Names and faces
In the opening scene of the final episode of HBO’s Big Little Lies, viewers hear but don’t see the brutal beating of Celeste Wright, an elegant former attorney turned stay-at-home mom whose seemingly dreamy husband is secretly abusive. The muffled screams of Celeste, played by Nicole Kidman, seep through an air vent in the couple’s basement, where their twin sons were watching TV. Then the camera is suddenly at ground level with a gasping and shaking Celeste, whose curtain of red hair shields her face as she lies in a heap on the bathroom floor. Of all the scenes of domestic violence between Perry and Celeste in the popular HBO series, this one was chilling for the actress as well. Kidman recalled the scene’s overwhelming emotion and her internalizing the pain of her character’s experiences, during a recent discussion with other actresses hosted by the Hollywood Reporter. “I remember lying on the floor in the last episode, being in my underwear and having just been really thrown around,” Kidman said. “I just lay on the floor. I couldn’t get up. I didn’t want to get up.” She said she chose to participate in nearly all the violent scenes herself, rather than relying on a stunt double, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
In her first interview since being released from a military prison last month, Chelsea Manning said she believed she had a “responsibility to the public” and didn’t think she was risking national security when she leaked a trove of classified documents. The 29-yearold formerly known as Bradley Manning said in a pre-taped interview broadcast Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America that she was prompted to give the 700,000 military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks because of the human toll of the “death, destruction and mayhem” she saw as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. She told ABC that she has “accepted responsibility” for her actions. “No one told me to do this. No one directed me to do this,” she said. Manning was released from a military prison in May after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence, which was commuted by former President Barack Obama in his final days in office. Manning also touched on her struggles dealing with her gender transition while in prison. She says she tried to kill herself twice behind bars and fought for the hormone treatments she says keep her alive.