This Week in Gossip #6

The Golden Globes are silly, Oprah talks weight loss medication, Broadway affair drama, and Ivanka makes her comeback via Kim.

1. Broadway Drama! Did Hugh Jackman Have an Affair With Sutton Foster?!

Hollywood drama is fun, but it just can’t compare to its friends on the East Coast. The New York theatre scene is far smaller, more tight-knit, and prone to high emotions because what else would you expect to happen in a room full of horny musical kids with chemistry to spare? Ariana and Spongebob is only as funny as it is because Ethan Slater’s a theatre kid. Now, we have Wolverine himself getting into some alleged cheating shenanigans following his most recent stint on the Great White Way.

In Touch reported that Hugh Jackman was caught getting cozy with Sutton Foster, the two-time Tony-winning actress who TV fans might recognise from Bunheads and Younger. The pair recently starred in a very highly publicised revival of The Music Man, which made a veritable f*ck-bucket worth of cash. The actors received good write-ups for their chemistry, so at least we know that came from a real place (allegedly.) Of course, it’s a bit messier when you remember that both of them were, as far as we know, still married to other people at the time. Jackman is currently divorcing his estranged wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, while Foster is still married to screenwriter and producer Ted Griffin. Page Six followed up the story by claiming that the pair became romantically involved last year and that his relationship with Foster is why Jackman left Furness.

But then that Page Six story disappeared. It’s not on their website now, or Twitter. Given that they still have a number of stories up about Furness being devastated by the split, I wouldn’t have thought they’d be rushing to get Hugh’s team on their side. Then again, Jackman is friends with the Murdochs. Foster then posted a photograph of herself with her husband and daughter on social media, showing them attending a couple of stage shows.

This rumour has been floating around Broadway circles and forums for quite some time now. I heard it a while back and just sort of shrugged because I honestly thought Jackman and Furness were rock-solid. Yes, I know he’s been the subject of gay rumours for as long as he’s been an actor, and this latest romance hasn’t stopped that. Apparently, bisexuality means nothing to some people (if he is in any way not straight, which is his business and as long as there’s no hypocrisy at play, it remains so.)

The story possibly picked up more heat among Broadway fans because Foster’s kinda been here before. Try and keep up. She used to be married to Christian Borle, who is also a two-time Tony winner and former star of Smash, poor dear. While performing in Legally Blonde, he allegedly had an affair with his co-star Laura Bell Bundy. In retaliation (allegedly), Foster got it on with her then-co-star Roger Bart while they worked on Young Frankenstein. Allegedly. Foster and Borle now seem to be on good terms and appeared in a Gilmore Girls episode together, but this love square was all that Broadway fans could talk about at the time. I remember Broadway Secrets on LiveJournal. I lived it!

In Touch has not removed their story, although they have less need to cozy up to a friend of their evil billionaire owner. Jackman hasn’t said anything as of the writing of this newsletter. Stay tuned to see if his divorce era gets messier.

2. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron Breaks Box Office Records for Anime

My favourite film of 2023 is The Boy and the Heron. I was fortunate to see the film when it had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and it blew away even my lofty expectations. Hayao Miyazaki is a true master director and the arrival of a new film from Studio Ghibli’s co-founder is always an Event for cineastes. That proved to be the case with the movie’s official release last week. In a quiet weekend for new titles, The Boy and the Heron took the top spot at the box office with $12.8 million, putting it well above Disney’s Wish. This made it the highest-grossing debut for any Japanese animated film in North America.

The movie was supposed to be Miyazaki’s final work before retirement, but he decided to go back to work because this man retires and unretires with the same frequency that I change my socks. In Japan, it was offered to hungry audiences in a very unconventional way. Miyazaki offered no trailer, no synopsis, not even an image from the final product. Moviegoers got a poster and a title (How Do You Live, which makes way more sense than the one we got because, spoiler alert, the heron’s not that big a part of the story.) Miyazaki and Ghibli are such power players that they could sell a film based on their names alone, and it worked. It became the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan. As much as I wanted GKIDS to replicate that model for America, we knew it’d never happen, in large part because the logistics don’t work when critics have seen the movie and you can read reviews (like mine, shameless plug, see the link in the first paragraph!)