HWD Daily – The 26th Annual Hollywood Issue Is Here
The 26th Annual Hollywood Issue Is Here
The road to Hollywood is rarely a straight one. When Vanity Fair asked 23 of this year’s most captivating stars to make a road movie with us—Taika Waititi as the hitchhiker promising, “I won’t kill you,” Willem Dafoe as a wild-eyed farmer by the side of the road, Lily-Rose Depp as a reporter taking it all in—we also went deep with our three cover stars about the journeys that got them here. As Mark Harris writes for the cover story, “By the time actors are ready to give the performance of a lifetime, they usually understand a great deal about lifetimes”—and for Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, and Jennifer Lopez, those lifetimes have included incredible bursts of fame, periods of bad work or no work at all, and now, all three in their 50s, some of the most acclaimed performances of their careers. Come, take a drive through our 26th annual Hollywood Issue—Antonio Banderas, Alfre Woodard, and Lili Reinhart are all riding shotgun.
Elsewhere in HWD, there’s much more to read from our Hollywood Issue, including in-depth interviews with the three cover stars. We’ve also got Anthony Breznican checking in with Team Little Women on its own bittersweet Oscar nods, and Yohana Desta wondering what Spike Lee might say in front of a long series of open microphones as the president of this year’s Cannes Film Festival jury.
On the Road
Writes Mark Harris in our Hollywood Issue cover story, “Very often, there are bumps along the way—the rises, the disappointments, the comebacks, the odd detours, the triumphs, the mistakes, the loops that can trap you before you realize they’re loops, the odd whims or phone calls or spur-of-the-moment decisions that can change your trajectory forever. All entertainers eventually understand the vicissitudes of a career, but few understand it as vividly as the three people on our cover.”
How Antonio Banderas Changed His Life
The Pain and Glory Oscar nominee had a heart attack two years ago, and it inspired a lot of things, from recognizing that money is “nothing but an intellectual Machiavelli process” to buying his own theater in his hometown of Malaga, Spain. “They say it was one of the best things that happened in my life.”
Jennifer Lopez, Force of Nature
It’s hard to imagine anything Jennifer Lopez hasn’t accomplished, but the Hustlers star has one very specific goal she hasn’t reached yet: “I would love to live somewhere other than the United States, in a small town in Italy, or on the other side of the world, in Bali. Find another life where it’s a little bit more simple and organic and where I get to ride a bike, and buy bread, and put it in my basket, and then go home and put jelly on it, and just eat and paint, or sit in a rocking chair where there was a beautiful view of an olive tree or an oak tree and I could just smell. I have fantasies like that.”
