You Never Saw My …

Paramount’s marketing boss had no access to talent and no footage to promote the PAW Patrol movie, so he let the dogs out — and set a world record in the process • By Pamela McClintock

This past summer, Paramount president of global marketing and distribution Marc Weinstock had planned to do huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem takeovers in Los Angeles and New York City that would be attended by talent, including writer and producer Seth Rogen and voice cast Rose Byrne, Jackie Chan, Paul Rudd, Ice Cube and Maya Rudolph. There were also plans for a Comic-Con event. But any plotting came to a full stop when the strike commenced July 14, roughly six weeks before Mutant Mayhem opened.

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Mandy Patinkin and wife Kathryn Grody on the Showtime project they shot with their son: “He has to sit there as we’re pitching out ideas about his parents’ death or their sex lives” • By Lacey Rose

As Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody’s son, Gideon, tells it, his parents’ social media stardom began rather innocently. Grody-Patinkin had moved in with his actor parents early in the pandemic and began interviewing them for what would be a family archive. “I thought they might die from COVID maybe soon-ish, so I was getting them to tell me some stories,” he says via Zoom, to which his father jokes from another square (albeit from the same upstate New York property that they still share): “We’re big on positive thinking here.” 

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A glimpse at While You Were Breeding, a strike casualty still looking for love — or at least a new home • By Lacey Rose

In the spring of 2022, Freeform handed veteran comedy writer Kristin Newman a series order for While You Were Breeding, based on her Eat Pray Love-esque memoir. By the time the writers strike hit, she’d wrapped production on season one but, in solidarity, hit pause on postproduction, which meant she’d miss the show’s August premiere date. By September, Freeform had shifted its strategy, and Newman’s series no longer fit.

The cast and showrunner of the Amazon spinoff on what would have gone down in San Diego: “We had a lot of body parts exploding” • By Aaron Couch

In 2019, Lizze Broadway was at San Diego Comic-Con when the whispers began. “The Boys are coming. The Boys are coming.” A few minutes later, castmembers including Karl Urban and Jack Quaid walked by. “For a show I knew nothing about, this moment stuck with me big time,” says Broadway, who plays size-changing student Emma. Four years later, Broadway and her fellow cast were preparing to show off Amazon’s college-set The Boys spinoff, Gen V, at their own Comic-Con panel — a chance to assure the 4,800 or so fans of The Boys who were packed into the convention center that the new series would be just as raunchy and violent as the mother ship. The strike derailed that. But, months later, the Gen V team tells THR how it would have gone down. 

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Featuring Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon, THR‘s cover was swapped out last minute for one announcing the historic actors strike called that day.

Photographer David Needleman, who captured the busy trio on June 15 at the Four Seasons in New York, in a rare postproduction moment when they were all in the same city on the same day, recalls: “I had asked them literally to lean on each other as a means of support. They looked at each other, looked at me, laughed, then fell into pose. Within seconds, I knew we had the picture. While the cover itself couldn’t be published, I wouldn’t have had it any other way, with the far more important need to support the historic strikes. Symbolically, I took comfort in our greater concept of leaning on each other for support — something I was eager to do, in solidarity with the actors and writers from whom I’ve had the privilege to derive so much inspiration within my own career.” 

This story first appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.