Hollywood Q&A

Q: What ever happened to Clive Owen? He used to be everywhere, but I haven’t seen him in a while.

A: Big-screen leading man Clive Owen (“Children of Men,” 2006) has actually been doing pretty steady work lately. If you haven’t seen it, it’s either because you were looking in the wrong place or because it was a flop that nobody saw.

His most successful role lately has been on the small screen instead of the big one — he did a stint as President Clinton on the third season of “American Crime Story” in 2021.

But he’s mostly stuck to his normal milieu of feature films, even though he hasn’t had much luck. He’s had a run of pretty notable flops, such as the crime drama “The Informer” (2019), the sci-fi film “Anon” (2018), and, the biggest flop of them all, the 2017 space opera “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.” This high-profile, long-developing project based on a popular French comic barely earned its enormous, $177-million budget back.

All this seems to have convinced Owen to commit to TV. And that decision is paying off already, in the form of a lead role in a highprofile series coming soon to AMC.

It’s high-profile specifically because of his character: he’ll be playing Sam Spade, the beloved literary sleuth created by crime writer Dashiell Hammett, made famous in the 1941 cinematic classic “The Maltese Falcon.”

“Monsieur Spade” is about an older version of the character, retired from big-city detective work and living out his golden years in small-town France in the early 1960s.

Q: I just had a friend tell me that “Paranormal Activity” is actually the most successful movie of all time. But that’s not right, is it? I thought it was “Avatar” or something.

A: It looks like your friend follows Information Is Beautiful on social media.

This company specializes in producing understandable and, yes, even beautiful charts and graphs about popular topics. It recently took on the movie biz, charting the biggest movies of all time, and it illustrated a fascinating fact: if you define “biggest” in relative terms — on return-on-investment as a percentage — then the humble 2007 horror flick “Paranormal Activity” beats everyone. By a lot.

That’s partly a function of its success — it pulled in nearly $200 million, according to Box Office Mojo — but mostly because it was incredibly cheap to make.

It cost just $15,000, thanks to its cast of unknowns and its found footage-style production.

And so, expressed as a percentage, “Paranormal Activity” earned 1.3 million per cent of its budget back. “Avatar” (2009), the highestgrossing film of all time (raking in nearly $3 billion worldwide), can’t compare to that — it earned back a mere 1,200 per cent of its budget.

Q: Have any of the cast members of “Glee” actually gone on to have a career in music?

A: For the multitalented veterans of Fox’s hit musical series “Glee,” the answer depends on what you mean by “have a career.” Because most of them went on to release music at some point in the eight years since the show ended.

Lea Michele, who played Rachel, has probably had the most success on this front. She’s released four full albums so far, two of which placed on the prestigious Billboard 200 charts.

But co-stars Amber Riley (who played Mercedes), Chord Overstreet (Sam), Kevin McHale (Artie), Darren Criss (Blaine), and Jane Lynch and Matthew Morrison (who played teachers Sue Sylvester and Will Schuester, respectively) have all released music.

Some of them have also branched out into Broadway and other stage-musical roles, and they’ve all kept a foot in screen acting as well. So if by “have a career in music” you mean dedicate themselves full time to being musicians, the answer is no.

Instead, they’ve more or less continued doing what they were doing on “Glee” — blending together acting, singing and, in some cases, behind-the-scenes producing to create something that’s bigger than the sum of those parts.