Welcome to Famous Last Words, our weekly column on what's been going on in the world of pop culture. This week we speculate on names for the new Kardashian spawn and wonder aloud why we're expecting so much from our child stars.
Kim’s had a baby girl! She’s happy, she’s healthy, she’s unnamed, but my money is on the uber-celeb pair naming her either East, West, Sinner, Three or God. I’d go with Sinner — how impactful!
And speaking of babies, recent reports have confirmed that Finn Wolfhard will be taking his brand of too-much-too-young to the role of young Boris in the film adaptation of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. TBH, it's our fault. We seem to have a need to deify 13-year-old stars to the point of ruin, just so we can feel temporarily expunged of our own loss of innocence. It's a really bleak cyclical trend we can’t quite seem to shake off. While indeed the child star is a longstanding obsession, it’s also one we look away from when things go awry — think Mary Kate Olsen and her eating disorder, Drew Barrymore and her teenage drug addiction.
For the Stranger Things kids, living in a politically aware world, it’s become very strange indeed. They have become spokespeople for things that 13-year-olds shouldn’t be spokespeople for. Just this week, Millie Bobby Brown shared her most “empowering moment” ever on Instagram – the moment when she was Eleven and she shaved her head. Yes, for many women shaving their head is an incredibly empowering act, and while I’m very happy for MBB, the pressure to perform on social media has been linked to a third of teenage girls experiencing depression and anxiety. We need to take care of our young people, not lose them to the somewhat fleeting system of social media.
For real advice, we should in fact be looking to Lisa Tchenguiz — star of the heartbreakingly exploitative Millionaires' Ex-Wives Club which aired this week, which saw rich people battling for literally tons of cash through savage divorces. While the show was filled with really bleak zingers, Tchenguiz spoke truth to power when she said, “I’d rather have money and be sad, than no money and be sad.” Same.
Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of director Woody Allen, gave her first onscreen interview this week about the sexual assault she says she endured at the hands of Allen when she was young. People seem to be listening though, with many coming out publicly in support of Farrow and to denounce Allen — stars like Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Hall are donating their salaries from Allen’s upcoming movie to different charities aiming to tackle sexual assault and misconduct. It’s an incredibly emotional interview. Time’s up, finally.
And while the landscape of Hollywood continues to redevelop, what is coming next is perhaps a less glamorous version of the red carpet style revolution we saw at the Golden Globes: it's time for the Admin Revolution! Now is the time to go into the nitty-gritty in the workplace — who gets paid what, why, who says? An example for how to do this is perhaps the upcoming Black Panther movie — the next in the long line of Marvel movies — which features a predominantly black cast. Entertainment lawyer Darrell Miller told The Hollywood Reporter that actors of colour are so often underpaid “because they infrequently get golden opportunities.” Now people are actually engaging head-on with skewed manifestations of equality and diversity in Hollywood, it’s time for movies like this to set a precedent for paying people who are less represented on screen. And how’s that, you ask? Fairly! And well!
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