Entertainment

Cannes 2026: Nicolas Winding Refn Gets Emotional Over Almost Dying

Published

3 months ago

May 20, 2026

Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-soaked revenge sci-fi slasher “Her Private Hell” debuted to mixed reviews after its premiere on Monday, but all hearts were sympathetic toward the Danish director on Tuesday for the film’s press conference, alongside stars Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, and composer Pino Donaggio, as he articulated a near-death experience that served as the creative impetus for his first film in ten years.

“Her Private Hell” follows two narratives: a woman, Elle (Thatcher), who sets out in search of her father, and Private K (Melton), an American GI who is trying to save his own daughter from hell.

Speaking about the idea, Refn shared how the project is really three ideas, held together by Donaggio’s operatic score. “I had an idea about a young woman who came to a city that didn’t exist,” he said. “Then I had another idea about a man who wants to go to hell and come back, and those ideas weren’t really talking to each other very well. I had to come up with a third idea, and I created a monster. These three created a triangle and then suddenly I could fill the triangle up with everything that I wanted to do, like a kaleidoscope.”

The director got emotional when describing how his being dead for twenty-five minutes rattled and reshaped his creative life. “Dying is very interesting,” he noted wryly. “Before I died, I had come to the end of my career because I didn’t have anything left in me. I suddenly had what is called a leaking heart, which means your blood runs backwards in your heart. I was dying as my lungs were filling up with blood. Two weeks later, I was operated on and put back together with electricity like Frankenstein.”

Getting teary-eyed, he said, “When I came back, I realized I had maybe 25 years left, but I was going to make damn good use of those 25 years. … I’d been given a gift I could start over again … like how many people in their lives get a second chance? I was given a second chance by God. I was going to use that chance for something that was going to be good. How can I expand my kids’ horizons? How can I expand everyone’s horizons? It’s for the kids.”

Speaking of the score, Donaggio joked, “It wasn’t simple to work with [Refn] because he’s extremely demanding.” He further articulated: “It’s a lengthy piece of work, and it‘s the work that needs the longest amount of time for me to write. He asked me to write a complete opera.”

The actors all praised their experience working on the set, with some describing it as one of the most fulfilling artistic experiences they’ve had. “[Refn] really pushes you into the deep end, but with so much love and care, and he believes in you, and he makes you challenge yourself in the best way possible,” Froseth said.

“He’s one of the great auteurs in cinema,” Melton shared. “We filmed for 56 days, and I think one of the many beautiful things throughout the journey was that we shot in order. It was the most collaborative experience I’ve had, and there were so many revelations and things that were revealed in the process of making. My favorite note from Nic is ‘One more time.’”

Concurring, Liu said, “I think one of the coolest things about working with Nic is the way he holds space … he holds this atmosphere … Nothing is clear cut, everything is poetic, every answer you want, you get a question and I think that it keeps you in sort of a creative liminal place that I really have never been challenged that way before as an actor. It did keep me very mobile and challenged my desire to hold things into a real level of certainty that just had to go away.”

Lead actress Thatcher shared, “It was one of the most artistically satisfying experiences of my life. He would turn the monitor around so we could see ourselves. I learned how to inhabit a space in an entirely different way. He would play music on set, and music is the easiest way to transport your emotions,” listing the “Don’t Look Now” and “Dress to Kill” soundtracks as mood setters for the set.

The question of AI was also inescapable, and Refn offered his thoughts on the use of technology. “I think human to human will always act predominantly better. I think AI is an amazing creative canvas. Having now tried it on something later on that may show here, I really love the creativity. For me, it’s like a brush. And obviously, no one really knows all the implications of what this is going to do and what’s going to happen, but from the perspective of creativity, it’s a new invention. With every interaction and intervention, something changes, something dies, something is reborn. So, in a way, I think the best time ever to be creative is now.”

TheWrap asked a question to Melton, connecting his work in the second season of “Beef” with his role of Private K, and the gift of being able to explore the Jungian idea of “shadow selves” across both. “It’s a gift,” Melton said. “I feel like with each thing I do, a part of my soul rises to the surface to be channeled and lived in. There’s a lot of exploration and internal violence and pain, and agony, which is reflective of the armor Private K wears.”

He articulated about the immersiveness of working on the project, sharing, “life and the art of the set was the same thing.” Towards the end of the film, where Private K meets his daughter, he shared that he understands that scene better now because of having a daughter himself. “Right before that scene, I was FaceTiming with my wife, and I heard my daughter’s heartbeat on the ultrasound for the first time, and then I filmed that scene,” Melton explained. “I don’t know. I was meant to go on this journey with Nic. I think everything we do is to explore the roles to explore the shadow self, and it only takes an author like Nic to turn that unreality into a reality or the reality into an unreality.”

movies

O-T Fagbenle Signs With Artists First (EXCLUSIVE)

Published

9 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

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EXCLUSIVE: Artists First has signed O-T Fagbenle for management.

An actor, director, writer and creator, Fagbenle is best known for his role of Luke Bankole, husband of Elisabeth Moss’s June Osborne, in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which ran for six seasons. More recently, he’s appeared alongside Elizabeth Banks and Matthew MacFadyen in the Peacock series The Miniature Wife, as well as in Wonder Project/Prime Video’s The Old Stories: Moses as the domineering Pharaoh, and Hulu’s All’s Fair alongside Naomi Watts.

Other recent notable credits include the hit Apple TV series Presumed Innocent, the Neon comedy Splitsville, the Netflix series No Good Deed with Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano, and Showtime’s The First Lady, where he portrayed Barack Obama opposite Viola Davis’s Michelle.

Previously, Fagbenle has also been seen in Marvel’s Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson and the animated Netflix series Tomb Raider with Hayley Atwell. Additionally, he wrote, produced and starred in the Hulu/Ch4 series Maxxx, a comedy revolving around a disgraced former boy band star.

Fagbenle continues to be represented by Buchwald Talent Agency and attorney Barry Littman of Hansen, Jacobson, Teller.

Entertainment

Why Did ‘The End of Oak Street’ Use AI Dogs Podcast to Promote It?

Published

13 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

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Data from Inception Point AI suggests there are over 175,000 podcast episodes available on Spotify or Apple that are generated by artificial intelligence, and AI companies are churning out thousands of new episodes a day as part of a multi-billion industry. Spotify has even introduced features that essentially let you prompt your own podcast you want to listen to, because as if there weren’t enough podcasters in the world, you might want to create hosts that are just for you.

It’s the sheer numbers here that probably led someone in the marketing department at Warner Bros. to come up with the partnership with “Dog Pack,” a “podcast” hosted by two AI-generated dogs, as a means to promote its upcoming movie “The End of Oak Street.”

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, Leonard Maltin, 1990. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

The two digital dog hosts, Goldie and Frenchie, welcomed onto their “show” Starbuck, who is the dog featured in “The End of Oak Street,” to ask about who was the best trained of his human co-stars, Ewan McGregor or Anne Hathaway, and what it was like being chased by dinosaurs on a tennis ball. The clip shows some behind the scenes footage of one of the real dog actors playing around on set, though Starbuck in the film is at times crafted from visual effects.

Look, this promo is pretty benign. This isn’t even a real “podcast” in which these AI dogs prattle on for an hour about the movie. It’s a 90-second ad, and frankly there are more important things to get angry about online than this. We can’t all be interviewing real life dogs all the time, as much as we love to.

But there was genuine annoyance and backlash to this clip when it dropped this weekend, calling it out as the type of thing that will actively turning people off seeing “The End of Oak Street,” like this guy who got some engagement out of his outrage. Others are wondering whether this also entails that there’s other AI-generated material in the movie (there’s not) or why someone would promote their movie this way when the biggest recent blockbusters like “Project Hail Mary” and “The Odyssey” have all sold themselves on their practical effects.

It also feels like a weird about-face for the movie’s own marketing. “The End of Oak Street” was originally sold with a bit of mystery and cloak and dagger, concealing what happens to this family after it seems as though their suburban home, along with their entire street, has been transported to some other dimension. Now the marketing very explicitly features dinosaurs chasing the family, to the point that Starbuck is talking about it and trying to appeal to moms on Facebook who might be among the nearly million followers to this AI feed.

It’s hard too to imagine director David Robert Mitchell — the guy who directed “It Follows” — seeing this ad campaign and saying yeah, I dig it. But we could be wrong. And maybe Warner Bros. is smart to make this film a bit more 4-quadrant. The film is projected for an opening between $25-35 million, a solid start for an original property opening in mid-August.

Warner Bros. did not respond to a request for comment on the marketing campaign.

movies

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong On Son’s ‘Nimrods’ Work

Published

21 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

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Nearly 30 years after the album after which the movie is named, Green Day is using their own coming-of-age story to reach a new generation in Nimrods.

Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who teamed up with co-writer/director Lee Kirk on the movie premiering Aug. 14, told Deadline that it was “fun to have a project” on the film with his son Jakob, who wrote songs for the movie’s fictional band Analog Dogs.

“It was really cool,” said Armstrong, who appears in the movie with his Green Day bandmates Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool. “I think the whole thing with having that generation gap, and how we can get the cast to sort of own it and do their thing and put their spin on it, it really sort of made it current.”

As Armstrong noted they didn’t want to sound like “a couple of uncs” making a movie for Gen Z inspired by the band’s Gen X adolescence, Kirk explained that they told the young cast to “take any dialogue and make it your own,” adding, “And that was so important to the story that it just didn’t feel like it was written by a guy in his 50s.”

In Nimrods, Tommy (Mason Thames) receives a call inviting him and his band Analog Dogs to open for Green Day on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. Not realizing it’s his older brother Wayne (Keen Ruffalo) pulling an elaborate prank, Tommy steals Wayne’s car and sets off on a cross-country roadtrip from Kansas City with his bandmates Fred (Kylr Coffman) and Chad (Ryan Foust).

Kirk recalled, “When Billie Joe reached out, he said, ‘I don’t have a story, but I just thought it’d be fun to make a movie, and somehow, it ends with a Green Day concert on New Year’s Eve. So, it’s about the people going to the concert.’ So, we started talking like, who are those people, what could the story be, and eventually, we came up with this idea of these three kids who are traveling across the country to see Green Day on New Year’s Eve. And that’s when it got more interesting, that’s when we came up with the idea of the older brother pranking them.

“And then I realized, I needed story. It’s a road movie where you can just have one-off incidents happen,” he continued. “And I thought it’d be fun if I quiz these guys about their days of driving around in a van, and the crazy stuff that happened to them and sort of start to thread those into the story and sort of turn them into my own sort of idea, or let them evolve and change into how the plot needs it to, and it was fun.”

Featuring a soundtrack of some of Green Day’s most iconic hits, as well as songs by the fictional band Analog Dogs and star McKenna Grace, the movie is filled with cameos from the likes of Fred Armisen, Bobby Lee, Angela Kinsey, Sean Gunn and Kirk’s wife Jenna Fischer.

Ryan Foust, Kylr Coffman and Mason Thames in ‘Nimrods’

Read on about Billie Joe Armstrong and Lee Kirk’s experience teaming up to make the Green Day-inspired movie Nimrods, as well as the potential for an American Idiot movie musical adaptation.

DEADLINE: What was it like for you guys, 10 years since you worked together on Ordinary World, reuniting and making another movie together?

BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG: I thought it was great. I mean, when I thought about doing a Green Day movie, Lee was the first person I called to see if he wanted to dive into a script, and make it about New Year’s Eve. So, we’re old working buds.

LEE KIRK: Yeah, it was cool. We’ve worked together before, obviously, and in the time since, I’ve gotten to know him and his family quite well, he knows my family, I know the sort of extended Green Day family. So, it felt like a good fit, to be working on this movie together, and I feel like we picked up where we left off, pretty much.

DEADLINE: Tell me about how the idea to include the band’s story in the script, with the throwback to touring in a van and all that.

KIRK: When Billie Joe reached out, he said, “I don’t have a story, but I just thought it’d be fun to make a movie, and somehow, it ends with a Green Day concert on New Year’s Eve. So, it’s about the people going to the concert.” So, we started talking like, who are those people, what could the story be, and eventually, we came up with this idea of these three kids who are traveling across the country to see Green Day on New Year’s Eve. And that’s when it got more interesting, that’s when we came up with the idea of the older brother pranking them. And then I realized, I needed story. It’s a road movie where you can just have one-off incidents happen. And I thought it’d be fun if I quiz these guys about their days of driving around in a van, and the crazy stuff that happened to them and sort of start to thread those into the story and sort of turn them into my own sort of idea, or let them evolve and change into how the plot needs it to, and it was fun. And then, that extended to little details of these guys’ lives that I took, little Easter eggs of them, and put them into the movie and let them kind of change. For example, you brought up the ice cream truck. They famously drove around in a bookmobile, and so that was how the ice cream truck idea came in, and there’s all kinds of fun stuff like that in there.

Mason Thames and McKenna Grace in ‘Nimrods’

DEADLINE: Yeah, I caught a few of those kind of Easter eggs. Tell me what was it like working with Mason Thames and McKenna Grace. They’re both great actors, but I didn’t realize they were such talented musicians as well.

KIRK: I mean, those kids are fantastic. They can do anything, and they’re the nicest kids, creative kids, very eager. They were up for whatever we wanted to do. I was so lucky that McKenna wanted to do it and she wanted to put her song in the movie. I just felt like it gave it some authenticity to it, and Mason with his singing, he rehearsed, he worked on those songs, which were written by Billie Joe’s son, by the way. Yeah, Jakob wrote those songs for the Analog Dogs.

ARMSTRONG: Yeah, it was fun to have a project with Jakob, so it was really cool.

DEADLINE: I love that. I was curious about what it was like trying to write a story for Gen Z, but it’s awesome to know that you actually had someone Gen Z part of it as well.

ARMSTRONG: Yeah, I think the whole thing with having that generation gap, and how we can get the cast to sort of own it and do their thing and put their spin on it, it really sort of made it current.

KIRK: Yeah, one of the first things I said, working with the kids, one of the first things I said to them is, “Please take any dialogue and make it your own. Please, just turn it as youthful. If it doesn’t feel authentic, make it your own, make it authentic.” And that was so important to the story that it just didn’t feel like it was written by a guy in his 50s.

ARMSTRONG: A couple of uncs.

DEADLINE: No, it felt very timeless, just as a coming-of-age story in general. I loved it. Tell me about assembling this awesome ensemble with Jenna [Fischer] and Fred Armisen and Bobby Lee.

KIRK: So, when Billie Joe and I talked about the movie, we talked about a lot of the 80s movies that we grew up on, Goonies and Vacation and films like that. And something I love about those films is they just have these characters that pop up that are real fun and funny. And I wanted to have that in the story, on this road trip that these funny guys—so that’s where, Fred and Bobby Lee, thank God they wanted to do the movie, because they just add so much to it. They bring so much comedy to it. And then to have my wife Jenna in the movie, it was a thrill to have her in. I’ve worked with her before, but I felt like her performance, she just delivered this nice big heart at the center of the movie, and she did a great job.

DEADLINE: Yeah, I loved it at the end when she joined them at the punk junkyard festival and was like rocking out with them, that was cute. Billie Joe, I heard that you guys were trying to adapt the Broadway musical of American Idiot into a movie and I’m wondering if that’s still on the horizon.

ARMSTRONG: We talk about it sometimes here and there, I think it would be great to do it. It’s just a matter of—working with [co-writer] Michael Mayer was amazing, so hopefully someday. But right now, it’s just been all about Nimrods.

DEADLINE: I also am so appreciative of the way you guys have been calling out MAGA and ICE in your performances. What was the reaction like for you guys behind the scenes?

ARMSTRONG: I mean, I just sort of say what comes natural with my own values, really, and I think the current administration is completely opposite of the way I feel like everyday Americans are hurting, with corruption, with ICE, Gestapo in the streets, it’s just been America that I don’t recognize from 10, even six years ago. Not to get too political into it, but it’s heartbreaking to watch. It’s sad.