Last year, I hoped that the rumors were not true about Daniel Craig leaving the James Bond franchise. I always liked Craig’s James Bond, and I thought Craig would continue to make the movies for several more years. But then I saw Spectre, which was… how shall I say? NOT GOOD. Like, Quantum of Solace was a bad movie but you can sort of blame that on the writers’ strike. Spectre had no excuse for being so awful. So, if that was Daniel Craig’s last outing as Bond, so be it. Bring in some fresh blood. And apparently Daniel feels the same way. He reportedly turned down an extremely lucrative deal to play Bond again. Ugh.

Daniel Craig has told studio bosses he is ‘done’ playing 007, sources claim. The news comes just days after bookmakers called off bets on Cambridge-educated Tom Hiddleston becoming the next James Bond. Craig is the highest-paid actor to play the role, netting a reported total of £38million for the four films he has appeared in.

He has played Bond since 2005 and helped bank well over £2billion in box office revenue, helping ease MGM’s bankruptcy issues. Insiders said Craig turned down a £68 million offer from MGM studio to return as Bond for two more films following last year’s hit Spectre. The sum included endorsements, profit shares, and a role for him working as a co-producer.

One LA film source said: ‘Daniel is done – pure and simple – he told top brass at MGM after Spectre. They threw huge amounts of money at him, but it just wasn’t what he wanted. He had told people after shooting that this would be his final outing, but the film company still felt he could come around after Spectre if he was offered a money deal.’

One source said that executives had finally agreed to let the actor go after growing tired of his criticism of the franchise. Craig, 48, told interviewers last year that he would rather ‘slash my wrists’ than agree to another Bond film.

The source said: ‘With knee problems and general exhaustion, he felt it was a journey with an ending.’ The studio delayed the next Bond film after Craig committed to a 20-episode US TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity.

[From The Daily Mail]

Good. Get a new Bond. Get some new writers too. And get a director other than Sam Mendes, someone who will stop filming scenes in utter darkness. Anyway, considering that Craig seemed totally over it late last year, I do think this is the end. I’m surprised that MGM was so hellbent on getting him to stay on, actually, because Craig was behaving like a man who couldn’t have given two sh-ts about the franchise.

As for Tom Hiddleston, it’s true that one UK bookmaker suspended bets on Hiddles becoming the next Bond. I still don’t understand why people are so “HE SHOULD PLAY BOND” about Hiddles following The Night Manager. And just the fact that so many people are associating Tom with Bond is probably reason enough for Tom to NOT be considered. It’s too “obvious.” Although I did enjoy this bitchy headline from The Sun: “Tom Hiddleston is bookies favourite to be next Bond… but his latest movie is a flop.” Damn, Daniel Craig has had some flops too!

Photos courtesy of WENN.

Sarah Paulson, Kirsten Dunst, Kerry Washington, Constance Zimmer, Regina King, Julianna Margulies, and, look who else, it’s Jennifer Lopez on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter Actresses Roundtable as we approach Emmy season. You’ll recall, I wrote last month about JLO campaigning for a nominati…

I’m slowly coming around to Kendall Jenner-as-model. I used to just roll my eyes and mutter about nepotism, but as Kendall’s modeling career gets more heat and she gets more editorial work, I’m not hating it. She photographs well. She looks a lot like a young Ali McGraw, and I love Ali McGraw, so it’s a good association. I don’t even hate Kendall’s new cover editorial for Harper’s Bazaar, shot by Karl Lagerfeld. The photos are sort of pleasantly bland. I think she was going for sexy and modern, but that’s not coming across (though her hair looks great). Anyway, while I’m currently okay with Kendall’s career, you couldn’t pay me to find her an interesting interview subject. She’s not as vapid as Kylie, but Kendall just is NOT interesting. Even doing a dual interview with Karl Lagerfeld doesn’t make her more interesting. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

On being raised in the public eye: “We were brought up in this abnormal world, if that’s what you want to call it. I feel like a lot of people say that kids who grow up in that kind of world go crazy. But it has everything to do with how your parents raise you. I was raised so normally, or as normally as I could have been.”

On what she thought she wanted to be when she grew up: “I’ve always loved animals. I rode horses for 10 and a half years, so I thought I was going to be a professional horseback rider and then a vet. I used to play these vet video games.”

On meeting new people and being closed off: “I’m not super open to new people. I have a small group of people I trust. I’m very intuitive, so I’m good at feeling out how people are, like if they have bad intentions. Sometimes I’m very closed off, which annoys me, but I think it’s for the best.”

On her taste in music: “I went to Justin Bieber’s concert the other night. Of course I have the fever! He’s a really good friend of the family’s, so we all went to support him. Kanye went two nights in a row. He’s a huge fan – I was shocked. He was dancing around the whole night, having so much fun”

She loves Beyonce too: “Beyoncé. Oh, my God, are you kidding? I am 100 percent a huge fan of Beyoncé. If I see her, I will faint. I’ve met her before. I just get really nervous and quiet—I just shut up and bow down.”

She’s stalked by paparazzi: “Yes, they wait outside my house every single day. It’s so crazy to me because it’s stalking at this point. When I say every day, I’m not kidding. I don’t understand how that is legal. There should be some kind of Sunday off or something.”

[From Harper’s Bazaar]

I look at paparazzi photos all day, every day, and so I end up getting a sense of who the biggest paparazzi targets are. And much like the Elizabeth Olsen thing, I have to wonder if there’s something I’m missing? Is Kendall Jenner as famous as she thinks she is? Unlike Olsen – who really seemed to have inflated sense of her own celebrity – Kendall does get pap’d when she’s working in Paris, or at LAX, or at a nightclub, or filming KUWTK. But… there aren’t photos of her every day. And I’m pretty sure the whole clan lives in a gated estate, so how are there paparazzi waiting outside her house every day?

Photos courtesy of Karl Lagerfeld/Harper’s Bazaar.

Congratulations to Melissa Rycroft and Tye Strickland.

The Bachelor alum, 33, and her husband, 34, welcomed their third child – son Cayson Jack Strickland – on Wednesday (May 18), E! News reports.

The newborn – who weighed in at 8 lbs., 12 oz. – joins sister Ava Grace, 5, and brother Beckett Thomas, 2.

In November, the former Dancing with the Stars champ announced her pregnancy news on social media with a photo featuring their kids holding signs reading “Big Brother” and “And then there were five.”

“This is definitely the last one … probably…” Rycroft captioned the family photo.

Congratulations to the Rycroft-Strickland family!

Ooooooh, it’s time for a French Bae-Off. Here are some photos from today’s Cannes Film Festival photocall of It’s Only The End Of The World, or Juste La Fin Du Monde. The film stars Léa Seydoux and Marion Cotillard, but that’s not even important. Because the film also stars Vincent Cassel and Gaspard Ulliel. BLESS.

Obviously, I’m including more photos of Gaspard’s squinty beauty, because he is now and will forever be my French bae. But! These photos of Vincent are really nice too. I’ve always thought he had the jolie-laide thing happening, that his sexiness was more of a quirk just because he’s so confident and physical and amazing, not because of his actual looks. But the beard is working for me. He looks HOT with a beard. As for Gaspard… the dimples, the shy smile, the fact that he’s dressed like a middle-American dad on his way to high school basketball game… it’s hot.

So, in a French Bae-Off, who would you choose?

Photos courtesy of WENN.

Kanye West has long kept a recording studio in his home. I think in the years when Kanye and Kim were living with Kris Jenner, he kept his “bachelor pad” in LA and used that place to record music, solo or with collaborators. Kanye also has a well-documented history of doing weird, inappropriate and even sexist things, and I’m saying that as a Kanye Apologist for the most part. He has moments where he treats women terribly, where he says horribly sexist and misogynistic things about women, and there are no excuses. So while this story didn’t surprise me, that doesn’t mean I found it acceptable.

In the storied history of Kanye West, many people can attest to odd interactions. He’s not exactly the most grounded individual in the music/entertainment business, so almost anyone who’s spent time with him can recite an odd happening. Ninja, from Die Antwoord, pretty much just beat everyone with this.

During what was supposed to be a recording session with Kanye at his home, Kanye apparently turned on anal sex porn in the midst of a conversation.

“I had this idea for a track and, as I’m about to say the sh*t about the track, Kanye just turns on an anal sex video. Like a random anal sex video,” said Ninja. “And then Kanye says, ‘Why is this guy putting his whole hand in her ass with his dick?’ And then he turned back to me and said, ‘Sorry, what were you saying?’”

Guys will be guys, right? But it didn’t end there. Kanye interrupted Ninja again to ask if he liked banana pudding. Based on the immediately previous interaction, it wouldn’t be too hard to assume that ‘banana pudding’ was some kind of weird euphemism, but no, Kim had just made dessert.

[From Your EDM]

This reminded me of what Madonna said about working with Kanye, that his mind is always in twenty different places at once, that he was constantly watching other stuff, texting, talking on the phone and more while they were supposed to be working. Although I doubt that Kanye would have pulled this move with Madonna. It’s completely inappropriate to turn on a hardcore p0rn while in the middle of a work situation. I don’t care if you’re in a home studio, I don’t care if the “music industry” finds that kind of behavior to be the norm, and I don’t care if you’re planning on following it up with the best banana pudding ever. It’s wrong. Kanye should know better.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.

Dear Gossips,

What’d I miss? A lot of Mimi, yeah.

Thanks for your well-wishes yesterday. And I’m sorry again for the gossip interruption. Let’s get caught up. But first, today’s read recommendation, which was supposed to be yesterday’s read recommendation:

The New Yorker profile on Bi…

Maybe I’ve been living under a rock (have I?), but I don’t really think Oscar Isaac has risen to the status of “the internet’s boyfriend”… yet. Like, he’s on the cusp. The internet absolutely has a crush. The internet has drawn hearts around photos of Oscar Isaac and the internet is daydreaming about when their first kiss will happen. But full-on boyfriend? Not yet. But according to Rolling Stone, Oscar is it. And while he tries to shrug off the title, he ends up doing a lot of internet boyfriend-y stuff in this interview, like strumming a guitar and singing Jeff Buckley-esque love songs, and talking about his one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, and talking about whether he’ll have kids, etc. He’s a bit of a hipster. But I don’t hate it. Oh, and he’s actually still the real boyfriend of filmmaker Elvira Lind, just FYI. She gets mentioned in the piece, although he doesn’t actually say anything about her. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

He’s not a movie star: “I’m an actor, not a star. I don’t really know what you mean when you say ‘star,’ ‘movie star,’ that stuff.”

He doesn’t know what to make of his new title, “the Internet’s boyfriend”: “The Internet never struck me as being into monogamous relationships. It’s very promiscuous, the Internet.”

The outrage when he wore a t-shirt with the cover of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. “I liked the design. I didn’t think wearing the shirt was saying I agreed with all her politics. I’m not a libertarian!”

Playing a big blue guy in X-Men Apocalypse: “I would do some acting and then go to my tent and try to breathe and not freak out that sweat was pouring into my ears and I couldn’t touch them. It was rough. But the challenge of basically doing Kabuki theater in a film was crazy.”

He’s always liked X-Men: “I was really into the character. I’m not a huge comic-book-movie fan. I like them and I appreciate them, but it’s started to feel a little bit repetitive. I did really like Deadpool, and the last X-Men.”

Losing his surname, Hernandez: “They define you – ‘Latino actor, we’ll just bring him in for Spanish commercials.’ I’m interested in telling stories about the human experience that are not necessarily just about my personal circumstances. So how do I navigate that? I feel like I’ve been able to.”

The rise of Donald Trump: It’s “definitely irritating. The problem is it’s less about the guy that’s saying it, and more that he’s being the mouthpiece for a large part of the population. Because that’s me, that’s my family. We’re immigrants. What could be positive about it is that Trump could help to rally a lot of disparate parts of Latin America together. Because Latino is not a race – it’s a culture. There’s Chinese Latinos, there’s very white Latinos, there’s very dark Latinos, there’s black Latinos. There’s all sorts of variants – it’s not one thing.”

He abandoned his parents’ evangelical Christianity: “The social-conservative culture wasn’t lining up with what I was understanding Jesus was saying.”

He’s got a bigger role in Star Wars VIII: “In the new film, there’s a lot more to do. What happens now is the heroes get tested. All three of them” – Poe, Daisy Ridley’s Rey and John Boyega’s Finn – “get tested immensely.” And how’s BB-8 doing? “BB-8?s doing all right. BB-8 gets tested too! Everybody gets tested! It’s the dark second chapter, but not really dark.”

[From Rolling Stone]

The most interesting thing to me is that Poe is now seen as “on par” with Finn and Rey, like they’re the three leads. Quite a turn of events for Oscar Isaac, because wasn’t Poe supposed to be killed off in The Force Awakens originally? I also found the conversation about Latin identity interesting, how it’s a culture and not a race, and I think he’s trying to be diplomatic and noncommittal about the Trump stuff. If he talks about it, he’ll be seen as the stereotype of “the Latin actor talking about immigrants” and if he doesn’t talk about it, he’ll be a traitor to his people. Rock, hard place.

Photos courtesy of Mark Seliger/Rolling Stone.

A photo posted by Women’s Health Magazine (@womenshealthmag) on May 17, 2016 at 5:32am PDT

Olivia Munn covers Women’s Health in a tank top and her undies. Maybe it’s Photoshopping, but you can really see how much her face has changed lately, which she claims is due to makeup and the purple potatoes she eats. E! is running this story with the title that claiming Munn lost weight by following the same diet as Gisele Bundchen. That made me assume that Munn’s diet was as extreme as I’ve heard about Gisele’s, but Munn doesn’t talk about eliminating dairy, flour, sugar, etc. so it sounds more reasonable. She says she lost 12 pounds on an 80/20 diet. Here’s more of what she said:

“When I started on X-Men, I had been training and doing regular personal training and trying to eat in a healthy way,” Munn says. Losing weight was not the goal, but rather a byproduct of her desire to become healthier all around. “My intention was to just get as fit and as healthy as I could be, for myself…I started working out every single day, and then I also started getting into eating 20-80, where 80 percent of your diet is fruits and vegetables and 20 percent is whatever. So, that can be any kind of meats or breads or anything else, but mostly fruits and vegetables.”

Sound familiar? Those are the same dietary guidelines Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady follow. The 35-year-old supermodel and 38-year-old New England Patriots quarterback employ private chef Allen Campbell, who cooks organic, plant-based meals for their family. While Munn hasn’t gone to those lengths, she says, “The thing that I’ve kept up since X-Men is eating organically. That’s been a big part of, I think, feeling healthy, feeling fit, feeling clear. Knowing that you’re putting only clean foods into your body, that’s been a really important thing for me.” Munn’s personal trainer in Montreal also taught her how to make her own almond milk. “It’ll last me two or three days,” the actress explains. “I use that to make organic smoothies every morning.”

As if Munn needed any more motivation to be in the best shape of her life: Her X-Men: Apocalypse costume leaves little to the imagination. “Even though she’s always drawn in a sexual way, she always has substantive plotlines,” she says of Psylocke, a telekinetic mutant. “What she looked like became secondary because she was lethal. She is such a badass. And smart.” It’s the kind of role Munn had been gunning for, considering her other options. “They wanted me to play the girlfriend or the bad girl who takes another girl’s boyfriend away. But I didn’t want to do roles that only revolved around a man or were always in service of a man.”

[From E! Online]

Isn’t the 80/20 rule 80% whole, nutritious food and 20% other “cheat” food and not 80% fruit and vegetables? I like a big salad, but I don’t know if I could stomach 80% fruit and vegetables. How does that work exactly? I guess you would just be so full from all those veggies you wouldn’t have room for much more, but I also mean logistically, how would you measure it?

I have a feeling that X Men: Apocalypse is going to disappoint at the box office. It only has 50% on Rotten Tomatoes and I know there are people who will say that critics don’t matter but they do. People look up the ratings before they see a film and ticket sales depend on word of mouth. I doubt Psychlocke’s badassery is going to make much of a difference.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Photos credit Women’s Health and Getty

Over the weekend, the New York Times finally figured out that Donald Trump needed to be seriously vetted by the media, because that really hasn’t happened. The media has been fascinated by the “Trump phenomenon,” obviously, and they dutifully report on his daily craziness, but he hasn’t been “vetted” in the way typical presidential candidates have been in the past. The NY Times tried to rectify that by doing a long-read piece about Trump’s history of problematic, creepy and gross interactions with women. You can read the piece here.

Beyond the specifically problematic interactions with women, a picture of Trump begins to emerge: he is a man who sees all women as merely ornamental, there for his pleasure and nothing more. The exception to that might be Ivanka Trump, who I believe is Donald’s favorite child. One of the many stories featured in the piece is a tale about how Donald Trump groped a woman (who was not into it) in the 1990s, and now Donald’s favorite child is trying to ride to her father’s defense.

The New York Times cited a deposition from a woman who claimed that Donald Trump groped her under the table decades ago, but the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is certainly not a groper, his daughter said Wednesday.

“Look, I’m not in every interaction my father has, but he’s not a groper,” Ivanka Trump said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on “CBS This Morning.” “It’s not who he is. And I’ve known my father obviously my whole life and he has total respect for women.”

Ivanka Trump said she read the Sunday cover story and “found it to be pretty disturbing, based on the facts as I know them, and obviously I very much know them” as a daughter and an executive who’s worked alongside him for more than a decade.

“I was bothered by it, but it’s largely been discredited since,” she said, referring to Brewer Lane’s criticism of the report. Brewer Lane, the ex-girlfriend whose first run-in with Donald Trump was used as the lead anecdote for the article, titled “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private,” accused the newspaper of putting a negative connotation on her words.

“Most of the time when stories are inaccurate they’re not discredited, and I will be frustrated by that, but in this case I think they went so far,” Ivanka Trump continued. “They had such a strong thesis and created facts to reinforce it and, you know, I think that narrative has been playing out now and there’s backlash in that regard.”

[From Politico]

I’m sure Trump’s advisors thought this was a good play: having his daughter defend Trump’s history of gross interactions with women. Maybe it was a good play, because now I just feel sorry for Ivanka. The words coming out of Ivanka and Melania’s mouths these days, it’s like no one ever told them that they should never speak in pullquotes using the words “Hitler” or “groper.” As for Ivanka’s defense of her father… no, the NYT story has not been “largely discredited.” One of the fifty women said the NYT used her quotes in a negative way when that was not her intention. And the NY Times is sticking by their story too, because why wouldn’t they? Everyone has known about Trump’s problematic history with women for a long, long time.

Photos courtesy of WENN.