Celebrity News

CELEBRITY NEWS

NATE BLOOM COLUMNIST

A THRILLER, FATHER/ DAUGHTER SURGEONS, PIVOTING WOMEN AND MORE

The 355, an action spy thriller, opens in theaters Jan. 7. Jessica Chastain stars as a CIA secret agent who teams up with other international agents to recover a secret weapon. Simon Kinberg, 49, directed the film and he co-wrote it. He has co-written several X-Men films and he’s also a top film producer.

Check out Good Sam, a CBS series that premiered on Jan. 5. New episodes air Wednesdays at 9 p.m. It’s easy to catch encore showings on-demand or free online.

Here’s the capsule plot: Dr. Samantha Griffith (Sophia Bush) becomes the top surgeon at her hospital after her boss and father, Dr. Rob Griffith (British Jewish actor Jason Isaacs, 58), falls into a coma. Her life becomes complicated when he awakens and wants to resume surgery. She’s now her father’s boss and decisions about his professional career are now in her hands.

Isaacs was raised in a religious Jewish home, but he is not religious as an adult. He is best known for playing Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies. His list of starring or co-starring roles goes back decades. But he hasn’t had the best luck in picking roles. Most of his films were so/so in quality and weren’t box-office hits. Likewise, his TV series record isn’t stellar. He has co-starred in two American TV series that weren’t renewed after their first 13 episodes aired.

Do check out Isaacs in The Death of Stalin (2017), a critically acclaimed film that somehow managed to be funny and factually accurate. It depicted the fierce jockeying to be Stalin’s successor (1953) as the dictator lay dying. Isaacs co-stars as Marshall Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s greatest WWII hero. All the would-be Stalin successors courted Zhukov. (Historians really love this movie.)

Pivoting, a dramedy series, premieres on Jan. 9 (9 p.m., Fox). Here’s the premise: Three middle-aged women, who are friends, are jarred by the sudden death of a mutual friend. They decide that “life is short” and they must take chances to shake up their lives. In other words, pivot from what they have been doing.

Ginnifer Goodwin, 43, plays Jodie, one of the three friends. Her most memorable roles include playing the third wife of a polygamous renegade Mormon in Big Love on HBO (2006-2011); a romance-seeking young woman in the hit film He’s Not Just That Into You (2010); and Snow White on the ABC series Once Upon a Time (2011-2018). Goodwin is the daughter of a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother. She was raised “both” Jewish and Unitarian (with more exposure to Judaism). In 2013, she said that she had left religion behind her 10 years before, but she had recently made a choice to embrace Judaism.

The PBS celebrity ancestry show, Finding Your Roots, began its eighth season Jan. 4. The 21 celebs profiled this season include actress Pamela Adlon (fourth episode) and director/writer Damon Lindelof (ninth episode). I’ll say more about them just before their episode premieres.

I previously noted that Willie Garson died last September, age 57. He was best known for playing Stanford Blatch, the gay

best friend of star character Carrie, on Sex and the City. I wrote that it wasn’t clear whether Garson had filmed episodes of the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, before his death from cancer. Garson did appear in the first four episodes of And Just Like That. His character was written out of the series in the Dec. 19 episode (the excuse being that he was taking a big job in Japan). Garson wasn’t gay in “real life,” but he didn’t want to talk about that. He thought that telling the media that you’re straight, while playing a gay character, could be taken by some that there is something wrong with being gay. His friendship with Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie) pre-dated Sex and the City. In a recent interview, she said she kept his illness confidential. Knowing his condition, she worried about the big health risk Garson took by filming during the pandemic. Parker also worried about the emotions Garson The late Willie Garson must have felt as his character attended the funeral (scene) of Carrie’s husband, Mr. Big. I recently learned that Garson was long involved with a woman who didn’t want children. Garson did and, after they broke-up, he adopted a 7-year-old boy. Reports are that Garson decided to stop acting in And Just episodes so he could spend his last months at home with Nathan, his son. Nathan, now 20, posted a moving statement about how much he loved his father on Instagram.

LISA FRANCHOT VIA WIKIPEDIA