Always makes me laugh when stars go to parties and then sequester themselves in roped-off VIP enclaves policed by grim-faced bouncers and eagle-eyed personal publicists. There was this odd sight of Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney leaning in from the outside to converse with Emma Stone seated inside the private zone at the afterparty for the Cannes Film Festival competition film Eddington directed by Ari Aster.
Guiney could’ve been invited in or Stone could’ve stepped out. I respect and admire actors of all ranks, and I understand their significance in our culture. And I get that they fear other people — I mean mere mortals. They might have an unapproved snap of themselves taken by someone. Me, for instance. Or they might have to have a conversation about which they weren’t given talking points ahead of time.
Anthony Hopkins always says — or he used to, anyway — that thespians can’t act real life on stage or screen if they don’t actually practice real life in real life.
I get it. We see them, these acting gods and goddesses, up there on the big screen, and we exalt them. We want to mingle, and sometimes we want to breathe the same air they breathe.
But, as Meryl Streep put it to me eons ago, “We all go to the bathroom, you know.”
Talking of which, the only time I caught sight of Joaquin Phoenix was when he slipped out of the inner circle and walked with purpose to the loo, and then back again.
Mr. Phoenix is the star of Mr. Aster’s movie, a masterpiece about the corruption and ongoing self-inflicted destruction of the United States of America. It’s a tough watch. But it also made me howl with laughter at times at the absurdity of how I, an outsider, see America — a country I’ve always felt a kinship to — sink.
Lars Knudsen, Aster’s producing partner, lives in Austin, Texas. My immediate reaction to that was to ask him if he kept a gun in his home. “No, but my neighbors do,” was his response.
The movie has a terrific cast that includes the British actor Micheal Ward and William Belleau, who gives, in my view, the picture’s most vital performance.
Harris Dickinson was at the Eddington party hosted by A24. He’s not in the movie, but I guess he was invited because he starred with Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, also an A24 production.
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Dickinson’s in town for the world premiere screenings of Urchin, his feature directorial debut starring an incredible Frank Dillane as a middle-class lad on the skids.
What made me do a double-take was Dickinson’s mop-headed hairstyle. Then I remembered that he’s portraying John Lennon in the Beatles movies that Sam Mendes is shooting for Apple, Sony and Neal Street.
Earlier, I was over at Fred L’Ecailler’s seafood restaurant, where Charles Finch and the culture magazine A Rabbit’s Foot hosted a dinner honoring Benicio Del Toro, the star of Focus Features’ The Phoenician Scheme directed, of course, by Wes Anderson.
Robert De Niro was there and was seated at table opposite Del Toro.
Del Toro regaled guests with an amusing tale about when he appeared alongside De Niro in Tony Scott’s 1996 film The Fan.
“I went in to do my first reading with Robert De Niro and the director, and I had two lines and he four lines. And he took out his line and then scratched my line, then he scratched his line, then he scratched my line. And I said, ‘Well. now we don’t have any lines.’ And he said, ’It’s going to be better.’ I took that to heart and made a career of saying nothing.”
Benicio Del Toro with Charles Finch at the Rabbit’s Foot Magazine dinner honoring the actor’s career reveals how Robert De Niro cut his lines when they worked together on Tony Scott’s movie ‘The Fan’ #Cannes2025 pic.twitter.com/mf0222p1aB
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Both stars had security discreetly placed outside of the restaurant, but they were approachable. Interestingly, the more amiable people are, the more respectful we are of them. This stuff works both ways, you know?
Cuba Gooding Jr. was at L’Ecailler’s with Claudine De Niro, Robert’s former daughter-in-law.
Gooding reminded me that he and I first met in 1991, when John Singleton’s classic picture Boyz n the Hood premiered at Cannes. Singleton snuck Gooding into the movie’s gala party, and we chatted there. Then I remembered interviewing them all the following day.
Gooding showed me a clip on his cell from a sci-fi film Quantum Supremacy. “I’m the only live actor in it,,” Gooding says. “The rest is all AI.”
I suddenly felt nauseous but regained my equilibrium after Tom Hooper explained that he’s using live actors in his film Photograph 51, with Natalie Portman portraying DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. I know Franklin’s story well and how her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA in the 1950s were overlooked, because I followed very closely a play in which Nicole Kidman portrayed Franklin on the London stage, directed by Michael Grandage.
Franklin never got to share in the Nobel Prize awarded to men she had worked with on the pioneering DNA studies. Hooper says his own mother always spoke of how women in science and other disciplines were “always” being dismissed by their male colleagues. Sadly, misogyny hasn’t dated.
Always enjoy catching up with the Sony Pictures Classics chiefs Michael Barker and Tom Bernard and the Focus gang: Chairman Peter Kujawski, Vice Chairman Jason Cassidy and Stephanie Phillips, EVP Publicity. Ditto Netflix awards supremo Lisa Taback, who was at the Rabbit’s Foot shindig with Netflix’s London-based awards director Cai Mason.
The formidable Claire Ingle-Finch, managing partner at Finch & Partners, put the dinner together with her team that included Rosie Viles and Yasar Torunoglu.
Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Luca Guadagnino’s frequent producing collaborator, was deep in conversation with Daniel Battsek, president of Film at Lincoln Center.
I saw Battsek earlier in the day at the United in Cannes party thrown by the BFI, BATA, BBCFilm and Film4. I try to ignore him because he’s a die-hard fan of Chelsea football club. He was chatting with Christine Langan of Bobbie Productions, another Chelsea supporter.
Seriously, though, I put that aside because Battsek and I have known each other since, if memory serves me correctly, he tried to ban me from entering some movie party back in the 1980s. He’s much smaller than I am, so I forgave him, plus he always makes me chuckle. And he knows tons about film.
The United bash was a smart idea, and I liked seeing Ben Roberts from the BFI, Jane Millichip from BAFTA, Eva Yates from BBCFilm and Ollie Madden from Film4 metaphorically link arms.
Can’t remember the other parties I went to on Friday night into Saturday morning, which is probably a good thing.
The post Breaking Baz @ Cannes: Harris Dickinson Shows Off John Lennon Mop Hairstyle At ‘Eddington’ Afterparty & Benicio Del Toro Reveals Why Robert De Niro Cut His Lines On Tony Scott’s ‘The Fan’ appeared first on Deadline.
