Hollywood Q&A
Q: I saw a reference made about Rachel McAdams’ recent appearance on “Saturday Night Live” being her first time on the show. Is that true? – Jonathan Ford, via e-mail
A: It is, which might seem surprising, unless one considers that McAdams seems to eschew the limelight quite a bit — somewhat unusual for a celebrity, admittedly. She had turned down an opportunity to reunite with several other “Mean Girls” (2004) alums in a commercial recently, reasoning that it didn’t quite feel like the right thing for her. (She later said that she hadn’t known that so many other former co-stars of hers would be participating.) Though she did television at the start of her career, McAdams has kept her main focus on movie work, the second season of HBO’s “True Detective” and several episodes of FX’s “Dave” being notable extensions later on. That made her previously unannounced stint on “Saturday Night Live,” which amounted to her introduction of musical guest Renee Rapp (who assumed McAdams’ Regina George role from the original “Mean Girls” movie in the recent stage and film versions) and participation in a skit as a Rachel McAdams look-alike, even more of a surprise.
Q: It’s good to see “Ride” getting another opportunity for an audience with its current run on The CW. Will there be a second season of the show? – Tara Williams, Buffalo, N.Y.
A: Apparently not, which makes its CW pickup interesting since that network had to know it would be an automatically finite run — unless The CW should make its own move to revive it, but it’s known that the intention there now is to keep production costs low, thus the many acquisitions of shows already produced elsewhere. CTV Drama ran the Nancy Travis-starring “Ride” in Canada, where the program originated, but there evidently aren’t any plans beyond repeating the 10 existing episodes.
Q: I enjoyed seeing Vivica A. Fox in “The Wrong Life Coach” on LMN recently. I know she has made a lot of movies with “Wrong” in the title. When will the next one be coming? – Jean Murray, via e-mail
A: It’s hard to predict when that will be, since the titles are usually announced only a few weeks before they premiere. However, you can bet that Fox will keep the “Wrong” franchise going, as an executive producer as well as a star. Those pictures traditionally get good ratings, also indicated by the marathons that LMN and sister network Lifetime often do by showing several of the titles on the same day. No matter who else is in the cast of any given one, Fox is always a selling point of them — giving herself a role in each as a corporate boss, an athletic coach or whatever. No matter what career she’s portraying, the character typically gets to put a coda on the story with some variation of the same line: “You messed with the wrong (check the given title)!” Viewers have come to expect that, and Fox enjoys doing it, as she has told us.
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