News

Horror Pride Month: Actor/Musician Daniel Newman

Published

4 years ago

June 4, 2020

Daniel Newman has, in some ways, lived out his dream numerous times.

The Georgia native was only 12 years old when he landed his first guest role on a TV series, and since that time he’s worked steadily as an actor on both the big and small screens.

The lifelong horror fan has even had the opportunity to step into dream roles along the way including 2012’s television adaptation of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn in which he took on the role of Malachai, the lethal enforcer and right-hand to crazed child preacher Isaac.

The actor called the experience a “magical” one that allowed him to just let go and have an amazing time among the rows.

It was his guest-starring turn in The Walking Dead, however, that really seemed to put him on the radar of many horror fans. It was an exciting role for him, but one that he also entered with a bit of trepidation.

“It was really crazy,” the actor told me in our interview, “because I expected it to be like a lot of hit shows that I’ve been on where it’s a tight group cast and you can’t really fit in, but on the first day Melissa McBride ‘Carol’ came up to me in the trailer saying, ‘Daniel! How have you been? I’ve missed you so much!’ I thought I was being pranked, but then I suddenly realized she was actually my casting director on projects when I was a kid! I totally forgot. So she really brought me into the cast and made me feel at home.”

And yet, through most of his career, perhaps his best acting went on off-screen. It was, in fact, in the wake of his success on The Walking Dead, he says, when reporters and journalists began to ask him about his personal life. Did he have a girlfriend? Was he in a relationship? What did he he look for in a potential girlfriend?

In those moments, the bisexual actor’s story became one that wasn’t so different from many actors. For years he was told if he came out it would kill his career, that it would destroy all the work his agents had done, and that it was just really “none of other people’s business anyway.”

Like so many before him, the actor bought into that lie until he found himself confronted by a far different reality.

Newman was volunteering at a shelter for LGBTQ youth when one of the young people there approached him and thanked him for being so nice to them. She said it in such a way that acknowledged the line that everyone on the queer spectrum knows exists.

In response, Newman told her that he was one of them.

“I thought she would be happy when I told her I also am part of the community,” he explained, “but she was furious and she said ‘why do celebrities and public people stay in the closet when they are successful! It hurts the whole community.’ I remembered thinking the exact same thing all throughout my youth being so mad that successful people weren’t out and proud representing all of us.”

When the actor left the shelter that day, he went home and came out publicly on Twitter and on YouTube saying he didn’t want to give himself an out to backtrack on his decision.

With the statement made, he sat down to await the career implosion that he’d be warned about his entire life. To his shock, however, the destruction never came. In fact, he says, he began to get more offers than he’d had before.

Today, Newman continues his work onscreen while also touring with his band and working in the technology industry. That has not stopped his activism, however, and if anything, it has more solidified his stance on representation in the entertainment industry.

“I think the mistake throughout the past in LGBTQ roles was to marginalize them and sexualize them,” Newman pointed out, “rather than to humanize them and base the characters and narratives on relatable human attributes. There are hundreds of millions of diverse LGBTQ people around the world and nothing could be broader than the personalities and character types of our culture.”

Personally, I couldn’t agree more.

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

1 day ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

^{High Desert Hell}

^{The Gemini Project}

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

1 day ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

^{Happy Sad Confused}

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

2 days ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.