The first Monday in May has arrived, which in the fashion world means one thing: the stars have descended upon Manhattan for the Met’s annual gala benefiting the Costume Institute. This year's edition, co-chaired by Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour—with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as honorary chairs—celebrates the opening of "Costume Art," an exhibition pairing garments and artworks from across the Met's vast collection to make the case for fashion as an embodied art form. The dress code, "Fashion Is Art," plays on the same theme.

The gala surpassed last year's $31 million in funds raised with a record-breaking $42 million, an especially vital sum given that the Costume Institute is largely self-funded. That’s part of what makes the night so important for supporting the arts, and while the parade of celebrities, designers, and artists posing in meticulously crafted looks is the night's biggest draw, the spontaneous moments once guests clear the museum steps are the most coveted. That's in part because phones and photography inside the gala have been banned—per Wintour—since 2015, though a few candid photos typically manage to make it out (you might recall 2017’s infamous bathroom-smoking photos). Below, the behind-the-scenes celeb run-ins and moments from the 2026 Met Gala you might've missed.

Rihanna, Ciara and Katy Perry

Teyana Taylor and Connor Storrie

Ayo Edebiri and Zoë Kravitz

Zoë Kravitz, Lily-Rose Depp and Gracie Abrams

Tate McRae, Rosé, and Connor Storrie

Ayo Edebiri and Lily-Rose Depp

Rihanna, Heidi Klum, and A$AP Rocky

Beyoncé

Beyoncé and Blue Ivy

Blue Ivy and Beyoncé

Sabrina Carpenter, Zoë Kravitz and Hailey Bieber

Sabrina Carpenter admiring the Met’s art collection

Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner

Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner and Zoë Kravitz

Hailey Bieber, SZA and Doechii

SZA, Doechii and Hailey Bieber

Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner and Russell Westbrook

Chase Sui Wonders, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Hailey Bieber

Olivia Wilde and Katy Perry

Alexis Roche, Kylie Jenner and John Galliano

Colman Domingo and Janelle Monáe

Felicity Blunt, Heidi Klum, Colman Domingo, Emily Blunt, Carey Mulligan, and Nicholas Hoult

Jordan Roth, Paul Anthony Kelly and Olivia Wilde

Mark Zuckerberg, Alysa Liu, and Priscilla Chan

Sunday Rose Kidman Urban and Nicole Kidman

Coco Jones and Doechii

Anok Yai and Pierpaolo Piccioli

Greta Gerwig, Stella McCartney, and Tate McRae

Jennie, Hoyeon, and Chase Infiniti

Chase Infiniti and Hoyeon

Jennie, Hoyeon, and Chase Infiniti

Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor and Heidi Klum

Ben Stiller and Heidi Klum

Olivia Wilde and Patrick Schwarzenegger

Rami Malek

Huma Abedin and Ben Stiller

Julianne Moore and Lux Pascal

Conner Ives, Lila Moss, Laura Harrier, Adwoa Aboah and Louisa Jacobson

Tom Sturridge, Alexa Chung, Conner Ives, Lila Moss and Adwoa Aboah at The Mark Hotel

The new episode opens where we left off: with Rue in the back of a cop car waxing poetic on the nature of truth while a DEA agent and a dog search her car. As the blue and red lights flash on Rue’s forlorn face, and the K9 gets a positive on the drugs in her trunk, Rue spells out her predicament (and the theme of the episode): “People love to argue about the truth. Some say it’s just the facts. Others say it’s what’s right. Some even claim there’s no real truth at all, just opinions. While we may disagree about what the truth is, we all know when we’re telling a lie.”

She finds herself telling multiple lies as she’s fingerprinted and brought into a brightly lit room to be questioned. The DEA knows that she knows Laurie, and they know she’s been to Mexico. They even have photo evidence of her talking to a cartel member. Rue does her best to lie her way out of the situation, but she’s terrible at it. Soon, they’re telling her she’s facing 20 years in prison without parole—at least—with an additional 20 for every death she might’ve been involved in. After breaking down in tears, Rue cuts a deal. “And that is how I became a snitch,” she narrates.

The DEA gives Rue her bag back, but not before swapping out the drugs for sugar pills and laxatives. She heads back to the club, waiting for them to “be in touch.” She’s so freaked out that she can’t even be bothered to check out Alamo’s newest worker, a girl posing in a thong that we come to know as Kitty from Kansas (Anna Van Patten). Alamo is happy because he believes he’s destroyed Laurie by killing her bird, Paladin. He wants to celebrate by taking Kitty into a backroom and having sex with her, and it’s even more ominous than usual.

In a flashback, we get more details on Rue’s deal with the DEA. They hope the fake drugs will lead Alamo back to Laurie. They also installed an app on her phone to track everything and keep her bugged. The catch is that she needs to keep her phone out in the open to capture everything, which could easily be read as suspicious. She opts for a very conspicuous fanny pack that gets put in a safe. Things are not looking great for Rue, as usual.

Things also aren’t looking great for Nate, but he seems delusional about his fate. Back at the mansion, we see the newlywed sitting on his couch with stitches on his face and his bruised, bloodied toe sewn back onto his foot. “The toe is a metaphor,” he tells Cassie. “I thought that I’d lost it forever. But we were smart. We put it on ice. We took it to the hospital. And they were able to put it back on.” The metaphor, he tells a skeptical Cassie, is that “when you break something, you gotta pick up the pieces.” In other words, it’s them. Cassie sees things differently. As she kneels down to tend to his wound, she tells him that, actually, “the toe is never going to be the same.” The metaphor doesn’t mean what Nate wants it to mean. Nate is motivated by the toe to “build back better,” but Cassie points out that everything Nate has built has been built upon a lie. He finally admits one truth to her: the real amount he owes is a million dollars. “You have to keep faith in me, us, our life,” Nate says. But according to Cassie, “The fairytale’s over.”

Having been brutally let down by one love of her life, Cassie calls the other—“the one person that could help her,” according to Rue. Cassie packs her bags and leaves Nate in shag-carpet misery, telling him she’s “going to work” and jumping in Maddy’s fabulous convertible while a pair of young girls that resemble the two old friends look on. “Let’s do something about your look,” Maddy says. Finally. Maddy assembles a team to take Cassie from “the suburbs to the city,” and as the two drink champagne, Cassie gets a makeover to become her fully realized version of a glambot; the pair drives down Hollywood Boulevard in Thelma & Louise-style bliss.

We head over to the studio lot, where Lexi is offering Jules a work opportunity (at least something good came out of that wedding). She wants to commission Jules to make a painting for LA Nights, which gets 7 million viewers a week. Lexi explains that the character is inspired, improbably, by Georges Seurat, so they want Jules’s take on something in that vein. Presented with a blank canvas, Jules goes to work, and, unfortunately, her vision does not match what Lexi and her boss, Patty (Sharon Stone), wanted—to say the least. She’s painted a disturbing take on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, one that includes no fewer than 14 penises. Lexi tells her boss that Jules is trans, you see, and can’t be blamed for having such a unique vision. Despite being horrified by her work, the team handles her with kid gloves. Jules can’t fix it in time, and the scene gets pushed to the following week.

Lexi gets chewed out by her boss, who explains that Lexi’s failure to communicate with Jules cost them an hour and a half of shooting, or $56,000, or $191,000 total, all things considered. As Lexi chokes back tears, she tells her not to be a “net negative.” It feels like a meta commentary on Levinson’s own history. The first season of Euphoria famously included a scene with so many penises that it became the main headline about the show; plus, Levinson’s work on The Idol, not to mention Euphoria itself, has been plagued with delays, reshoots, and going over budget. It’s a hard lesson for Lexi to learn, and Jules, too, who takes the painting home and destroys it with red paint.

Back at Laurie’s ranch, there’s a very somber bird funeral for Paladin. Laurie’s crew vows to get revenge on Alamo. The DEA agents call Rue and threaten her with going to prison if she can’t arrange a meeting between the mortal enemies, even when she explains they’re unlikely to ever do business together again. She offers to set up a buy with a different dealer.

We learn that Cassie has taken up residence at Lexi’s apartment while she works on getting famous. She pawned her wedding ring—“took the cash, and invested it in herself,” Rue narrates. Maddy helps her create content by the pool, and Lexi is shocked by how much money women and girls make online. (Maddy cites Bhad Bhabie as an example for making $53 million her first year on OF after turning 18.) Rue shows up out of the blue and tells Maddy she needs drugs—coke, molly, heroin—“for her boss.” Lexi is again scandalized, thinking that Rue is using again (well, to be fair, she is). “Do you guys hear yourselves right now? What is wrong with you right now?” Lexi asks. “You’re looking for drugs, you’re selling yourself on your porn site, and you’re like some Internet pimp? It’s sad, and it’s pathetic, and it’s really disturbing, honestly,” she says, before storming off. As always, Lexi’s not wrong.

Nate finds himself before the permit board, quoting the Bible and begging for reconsideration of his Sunset Settlers plan. He does his best to ask whether they can rebuild around the endangered flowers, but the motion is denied. Nate goes off on the board, asking them if they’re trying to ruin his life; he literally gets on his hands and knees to beg, but they aren’t budging. He breaks down in tears, sobbing on the floor. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Back at Alamo’s house, Rue is playing poker with Alamo and the guys while the DEA listens to her tapped phone. She starts nervously questioning Alamo about where they’re going to get drugs now that Laurie isn’t an option, and offers a connect in Mexico. Alamo isn’t buying what she’s selling, and quickly becomes skeptical, telling her “something doesn’t add up,” and asking why she would ask him “something so catastrophically dumb.” Rue is literally and figuratively sweating, as Alamo accuses her of hiding something.

Rue says she’s got a good poker hand, but Alamo accuses her of having a look in her eye “like a motherfucking rat.” Luckily, though, he just thinks she’s using again. Relieved, Rue goes all in on her hand and celebrates her win, with Alamo warning her to stay away from hard drugs.

Back at the club, Rue removes Angel’s name from her locker. Sadly, it doesn’t look like she’s coming back from that scary rehab place. Magick (Rosalía, with a bigger role this episode) says Angel “disappeared” and “ran away from rehab.” But, she says, “life goes on.” Kitty takes her locker instead and dances for the crowd while Rue watches, unsettled. “It’s almost like Angel knew she was never coming back,” Rue narrates. “And just like Tish, everyone would soon forget.”

Dressed in a backless catsuit with matching gloves, Cassie hops in an Uber with Maddy, who purrs approvingly, “You look good, bitch.” Maddy is taking Cassie to the house of someone named Brandon Fontaine (Jeff Wahlberg). She tells Cassie that he has 20 million followers, and their goal is to get him to post a video of Cassie looking hot. They make their way through the crowd in a scene reminiscent of early Euphoria high school parties.

Maddy gives Cassie her best pep talk about dealing with Brandon and his scene: “All he cares about is pussy. You’re gonna tempt him with pussy, you’re not gonna give him pussy. The moment you do, he’ll never speak to you again.” She directs her further: “Don’t trust these girls. These bitches are dogs. Stray dogs.” Cassie is the “cute new bitch” on the block. “Stay sharp, stay focused, and let’s fucking win.” Cassie says it feels like they’re going to war, and Maddy smiles deviously.

Cassie does her best work, getting up on a table and dancing and making out with another girl to draw attention to herself. It works, and she jumps up and down as he puts her on film. There’s a stark juxtaposition with a scene back at the club, where a group of youngish dudes in polos and backward caps have taken Kitty into a private room to have rough sex with her while they high-five and slap each other’s asses. Rue watches on the surveillance camera, again rattled.

It turns out the girl Cassie made out with is Katelyn, the TikToker that Maddy turned into a porn star earlier in the season before being forced to drop her. Cassie goes off with Brandon and Katelyn to do drugs (“I love coke,” Cassie says brightly). They go up to Brandon’s room, and as Katelyn has Brandon sniff coke out of her belly button, Maddy bangs on the door in a callback to the infamous bathroom episode from season two. Cassie jumps in and does the drugs first, and they hit her a little too hard as she screams and gets Brandon to do a line off her crotch. Ever the hustler, Maddy returns to the locked door with a crew of guys with cameras in tow. Just as Brandon takes his shirt off and straddles Cassie, Maddy bursts into the room with the cameras, and Cassie blows a kiss to the camera, saying, “It’s me, Cassie, and that’s my handle.” As Cassie’s phone blows up with followers, Maddy tells her, “You got their attention, now you gotta keep it.”

Rue finds Kitty in the bathroom, swilling mouthwash and asking for ketamine. Rue asks her if she wants to be doing this, and if she’s being forced. But Kitty just says, “I like to dance.” Magick comes whistling out of a stall, having heard everything, and it’s hard to know if she’s friend or foe. She immediately tells Big Eddy what she heard Rue asking Kitty. “I don’t trust this bitch,” she tells him.

Rue enters the office where Big Eddy is sitting with Magick, and her “Mom,” or the DEA, starts calling her phone. She picks up, and they tell her what just happened, that she’s been compromised. As she does her best to discredit Magick, a group of masked, armed men break into the club—Laurie’s crew, presumably. They put a gun to Rue and Magick’s heads, telling Big Eddy to open the safe. He doesn’t and is totally willing to let them die. But instead, the gunman shoots him in the stomach. As he bleeds out painfully, with his blood spattered over Rue’s face, they threaten him again: “It’s either your balls, or the motherfucking safe.” Big Eddy gives up the safe, opening it for them. They take what’s inside and run, giggling, to their getaway truck.

Rue calls Bishop, who tells her that rather than take Big Eddy to the hospital, they need to check the cameras for footage. Magick says the driver is a woman with “gigantic lips”—who could it be, but Faye? Rue immediately gives her up as Laurie’s worker, and the war is officially on.

Simone Ashley spent last summer living the kind of life “a million girls would kill for.” She’d been cast in The Devil Wears Prada 2 as Amari, the new first assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, taking on the role that Emily Blunt first made so famous. Ashley moved across the Atlantic for the shoot, and in the gaps between call times, was in the studio writing what would become Songs I Wrote in New York, her debut EP, released last month.

“I had the best summer of my life,” she tells W of that time. On the EP’s opener, “Sublime,” she describes the exact feeling: “I felt so lucky just riding bikes in New York City/In the summer, and nothing could touch me/Kind of like when you were a kid.”

It’s not hard to understand why. Like for so many Millennials, The Devil Wears Prada was a fixture of the 31-year-old’s childhood: “one of the movies I would watch a few times a year, at least,” she says. Finding out they were making a sequel, let alone that she’d been cast in it, was life-changing.

Until now, the British-born actress has been known for playing Kate Sharma, the sharp-witted, stubborn lead of Bridgerton season two, whose slow-burn courtship with Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) quickly became one of the series’s most beloved arcs. (She returned for seasons three and four, and may reappear in season five.) In Devil Wears Prada 2, Ashley is once again unassailable, playing Priestly’s hyper-competent assistant.

Ashley took cues from Blunt and Hathaway, the latter of whom she “spent a lot of time with” on set. But she makes the character her own. With a high ponytail and higher heels, she’s a calmer version of Blunt’s tightly wound Emily, maintaining perfect composure while keeping Priestly in check when she drops problematic phrases in staff meetings, or gently but firmly putting the second assistant (Caleb Hearon) in his place.

Then there are the clothes. Costume designer Molly Rogers dresses Amari in a near-uninterrupted run of looks—archive pulls, runway, custom—with Thom Browne suiting (and a recurring tie motif) and Dolce & Gabbana featured heavily. Ashley names the Browne pieces and the Milan Dolce looks as her favorites. “Molly has just such an amazing imagination,” Ashley says of working with the Patricia Field protégée. The film’s Met Gala sequence is the showstopper, with Amari arriving in the custom Jean Paul Gaultier gown that Miley Cyrus wore to the 2019 Grammys. For Ashley—who has tended to favor princess-style dresses from houses like Valentino, Prada, and Versace—the look adds an edgy twist to her red-carpet oeuvre, even if it’s fictional.

As for the music, Songs I Wrote in New York is a guitar-forward collection of delicate pop songs with their own soulful edge, with Ashley’s vocals both controlled and emotive. She worked on the EP with Fraser T. Smith, best known for his work with Stormzy and Adele, and the production is tight and grounded. Even as she participates in the massive Prada 2 rollout, Ashley is nurturing her musical identity, working on what will be a full album to be released at the end of the year. As for why she’s decided to embrace her lifelong love of singing at this moment, she echoes the spontaneous spirit of the EP: “Why not now?”

There’s never been a better moment to spend time with Peter Hujar. Last fall, director Ira Sachs brought the downtown photographer to the screen in Peter Hujar’s Day, a biographical drama about Hujar’s friendship with writer Linda Rosenkrantz in the early 1970s that premiered at Sundance. This spring, Andrew Durbin’s dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek traces the decades-long relationship between Hujar and his sometimes lover, the sculptor Paul Thek. Now, The Morgan Library & Museum adds another piece to the Hujar renaissance. Hujar: Contact, opening May 22, brings together more than 110 of the photographer’s contact sheets and 20 enlargements, drawn from The Morgan’s archive of over 5,700 preserved sheets. The accompanying catalog, published by MACK, arrives the same day.

The black-and-white sheets offer a candid glimpse into Hujar’s vibrant social scene, which included luminaries of the day: Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, Iggy Pop, Candy Darling, and David Wojnarowicz all make appearances (Thek is in there, too). The images are made all the more intimate by Hujar’s cropping notes and personal edits in the margins.

Hujar, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1987, began making and filing his contact sheets at 21. The meticulously organized images trace Hujar’s photography career—from his beginnings as a studio assistant in 1955 to his years as a freelancer in the late ’60s working across industries, including fashion and advertising. Of course, his influential years as a working artist embedded in the East Village scene of the 1970s and ’80s is well-covered. The photos capture the spirit of that period, with subjects like Marsha P. Johnson and Patti Smith acting as figureheads for movements including the Stonewall riots and the explosion of punk rock in New York City.

There are truly vulnerable moments—like the contact sheet for Candy Darling, made in 1973, in room 1423 of Cabrini Health Care Center, where the Warhol superstar was dying of leukemia at 29. She’s depicted surrounded by flowers, reclining against white hospital linens. In another image, Marsha P. Johnson beams at the camera from the Christopher Street Pier on Easter Sunday in 1976, surrounded by bikes, bodies, and the wide Hudson River. And in yet another, Thek stands, young and alive, among the mummified dead of the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo; neither Thek nor Hujar knew at that time they would go on to pass within a year of each other.

“Peter Hujar’s portraits exclude the trivial and the superfluous, but they leave intact his subjects’ singularity and eccentricity,” says Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography at The Morgan, who organized the exhibition. “His pictures are uncluttered, but full of the complication of being an individual. Our lives, so much of which happen online, are full of photographs that are supposedly about self-expression. But everyone suspects or knows that their public photos are really about conforming, imitating, pretending. Living in a sameness machine leaves us hungry for images of selfhood that aren’t fake. That’s what Hujar insisted on.”

Hujar: Contact (2026) by Joel Smith is published by MACK and The Morgan Library & Museum. Hujar: Contact is at The Morgan Library & Museum from May 22 to October 25, 2026.

Warning: spoilers for season three of The White Lotus ahead.

Season three of The White Lotus packed a lot of questionable things into its eight-episode run: an incestuous threesome, intrusive murder-suicide fantasies, and endless brand collabs, to name a few. After ending on a shocking note, with toxic but lovable couple Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) meeting a tragic end, the series’ Thailand-set third season set a high bar for chaos and mystic symbolism. Creator Mike White is surely up to the task, though—and naturally, the Emmy-winning HBO hit has already been renewed for a season four. Here’s everything we know about it so far:

Where will The White Lotus season four be set?

Deadline broke the news in September that season four will be set in France. Specifically, the story will take place along the French Riviera, with some scenes shot at a Paris hotel, with a focus on the Cannes Film Festival (more on that below).

While past seasons took place at various Four Seasons properties, this time will break form. Variety reports that most shooting will take place at a stunning 19th-century palace-turned-luxury hotel in Saint-Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, called the Château de La Messardière, and at Hôtel Martinez in Cannes.

As for the Paris scenes—no other hotels have been locked in for filming yet, but Variety reports that production has scouted the chic Le Lutetia on the Left Bank of the Seine in the Saint-Germain des Prés neighborhood (where artists including Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Josephine Baker all stayed), and the five-star Ritz Paris, which opened in 1898 and was visited by a similarly iconic crew of historic figures, including Coco Chanel and Marcel Proust.

Given its close, confined quarters at a single hotel property, The White Lotus filming experience has been described by many former cast members as a cross between a sleepaway camp and a reality TV set. It’ll be interesting to see how the new setting affects this installment’s outcome.

Who is in the cast?

A few guests have already been confirmed for season four: Laura Dern, Sandra Bernhard, Ari Graynor, and British actor and comedian Steve Coogan (of Alan Partridge fame) are all joining the series. This is in addition to models/newcomers Caleb Jonte Edwards, Dylan Ennis, and Marissa Long, Canadian actor and country musician Alexander Ludwig (he played Cato in The Hunger Games), Chris Messina (Argo and The Mindy Project), and Amanda “AJ” Michalka (of cult favorite aughts pop duo Aly & AJ). Max Greenfield (The Neighborhood), Kumail Nanjiani (Only Murders In the Building), Chloe Bennet (Interior Chinatown), Charlie Hall (The Sex Lives of College Girls), and Jarrad Paul (Free Bert) have also joined the cast.

On March 30, additional actors were added to the sprawling ensemble, including Heather Graham, Rosie Perez, Ben Schnetzer, Tobias Santelmann, Frida Gustavsson, and Laura Smet.

What happened to Helena Bonham Carter?

Some other casting gossip: a little over a week into production, it was reported that Helena Bonham Carter would be exiting the season, with her role recast. An HBO spokesperson gave the following statement to Deadline: “With filming just underway on Season 4 of The White Lotus, it had become apparent that the character which Mike White created for Helena Bonham Carter did not align once on set. The role has subsequently been rethought, is being rewritten and will be recast in the coming weeks. HBO, the producers and Mike White are saddened that they won’t get to work with her, but remain ardent fans and very much hope to work with the legendary actress on another project soon.”

Laura Dern will be replacing her. Which makes both perfect sense, but also leads to some questions.

Dern is one of White’s most frequent collaborator. The pair previously worked together on the cult classic HBO show Enlightened. She also played a supporting role in White’s 2007 film Year of the Dog. Technically, she’s also contributed to TWL before. She made a vocal cameo as Michael Imperioli’s character’s estranged wife in the second season.

According to Deadline, Dern will not be playing either the character originally meant for Carter’s but rather one that “is being developed and written for her by White.” For now, the assumption would be that it is not the same character she had voiced in the second season.

Are any former cast members returning?

Though each season of the anthology series features a new group of nepo babies, beloved character actors, and other casting wild cards, White has also always brought back at least one character to tie the seasons together. In season two, it was Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and Greg (Jon Gries), who gallivanted around Italy on a moped before Greg set Tanya up to be killed in a murder-by-gays plot. In season three, we were reintroduced to Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), who finally got hers after being ghosted by Tanya—though in a characteristically cynical White-twist, she turned around and did the same thing to someone else (Pornchai).

So who could be coming back next season? Wood confirmed to W that, despite some fan theories, there’s no chance of Chelsea or Rick returning. Maybe we’ll circle back to Belinda and Pornchai—will White want plot symmetry between seasons, with Pornchai somehow getting justice this time?

The other most apparent loose end is with the Ratliff family. After the slow, season-long build-up toward Timothy (Jason Isaacs) revealing to his family that he had lost all of their money, it was disappointing to be denied that climactic moment as a viewer. He was also apparently facing time in federal prison. Will there be Zoom calls with Isaacs from his cushy minimum security institution next season? Will we see Parker Posey’s Victoria working at a hotel, rather than visiting one as a guest? Will Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon go on his own spiritual journey, inspired by the death of Chelsea? The possibilities are endless.

What will the season’s themes be about?

Last season focused on issues of life, death, rebirth, and Eastern philosophy. According to executive producer David Bernad, season four will be about “the life of an artist.”

“Early on, Mike talked about wanting to do Season 4 as the life of an artist—the loneliness and the pain,” Bernad recently said at the annual Canneseries. He added: “That’s a throughline that runs throughout the season. As we located the show at the Cannes Film festival, this idea of fame popped up and who has the world’s attention? Who can grab it and who is the plus one in a relationship? What are the things that satisfy us? Is it the love of an intimate partner, the love of strangers, what do we prioritize in people?”

He went on: “It really examines the things we value as people and what is attractive to us, and how fame can be corrosive and dictate your choices in life. Some of the characters are existentially reflecting on those choices, some are reflecting on the choices and sacrifices they made as artists, and some are just starting to enter into this world of fame.”

Sounds like it will be very meta.

When will The White Lotus season 4 return?

There’s no release date yet—stay tuned for updates. Filming began in April and will last through October, with a possible premiere in May 2027, if past release schedules are any hint.

There’s a saying Martha Kelly’s Laurie wheels out this episode: “the grass is always greener over the septic tank.” It was the title of American humorist Erma Bombeck’s 1976 book about the dark side of suburban life, and although it’s said as a joke, it’s really the thesis of the episode. Sunday night also features the event the season has been building toward: Cassie and Nate’s wedding.

First, we start with Hunter Schafer’s Jules. The episode opens not in the present, but in Jules’s past, and we learn about her origin story as a sugar baby through the kind of flashback structure the show has been using to fill in the four-year gap since season two. She’s at art school, living in an inexplicably giant loft with a roommate who tells her how she can make some easy cash (“It’s just like dating, except you get paid”).

We then see a sequence of Jules going on her first dates, including one with a 48-year-old lawyer named Rick, who just wants to masturbate while licking Jules’s tights. “All I have to do is see this guy twice a month, and he pays my rent? I’m going to clean up,” Jules says. She sees Randy, a “Hollywood producer worth $200 million,” and a “run-of-the-mill” finance guy, whom we watch her go down on under his desk while he makes a call.

The only one who actually matters is Ellis (Sam Trammell), a plastic surgeon with a clinical interest in Jules-as-specimen. He quickly becomes her only client, and Jules drops out of art school, for some reason. “All her fears about making it as an artist disappeared,” Rue narrates. When Jules tells Ellis that she transitioned at 14, he caresses her skin, saying, “That’s why you’re poreless. You never went through puberty. It’s beautiful.” He compares his work as a plastic surgeon to Jules’s transition, saying, “I do what God couldn’t.”

A doctor with a God complex—very original. When Jules asks him about his family, she starts to apologize for making him uncomfortable. “I slice women open for a living,” he says. “There’s very little that makes me uncomfortable.” Hopefully that’s not a piece of foreshadowing, but the following scene doesn’t do much to assuage our fears. At the penthouse apartment we now realize he’s been putting Jules up in, she stands nude with her arms raised above her head in a stress position as he wraps her tightly in cellophane, leaving only a small hole for her to breathe through her mouth. He steps back to admire his handiwork, then says, “I just might keep you forever,” before kissing her. The score—not by Labrinth, mind you—is triumphant.

Back at Alamo’s club, Rosalía is performing for a crowd of older cowboys while wearing that damn bedazzled neck brace. A man watching her heads to a backroom and meets with Rue, where she’s selling guns. She’s worked her way up at the Silver Slipper to being an arms dealer, shaving off serial numbers and upselling criminals on AR-15s. “I know a lot of Americans have very strong feelings about guns,” she narrates breezily. “But if it’s any consolation, the majority of the weapons I was selling were headed to Mexico.” Alamo names her employee of the month, but when she tells him that her goal is to make enough money to go legit, he takes it extremely personally. Per his argument, all underground economies, from running numbers to bootlegging, eventually get taken over by the government. “What was once illegal is now legit,” he says. “The question is: where does all that money go?” The government says it’s going toward education, but the kids are getting dumber, so something isn’t adding up.

This civil discourse is interrupted by the pig that Alamo sent to Laurie’s house in their ongoing feud, appearing out of nowhere, peeing all over the strip club floor. Alamo shoots the poor animal, its blood and brains splattering all over a dancer (lest we forget for a moment what this show is really about: shock and awe).

In his rage, Alamo says he wants to take what matters most to Laurie in order to break her heart. We learn that she has a pet parrot named Paladin, as we watch her coo and sing to the bird. It’s looking like Paladin’s days are numbered.

Back at Jules’s apartment, Rue and Jules discuss going to Nate and Cassie’s wedding. Rue is bringing Jules as a plus one. Sticking money in Jules’s bra, Rue jokes, “I’m your sugar daddy now. Dress sexy.”

Finally, we arrive at the wedding, and the show’s new costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas, who took over for Heidi Bivens, pulled out all the stops, bringing back the over-the-top looks that helped make Euphoria such a sensation in the first place. First, there’s Cassie, spilling out of her Wiederhoeft corset as she tells Lexi (Maude Apatow) in a Nana Jacqueline pink bridesmaid gown that Nate didn’t come home the prior night (we see him hiding in the bathroom, vomiting and breathing into a paper bag with either a nasty hangover, anticipatory regret, or both).

Then there’s Jules, who took Rue’s brief to dress sexy very seriously. She’s in the most naked of naked dresses, an icy blue gathered number from Acne Studios’s spring 2023 collection, her blonde wig providing more cover than the dress itself. “I can’t believe she had the nerve to show her face,” Nate’s mom says to Cal. “She showed a little more than her face,” he adds.

Maddy is there too, in a custom green dress with a matching fur stole that’s open as low down the back as it can be, with a rosary dangling past her hips. To address the question you’d be justified in thinking (why is Maddy at her abusive ex and ex-best friend’s wedding at all?), Rue narrates: “Maddy didn’t know what she wanted more—to get in between Nate and Cassie, or to make a little money.”

It’s not clear that she does either, though. Instead, we watch Maddy’s face become increasingly crestfallen as she sits in the audience of Cassie and Nate’s nuptials, which are as over-the-top as Cassie wanted them to be. She clearly got her $50,000 worth of flowers, which are arranged in pink-and-orange archways over the aisle and into a giant formation of their initials. There are not one but two flower girls, and an ice sculpture of the couple, though Cassie quickly notes that her breasts are unfortunately melting.

Cassie’s mom (Alanna Ubach) manages to make the day about herself, whispering a darkly funny monologue as she walks her daughter down the aisle about how her wedding to Cassie’s dad was the last happy moment they ever shared as a couple. “As I marched down the aisle, like we’re doing now,” she says, “it never occurred to me the brutality of the man that I never knew before. It’s like, how could I be so naive? It’s not a mistake you can fix.” Cassie’s eyes well up with tears and raw fear as her mom hands her over to her towering future husband, who has cleaned up since spending the morning vomiting. But then, when they say their vows and ferociously make out for their first kiss as husband and wife, it’s a real high, and they seem genuinely happy, beaming as they walk down the aisle.

Like her mother and father, though, it might’ve been Cassie and Nate’s final moment of bliss. The rest of the wedding goes downhill from there. Halfway through dinner, Nas, the man Nate owes money to, suddenly appears behind them, threatening Nate and telling Cassie just how deeply they’re in debt. The couple from last episode’s dinner party, who put their kids’ college fund in Nate's real estate development scheme, overhear what’s happened, and the wife calls out Cassie for letting Nate “pimp her out” for flowers.

“Is everything okay?” Lexi asks her sister. “Of course!” Cassie says, eyes red with tears. “It’s my wedding day. What a weird question to ask on the best day of my life.” Come on, Lexi, she’s clearly “never, ever been happier!”

In the midst of this chaos, Rue gets a call from Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson) that she has to do a pickup from Laurie for Alamo. This leaves Jules alone at the wedding, where she chats with both of the Jacobs men. First, she runs into Cal at the bar, who tells her what happened to him at the end of season two, when he got busted for a video where he “fucked a guy who was two and a half months away from turning 18.” He “lied about his age, just like you,” Cal tells Jules. He copped a plea deal and ended up on the sex offenders registration list, calling it the “Modern-day scarlet letter. It’s a pretty cringey line, considering the atmosphere the season is being released in, but Euphoria has never minded pushing the limits.

Cal apologizes for taping Jules, though his reasoning (“I just wanted to jerk off to it”) doesn’t exactly redeem him. The more interesting revelation is Jules connecting the dots that since the police never got the tape, Nate must have destroyed it. He finds a moment between being threatened by a loan shark and having his bride implode on him to share a private cigarette with Jules outside. The whole thing wraps up a little too neatly for two of the show’s longest-running loose threads.

Rue, meanwhile, is on her way to Laurie’s and, on the drive over, gets a call from Fez. It’s a delicately handled, one-sided call, where Rue chops it up with her old friend, who jokes about escaping prison with parkour. When she and Bishop arrive at Laurie’s, they’re ostensibly there to purchase some pills, but it quickly becomes clear the real mission is to poison Laurie’s bird. The bird is named after Paladin, the well-dressed mercenary from the old series Have Gun—Will Travel, which Laurie often has on in the background. It goes back to the Western theme Levinson wants to bring forth this season, and if anyone is Paladin, it’s the silent Bishop, with his slick outfits and deadpan one-liners. While Laurie focuses on trying to get Rue to come back and work with her, he slips what’s presumably a tablet of fentanyl in the bird’s water. Rue and Bishop leave, with Laurie none the wiser.

Back at the wedding from hell, Cassie screams at Nate, who takes shots with his groomsmen. “You’re not who you say you are,” she says, clutching a bottle of champagne. “You want me to be the perfect housewife? You want me to cook and clean and suck your cock? And you don’t even have money for food. You’re not a man. Men provide.”

Nate tries to calm her, but she accidentally pops the cork in his eye. Still, he forgives her, and she tries to forgive him too, as they drive off from the wedding in their circa-2005 Hummer stretch limo. Nate assures Cassie that he will get them out of the mess he’s created, and Cassie is pacified as he promises to be a better husband and, one day, a father.

Maddy, meanwhile, gets dropped off alone by an Uber on her dark, sketchy side street, where she walks back to her little garden studio apartment, looking beautiful and sad. If only she knew that the grass is greener by the septic tank! Rejection, in this case, was truly protection.

Back at the mansion, Nate is carrying Cassie over the threshold of their home into certain doom. The lights flick on, and we see Nas waiting for the couple. Immediately, his henchmen pop up from behind and start beating Nate within an inch of his life. Cassie gets hit in the melee and, realizing her nose is bleeding, starts wailing like a baby. “This is so unfair!” she cries out, not even turning around as Nate is dragged by his feet behind her. “It was supposed to be the best day of my life!”

The henchmen take off Nate’s dress shoes and cut off his pinky toe, and as blood spurts all over the hideous carpet, Nas says, “You know, Cassie, some women inherit wealth, but others inherit debt.”

We end the episode with Rue, driving along, listening to her Bible tapes that Ali put her onto, getting pulled over by the DEA.

A final shot shows Paladin, the bird, taking a sip of water before falling over and dying.

The year is just getting started, but there are already several compelling documentaries in the pipeline for the months ahead. Landing on Netflix next month is a long-awaited, three-part docuseries examining the controversies, politics, and lasting cultural legacy of America’s Next Top Model (trailer below), with commentary from creator and host Tyra Banks herself.

Many of the year’s other most anticipated films are premiering at the Sundance Film Festival before heading to theaters and streaming platforms, including the highly anticipated Antiheroine, about the life and art of Courtney Love; John Wilson’s feature directorial debut (about concrete, no less); and a rare portal back in time to the Harlem Renaissance.

Later in the year, Leonardo DiCaprio produces a film on the controversial making of The Wizard of Oz, Questlove examines the legacy of Earth, Wind & Fire, and Everything Everywhere All At Once director Daniel Kwan backs a thorough debate on the future of AI.

KYLIE

From the creators of the Beckham doc comes a new three-part documentary about Australian icon Kylie Minogue. The series will chart her rise from acting on Aussie soap Neighbours in the 1980s to becoming a chart-topping pop star with a global fanbase and decades of hits. Minogue herself participated in the series, which will draw on footage from her personal archive (including home movies), photographs, and interviews with collaborators, friends, family, and Minogue herself to learn what makes her tick.

Release date: Likely 2026 (TBD)

Ask E. Jean

E. Jean Carroll became one of the few people to beat Trump in court when she successfully sued him for sexual abuse and defamation toward the end of his first term. Before that, though, she spent decades at the top of the male-dominated publishing world, making a name for herself as an investigative journalist who wasn’t afraid to live as a single, independent woman during a time when that was less than common. Her advice column for Elle went on to reach millions of readers facing dilemmas that her unique perspective made her uniquely qualified to address. Ask E. Jean chronicles Carroll’s experiences from reporter to household name, with extensive interviews with Carroll herself.

Release date: May 22 in New York and May 29 in Los Angeles with a national rollout to follow

Marty, Life Is Short

Billed by director Lawrence Kasdan as the “definitive documentary” on Martin Short, Marty, Life Is Short chronicles the rise and career of the 75-year-old comedian, from his early days as a performer on “SCTV” in the 1970s to his starring roles in hit movies like Father of the Bride, and Three Amigos, plus his Emmy-nominated run on Only Murders in the Building.

Release date: May 12 on Netflix

Steal This Story, Please!

Journalism is going through a period of reinvention, to say the least, and no one understands innovation in the field better than Amy Goodman. The veteran investigative reporter and creator of the daily news show Democracy Now! shares the stories behind the stories, taking audiences behind the scenes of her harrowing lifelong journey to uncover the truth. Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Dean and Tia Lessin, Steal This Story, Please! is also an urgent call to action to protect freedom of the press and the integrity of the fourth estate.

Release date: April 10 in NYC, April 17 in LA, national rollout to follow

Trust Me: The False Prophet

Interest in the mainstream Mormon church has reached a pop culture pitch, but this four-part documentary digs into a more radical offshoot: the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). The series chronicles the rise of Samuel Bateman, who has proclaimed himself the next leader of the church, and is told from the perspective of a couple—cult expert Christine Marie and her videographer husband Tolga Katas—who infiltrate Bateman’s world to try and save the vulnerable people he is preying upon.

Release date: April 8 on Netflix

Marc by Sofia

Sofia Coppola’s first documentary trains her lens on her best friend and collaborator, Marc Jacobs. Told through archival footage, photos, and intimate interviews—and with plenty of Coppola’s signature stylized flourishes—Marc by Sofia is both a look back at a hopeful, inventive, rebellious time in fashion and downtown NYC culture and a love letter to one of fashion’s most enduring creative minds.

Release date: In theaters March 27

The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers

From their close childhood bonds to their rise on the Los Angeles music scene in the 1980s and beyond, the Red Hot Chili Peppers—including lead singer Anthony Kiedis and guitarist Flea—look back on the journey that took them from unknowns to global superstars.

Release date: Premieres March 20 on Netflix

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere

British documentarian Louis Theroux, known for expertly letting his subjects hang themselves with their own rope, trained his lens on the growing network of podcasters, streamers, and influencers who make up the manosphere. Talking to controversial internet figures with massive global audiences—people like Sneako, Myron Gaines, and Harrison Sullivan (aka HSTikkyTokky, pictured here), Theroux examines their misogynistic worldviews, business models, and appeal to their fans. Better for audiences unfamiliar with the manosphere, the documentary examines some of the current structures and cultural, economic, and political trends that have led to the rise in popularity of such content, but spends most of its time pointing out its more obvious weaknesses.

Release date: Premieres March 11 on Netflix

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model

When America’s Next Top Model first premiered in 2003, host and creator Tyra Banks had the explicit goal of pushing back against the suffocating norms of the fashion industry to spotlight a new generation of models. What followed was a 24-season pop culture juggernaut that did indeed expose the underbelly of the modeling industry, but not necessarily in the way Banks originally intended. A new three-part documentary goes behind-the-scenes of the series, with interviews from the competition show’s core judges: Jay Manuel, J. Alexander, Nigel Barker, and Banks herself, plus many of the contestants who went through ANTM’s most controversial ordeals. As Banks admits in the doc’s first trailer, she’s well-aware that she “went too far.”

Release date: Premieres February 16 on Netflix

Neighbors

Neighborly disputes can be the stuff of nightmares, and in this series, executive-produced by Josh Safdie with A24, the terrors come to life. Each episode is a self-contained story about two different ongoing wars between neighbors (over things like property lines, animal ownership, and beach access), highlighting the wacky, weird, and at times, moving dynamics between modern American neighbors.

Release date: February 13 on HBO

Billy Preston: That’s The Way God Planned It

Billy Preston: That’s The Way God Planned It debuted at SXSW two years ago, but the music doc is finally getting a theatrical release. The biopic-doc tells the story of Preston, a Grammy-winning keyboardist who played with everyone from The Beatles to Ray Charles, Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, and The Rolling Stones (he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, 15 years after his death). While Preston’s artistic impact is legendary, his life is less well-known—until now.

Release date: Premieres in theaters February 20 at New York’s Film Forum Theater

Beam Me Up, Sulu

This feature from Tribeca Films explores George Takei’s legacy through the lens of his time on Star Trek—and with the help of lost footage from a 1985 student film that he participated in making. “We were interested in figuring out what it is about Star Trek that makes people care so much—what made these student filmmakers spend 35 years making a fan film, what made George participate in it, what makes all of the fans so passionate,” directors Timour Gregory and Sasha Schneider said in a statement. “We found that it really comes back to this idea of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’ that’s been baked into the show from the beginning and resonates now more than ever.”

Release date: February 17

Natchez

Director Suzannah Herbert’s new documentary tells the story of Natchez, Mississippi—a small town and antebellum tourist destination grappling with how its unsettling history continues to define its present. Natchez won the Best Documentary Feature prize at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and will soon get a wider theater release.

Release date: Premiered at Tribeca; in New York City theaters January 30, followed by national rollout

The Brittney Griner Story

Brittney Griner tells her story in this new documentary, opening up about her harrowing experience in a Russian prison after being detained on drug charges for 10 months. The film explores Griner’s childhood, the reasons the WNBA star was playing abroad in the first place, and how her detainment—which became an international political scandal—affected her and her family.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance

Antiheroine

Courtney Love will tell her own story in this documentary from directors Edward Lovelace and James Hall. The film will include Love’s look back at her relationship with Kurt Cobain, yes, but it’ll also explore the creativity that’s driven her own highly influential art. Love is also reportedly working on a memoir and releasing new music for the first time in over a decade. It’s about time for a retrospective on the Gen X icon.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance

Barbara Forever

Over the course of fifty years, Barbara Hammer became a leading pioneer of the lesbian film movement, creating works that celebrated and affirmed her identity and life experiences while knocking down barriers along the way. In this intimate portrayal of Hammer’s life, legacy, and creative process, filmmaker Brydie O’Connor draws on archival footage and Hammer’s voice to pay tribute to a legend.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance

The History of Concrete

Only John Wilson could make a documentary about concrete seem appealing. With The History of Concrete, the humorist makes his feature directorial debut, and his filmmaking trick here is to apply the Hallmark movie formula to a film about cement. If it’s anything like his How to With John Wilson docuseries, it’ll be equal parts funny, moving, thought-provoking, and absurd.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance

Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story

Another documentary from one of the most disarming comedians of our time: In Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story, Bamford takes viewers on a journey through her childhood and successful comedy career while exploring the mental health issues that have followed her at every turn.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance

Once Upon a Time in Harlem

William Greaves, known for avant-garde films like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and his experimental approach to cinema, shot a very important scene in 1972: a party he arranged at Duke Ellington’s home, where he brought together the last living figures of the Harlem Renaissance. While Greaves passed away in 2014, his son, David, was there that day as a cameraman, and he assembled the footage into a rare, intimate look at that pivotal moment in time.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Who better to tackle the complexity of artificial intelligence’s swift proliferation than the Everything Everywhere All at Once filmmakers? Daniel Kwan is one of the producers behind The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, created by Daniel Roher (director of the Oscar-winning 2023 doc Navalny) and filmmaker Charlie Tyrell. For this film, the duo takes on the complicated, emotionally charged topic by enlisting both AI skeptics and evangelists to debate the technology’s merits in full.

Release date: Premieres at Sundance; in theaters March 27

Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!

This two-part documentary from Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio examines the life and legacy of comedic genius Mel Brooks. Archival footage and candid interviews with Brooks himself paint a picture of his Brooklyn boyhood, WWII combat years, postwar trauma, and his early innovations in sketch comedy and television. Friends, collaborators, and admirers like Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Conan O’Brien, Amy Schumer, David Lynch, Rob Reiner, and many, many more weigh in on what made Brooks’s approach to comedy—which resulted in beloved works like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and The Producers—so special.

Release date: Premieres January 22 on HBO

Oz

With audiences flocking to theaters to see both Wicked movies, The Wizard of Oz remains more culturally relevant than ever. Still, not everyone knows the story behind the incredibly challenging production of the 1939 film. Events from that set have become the stuff of Hollywood lore, and the new documentary Oz, from Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way, will explore exactly what happened and why the film still has so much resonance today.

Release date: TBD 2026

Questlove’s Earth Wind and Fire

Questlove will soon add another entry into his burgeoning canon of stories about iconic Black musicians—from Summer of Soul to Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), The Roots artist has been steadily creating his own historical archive. Now, he’s back with one more: this time, a deep dive into the creation of legendary funk group Earth, Wind & Fire. The film was made with the full support of the band, including exclusive access to decades of archival footage and material. It’ll premiere on HBO sometime in 2026.

Release date: TBD 2026

It’s officially the season of the witch. Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock have reunited for the rare reboot we can root for: a sequel to Practical Magic, their 1998 fantasy film that is single-handedly responsible for thousands of “coastal witch” moodboards. Now, Practical Magic 2 has both a release date and its first trailer. Here’s everything we know so far:

Here’s everything we know about Practical Magic 2 so far:

What will the Practical Magic 2 plot be?

Kidman and Bullock will reprise their roles as sisters Gillian and Sally Owens, respectively. In the original film, which was adapted from the 1995 novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman, the pair learn to harness their supernatural powers to overcome an ancestral curse that leads to several untimely deaths and an inability to have romantic relationships. The sequel picks up years later and includes the next generation of witches.

Who else will be in the Practical Magic 2 cast?

In addition to Kidman and Bullock, Joey King and Maisie Williams play Sally’s daughters. Lee Pace is in the film in an undetermined role. Stockard Channing and Dianne West, who were in the original film, are also returning.

Akiva Goldsman, one of the original film’s writers, penned the screenplay (he also co-wrote one of Kidman’s other campy ’90s classics, Batman Forever). Susanne Bier, who recently worked with Kidman on The Perfect Couple, directed.

Is there a Practical Magic 2 trailer?

The first trailer for the film was released on April 20, and is set to Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut Song.” The clip starts with Bullock’s Sally, who says, “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Owens family: the ones from Massachusetts, the ones their neighbors whisper are witches.” They start chatting with Lee Pace’s character, with Sally telling him, “Everyone we love dies.” Kidman adds: “A really horrible death. It’s not great for the Tinder bio.”

Later, Gillian (Kidman) says, “Everything’s going to be okay.” Sally (Bullock) responds: “Everything’s going to be okay? Just like it was when we had to bury a corpse under a rose bush? That kind of fine, or different?”

Watch below:

How is Lana Del Rey involved?

Del Rey is rumored to be involved in Practical Magic 2 in some capacity. On April 19, she reposted Sandra Bullock’s Instagram story teasing the film’s trailer and adding her own cover of “Season of the Witch” in the background, further fueling the theory.

When is the Practical Magic 2 release date?

Practical Magic 2 has a theatrical release date of September 18, 2026, just in time for Halloween. On May 6, Warner Bros. posted a quick teaser for the film, which featured Kidman and Bullock voicing an incantation ending in the release date: “Tooth of wolf and morning dew. Something old and something new. Let the spell begin to mix. Sept. 18, 2026.”

The official title of this episode is “America My Dream,” but perhaps it should be “Sex Sells.” That old maxim has never been truer than in this moment of the Euphoria universe, where it seems like everyone is either selling, buying, or leveraging flesh—and Sam Levinson has no bones about showing it all.

Alexa Demie fans will be glad to see Maddy get more screen time—this is really her episode. We learn that she got her unglamorous job as an assistant talent manager the old-fashioned way: by marching up to her prospective boss at a diner and demanding she give her a chance. It doesn’t hurt that she’s willing to skewer her competition, telling Ms. Penzler (Rebecca Pidgeon) that, while as a child of immigrants, she didn’t even bother applying to college—let alone attend an entertainment-industry feeder school like USC—but she’s “not entitled, not a victim, not an HR nightmare.” Oh, and she “believes in capitalism.”

She gets the job, but is immediately relegated to smoking weed and doomscrolling in her studio apartment when the pandemic hits. Real-life footage of California Governor Gavin Newsom announcing stay-at-home mandates and civil unrest taking over the streets of L.A. is accompanied by Rue’s narration of young people’s westward migration in search of freedom, fortune, and TikTok fame (a shot of a blonde suburban girl named Katelyn doing the “Say So” dance in a Shein two-piece in front of a ring light is a particularly dystopian callback to the era).

But Maddy is a hustler, and she quickly sees the money-making potential of social media. She starts managing Katelyn on the side, convincing her to push the boundaries further into full-blown nudity. When Maddy ropes her agency client, burgeoning star Dylan Reid (Homer Gere), into her scheme, her boss is furious. She lays into Maddy and forces her to drop Katelyn as a client. Maddy’s argument that there’s a new middle ground where OnlyFans influencers can transition into mainstream careers strikes a particularly knowing chord from Levinson, who cast Chloe Cherry as Faye when she was known for making porn. To Maddy’s chagrin, Katelyn goes on to make more than half a million dollars a month. “If she had listened to her instincts,” Rue narrates, “she wouldn’t be an assistant. She’d actually be successful.”

It’s in this low state that Maddy receives a DM from Cassie—the first time she’s heard from her since their all-out brawl in high school. As she scrolls Cassie’s soft-core page, the wheels start turning.

Rue, meanwhile, has found her own American Dream, which she partially credits with her newfound faith in God. She’s managing one of Alamo’s strip clubs, the Silver Slipper, a seedy roadside joint where old men in cowboy hats watch young women pole dance, mouths stupidly agape (Rosalía makes a cameo as one such dancer in a bedazzled neck brace that she refuses to take off, lest she lose a bogus lawsuit she’s filed. Everyone’s got an angle.)

The club is also unsurprisingly a hotbed for drug use, and selling to the clients becomes part of Rue’s job. There’s a particularly graphic sequence where Angel (Priscilla Delgado), a dancer with an attitude who’s caught Rue’s eye, lets a client sniff powder off her nipples before going down on him, followed by a cut to Rue plunging a disgustingly clogged toilet. If there’s a message here, it isn’t subtle.

Rue ends up doing drugs and hooking up with Angel in her van outside the club, but she narrates that she’d “be lying” if she said she didn’t miss Jules.

Her longing for her first love is tied up in her shame over her continued drug use, as we find out in a flashback sequence. First, we see Rue nodding off in a filthy house with other addicts—“I wasn’t in a good place,” she says. Then Rue visits Jules at art school, but admits it “never quite felt like high school. Too much had happened between us.” A heartbreaking scene shows her leaving a tearful, desperate voicemail begging her mom to call her back so she can come home, promising that she’s sober. But given where Rue is now, it seems like she never did. “To be honest,” Rue narrates, “I haven’t really been sober since.”

Back at the club, Angel can’t let go of the fact that Tish, the stripper who OD’ed in the first episode, is missing. It turns out the two were best friends, and Angel isn’t accepting Alamo’s vague story about Tish running off with some guy. Eventually, Rue just tells her the truth: that Tish died. A devastated Angel descends into her own pit of drug-using despair. Alamo tells Rue he’ll pay for Angel to go to rehab—an offer that seems too good to be true, because it is. When Rue drops Angel off at the nondescript facility, something is clearly wrong. A glowering woman with dirt-crusted nails at the front desk barely looks up from her video game, knows Alamo by name, and says there’s no intake paperwork to be done. Rue reluctantly leaves Angel behind, and there’s an ominous feeling that it’s the last time we’ll be seeing her.

Rue pays Maddy a visit and learns that Jules, too, is in the sex trade—she’s working as a sugar baby, which “isn’t weird at all,” according to Maddy, since “every girl she meets” is one. When Rue points out that Maddy doesn’t have a sugar daddy, she shoots back, “Yeah, I’m not a fucking hooker.”

There are a lot of double standards and mixed messages going on as the women of Euphoria navigate the changing sexual politics of the day. Take Cassie, for example, who is fully embracing her new career on OnlyFans. Despite her insistence that it’s a “common misconception” that OnlyFans is porn, she’s pretty much fully exposing herself for the platform.

“It was a shame she was with Nate,” Rue narrates over a montage of Cassie posing in varying states of kink-themed undress, including with ice cream dripping off her naked breasts and sucking on a pacifier like a baby. For Maddy, “Cassie was exactly the kind of girl you’d dream of signing. Beautiful, but directionless. So desperate for attention, she’s willing to humiliate herself.”

Cassie definitely doesn’t see it that way, though. We finally have the Maddy-Cassie rematch we’ve been waiting for since season two, but it’s more Mean Girls than Rocky. Dressed in a full fur coat and side-swept bangs, Maddy literally takes Cassie’s breath away when she appears at the poolside bar where they end up downing Aperol Spritzes.

First, Cassie—in far more basic white skinny jeans and matching hot pink halter and strappy heels—gets her obligatory apology for stealing Nate out of the way.

“I found the love of my life,” Cassie says somewhat convincingly, “at the expense of the other love of my life.” “It was at that moment,” Rue narrates as Maddy glances down at Cassie’s engagement ring, “that she realized this dumb bitch had waited years for that ring just to clear her conscience.” When it becomes clear that Cassie’s ulterior motive for reaching out to Maddy was to ask her for advice on becoming famous, Maddy decides to play the long game—and turn Cassie into a cash cow—but not without first letting Cassie know in the fake nicest way possible that she’s tacky and has no taste.

Cassie also, apparently, has far less money than she thinks. We soon learn Rue isn’t the only character who has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to a terrifying criminal. It’s not clear how Nate got into this situation, but to get out of it, he plans to invite more potential investors over to help bail him out. First, his disgraced father, Cal, drops by, though Nate insists he’s doing just fine running Cal’s real estate development company, which he’s taken over.

Cal is more interested in Nate’s personal life, anyway, and immediately starts lecturing his son on the impropriety of Cassie’s OnlyFans—which he heard about, funnily, from a friend at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. Nate pushes back, pointing out his father’s hypocrisy, given that Cal was both constantly cheating on Nate’s mother and found out for sleeping with Nate’s classmates. “Once you give in to temptation, it has no limits,” Cal warns, noting that he’s “speaking from experience.” But what Cassie is doing and what Cal did “are not the same thing,” Nate says. To Cal, it’s the same issue. “I was a hedonist. I was chasing pleasure instead of being grateful for what I had at home.”

Still, Nate brushes him off the same way Cassie brushes off her friend at the party later on. Cassie can’t help but show off her OnlyFans, revealing the pictures her housekeeper took and bragging about all the money she’s making. The friend is particularly horrified by the “adult baby” images, calling them “sick.” But Cassie has a rebuttal: “If I don’t do it, someone else will. It’s just supply and demand.” Word about the OnlyFans spreads quickly at the party, which looks straight out of 2005 Orange County, with guests wearing double-popped collars as they stand around Nate and Cassie’s gaudy McMansion pool. To save face, Nate demands that Cassie delete her OnlyFans account, and when he agrees to pay for her over-the-top wedding, she cheerfully complies.

The episode ends at Jules’s apartment: a swanky penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the city. It suggests her alleged sugar-baby arrangement is going quite well, which Rue also clocks. Yes, Rue has shown up unannounced at Jules’s place, but Jules—wearing a body-skimming dress and an icy blonde wig that she eventually takes off—doesn’t seem to mind. Jules mentions her boyfriend, and Rue asks whether he has a family. “I don’t think people are meant to be monogamous,” Jules says. Rue makes a pass at Jules, who tells her, “You can’t just show up after all this time and think everything’s going to be the same.” Still, Jules ends the night by inviting Rue to join her in the bath. Although she’s still missing high school, for now, Rue is living her dream.

Lee Sung Jin was on a mission. During a dinner party thrown by Gold House, an organization that champions Asian American excellence, the director—who also goes by Sonny—asked to be seated next to one Charles Melton. Fresh off the Emmy-sweeping success of 2023’s Beef, the surprise Netflix hit he created starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as road-raging strangers locked in a karmic cycle of mutual destruction, Lee was determined to pitch the Riverdale heartthrob on joining the second season of the anthology series. The soirée was held in honor of Melton’s role in Todd Haynes’s 2023 drama May December and like many in attendance, Sonny had been enamored by the actor’s performance.

“[Sonny] showed me a picture on his phone,” Melton recalls to W of the evening. “He was like, ‘This is our writers’ room.’ And it was a picture of me. I was like, ‘Does the character have my hairstyle or something?’ He goes, ‘No, we’re writing it for you.’”

It turns out Melton would be writing it, too—at least, in the form of long conversations during which he and Sonny, who both lived in Korea for several years as children (Melton was an army brat who has lived all over the U.S. and the world), reflected on the Korean American experience. “It was the genesis of a constant collaboration: of spilling the tea behind personal experiences and existential thoughts about life,” he adds.

Even over the phone, Melton is preternaturally affable—the platonic ideal of a mellow American dude. He’ll go deep on an idea, like drawing upon Carl Jung and the shadow self to inform his character-building, and then he’ll laugh at himself good-naturedly. It’s not hard to draw comparisons between Melton and his Beef character, Austin Davis—a former college athlete turned aspiring personal trainer and influencer, whose dreamy relationship with fiancée Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) is tested for the first time when they start working together at a country club. Austin is both the season’s central comedic relief and its most unabashedly decorative element, a role that required Melton, a former Kansas State football player who famously gained weight for May December, to get back to his athletic roots.

Since this is Beef, conflict drives the story, though season two is more about passive aggression. That plays out especially across generational lines: Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac play a burnt-out Millennial couple on the verge of divorce who go to war with Davis and Spaeny, the naive Gen Z-ers, over an unflattering video being used as blackmail.

Below, Melton tells W about Beef, identifying as a Zillennial, and the joys of fatherhood:

You helped create the character of Austin—you even have an executive producer credit. How much of yourself did you put into him?

There’s that scene at the Chinese Bamboo house restaurant, and Eunice [played by Seoyeon Jang] asks Austin if he’s spent much time with the Korean community. He goes, “We went to a church, but everyone thought I was Mexican.” [Laughs] Like, people have thought I was Mexican. That was one blip of hundreds of hours of conversations with Sonny that he found a way to incorporate. When Ashley says, “I’ve never seen us as a mixed race couple. He’s always been Arizonian to me,” you know? It was all drawn from these conversations about what it was like living in Korea, and then America, and the cost of assimilation and the construct of capitalism.

The whole show is about conflict. At first, it’s Millennials vs. Gen Z. Did that generational divide show up on set at all?

I’m a Millennial, but I consider myself—I heard this term yesterday—a Zillennial, both Millennial and Gen Z. There were a lot of conversations [on set], and there was a lot of improv. The humor in Beef is reminiscent of Korean cinema. When you think about No Other Choice by Park Chan Wook or Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder, they’re funny, and the circumstances are either so absurd or just intense. I’ll just call it this “Korean levity,” that’s reminiscent of the Coen brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson.

You and your partner, Camille Summers Valli, just had a daughter; Austin is newly engaged and heading toward fatherhood. Did being a new dad influence the way you approached him at all?

With Austin, there are a lot of things about him that I understand. There are a lot of personal things I dream and hope for, and sometimes not all the puzzle pieces are there. But sometimes they do come together, and now I have my partner and my daughter, who are the best things in the world.

You have a lot coming up as an actor—Love Child with Elizabeth Olsen, and Her Private Hell by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. What quality do the projects you’re gravitating towards right now share?

I go filmmaker first, and then I read the material, and then, like, I want to know who the cinematographer is. And obviously, my scene partners. The last thing I finished was Saturn Return with Greg Kwedar. That’s my brother right there—I’m very excited for that film. I got to work with one of my best friends, Will Poulter, and Rachel Brosnahan. We filmed in Chicago and had such a special time.

No one plays a powerful woman in the midst of a downfall better than Cate Blanchett, so its natural she’s be the perfect choice to play Martha Stewart. The Australian actor and Oscar winner is set to star as the home and hospitality icon in Good Thing, a new film from Zola director Janicza Bravo. Here’s everything we know about the film so far:

Does Martha Stewart approve?

Well, yes. On the red carpet for the New York screening of Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, Stewart let slip that the 54-year-old Blanchett would be playing her. Variety then confirmed the news.

The film will be titled Good Thing.

The phrase comes from Stewart’s iconic catch phrase, “It’s a good thing,” which first took off in the early 1990s and was later famously satirized on Saturday Night Live by Ana Gasteyer. It’s her stamp of approval she gives to the products, methods, tips, and tricks for homemaking, cooking, and crafting that meet her famously exacting standards.

There’s a buzzy director attached.

Janicza Bravo, who cowrote and directed 2020’s Zola with Jeremy O. Harris, is attached to helm the project. South African screenwriter Ricky Tollman will write the script.

Good Thing is far from the first on-screen portrayal of Stewart.

Stewart, 84, has been given the biopic treatment before, though it hasn’t always gone well. Cybill Shepherd portrayed the mogul in two made-for-TV movies in the early 2000s: Martha, Inc.: The Story of Martha Stewart and Martha Behind Bars, about Stewart’s stint in prison.

Stewart was not a fan of the portrayal, and in 2024, she participated in a documentary, Martha, directed by R.J. Cutler for Netflix. The film charted the 84-year-old’s life story from her childhood in post-war New Jersey to her status as a businesswoman, television personality, and icon of American pop culture. It followed her marriage, the founding of her media empire and its sale in 1999 (which made her the country’s first self-made female billionaire), the five months she spent in a minimum security prison for lying to federal investigators regarding a well-timed stock sale in 2004, and her eventual comeback into the spotlight. It’s not clear yet how much ground Good Thing will cover.

Blanchett is a natural fit for the role.

Blanchett, of course, has a history of playing complex female characters at the height of their power—including the Queen of England, Katharine Hepburn, and, of course, Lydia Tár. Most recently, the two-time Oscar winner starred in Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which won the Golden Lion award at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Next, she’ll be in David Zellner’s sci-fi comedy Alpha Gang and Alice Birch’s drama Sweetsick.

There’s no release date.

Stay tuned for updates on production and release date.

Euphoria season three starts with Zendaya’s Rue trying to get out of the mud. That’s both literally—while the wheels of her dusty Jeep spin circles in the ground “somewhere in Chihuahua,” Mexico—and figuratively speaking. She’s still trying to pay off the ridiculous debt she incurred when we last saw her in season two, after her mom had thrown out the case of drugs she’d carried for Lori.

A group of jovial, unidentified men helps push her car forward, and as Rue makes a break for the border, another mysterious bag jangling around in the trunk of her car, we’re hit with a dose of what else—euphoria. But like most highs, it’s short-lived. The Jeep gets stuck on a steel beam meant to carry her over the border wall, tilting back and forth like a see-saw, in an allegory for Rue’s perpetual state as an addict: one step forward, two steps back. She ditches the automobile and heads on foot across the blazing desert, the sketchy bag slung over her back.

It’s been four years since we last saw the glitter-eyed cast of Euphoria together onscreen, and five years in the universe of the show. You’d think that might be enough time for some of them to move on from the dramatic exploits they got into at East Highland High, but overall, it seems like they’re stuck in the same cycles of self-destruction, oppression, and in some cases, both. “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school,” Rue narrates over the season’s opening images–which include sweeping wide shots of the American West that illustrate Sam Levinson’s vision of the season as part spaghetti Western, part extended noir film. “And honestly?” she adds, “Nothing good.” When Rue is taken in for the night by a Christian family in Texas, she muses that the homeschooled teens with zero internet access are the happiest people she’s ever met. Based on where we find her next, that seems plausible.

That is: living with the terrifyingly deadpan Lori (Martha Kelly) and her ragtag—to put it generously (“inbred” is the word Rue uses)—family of drug dealers. We find out what Rue was schlepping across the desert in her bag (fentanyl, of course), and in a particularly grisly montage, see how the deadly drug gets smuggled across the Mexican border, with Rue and Faye (Chloe Cherry, in all her plump-lipped, drawling glory) performing the dangerous ritual of body packing.

Now that we know Rue is a drug mule, it feels safe to assume she isn’t sober, either—but before we get to that, we’re treated to a visit with Lexi (Maude Apatow), who, with her curtain bangs and collared shirt-and-sweater combo, looks like she wandered in from a different show. Lexi’s old flame, Fezco, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after his apartment was raided in the season two finale. In show notes, Levinson shared that he wrote this season in honor of Angus Cloud, who himself died of a fentanyl overdose in 2023, “and all the kids who weren’t offered a second chance.”

Ever the observer, Lexi is back in the writer’s room‚ sort of. She’s working as an assistant to a legendary showrunner, Patti Lance, played in a brilliant stroke of casting by Sharon Stone. The actual writer’s room of the nighttime soap they’re on is filled with blue-haired Zillennials doing the Gen-Z finger clap when Lance makes sweeping pronouncements about television’s power to drive people to the ballot box. Lexi is chuffed, and she’s worlds away from the “right-wing suburban hell” her sister, Cassie, is currently inhabiting.

We’re halfway through the episode when we’re reminded why Sydney Sweeney is the ultimate muse for Levinson’s edgelord proclivities. The first time we see Cassie, it’s from behind. She’s on all fours, wearing a dog costume—well, lingerie with dog ears, a tail, and a leash around her neck—barking and lapping up water from a bowl while her housekeeper films it for TikTok. This is all happening in the ridiculously gauche mansion she shares with husband-to-be Nate Jacobs (the egg-yolk yellow walls and wall-to-wall plush carpeting make the house feel like it was designed by John Waters’s much trashier tether). Jacobs rolls up to the home in a Tesla Cybertruck, of course, and drops his Bottega bag carelessly on the floor before stalking into the bedroom where Cassie is continuing her performance.

Naturally, he’s not thrilled with the scene and immediately accuses her of acting like a prostitute. Later, over dinner, Cassie will poutily emotionally blackmail Nate into letting her start a semi-anonymous OnlyFans to pay for the $50,000 worth of flowers she wants for their upcoming wedding. Cassie has always been transfixed by the male gaze; now she’s just found a way to monetize it. Which is apparently needed to maintain her lavish lifestyle: Nate has taken over his disgraced father Cal’s real estate development business, but is finding his proposed national chain of end-of-life facilities (“a Boomer dies every 15 seconds,” he tells a prospective business partner), less appealing to investors than he’d hoped.

The pair still has combustible chemistry, though, and as Nate pulls on Cassie’s leash to literally walk her like a dog (shades of Wuthering Heights here—how many more times will Jacob Elordi engage in pup play onscreen this year?)—we’re reminded why these two got together in the first place.

Speaking of, Cassie and Nate’s mutual ex (friend and girlfriend, respectively) Maddy (Alexa Demie), is also working in Hollywood, though Rue’s voiceover lets us know that it’s less glamorous than it all seems. That’s evidenced by Maddy’s dimly-lit studio apartment, which seems more like a storage space for her racks of enviable matching sets than a home. She’s managing, or assisting the manager, of Dylan Reed, the star of Lexi’s nighttime soap. It’s on the studio lot that Maddy tells Lexi, who later tells Rue, that while Jules (Hunter Schafer) has been away at art school, she’s also been working as a sugar baby.

Rue’s not super happy to hear that piece of information, but as usual, she’s got bigger problems to contend with (and her own foray into sex work—clearly another big theme of the season). Lori tasks her with delivering a bag of pills to a party at a mansion, where she meets the larger-than-life Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who smokes a cigar in a blue silk robe, clinking his handful of gold rings as a menacing form of stimming. Alamo owns the mansion, a strip club, and—as he makes clear—the women inside both. Immediately enthralled by his lifestyle and desperate to stop drug muling for Lori, Rue begs Alamo to hire her. But when one of the fentanyl-laced pills she sold him immediately kills one of the girls at the party, she’s forced to beg for her life instead.

“God brought us together,” Rue placates and pleads, as Alamo and his two henchmen, played by a wise-cracking Marshawn Lynch and The Wire’s Darrell Britt-Gibson, drag Rue outside for a literal trial by fire. Alamo balances a bright green apple on Rue’s head and walks ten paces before aiming his gold revolver at his target. “You believe in God?” he asks her. “Let’s see if he believes in you.” The apple, of course, is hit by the bullet, leaving Rue unscathed. She falls to her knees, kissing the ground.

Check back next week, but for now, at least, God is on her side.