Billy's Fairy Ways

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I'm still so mad at myself that I didn't go see the play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike when it was playing here in New York and starring Sigourney Weaver and Billy Magnussen looking like this - what an American Tragedy. Me not going to that play should be the next season of American Crime Story. Anyway I was reminded of this with today's news that Billy has landed the lead role on Kevin Williamson's new anthology series called Tell Me a Story, which doesn't quite have Sigourney wearing Snow White's Costume but is spinning off fairy tales in modern ways. Says BD:

"The first season of the anthology series, which takes the world’s most beloved fairy tales and reimagines them as a dark and twisted psychological thriller, will interweave “The Three Little Pigs”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, and “Jack and the Beanstalk” into a subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge and murder.
 Magnussen will play Nick, a young high school teacher who’s handsome, seductive, and quite possibly a wolf in sheep’s clothing. After a wild night with a girl he met at a nightclub results in a hookup but no phone numbers swapped, he thinks his chances with her have gone out the window. But when he runs into her again, he’s sure to take advantage of his second chance, proving he’s sensitive, understanding… and, quite possibly, too good to be true."

(thanks Mac) How strange and specific that Billy's cornered the niche of injecting his patented brand of pure sex into Fairy Tales - you might recall that he also played the character of "Rapunzel's Prince" in the Into the Woods movie...

I guess there's just something about him that 

makes us feel like innocent blushing little virgins again... 

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Gratuitous Billy Magnussen

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Am I late to the game on this one? I think I might be late to the game on this one. Billy Magnussen was on As the World Turns for a couple of years, and then recently he did a couple of episodes of Boardwalk Empire (and judging from the pictures, some seen below, it was a memorably gratuitous stint), oh and he was Thor in Damsels in Distress, which sounds vaguely familiar like I should remember his character - was he the spectacularly dumb guy? I think so, right? 

Yes. Anyway what's brought him to my attention today is The Film Experience's review of a new play starring the one and only Sigourney Weaver called Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike - Billy plays Spike, and apparently he spends the majority of the show tearing off his clothes. Example A, via Nat:

That is what front row seats were invented for, right there. So if he's good enough for Sigourney... well okay he's good enough for anybody, Siggy or no Siggy, obviously. Coming up he's in that movie about Alexander Skarsgard and Shiloh Fernandez being gay for each other (that's the movie that The East is in my head, at least). And now you go and hit the jump and see sixty more shots of him.

Great Moments In Movie Shelves #55

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Fifty-five entries in to this series and I've already cheated with it several times, stretching us out from the "Movie" portion of its title into other entertainment arenas like television and now Broadway - but what am I to do, find a picture of Billy Magnussen in just his little black briefs in front of a book-case in the play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike that I've somehow never posted here before and not post it? Let's not be daft. (I have posted many pictures of him in that show before though, click here for our enormous NSFW post on him.) Anyway, I was looking up Billy because...

... I was reading the Fug Girls terrific recap of the first episode of American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson (I do not plan on ever writing out that full title again ever in my life, good grief) and they got around to praising Billy as Kato (so so funny, indeed) and I realized that now that I have actually sat down and watched the episode (and found it kind of perfect in every way)  I can post the pictures of him - hooray! Hit the jump for several more gifs...

Song Boy Billy

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Billy Magnussen, who is currently nominated for a Tony for dancing in his underpants opposite Sigourney Weaver in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and even more impressively the recipient of an awesomely gratuitous gratuitous post here at MNPP back in March, is in talks to top replace Jake Gyllenhaal as one of the princes in the adaptation of Stephen Sondhiem's Into the Woods, which Jake just dropped out of last week so he could make that journo-gone-bad movie Nightcrawler. (thanks Mac) The other prince part is supposed to be played by Chris Pine. I assume this will make people who give a shit about musicals happy, right? Casting a tried-n-tested stage fellow instead of just A Name.
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Good Morning, Billy

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We'll allow Sigourney Weaver to be our surrogate (our Sigournogate?) this morning in wishing Billy "Boy" Magnussen a very happy 31st birthday today -- these shots here of him on stage are from the play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which really seems to have been his big break; at least it's when I first heard of (slash saw) him. And oh what a sight! 

And wasn't he great as Kato Kaelin on The People Vs OJ Simpson? I kept wanting more Kato, honestly. They should've changed the true history and given Kato a bigger role; like Kato goes out on his own as a private investigator! Ooh I smell a spin-off!

I Am Link

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--- Friendly Fire - I didn't realize that Halt and Catch Fire, AMC's series about Eighties computing starring Lee Pace and Scoot McNairy, was coming back so soon - the second season to the depressingly low-rated series begins on May 31st! Have they put the first season on Netflix or anything? They gotta get people watching it; I'd really grown to love it by the end of the first season. Anyway EW has the first clip, plus some chatter about where we're at when the show returns. More gay sex for Lee Pace please! (thanks Mac)

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--- Carrie On - I don't know if Sufjan Stevens' new album Carrie and Lowell coming out tomorrow will finally shut me up about it or not - I'm still listening to it pretty much non-stop, and it's still managing to make me sob in public. Anyway some Suffy links to share: the rave review at Pitchfork was clearly written by a longtime Sufjan fan who fills in all kinds of nice details and callbacks to his previous work. I also found this article talking about Sufjan's religion interesting, even though I'm a super atheist. It also led me to this old interview with Sufjan that I don't think I'd ever read before. Choice bit is when they asked him about his first experience performing music in front of a crowd

"I entered a lip sync contest in middle school (I did Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love”—from The Karate Kid Part II with choreography and make-up). I wore a red bow-tie and pants with zippers on the cuffs. I didn’t even get runner-up, it was so awful. I wasn’t interested in art or aesthetics. I wanted to be a celebrity, smothered with reputation, smoke machine and all."

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--- Super Squad - Suicide Squad's been filming for a couple weeks now but they're still adding hot guys to the cast! DH is reporting that both Scott "Seed of Clint" Eastwood and the boxer Raymond Olubowale (seen there to the left) have just joined the cast, although there's no word on who they're playing. There's a rumor that Olubowale is playing "King Shark" though, whoever that is. Hopefully King Shark is better known as "The dude who makes out with Jai Courtney's character a lot."

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--- Demon Seeded - So it seems that Nicolas Winding Refn began filming his female-centric horror movie The Neon Demon today out in Los Angeles, and at that link there's a little bit more specific of a plot tagline then we've seen before (here's what we'd heard before). Also of news are a couple new cast members listed, including Desmond Harrington, who we gratuitized here at the blog back in 2009. Where the heck has he been? Oh and this dude too:

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His name is Karl Glusman and that's him playing the same part that Billy Magnussen memorably played in the play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Glad to know there will be beefcake besides all the women-folk then!

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--- Peggy's My Hero - I didn't need any more reasons to adore Hayley Atwell after Agent Carter - she's the bee's knees, you guys - but if she wants to tell terribly amusing stories about how she couldn't keep her hands off of Chris Evans' man-boob, then she can go right ahead and do that, and together we'll find out that I can actually love her more. (thanks Mac)
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--- Mad Adam - It becomes clearer and clearer to me the more interviews with Adam Driver that I read that he is genuinely and honestly a super weird person and he doesn't just play one on TV. Take this chat with him in The Guardian (thanks Mac) where, when asked what it's like working with Martin Scorsese (they're currently filming the Jesuit priest drama Silence) he says, and I quote:

"Surreal. I grew up watching his movies. In my culture, in Indiana, it was all about going to Blockbuster Video and renting Martin Scorsese movies."

I get that he's talking to a British newspaper here but it stills trikes me as such an odd bit of phrasing - "in my culture" - that just makes him sound like he's from outer space, instead of placing him anywhere where people actually do things like go to Blockbuster.
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--- Hamm Handed - I knew there was a reason I have never gotten into watching Mad Men! It was all a pre-reaction to the rumor that the show's creator Matthew Weiner apparently refused to let his star Jon Hamm take on the leading role in David Fincher's Gone Girl in between filming the show, and thereby forcing me to sit through another godawful Ben Affleck performance. Goddamn you, Matthew Wiener. You can go to hell for that one, I'll never watch your dumb show now.
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Good Morning, World

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One of the things about posting as much as I do and have done for twelve years now is I forget half this shit I'm spouting. So sometimes something from the past will rear its head in a random manner and I'll realize that, "Hey, you wrote that." Such it was last week when is tumbled upon a picture of Nocturnal Animals and Neon Demon star Karl Glusman playing "Spike" in a run of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike in Pittsburgh in 2014. (The NYT actually did a piece on actors playing the role of Spike at the time, which also includes Billy Magnussen, who played it on Broadway.) 

The very first time I ever posted about Glusman in March 2015 when Demon was filming I included this information, but it took a couple of years (wherein importantly I managed to watch his pornographic performance in Love, and then find out he is 6'2" tall) for me to really care enough to dig into it. And so here are a couple not-posted-before pictures after the jump...