphorical, he isn’t actually out to kill fish — although he is now working to save them from a different, nastier race of alien.
Some actors play their first part and suddenly their name is everywhere; others slide into public consciousness slowly, through a side door — which may lead, after all, to a longer, more varied career. Tudyk has the quality of having arrived, despite having been there all along. Like many actors with a long CV, he might surprise you, turning up on old episodes of “Strangers With Candy,” “Frasier,” “Arrested Development” or “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” or repeatedly crying “Cramped!” in a scene from “Patch Adams,” or in the movies “Wonder Boys,” “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Tale” or “3:10 to Yuma.” You might say to yourself, or the person you’re watching with, “Hey, that’s Alan Tudyk.” (You might add, “He hasn’t aged a bit.”) It was “Suburgatory,” an underloved ABC sitcom from 2011, though not underloved by me, where he played the confused best friend of star Jeremy Sisto, that, combined with “Firefly,” cemented Tudyk in my mind as someone I would always be happy to see.
He’s handsome in a pleasant, ordinary way. If he’s not exactly Hollywood’s idea of a leading man, it only points up the limitations of that concept. His eyes are maybe a trifle close set, his lips a little thin. There’s a softness to him that feeds into or productively contrasts with his characters, depending on where they fall on the good-bad or calm-hysterical scales. (In the current season of “Resident Alien,” a shape-shifting giant praying mantis has taken over Harry’s human identity, and this evil twin performance, which somehow fools Harry’s friends, is as frightening as the fact that the mantis eats people’s heads.) It makes his robots relatable and roots his more flamboyant characters, like Mr. Nowhere, the villain in the first season of “Doom Patrol” — who comments on the series from outside the fourth wall, inhabiting a white void where he might be discovered sitting on a toilet and reading a review of the show he’s in — in something like naturalism.
Sara Tomko and Alan Tudyk in a scene from Season 4 of “Resident Alien.”
(USA Network / James Dittiger / USA Network)
As Harry, Tudyk is never really calm. Relaxed neither in voice nor body, he tucks his lips inside his mouth and stretches it into a variety of blobby shapes. The actor can seem to be puppeteering his own expressions, which, in a way Harry is, or splitting the difference between a real person and an animated cartoon, in the Chuck Jones/Tex Avery sense of the term, which is not to say Tudyk overplays; he just hits the right note of exaggeration. Harry often has the air of being impatient to leave a scene and get on with whatever business he’s decided is important.
Though he’s given to explosive bursts of speech, as the character has developed, the humor he plays becomes more subtle and quiet, peppered with muttered comments and sotto voce asides he means to be heard. He is, as he likes to point out, the smartest and most powerful being around, but he has the emotional maturity of a child. At one point, having lost his alien powers, Harry was willing to sacrifice the entirety of his species to get them back.
Where once he had no emotions, now he is full of them. Last season, he was given a romance, with Heather (Edi Patterson), a bird person from outer space, which has continued into the current run; he is also a father, with a great affection — anomalous in his species — for his son, Bridget, an adorably fearsome little green creature. And he loves pie.
And that Tudyk himself seems genuinely nice — there are interviews with him up and down YouTube, and my friend David, who worked on “Firefly,” called him “kind, grateful and curious” — makes him easy to like, however likable a person he’s playing. That possibly shouldn’t matter when assessing an actor’s art, but it does anyway.
![Lee Little with a photograph of her daughter Alicia Little, who was killed by her partner after being driven into by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Alicia's killer would serve only two years and 8 months jail for the crime [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Stop-Killing-Women-1-1756363322.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C512&quality=80)
![Sherele Moody, from the Red Heart campaign, speaks with the media at a Stop Killing Women protest earlier this year in Melbourne, Australia. Moody says the official government data under-represents the true scale of femicide in Australia [Ali MC/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Stop-Killing-Women-03-1756363768.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C512&quality=80)
