Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
There’s a bromance brewing between actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds. The Hollywood stars say they hit it off so well during the filming of their new scifi thriller called Life that a genuine friendship has blossomed. The movie, about a team of scientists aboard the International Space Station who find an alien life form from Mars, premiered Saturday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. The Brokeback Mountain and Deadpool stars were mostly all jokes during rounds of press interviews prior to the film’s premier, answering most questions with a back-and-forth comedy shtick. But they turned serious when asked about the connection formed on set. “You do these films and get to work with really amazing people, really talented people and you think, ‘Oh I’m going to hang out with these people afterward and see them again,’” Reynolds said. “You don’t most of the time because you go on living your life. But with this guy, we’ve stayed friends. That’s a lucky thing. It doesn’t always happen.” Gyllenhaal was equally sentimental. “We sort of grew up in this business together without knowing each other until very recently,” Gyllenhaal said. “It’s hard in a business where … a lot of times we’re pretending to get closer to the truth and to find somebody who you feel is genuine. I feel that way about him, so we’re friends.”
“You gotta be real careful around here,” actor Tim Allen, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, said of Hollywood, after he stuttered through a confession that he attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration. “You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody else believes. This is like ’30s Germany,” he quipped. Allen, who plays a vocal conservative on his sitcom, Last Man Standing, has been one of few in Hollywood to speak openly about his right-leaning views. Since it premiered several years ago, Allen’s show has been hailed as a rare counterexample to Hollywood politics. Allen himself has complained of network censorship when his protagonist, an alpha-male family man whom the actor has called “an educated Archie Bunker,” tries to go after liberal icons. Allen “admits he has gotten more than one warning to stop calling former President [Barack] Obama a ‘communist,’” the TV Page reported in 2015. During the Republican primaries, The Hollywood Reporter asked whether he vented his own political views through his character. “It’s getting more and more comfortable,” he said. “These guys know me so well that they’re writing stuff that is exactly what I would’ve said. It’s a marvelous thing when you have liberal people writing for [a show like this].” And he sounded lukewarm about the prospect of a Trump presidency, deriding Trump’s comments on immigrants. “That’s just ignorant. But he might be able to do the stuff that really needs fixing.” After the election, on Fox News, Allen compared Trump to an amateur performer with “very bad comic timing.”