The actors will take part in TIFF’s 2026 In Conversation With… series, which also includes Lee Min-ho, Rachel Morrison and Andrew Scott.

Billy Eff est le Directeur de contenu pour Rolling Stone au Canada. Journaliste et chroniqueur maintes fois primé, il a précédemment contribué à des médias incluant VICE et Urbania. Féru des musiques underground, et musicien lui-même, il a au cours des 15 dernières années mené plusieurs centaines d'entrevues avec des artistes et des professionnels, dans tous les styles et genres. Il est basé à Montréal, au Québec.

Heated Rivalry breakout star Hudson Williams and comedy icon Chris Rock are among the biggest names joining TIFF’s 2026 In Conversation With… series, which will bring some of film and television's biggest figures to the stage for live discussions during this year’s festival.

Williams, who skyrocketed to international fame last year after playing Shane Hollander in the Crave series Heated Rivalry, will take part in a Making Waves With… conversation through TIFF Next Wave. He is also set to discuss his role in the upcoming series YAGA and the independent feature Apparatus, as well as the short films and creative collaborations that shaped his career.

Chris Rock will also appear at the Toronto International Film Festival world premiere of his latest film, Misty Green. The Emmy and Grammy-winning comedian, actor, writer, director and producer will reflect on his decades-long career, from Saturday Night Live and groundbreaking stand-up specials to films including Top Five and Good Hair.

The lineup also includes Korean superstar Lee Min-ho, Oscar-nominated cinematographer and filmmaker Rachel Morrison, and Ripley and Fleabag star Andrew Scott, who will discuss their careers and latest projects.

TIFF ’26 runs September 10 to 20 in Toronto, and tickets for In Conversation With… go on sale August 31st.

Tiffany Haddish at the Fanatics Fest NYC 2026 on July 18, 2026.

Tiffany Haddish lit up with one of her signature smiles Tuesday when a judge said she would serve “no more jail time” after pleading guilty to a single count of driving under the influence in Georgia.

The actress and comedian appeared by video at the court hearing in Fayette County as she accepted responsibility for the January 2022 incident where someone called 911 about a driver asleep at the wheel at a traffic light. In video of the hearing, obtained by The Associated Press, Haddish grinned broadly as the judge said all other charges would be dropped, based on the recommendation of prosecutors.

Haddish was officially sentenced to 12 months of probation and 24 hours in jail, though she was credited with time served. Under the terms of her probation, she must avoid drugs and alcohol, submit to testing, complete 40 hours of community service, undergo a substance abuse evaluation, and complete a DUI counseling program.

The performer who won a Grammy for her 2019 comedy album Black Mitzvah was arrested in January 2022 after she was pulled over driving a white Ford Explorer south of Atlanta. The 911 caller reportedly claimed someone had been passed out in the driver’s seat of the SUV, with their foot on the brake, in Peachtree City.

Haddish was arrested again in November 2023 in Beverly Hills, California, on suspicion of driving under the influence. In that case, police said they responded to a call of a person blocking a roadway, possibly slumped over the wheel. The officers encountered Haddish and took her into custody.

Known for her roles in the 2017 buddy movie Girls Trip and the Disney comedy Haunted Mansion, Haddish had just performed at the Laugh Factory’s 43rd annual free Thanksgiving feast and party. She was on her way to deliver food to a friend when she was pulled over, she later explained on Jimmy Kimmel Live. She ended up pleading no contest to a reduced charge of reckless driving and was ordered to serve one year of probation and complete 40 hours of community service, a driver’s education course, and the Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD) Victim Impact Program.

“Ms. Haddish has agreed to a simple vehicle code violation — not driving under the influence, which has been dismissed — and looks forward to this being behind her,” her lawyer Alex Spiro, also known for representing Jay-Z, Megan Thee Stallion, and Alec Baldwin, told Rolling Stone at the time.

Kevin Jonas, Nick Jonas, Demi Lovato, and Joe Jonas (from left) at the ‘Camp Rock 3’ premiere

Demi Lovato will officially appear in the upcoming Disney Channel Original Movie Camp Rock 3. The singer is reprising her role as Mitchie Torres from the first two films, 2008’s Camp Rock and 2010’s Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam, which spawned Lovato’s popular collaborations with the Jonas Brothers, “This Is Me” and “Wouldn’t Change a Thing.”

Camp Rock 3 finds the Jonas Brothers returning as fictional band Connect 3, who are looking for a new opening act. That search brings them back to Camp Rock, where a fresh set of campers are ready to show their stuff.

Joe Jonas, Nick Jonas, and Kevin Jonas were previously confirmed to be returning when the film was announced last year. At the time, Lovato was only mentioned as an executive producer. Ahead of the premiere, Lovato shared a photo of herself in the film and wrote, “Y’all miss me? xoxo, Mitchie.”

“We wanted to find the right balance of how much she should be in the film and what Mitchie’s involvement looked like,” director Veronica Rodriguez told The Hollywood Reporter. “Her character literally says in the movie, to her mom, ‘This isn’t about me, it’s about them. It’s their time to shine. This is the new generation of campers.’ With Mitchie and Connect 3, we wanted them to be ingrained and necessary for the story but also leave enough room and space for the world to fall in love with the new generation of campers.”

Camp Rock 3 premieres on Disney Channel on Aug. 13 and will be available to stream the next day on Disney+. The new cast members include Liamani Segura, Malachi Barton, Lumi Pollack, Sherry Cola, Hudson Stone, Casey Trotter, Brooklynn Pitts, and Ava Jean. Maria Canals-Barrera reprises her role as Connie, Mitchie’s mom.

The soundtrack to Camp Rock 3, out Aug. 13, includes a new song from the Jonas Brothers called “Come On Over.”

Even when he was alive, there was a sense of lore that surrounded Anthony Bourdain. He had the allure of someone with a true mythology, which he offered up throughout his writing and TV shows. His memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, released in 2000, established much of what we know about him — his early years in New York City kitchens, his drug use, his willingness to reveal tricks of the trade. The book famously recounted the three summers he spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as a young man, one of his earliest legends.

That time period is the focal point of Tony, a biopic of sorts from Canadian writer-director Matt Johnson. Dominic Sessa stars as Tony, a surly 19-year-old not yet formed into the Bourdain we have since anointed into culinary sainthood. Although the film is sanctioned by the Bourdain estate, the coming-of-age tale isn’t overly concerned with facts. Instead, Johnson conjures the same feelings one might have looking back at their own early years.

“I wanted this to feel like a memory that Bourdain would have that was totalizing his youth,” Johnson says, speaking over Zoom from Los Angeles. “For me, that’s going to summer camp [for] over a decade. I don’t think about it in a linear, year-to-year way — it’s a flash and a color and a feeling and maybe four or five conversations. This movie is trying to do that with a person who unfortunately can’t speak for himself [anymore]. He can’t tell you how close we got to it, but that’s the aim: to put you in the same place that Bourdain was in as he matured from this thoughtless young lout, as he put it, into somebody who started taking himself seriously.”

Johnson, 40, didn’t seek Tony out. After making the 2023 film BlackBerry, about the formation and rise of the mobile phone company, he was offered a “deluge of other biopic, true-story films,” he says. One of them was Tony, a Black List script (an annual list of the most popular unproduced screenplays in Hollywood) written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe that centered on Bourdain’s formative time as a dishwasher and budding cook in Provincetown. Although the script was interesting, the filmmaker passed. He didn’t want to do another based-on-real-life story.

At the time, Johnson was developing a comedy about the TSA with Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein for A24. About two years ago, during one of his trips to New York City to meet with them, Johnson and his producer, Matt Miller, took a casual meeting with Sessa, who Johnson had seen in the Oscar-nominated, prep-school-set story The Holdovers. Johnson wanted to find something to make together, and happened to mention the Tony script. Neither Johnson nor Sessa were fans of Bourdain, but as they talked, they became interested in approaching his formative years as a way of exploring their own youthful experiences and emotions.

“It was one of those conversations where you have a whole new perspective on something,” Johnson says. “Immediately, I knew I wanted to make the Anthony Bourdain movie and frame it around our shared ideas about role models and family and being young and what it’s like to try to find yourself at the exact age that he was.”

Sessa, 23, found the approach liberating. “I could never imagine myself doing, like, an impression of [Bourdain], trying to pretend to be a chef in a kitchen,” he says, speaking separately via Zoom from New York City. He adds that the haziness surrounding the chef’s life during that time period was a gift. This version of a Bourdain biopic was “an opportunity to not only further understand this person [but] to showcase a part of his life that even the biggest fans of him didn’t have access to.”

“The reality is there’s 100 minutes of ‘footage’ of Bourdain at this time, and it’s this movie,” Sessa says. “But for Matt and I, we were also able to work a lot of our own history into it. We had so much artistic freedom. Every aspect of it felt like an opportunity to highlight something about this person who’s really well respected, but also learn about ourselves.”

A24 CAME ON BOARD shortly after Sessa and Johnson spoke, and offered to put the TSA project on hold until after Johnson made Tony. Johnson and Sessa signed on with the understanding that they were making an unofficial Bourdain biopic. That was Johnson’s experience making BlackBerry, which had no participation from the tech company’s co-founders Douglas Fregin and Mike Lazaridis.

“I’m very comfortable in that,” Johnson says. “I like making movies about things I don’t know anything about, and about people who I can keep at arm’s length because I’m trying to be curious about them and observe them but not necessarily do what they would want me to do.”

Bourdain, despite being a cultural touchstone for so many, fit the bill. Johnson had only seen one episode of Bourdain’s series Parts Unknown, which ran for five years and 12 seasons on CNN; it was an early Season One installment where the chef traveled to Quebec. Otherwise, Johnson wasn’t really aware of Bourdain’s work or life. To learn more, he moved to Provincetown from Canada in March of 2025 and spent several months in the remote Cape Cod town, interviewing people who’d known the chef and imagining Bourdain’s life there.

“Other than that episode, which is so crazy to say, I had never seen anything,” Johnson says. “I’d never read Kitchen Confidential. I understood the power of this man’s legacy. I knew about him, but I had no emotional take on him. He wasn’t important to me in the way that I’ve realized he’s so extremely important to other people, especially my generation. But in the same way as with BlackBerry, that proved to be very useful to me.”

Ultimately, Johnson allowed himself to discover Bourdain through his writing (“Matt read every single thing Bourdain wrote, and everything written about him,” Sessa says). But he encouraged Sessa, also a Bourdain novice, to go into the project more or less cold.

“I had probably watched some YouTube videos of Anthony Bourdain, and I had seen maybe a couple episodes of his show, but I was not a Bourdain fan,” Sessa says. “Nor was I really aware of the level of fandom around him.” Still, he says, “Matt wanted me to not really concern myself with watching No Reservations and trying to be that guy. It was [about] understanding the loose facts of the story and then, for me, digging deep into my own life and trying to find the parallels.”

Sessa had extensions added to his hair to reflect Bourdain’s tousled look from that era, but he didn’t want to mimic the chef’s voice or mannerisms. He channeled his own experiences, including his time working in a bakery in Ocean City, New Jersey. His memory of being given a cigarette for the first time one summer on the beach made its way into the script.

“Obviously, Bourdain smoking cigarettes was a part of his character,” Sessa says. “We decided it would be cool if [his friend] Sal was the person who gives him a cigarette for the first time in the movie, rather than him smoking already. Little things like that were relatable to me and I was able to put these characters in a place in my mind that felt real.”

‘TONY’ INCORPORATES WHAT IS known about Bourdain’s time in Provincetown into a dramatized version of events. The film opens with a famous quote from Kitchen Confidential, which inspired much of what Johnson wrote: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”

After the fictional Tony fails to get a summer writing fellowship, he follows a crush to Cape Cod, where he flounders until a local restaurant owner — an amalgam character here known only as Chef (Antonio Banderas) — takes him under his wing. Bourdain described his experiences in the town in Kitchen Confidential, but that time period only spans a few pages in the book. Bourdain later went back for a Season Four episode of Parts Unknown, in which he reflected on working at the seafood restaurant The Flagship as a dishwasher.

Johnson says he wasn’t constrained by factual accuracy, but did feel “a deep obligation to get at the truth.” “I’m looking at Bourdain’s life not as these two chapters in Kitchen Confidential, where he’s in Provincetown, but the whole arc of his youth from age 10 to about age 25,” he says. “I’m trying to compress as much of that as I can into the narrative space that I have to work with, which is when he’s 19 years old and it’s 1975. I am taking liberties with what happened, definitely.”

There are moments Bourdain fans will recognize from his work: Tony witnesses one of his co-workers having sex with a new bride in the back of the restaurant. There’s the memorable fishing frenzy where, as Bourdain writes, “the striped bass jumped right out of the water and onto Cape Cod’s dinner tables.” The fledgling chef grabs a hot pan with his bare hand.

But other moments are fictionalized, as are some of the characters. Emilia Jones plays Nancy, an interpretation of Bourdain’s high school sweetheart and eventual first wife Nancy Putkoski. Chef, a mentor to the wayward Tony, represents several people who were formative for Bourdain, including the cook and writer Howard Mitcham.

Leo Woodall’s brash cook Sal blends Dmitri from Kitchen Confidential with the unnamed sous chef Bourdain later describes working with in New York. For Johnson, Sal combines the “culture of these pirate, libertine, drink all day, have sex all night, indestructible as a Clorox bottle” guys into one character.

“I’m trying to take these archetypes that Bourdain writes about and synthesize them into one personality, so that we as an audience feel as though we know a person,” Johnson says. “The fact is, Bourdain probably had 50 friends that summer, and each of them had an effect on him. But I can’t explore that in a way that is anything but cumbersome.”

Johnson also wanted to take the persona of Anthony Bourdain and “represent those facets in the other characters.” Both Sal and Chef, he says, represent to some degree who Bourdain was.

“What is Anthony Bourdain if not the pirate captain of a kitchen?” Johnson says. “His great duality is he’s an iconoclast who says ‘Fuck it, we’re gonna break the rules and we’re gonna live hard and go crazy.’ But he’s also the boss who says, ‘You’re gonna be here on time because I’m gonna be here on time and I’m gonna work like a dog until we get this done.’ That’s such an unbelievable contradiction: I’m going to be the hardest working, most diligent, almost militaristically strict person, and I’m also going to drink everybody under the table.”

Putkoski was a particular mystery. Bourdain didn’t speak about her often, either in the press or in his writing, and she has largely stayed out of the public eye. Johnson describes her as his “big question mark” going into the film in terms of backstory and research. He ultimately decided not to reach out to her to ensure he wasn’t in a position of disappointing anyone.

“Because this was Bourdain’s film, I needed to restrict myself to the things I could read him writing,” Johnson says. “He seemed to keep her a bit secret. He talks a lot about them watching television together and what they were like as kids. But she’s a very private person. I’m trying to grant her dignity by not wrapping her up in this.”

AS THE FILM PREPARED to shoot, it was suggested that Johnson meet with Kim Witherspoon, the literary agent who represented Bourdain and the literary executor of his estate. Witherspoon endorsed Tony and signed on as an executive producer. “We chose to support Tony because it is not a standard biopic and doesn’t attempt to summarize a life,” Witherspoon said in a statement in May, calling the film “an interpretation, as that part of Tony’s life will always remain somewhat unknown.”

Bourdain’s close friend Eric Ripert, who found Bourdain’s body after his suicide in France in 2018, also came on board for a cameo role. He appears in the closing scene as one of the chefs interviewing Tony for admission to the Culinary Institute of America. It was one of the first scenes filmed, and both Johnson and Sessa recall Ripert asking to rehearse because he wanted to get the moment right.

“He didn’t really talk much about Bourdain or tell any stories,” Sessa says. “He came on set and he wanted to nail his lines. That alone meant a lot. There didn’t have to be an exchange of, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m really happy with what you guys are doing.’ The fact that he treated the set with respect, treated us with respect, and read the script and liked it, and then wanted to be in the movie, gave us a lot of confidence.”

The film’s Tony contains glimpses of the real Bourdain’s eventual swagger and charisma, but focuses more on his vulnerability. He’s moody and unsure. He lies to Nancy about why he’s in Cape Cod. He’s a version of Bourdain we haven’t really seen before, which can be unsettling at times. And, perhaps, it’s a version of the man who never actually existed. But Sessa says Tony reflects on how Bourdain may have become the “mythic figure” he remains today.

“He didn’t come out of the womb with tattoos and ear piercings and smoking cigarettes and traveling the world,” Sessa says. “All of those elements are from these people that he met and who affected him, especially working in the kitchen.”

“He is not the charming, effortless rogue that people are coming to this movie expecting to see,” Johnson adds. “And, of course, this is by design. I’m trying to create a relationship in the audience who knows Bourdain between what their expectation is from what they’ve seen of him and the young man in this film. I want them to ask: Why is he not the adult that I know?”

Johnson is aware that Bourdain’s legacy inevitably looms over the film. Since his death on June 8, 2018, which occurred during a trip he and Ripert were filming for Parts Unknown, the myth of Bourdain has grown even larger. His shows, including Parts Unknown, No Reservations, and The Layover, remain exceptionally popular, as does Kitchen Confidential. Morgan Neville’s 2021 documentary, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, centered on the decline of his mental health and his final, tumultuous relationship with actress Asia Argento. The chef hanged himself shortly after reading a tabloid story about her being seen with another man. Many viewers will watch Tony armed with this knowledge, adding a layer of complexity to the story.

“I think the film I made is actually quite hopeful,” Johnson says. “But every life ends, [and] in this case it’s a true tragedy, and a mystery, in a way. One of the reasons that Eric Ripert is in that final scene is because he was literally there — he was the last person with him and the person who found him. That is going to be coloring the entire viewing experience of this movie for people who know it. But it also needs to work as a film for people who have no idea who Anthony Bourdain is.”

Despite the deep dive Johnson has now taken into Bourdain’s life, making Tony hasn’t illuminated his death for the filmmaker. “I don’t have any answers because I never knew him, and I don’t pretend to understand why he did what he did,” Johnson says. “But the movie is trying to capture the insecurity he felt around how certain people saw him, and how a lot of his self-worth, at least at this age, was tied up in others’ opinions of him.”

“We wanted the movie to be a hopeful one, because that’s why people connect with this guy,” Sessa adds. “He’s a symbol. He’s a beacon of hope. He is proof that your life can always change in a massive way.”

Canadians looking for love are about to get a very unusual way to find it, as Netflix has officially opened casting for Love Is Blind Canada, bringing one of its biggest reality dating franchises to the country for the first time.

The premise has already won over millions of viewers around the world: meet someone, create a connection and potentially fall in love before seeing what they look like. The real appeal, though, is what happens when that experiment moves from the pods into real life, where attraction, compatibility and all the little things that make or break a relationship suddenly come into play.

For Canadian hopefuls, the experience will be just as intense. Selected contestants will spend roughly two weeks living on set with dozens of other singles, with cameras and microphones capturing the experience around the clock. There will be little privacy, plenty of pressure and, maybe, a relationship that could change their lives.

See on Instagram

The application process is also considerably more involved than the average dating show. Applicants must be at least 19 and either Canadian citizens or permanent residents as of January 1, 2027. Those selected for consideration will undergo physical and psychological assessments and extensive background checks, including criminal, civil, financial and driving history.

Casting is now open, with applications currently scheduled to close November 2, 2026.

The wait for Heated Rivalry Season 2 is officially underway, and if the reaction online is any indication, fans are already bracing themselves for an even more emotional chapter of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov's story.

The second season will adapt material from Rachel Reid's The Long Game, while also expanding the television series with characters from elsewhere in the Game Changers universe. Production is now underway, the principal cast is returning, and two major new additions have already been announced.

Here's everything we know about Heated Rivalry Season 2 so far.

Season 2 is scheduled to arrive in Spring 2027, with the series returning to Crave in Canada and HBO Max internationally.

The production is currently underway, meaning the long-awaited continuation of Shane and Ilya's story is no longer sitting in the development stage. Fans have already begun dissecting production photos and appearances from the returning cast, although much of the actual storyline remains under wraps.

Season 2 is also introducing two major new players.

Justice Smith has been cast as Harris Drover, while Charlie Gillespie will play Troy Barrett. Both characters come from Reid's Game Changers series, with their relationship forming the basis of Role Model. Bringing them into the television adaptation signals that Heated Rivalry is expanding beyond Shane and Ilya's story and building a larger universe around professional hockey.

The casting has already generated a surprisingly intense reaction online.

Some fans are thrilled to see Smith, particularly because of his presence as an openly queer actor, while others have questioned whether the casting matches their mental image of the characters from the books. Harris's physical appearance has become a particularly contentious subject, with some readers pointing out that the character's stockier build was an important part of his representation in the novels.

At the same time, other fans have pushed back against the criticism, warning that conversations around Smith's casting should not turn into racist harassment.

Season 2 is expected to draw heavily from The Long Game, which picks up Shane and Ilya's story after the events of Heated Rivalry. Their relationship is no longer simply about two competing athletes secretly falling for one another; they now have to figure out what an actual future together looks like while continuing to navigate professional hockey, secrecy and the expectations surrounding them. At the same time, Troy and Harris will introduce another perspective on queer relationships within professional hockey.

Showrunner Jacob Tierney has also suggested that the series will continue examining the toxic culture surrounding professional hockey, while going deeper into the emotional and psychological consequences of the characters' experiences.

And with production now underway in the Greater Toronto Area and Montréal, fans finally have something more concrete than rumours and speculation to hold onto.