Of all Hollywood’s new couples, it seems to me that Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz have the best chemistry onscreen. Any chance they’ll make a sequel to Sahara?
No sequel is in the works but you’re not alone in thinking the couple make sweet music together. Aside from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, whose scenes in Mr. & Mrs. Smith are burning up movie theaters, the McConaughey-Cruz team is currently one of the most highly rated among moviegoers, and they’ll be back together in a movie called The Loop. In this romantic drama, McConaughey plays a highway patrolman who falls for an exotic drifter-turned-librarian (Cruz) as a result of their shared interest in a mysterious parrot.
Everyone was surprised about the relationship between the laid-back, bongo-playing 35-year-old Texan and the cool, sophisticated 31-year-old Spaniard. “Nobody on the set expected it,” says Sahara director Breck Eisner. “In fact, it wasn’t until we’d wrapped the movie that we learned about it.”
Biel in seventh heaven
A few years ago Jessica Biel was hailed as one of Hollywood’s brightest new stars. What happened?
The 23-year-old daughter of a businessman father and a spiritual-healer mother (“I’m a mix of English, French, German and Native American”), Biel appeared in school plays in Boulder, Colo., then won a scholarship to drama school. She was only 14 when she got her big break as a preacher’s goody-goody daughter on the family series 7th Heaven. But her career was not helped by spending five long years on the WB show, then taking 18 months off to attend college.
Realizing that time was passing her by, Biel quit college, posed for a sexy magazine spread and appeared in Blade: Trinity and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. None of these helped her make the difficult transition from starlet to star, and on July 29 she’ll be back in a very different role as a fighter pilot in Stealth, an action drama starring Ray Oscar winner Jamie Foxx. On Oct. 14, she’ll also try her hand at a romantic comedy, Elizabethtown, in which she is part of an all-star cast that includes Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst and Susan Sarandon.
Offscreen, meanwhile, Biel seems to be in a seventh heaven of her own. She is in the second year of a hot romance with 24-year-old Chris Evans, her co-star in the 2004 thriller Cellular.
Russell on a mission
With Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes getting engaged, what are the chances she will co-star with him in Mission Impossible 3?
It will certainly be a mission impossible if Keri Russell has anything to say about it; the 29-year-old actress, seen recently in the TNT miniseries Into the West, has already been signed to co-star with Cruise and Ving Rhames.
Russell’s selection was not totally unexpected, since the movie will be directed by J.J. Abrams, the writer-director who masterminded her popular 1998-2002 series Felicity and has since become a television titan by creating the rookie hit Lost and the reinvigorated Alias. It’s pretty late to make changes anyway — MI3 is due to start shooting in Italy next month for a May 2006 release — and Holmes has commitments of her own, including the movie Shame on You.
McAdams’ Wedding date
After seeing her as the meanest of the Mean Girls and a woman in love in The Notebook, I think Rachel McAdams is one of our most versatile young stars. What will we see her in next?
The Canadian-born actress is trying to prove that she’s more than a beautiful face by varying her roles as much as possible. On July 15, she co-stars with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in a romantic comedy, The Wedding Crashers, then has a quick change of pace on Aug. 19 when she stars as a kidnapped plane passenger in a Wes Craven thriller, Red-Eye. For good measure, she’s also in an ensemble movie, The Family Stone, in which she plays Diane Keaton’s daughter.
McAdams, 28, is the daughter of a truck driver and a nurse, and was raised in a town just outside Toronto. She decided to try acting after appearing in a play in summer camp, and admits that she originally planned to avoid Hollywood at all costs. “I thought, ‘I’ll only do theater and be poor and it will be really romantic,” she says. But on her first trip to L.A., she changed her mind and successfully auditioned for the Rob Schneider comedy The Hot Chick. Now, as one of Hollywood’s hottest, she is already a millionaire.
