Sebastian Stan and Annabelle Wallis’s busy year

Sebastian Stan and Annabelle Wallis are expecting their first child. They were out in New York yesterday, looking very happy. It’s a busy year for them, though, besides their family situation, Annabelle has a couple movies out this year (Mercy and Mutiny with Jason Statham), and Sebastian has Cristian Mungiu’s English-language debut, Fjord, which will premiere at Cannes next month, and then Avengers: Doomsday in December. Between them, he will film Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II over the summer. His role isn’t confirmed, but it’s speculated Stan is playing Harvey Dent.

Knowing Sebastian Stan’s ability to play both unhinged and sad villain, Harvey Dent/Two-Face makes a LOT of sense. It also jives with bringing Clayface into Reeves’ Bat-verse, Reeves really seems to like the monstrous members of Batman’s rogue’s gallery. Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, is rumored to play Gilda Dent, Harvey’s wife, and The Batman: Part II is still borrowing story points from The Long Halloween, which also influenced the first film. Part II is supposedly taking place just weeks after the events of the first film.

It is pure speculation, but there is some setup in the first film that suggests the entire Reeves trilogy could be a longform riff on The Long Halloween mashed up with The Court of Owls. I REALLY see The Court of Owls being a driving force for Reeves, it’s about Bruce Wayne uncovering an elite conspiracy in Gotham that rewrites his family history. They already introduced that in The Batman. Anyway, there’s a chance we’ll get the “Bucky-Nat” relationship the MCU denied us by way of SebStan and ScarJo playing a married couple in the Bat-verse.

In the real world, Stan and Wallis look super happy and hopefully their busy year is a good one, too.

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What else happened today…

Spring cleaning your friendships sounds kind of mean, but rearranging life priorities to make more room for connection is definitely a plus. Everyone’s so busy, I’ve started setting standing friendship dates. One friend and I meet once a month for brunch, another friend I meet once a month for dinner. One friend I take a walk with every week during our lunch break (we both work from home and live in the same neighborhood). Every couple of months we all get together for an activity.

It felt kind of depressing at first to schedule our hangouts, but a few months later, those friendships have renewed and deepened because we’re making time to see each other more. And we don’t cancel! That’s the agreement, we make this standing friend date, and we don’t back out! (Popsugar)

The NFL Draft started yesterday in Pittsburgh, bringing out the top picks in their suits for the televised portion of the draft. Let’s judge football fashion! (Go Fug Yourself)

Kylie Kelce doesn’t let her daughters go on sleepovers, citing that “we live in a different world” and she has trust issues. But her kids are very young, her oldest is just six. I don’t think I was doing sleepovers until I was like eight or nine, and then yeah, I did a bunch. I practically lived at my best friend Evelyn’s house. But! My parents also packed me off to summer camp for the whole summer starting at age seven, they really didn’t think twice about sending me places and then forgetting about me until the scheduled pickup time. (I don’t think they actually forgot about me.) I wonder if Kylie would send her kids to sleepaway camp? (Celebitchy)

An ode to the public bench and its disappearance. In trying to prevent unhoused people from having someplace to rest, everyone is being deprived of a place to sit. When we talk about the loss of third spaces, we should also talk about the loss of public benches, which makes collective spaces hostile to congregation (there is literally a concept called “hostile architecture” meant to prevent the public from using public spaces). We need third spaces and public benches and more empathy for our fellow humans so that we don’t “not in my backyard” our way out of benches any more than we already have. (Places Journal)