Coming off the news that VisionQuest will head to small screens Oct. 14 of this year, star Paul Bettany is teasing the show as a “huge” swing in the vein of its predecessor WandaVision.

In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz for his Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Emmy-nominated actor previewed the series, calling it “moving” and “super exciting.”

“It manages to feel very much like it’s somehow a part of that world, an end to a trilogy of sorts, whilst also being very much its own thing, and it is just really good,” he said. “I’m really proud of it.”

Billed as a spinoff of the aforementioned Elizabeth Olsen vehicle and the subsequent Agatha All Along, VisionQuest is set after the events of WandaVision, which reintroduced the android character after he was killed by Thanos in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War. The new show is said to follow Vision (Bettany) as he tries to regain his memory and humanity.

Featuring alongside Bettany is James Spader, reprising his role as supervillain Ultron, as well as Todd Stashwick as Paladin, a morally gray mercenary who acts as an assassin targeting Vision’s technology, and Faran Tahir, who is once again playing Raza, the Ten Rings leader from 2008’s Iron Man.

Bettany said the show has been in its editing stages “for a long while now.” He added, “I keep seeing cuts of it that just are getting better and better, and then, as all the effects get placed in — it’s funny, it’s moving and it’s super exciting. [Showrunner Terry Matalas] did a grand job.”

Of his co-star Spader, Bettany enthusiastically said, “He is delicious. He’s so funny in this; it’s so delicious to watch him, and we loved working together.”

However, the English actor stopped short of previewing how Ultron would appear in the show. “The story is largely revolved around that relationship, and it’s real fun,” he said. “It’s fun stuff.”

Watch the podcast in full below:

Hayden Panettiere is recalling her time on Nashville, saying the set of the ABC musical drama was unsupportive and isolating.

In a new interview with The Times U.K. tied to the release of her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, the child star also reflected on numerous negative experiences growing up in Hollywood.

“It’s just shocking to me how little empathy people had,” she said of Nashville. “There were plenty of people who made the choice to not protect me.”

In her book, she adds of tabloid hysteria and the paparazzi at the time, “I was raw meat laid out for a bunch of hyenas to devour every single day.”

Panettiere also alleged that during the press run for Heroes, when she was 16, one of her team members gave her a “happy pill” to boost her energy. She recalled that the pills worked and she soon began taking them habitually, though she now believes they were amphetamines. “I was so used to wholeheartedly trusting the team that was around me,” she said. “If they told me to jump, I jumped.”

In other harrowing instances, Panettiere said an Oscar winner once exposed himself to her at an industry party and a close female friend once invited her, then 18, onto a superyacht, only to abandon her to a famous man, who was undressed.

“It was as close to being human trafficked as I have ever experienced, especially being on a boat in the middle of the ocean,” she recalled. “You were stuck and you realize, ‘Oh, this is why they choose to do it in places like this.’”

Elsewhere in the profile, Panettiere also discussed recovering from postpartum depression and her journey toward sobriety from alcoholism and substance abuse.

“It’s when I don’t have the outlet of work, it’s then I go into the ‘an idle mind is the Devil’s playground,’” she said.

This year, she appeared in the psychological thriller Sleepwalker and said she is aiming to appear on screen in action and comedy features. “There’s so much I want to do,” the Scream VI actress said. “I want to be creative. I want to get behind the camera. I want to direct. I want to produce.”

Spain’s Rodrigo Sorogoyen has proven himself a master of the psychological thriller, whether the serial-killer kind (May God Save Us, 2016) the political kind (The Realm, 2018) or the true-crime kind (The Beasts, 2023). The Beloved, his first film in Competition at Cannes, is an incredible achievement that builds on all those films and leaves them standing in the dust, hitting all the same tense throat-clenching beats but somehow transcending genre altogether. Javier Bardem’s career has been building up to this stunning moment, and his character, Esteban Martinez, makes the self-centered film director of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value look like Walt Disney by comparison.

The first 20 minutes alone are a masterclass; Esteban takes his seat in a fancy restaurant and orders sparkling water with ice and lemon. Right there, you have his character; Esteban is a recovering alcoholic driven to self-destruction by his volatile temperament and exacting needs as a film director. But we don’t know this yet; it is about to be teased out by the woman he is dining with, someone he hasn’t seen for 13 years and clearly feels bad about leaving. She could be his mistress, since he talks of leaving Spain and starting a new life in New York. She is, however, his daughter; Esteban is a feared and lauded film director who wants to cast her in his latest project, a period drama set in the western Sahara desert.

This is how we meet Emilia Vera (Victoria Luengo), the product of an affair with one of Esteban’s leading ladies, and a strikingly mysterious actress who looks so much like an Almodóvar starlet that it should come as no surprise to learn she already is one. The scene is one of two extended moments that encapsulate the film in two very different movements, and as an opening salvo it is an impressive and almost unbearably awkward back and forth that only becomes more uncomfortable as it goes on — the camera pushes in close and closer as the gloves start to come off, and Emilia lets rip about the time her druggy, violent, estranged father once showed her up at a screening of Kill Bill 2.

Nevertheless, Emilia listens to Esteban’s apparently sincere compliments, about the crummy TV show she’s too good for, joining the all-star international cast in Fuerteventura where she is immediately feels out of her depth. Her first scene, a complicated tracking shot, is ruined when she mistimes her delivery, but Esteban — surprisingly — lets her off the hook, blaming a technical issue and giving her leeway to improvise. The other actors can’t help but quiz her on her famous father, winner of a Best Foreign Film Oscar, while the press ask Esteban much more cynical questions about his reasons for casting her in the first place.

Esteban’s motivation, like the real meaning of the title itself (“The Loved One” in Spanish), is opaque, and unlike many of Sorogoyen’s previous films — which would be nothing without a hefty chunk of moral ambiguity — there is very little in the way of closure. If Esteban wants to do right by Emilia, he’s not very good at that, giving her a self-righteous mini lecture about her incipient alcoholism (“Drinking is f*cking shit,” he thunders). It seems more likely that Esteban wants to exert some kind of control over her, which comes out in the second major sequence, a Kubrickian scene of behind-the-camera peacockery that sees Esteban finally lose his cool, revealing frightening wells of anger that cause the female cinematographer to pack up and go, costing the film two days of shooting.

Amazingly, it is not Emilia that leaves, and the film invites us to ponder on that. It also feeds us questions about the paradox of filmmaking, in which relationships are so often destroyed in the process of creation — Esteban wants truth and authenticity every time, and yet he is constantly retconning his past, pushing away his daughter when she pushes back on his version of their history. By the end there is a clear feeling that Esteban’s art is his real beloved, and Sorogoyen gives us a sense of that with his use of screen ratios and film stock, from classic black-and-white to shimmering color and grainy video-assist: Esteban always has the scene in his head (and Sorogoyen’s Godardian use of score underlines that).

Certainly one of the best films about filmmaking since François Truffaut’s Day for Night, The Beloved may be the scariest since Peeping Tom. Unwittingly, Esteban makes this observation himself when he quotes Ingmar Bergman’s muse Liv Ullmann in defense of his perfectionist, naturalist style: “The closer the camera, the more the mask must slip,” he tells Emilia. Which is great advice from one actor to another, but closer to a Death Row confession coming from a director.

Title: The Beloved
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Cast: Javier Bardem, Victoria Luengo, Melina Matthews, Marina Fois, Malena Villa
Sales: Goodfellas
Running time: 2 hrs 15 mins