Jennifer Love Hewitt dishes on new 'Ghost Whisperer' baby, time jump
It was the last day of Comic-Con 2009 on Sunday, and our Brian Truitt checked out a panel for the CBS Friday night staple, The Ghost Whisperer, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt as a woman who regularly talks to ghosts and helps them cross over to the other side. He found out there are big changes afoot this fall, coming out of last year’s season finale in which Melinda Gordon (Hewitt) was told her baby boy would have powers even greater than hers, and that the date of Melinda's death corresponded with her due date. Hewitt revealed on the panel that the fifth season premiere, an episode she directed that airs Sept. 25, will show the delivery of her baby, but then jump five years into the future. “We really felt it would allow us to tell better stories,” says Hewitt, who will also direct the 100th episode during the season. “We thought it would be really crazy for Melinda to be running to a bridge at 3 in the morning with a baby strapped to her chest.” The actress admits that she's wanted Melinda to have a baby for a couple years. "It's been fun to play a mom, but I didn't think I'd be doing that at 30."
Also on the panel was Hewitt’s co-star (and boyfriend) Jamie Kennedy, who plays Melinda’s ghost-listening confidante, Eli. “Are you going to kill every girlfriend on the show?” Kennedy jokes, referring to Eli’s love interest Zoe getting offed in the season four finale. “Yes. And I will cross them all over!” Hewitt playfully says. Eli’s parents will be be on the show in the fifth season, fans will find out what exactly happens when ghosts cross over, and the season premiere will begin a new mythology connected to a new place that’s important to the series. Also this season, The Ghost Whisperer is getting a sister psychic show with the former NBC drama Medium, which will air after it on Fridays. “Medium paved the way for us to do what we do,” Hewitt says. “I don’t know if there will ever be a case where Allison DuBois and Melinda Gordon cross over. But hopefully, people will want to watch both shows.”
July 26, 2009
'Lost' star Josh Holloway relishes fatherhood
The Lost panel has been well-attended every year at Comic-Con since the pilot first debuted there in 2005, and one of this year’s surprise guests Saturday was Josh Holloway, who plays the antiheroic Sawyer in ABC’s hit drama. Holloway flew in from Hawaii (where Lost films and he and his family live) for the occasion. He talked to our Brian Truitt about how his focus was split this past season between his newborn baby on the way and the show’s time-traveling fifth year, in which he became one of the show’s biggest heroes. “I was working so much,” Holloway says. “I was just thinking, ‘Man, Sawyer talks a lot in the ‘70s! What’s wrong with this guy? He’s lippy!’ But as the season goes, I go, OK, I see kinda where this is going, because they never let us know where it’s going.”
Holloway and his wife Yessica’s first child, a little girl named Java, was born in April, and he says the best part of fatherhood for him changes often. “Now it’s just those smiles,” he says. “Every morning when I first get to see the little bean smile, it just makes my heart explode. It’s really just added richness to my life. I don’t care how everything else goes now, as long as I’m a good father.”
The upcoming sixth season premiering early next year, which Holloway begins work on next month, will also be the final one for the series. So will he stay in Hawaii after it’s over, since he’s built a life there? “I’m working on my bikini tan and my surfboard business, but it’s not coming along too good,” Holloway jokes. “I’m not sure. We’re in love with Hawaii, we have very close friends there, and I fish like mad. So we’re gonna keep the place and go in and out, unless acting goes the way normally acting goes and I’m broke and I have to rent it.”
Photo by Bob D'Amico/ABC
Fans go berzerk over Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Iron Man 2' trailer
No one’s a bigger king of Comic-Con than Robert Downey Jr. He conquered the pop-culture convention in 2007 when he introduced the world to Iron Man, and this year he was in San Diego for two movies. On Friday, he greeted 6,500 people with exclusive Sherlock Holmes footage, telling them “I love you guys so much.” And then on Saturday, he got the best reaction for any movie at the convention when he showed a trailer from Iron Man 2 — alongside co-stars Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle and Sam Rockwell — and the packed exhibit gave it a standing ovation. “I have chills — this is what a nerd I am,” he told our Brian Truitt after the Iron Man 2 panel. Last year's original Iron Man brought him back into the A-list , and he owns up to having an Iron Man helmet in his home. “It’s not like you walk in and it’s like, ‘Welcome to Iron Man’s house.’ Most of the stuff is downstairs. It’s not beyond me to go there, not because I’m so attached to it as what my identity is, but because I think it's cool. It’s almost like people come and go, ‘This guy is full of himself.’ I’m just a guy who put a piece of plastic on something. But maybe I am full of myself, I don’t know.”
Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Fox's new 'Glee' continues to impress
Our Brian Truitt was a big fan of the May pilot debut of Fox’s Glee, and he was excited to see another new episode of the musical comedy when it premiered during a Glee panel at Comic-Con on Saturday. While the cast’s memorable version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ gave him goosebumps during the premiere, Brian says the second episode (airing Sept. 16) is actually better than the pilot (which you can check out here). It continues to set up the romance between the two talented glee-club singers from opposite sides of the high school social strata (played by Lea Michele and Cory Monteith, at left), and the increasing tension between glee teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) and the school’s domineering cheerleading coach (Jane Lynch). Schuester needs six more kids to join his vocal group so they can go to regionals, and he lands some surprising new recruits.
The vocal numbers were highlights in the pilot, and this time around, Morrison raps Kanye West’s Gold Digger, the singers bump and grind to a hilarious version of Salt-n-Pepa’s Push It, and Michele belts out Rihanna’s Take a Bow in an emotional sequence. Morrison, Michele and Monteith were in attendance at the panel, and they revealed that an original Glee soundtrack album would be released in November (an upcoming episode this fall includes Barbra Streisand and Rolling Stones songs within minutes of each other). Also, some of the upcoming guest stars for the season were revealed, including Josh Groban, Eve, Victor Garber and Kristin Chenoweth.
Brian will be back on TV patrol during the last day of Comic-Con today, getting scoop on Smallville, Supernatural and The Ghost Whisperer. So remember to follow his live Tweets on the right rail.
July 25, 2009
Josh Brolin unveils his newest movie, 'Jonah Hex'
There are a number of A-list names at Comic-Con this year but of those our Brian Truitt has seen so far, Josh Brolin, at left, seemed the most proud of his project, the movie Jonah Hex. Brolin, who plays the title role, unveiled six minutes of footage from the movie, due next summer, to an excited audience and he later told Brian he found it "amazing to have 6,500 people react to that teaser. You felt a buzz in the audience, and that’s what matters.”
Mainstream movie-goers aren't likely to know who Jonah Hex is, but Brolin — a first timer at Comic-Con — says that’s why he was attracted to the script. Hex is a post-Civil War outlaw, an alcoholic, disfigured and curmudgeon-y bounty hunter based in part on spaghetti Westerns. Hex first appeared in DC Comics in 1972 and never had Batman-like sales numbers, “but like the character himself, it refuses to go away,” says Brolin, who endured three hours in makeup every day to get his scarred face and nightmare-ish mouth just right. “There’s not another comic book character like him, and there’s no model to base a film of him on. We got to create what we wanted to create.”
Brian continues his Comic-Con coverage today, tweeting live from the Lost panel, checking out a new episode of Fox's new series Glee and interviewing some top-secret Iron Man 2 cast members. Follow his reports on the right rail.
Freddie Prinze Jr. talks about joining '24'
It’s been a great year so far for Freddie Prinze Jr. He and his wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar, are expecting their first baby, and Prinze was cast in the next season of one of his favorite shows, Fox’s action drama 24. At Comic-Con to help promote the series’ eighth season to begin in January, Prinze says 24 is “one of the only shows that I TiVo. That and Dodger games. That should let you know where it rates.” So how will Prinze’s character, a gung-ho CTU operative named Davis Cole, get along with the infamous Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland)? Our Brian Truitt finds out. Click read more for his report.
Photo by Mark Davis/Picture Group
Emily Deschanel explains controversial 'Bones' finale
In May, Bones fans took to the Internet to voice their dismay at the Fox series' season finale, a dream-sequence episode that had Booth (David Boreanaz) and Brennan (Emily Deschanel) as married owners of a nightclub who definitely break the sexual tension fostered over four seasons. Friday, Deschanel faced the show’s faithful at a Comic-Con panel — Boreanaz was back home in L.A., where his wife is close to delivering their second child, a little girl — and found that the feelings are more mixed then they had been a few months ago. Still, she felt the urge to explain that part of the reasoning behind the dream episode was to show Booth and Brennan in love and as a strong couple. “Maybe people just enjoy being angry that we’re not together,” Deschanel says. “I feel like they want us to get together, but they don’t really want us to give it to them.” She has a point.
Deschanel says Bones creators wanted to throw fans a romantic bone. Her explanation: “You see the characters together as a couple, and that kind of gives people an idea of how they would be, even though it’s not really them and it’s in a different world, but it’s from one or both of their brains. You’re not giving them a whole meal, but a taste.” But she confessed that even her grandmother was upset by the season finale, and not because of the intimacy. “She was like, 'I didn’t know they’re changing the show and now you own a performance place!’ She was confused by the ending and that there was another world and that we didn’t own a performance place.”
As for the new season, Deschanel says she is trying to get her sister, Zooey Deschanel, to guest-star. And Cyndi Lauper plays a psychic on the fifth season premiere, which airs Sept. 17.
July 24, 2009
'Twilight' stars talk at Comic-Con
Last year's Comic-Con, where hordes of fans of Stephenie Meyer's vampire books crowded an exhibit hall to see snippets of the first Twilight movie, was an eye-opener for the then-little known cast. What a difference a year makes. Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, in San Diego again this year to promote the November sequel New Moon (trailer below), are now big stars, (even if Pattinson claims life has changed little) and thousands of fans camped outside to get a glimpse of them.
Brian Truitt went to hear what the trio had to say at a press conference Thursday and the most interesting was Lautner, who has put on 30 pounds to play the beefy werewolf Jacob in the continuation of this vampire-human love story. "I’m trying to live up to the fan’s expectations and trying to represent Team Jacob in the right way," Lautner said. "I don’t want to disappoint them, so that’s why I worked so hard to not only mentally and emotionally but also physically change for this role.” Lautner said he gained the weight sensibly, hitting a gym religiously and eating “proteins, good carbs and healthy sugars.”
Stewart's look also has changed, though not necessarily for the better. “I cut my hair off,” she deadpanned. In a mullet and Minor Threat T-shirt she looked like Joan Jett, whom she is playing in a new movie, The Runaways.Today Brian expects to get a look at movies, Jonah Hex, Sherlock Holmes and Denzel Washington’s The Book of Eli, and see what's coming on TV shows 24, Bones and The Big Bang Theory. Watch our right rail for his live tweets on all the events as Comic-Con continues.
Megan Fox entertains at 'Jennifer's Body' preview
After a long day of panels and press rooms at Comic-Con, our Brian Truitt ended the evening with Megan Fox and her new horror comedy Jennifer’s Body, written by Oscar winner Diablo Cody and co-starring Mamma Mia!'s Amanda Seyfried. He reports that the first 15 minutes of the movie, screened for the crowd, is twisted but fun; Fox is turned into an undead creature who starts killing all the boys in her small town. After the preview, the Transformers star offered her own uncensored humor and candor. Click read more for some of her amusing thoughts.
Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
July 23, 2009
'Twilight,' other movies preview at Comic-Con
Fans of Twilight: New Moon were camping out late last night so they could get in to see today's afternoon panel discussion that will include preview footage and some of the cast of the November movie. Our Brian Truitt, in San Diego for the convention, says there were 1,000 or so Twilighters in tents and sleeping bags at 11 PST last night, and a booth (at right) promoting the movie looms large on the convention floor. Today Brian will be Twittering live updates (watch the right rail) from the New Moon press conference, as well as on presentations for Avatar (featuring Sigourney Weaver and director James Cameron), Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Jennifer's Body, starring Megan Fox.
Photo by Brian Truitt
