Fast & Furious 6, which hits theaters today, has now passed our critic’s inspection (we gave it a B+). Earlier this month, we caught up with costars Tyrese Gibson and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges at the film’s London press junket to see how they could handle our EW Pop Culture Personality Test. Find out which one of them loves Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and spa music below. READ FULL STORY »
Glee‘s fourth season may have just wrapped, but Jenna Ushkowitz, who plays Tina on the show, isn’t slowing down. She just released a book, Choosing Glee: 10 Rules to Finding Inspiration, Happiness, and the Real You, which is part scrapbook memoir and part teen advice book with anecdotes and tips about being yourself, achieving your goals and having confidence in your abilities. “It’s always been on my bucket list to write a book,” Ushkowitz said. “It sort of organically happened. I wrote this treatment in like 24 hours. The main 10 rules kept popping up over and over again, so that’s where we found the streamline for it.”
Gleeks will be excited to learn that the book has tips from the whole McKinley High crew, and even includes a letter from Ushkowitz to Tina. “I think some of the things I [hope for her are] to take risks and to not take everything so seriously,” Ushkowitz explains about her dreams for her character. “Make sure you tell people how you feel and to laugh everyday!”
Check out Ushkowitz laughing herself when she takes EW’s Pop Culture Personality Test — and fills us in on the movie she has to watch every time it’s on cable and her most prized pop culture possession — below: READ FULL STORY »
You’ll want to watch till the very end of tonight’s season finale of Bates Motel (A&E, 10 p.m. ET). Freddie Highmore, who stars as a young Norman Bates, says the last moment is fun one. Wait. Correction: “I always use the word ‘fun’ to describe things in Bates Motel, and people on set are like, ‘No, no, you can’t say it’s ‘fun,’ it’s not fun at all,’” Highmore tells EW, laughing. “It’s not really a fun last scene in any way. But it’s intriguing.” All he’ll tease about the hour is there’s a big revelation having to do with Norma’s past and a “big event” in Norman’s present. “He does something that will perhaps reevaluate our way of seeing him,” he says. “Or maybe not. Maybe we thought that he was always going to be like this.”
Highmore has already earned Emmy buzz for humanizing one of pop culture’s most famous monsters. “I think people still have sympathy for him,” he says. “It’s a weird sense of hope that you think he won’t have to go down the path that he must go down. So people have still been friendly. No one’s run away [from me] — yet. That would be good, wouldn’t it? You walk in, and everyone leaves or hides in the corner.”
To get to know 21-year-old Highmore better, we asked him to take the EW Pop Culture Personality Test earlier this month. Find out when he yells at the TV, what movies make him cry, what he considers his most prized pop culture possession, and what came with the most interesting fan letter he’s ever received below. READ FULL STORY »
Josh Malina’s Scandal character David Rosen has been keeping his dealings with the Mole a secret from Olivia Pope and Associates, but off screen, the actor has few secrets EW couldn’t uncover via our Pop Culture Personality Test!
Below, watch the actor reveal which celebrity he once wrote a fan letter in which he praised her bikini body, talk about what’s in his garage, and make a karaoke confession.
READ FULL STORY »
We don’t often get to see Mystic Falls’ finest attend class, but on the season finale of The Vampire Diaries tonight (CW, 8 p.m. ET) we’ll watch them graduate (yes, they actually passed!).
“There’s a lot of really sweet, happy moments within the episode of just everyone being together,” teases Candice Accola, who plays Caroline. “You’re going to see the whole gang [together].” READ FULL STORY »
“I think there are explosions in almost every episode. Some of the explosions mean that the contestants won, and some of them mean that they failed miserably,” says Kal Penn, host of Discovery’s competitive reality show for engineers, The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius (Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET). He admits he cowers on-camera for every blast. “And the reason being that I’m the only person on that set who is an actor — so this face,” he says, laughing. “I was always like, ‘Man, even if I get a little scar, that could really make a difference in whether somebody lets me audition for something.’ Meanwhile, these engineers are like, ‘I’ve got all these scars.’ They get burned, they get hurt. At least two of them had to hospitalized. This one guy, I think he had to be hospitalized because of the flu. He was instructing his team by hiding underneath a table. He was so sick that he couldn’t stand up, but he didn’t want to give up. When do you ever see somebody with that kind of commitment?”
Penn is a smart guy, but he’s learned from the show, which also features guest judges for challenges, including NASCAR driver Carl Edwards in the June 12 episode and Buzz Aldrin in the June 19 season finale. “Two things,” he says. “How much teamwork is required to get stuff done in the lives of engineers, and since the whole point was finding America’s next great innovator, how much the arts and creative thinking actually go into something like innovation. You can be an amazing engineer and really good at math, but you’re not gonna be an innovator unless you possess certain art skills or have a music background or something that makes your brain operate in that other kind of way. The contestants who did the best were the ones who were the most well-rounded.”
We gave Penn a simple challenge: The EW Pop Culture Personality Test. READ FULL STORY »
Tonight’s New Girl finale sees a definitive conclusion to the will-they-won’t-they saga between Jess (Zooey Deschanel) and Nick (Jake Johnson). “They come to a point where they’re at a crossroads together,” Johnson recently told EW, “and they address it and do something about it.” After last week’s episode, when Jess’s opinionated father (Rob Reiner) returned and put a wrench in the almost-couple’s relationship, there are a lot of questions to answer: “Yes, they’ve got a thing together; yeah, they like each other a lot, and there’s chemistry,” says Johnson, “but is that enough to try dating? Or are they not ready and not the right match?” He teases, “It all comes together at the wedding.”
Before that, though, Johnson sat down to take EW’s Pop Culture Personality Test. Between talking Michael Jackson jackets and Spike TV’s Bar Rescue, he shared a traumatic childhood memory involving an Oliver Stone film. Click through to find out which film scarred him for life, then scroll down to find out how Johnson’s research for the finale led him to compare a chart-topping boy band to prison inmates.
On Sunday, Revenge wraps its second season (ABC, 9 p.m. ET) with a two-hour finale, and Gabriel Mann (Nolan) admits the show’s writers “had their hands full” trying to sort out the chaos caused by the Carrion program’s activation and the whole mystery of the Initiative. “I would say our finale is the solution to a season-long puzzle,” he says. “I was really thrilled the way they were able to do it, because even in thinking about trying to answer some of those questions myself, I would not have come to this.” There will be a death: “It’s one of our original core characters. It’s very bittersweet,” he says. “You have to anticipate on a show like this that’s part of the game you play, but for some reason it doesn’t make it any easier.”
We thought our Pop Culture Personality Test might be a nice distraction, but then we asked him to name a TV moment that made him cry, and well, you’ll see… READ FULL STORY »
In the new movie Tyler Perry Presents Peeples hitting theaters this weekend, The Office‘s Craig Robinson stars as a man who meets the parents of the woman (Scandal‘s Kerry Washington) he’d like to marry. It does not go well — unlike when Robinson and David Alan Grier, who costars as the potential father-in-law, dropped by EW to take our Pop Culture Personality Test. You really don’t want to miss their reenactment of a deleted scene from E.T., which begins at 1:58 in the video below. READ FULL STORY »
It’s a good thing Veep has already been renewed for a third season because it’s going to take Amy (Anna Chlumsky), Chief of Staff for VP Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a while to figure out how to balance her professional and personal lives. “This season is about her questioning how important the D.C. life is to her,” Chlumsky says. “It’s been assumed for her for so long that this is the game, she likes to win the game, and this is what it’s all about for her. This is her first time really entertaining the idea that maybe there is more to life.” We will see Amy try to date, Chlumsky says. But, she adds, laughing, “By the end of the season, we still don’t know if she’s any good at that.”
There’s a new episode of Veep tonight at 10 p.m. ET on HBO, but we’re starting the laughs early with Chlumsky. She recently stopped by EW to take our Pop Culture Personality Test and revealed her most prized pop culture possession, the TV marathon that always sucks her in, the TV moment that made her cry, when she yells at the TV, and the collectibles from her childhood she wishes she still had. READ FULL STORY »
