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Dolly Parton at Fort Hood Army Base in Killeen, Texas, 1991

Photographer: Annie Liebovitz

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Alexander Skarsgård - The Moment - Excerpts from Charli xcx's Interview with Vanity Fair, 14 Oct '25 (x) Thanks SwedishDelish.

Charli will have a lead role in The Moment, distributed by A24, a revisionist history focused on the aftermath of Brat’s release in which she stars with Alexander Skarsgård. She is also writing songs for two major projects, including the Anne Hathaway–led pop idol epic Mother Mary.

Last September, in the middle of the Sweat tour and right before the Brat 2024 Arena Tour, Charli sent Zamiri a message; or, as he describes it, “word vomit.” Zamiri had worked with Charli directing the “Guess” and “360” videos, the latter featuring an It girl theme embodied by guest stars including Fox, YouTube star Emma Chamberlain, model (and Healy’s fiancée) Gabbriette, actors Hari Nef and Rachel Sennott, and proto It girl Chloë Sevigny. “It almost felt like a diary entry of, ‘This is how I feel right now,’ ” Zamiri says of Charli’s message. “This feeling of having just almost got everything she could have wanted, and what that felt like on kind of a human level.”

The document became the genesis for The Moment. Zamiri and Bertie Brandes finished the screenplay in a few months with input from Charli, and Zamiri filmed it last spring. “I really don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who works as hard as Charli does,” Sivan says, noting that in between Sweat dates, Charli would take on roles in movies, including Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, in which Araki says Charli does a “top-notch” American accent and nailed a scene in which “she’s faking an orgasm with Cooper Hoffman’s character.” What was Sivan doing during his downtime? “Resting,” he says.

One project Charli turned down during this period was a tour documentary. She felt the market was already saturated with similar projects and says, “I feel like my problem with a lot of musician documentaries is it often shows the musician coming up against some kind of opposition and eventually overcoming it to be the hero. And that’s just not been my experience, you know? Maybe it has been a lot of other people’s, and that’s awesome.”

Charli calls The Moment “a 2024 period piece.” “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film in any way, but the seed of the idea was conceived from this idea of being pressured to make one,” she says. “It’s fiction, but it’s the realest depiction of the music industry that I’ve ever seen.”

Asked to describe his role, Skarsgård says he plays someone whom “the record label convinces Charli is the hottest director out there at the moment; the right person to capture the essence of Charli xcx and get the most out of this phenomenon that brat was.”

Director Zamiri calls Skarsgård’s character “one of the villains or antagonists of the film.” (Charli herself may be another one; she describes her role as “sort of a hell version of myself.”) Zamiri is cagier about the plot, saying only that the film explores what would have happened if Charli had made “entirely different choices” around brat. (As far as we know, in this counterfactual, Charli’s viral X post “kamala IS brat” still does not make Harris win the presidential election against Donald Trump. At least, as Charli told Zane Lowe, she’s “obviously happy to be on the right side of history.”)

The Moment features a score by Cook. Skarsgård did not reveal to Charli until after they’d wrapped that she was his second most-played artist on Spotify in 2024. (The first was a Japanese pop star from the 1970s and ’80s named Eiichi Ohtaki, which Skarsgård concedes is a very brat choice.) He has just seen Charli perform for the first time at a music festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, a few days before we speak and says, “I got to see the snippets of that when we shot the movie. But the other night when I got to see the full show, it was really remarkable how the second she steps offstage, she sheds that part of her personality. Then she’s back to being this sweet little Charli.”

Charli views making The Moment as an almost therapeutic exercise. “I always find it hard to sit down and look at things with distance, because I am always moving on to the next thing,” she says. “I think that I process myself through my work. I’m writing about myself and my thoughts all the time, and my thoughts about what people think about me.” Charli gestures toward infinity with a Queen Elizabeth wave. “The meta-ness continues.”

[reduxpictures]

Anthony Bourdain Dead from Suicide at Age 61

The beloved CNN host and author had taken his viewers all around the world for over a decade.

ReduxStock: Photo by Eyevine photographer Geraint Lewis of Anthony Bourdain for his obit on the Vanity Fair website.

[frontpagewoman]

Obama to Give Trump Remedial Crash Course in Running the Government

Apparently, Trump didn’t realize how much work was involved.

“Trump offered an unusually conciliatory statement to the press, praising the same president he spent years trying to delegitimize and suggesting their meeting had been enormously helpful. “As far as I'm concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer,” Trump said, adding that he looks forward to continuing to receive Obama’s “counsel.” And Obama appears ready to give it. Faced with the prospect of handing over the nuclear codes and control of a sprawling, $18 billion economy to a Beltway neophyte and serial bankrupt, the president intends to spend even more time tutoring Trump”

Well isn’t this something. An unqualified white candidate needs to be supported by the black person. Merica in a nut shell. 

[aislingssong]

War on Everyone Review: Film’s Darkest Director Finds Something to Laugh About

John Michael McDonagh trades Ireland for New Mexico but still keeps the sunshine out of his comedy.

“Skarsgård—who is having a brilliant post-True Blood hunk career as an indie film star—plays Terry Monroe an alcoholic, Glen Campbell-loving insomniac with a damaged past and, possibly, a death wish. Hunching his lean 6’4” frame into a knuckle-dragging gorilla posture, Skarsgård as Terry is rarely sober, always spoiling for a fight, and delivers joke after joke in a melodious deadpan. Peña’s Bob Bolaño is the more educated of the detectives and, as he handily proved in Ant-Man, there is no line in existence that Peña can’t put a hilarious, fast-paced spin on. 

Any doubts about whether the character “Bolaño” is a reference to the famous Chilean novelist evaporate as Terry, Bob, and their love interests (Tessa Thompson and Stephanie Sigman respectively) trade jokes about everything from French feminist Simone de Beauvoir to mid-century painter Andrew Wyeth. This might be McDonagh’s most mainstream movie yet, but he isn’t afraid of his characters’ intelligence.”

[themorningnews]

Airline pilots were once the heroes of the skies. Today, in the quest for safety, airplanes are meant to largely fly themselves. Which is why the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed 228 people, remains so perplexing and significant. William Langewiesche explores how a series of small errors turned a state-of-the-art cockpit into a death trap.

The Human Factor

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Why Ian Somerhalder Feels Like “The Most Loved Human Being on the Planet” at Comic Con

As a star of two hugely beloved TV series, Lost and The Vampire Diaries, Ian Somerhalder is right at home at Comic Con. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. “I ran into Wonder Woman once,” he told us by phone before this year’s Con kicked off. “Beautiful, stunning woman. But she literally grab...

VIEW POST @ Blood Falls | the-vampirediaries.com | the vampire diaries |

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VanityFair.com April 24 2013, Band shorts.