We are back for our final episode of this season, and our slight break made the episode even better. A few weeks ago Lainey decided to gang up on me, implying that I’d say there’s nothing to talk about where Keanu Reeves is concerned, because he’s such an open book who’s also completely mysterious – as Lainey calls him “The World’s Favourite Movie Star”. And you all emailed and tweeted at me in droves to let me know you wanted to talk about him, and look – I did too! I swear I was never on the other side of this! 

But as Angelica Jade Bastien wrote this week, we still can’t stop watching Keanu Reeves, and he’s had an incredibly varied career. Not only that, but I realized this morning that he’s probably easily the biggest movie star in the world who has never been nominated for a major award – unlike the rest of his contemporaries who are actively choosing awards show bait year after year. 

And that’s before Lainey points out that everyone has their own Keanu Reeves on-ramp, when he first landed permanently in your consciousness – whether it was Bill & Ted, Point Break, Parenthood – or, you know, this:

 

And he does it all without showboating or trying to be a movie star, and is that what makes him so addictive? It takes someone special to be John Wick, Duke Caboom in Toy Story 4, and also utterly skewer himself in Always Be My Maybe, but how exactly is he able to do it? 

As usual, we don’t try for themes in our episodes, and yet that theme of not showboating, not trying, came out again in our discussions of someone who is extremely visible, and somehow just as authentic: Rihanna. 

She’s been named the wealthiest female musician in the world, worth some $600M, and with incredible achievements in style and beauty under her belt in addition to her music, and yeah of course we all immediately sing “Work work work work work work” – and yet, she’s still …Rihanna, with all the addictive DGAF-ness that implies. 

How?!?

(A sidebar – we reference this Forbes article quite a bit, and they include a clarification from Rihanna herself that her name is accurately pronounced “Ri-ANN-ah”, not “Ri-AWN-ah”. I don’t know how to feel about this, not least because my own name is often pronounced with that same middle ‘Awn’ syllable – and it was hard for us to maintain during our conversation. Discuss.)

We wondered whether Rihanna’s casual, whatever-happens persona is only the part of her that she lets us see – or if it’s what has actually made her such a phenomenal businesswoman. Is it her no bullsh-t manner that finally made major fashion houses like her partner, LVMH, see that “hey, yeah, there is a benefit to appealing to people of all sizes and skin tones, who knew?” Not that it’s in any way revolutionary, of course, but Rihanna is revolutionary for being the one to bring that revelation to high fashion. 

And yet, she’s still… just Rihanna. So Rihanna. Like, case in point – she’s worth $600M and she’s still doing stuff like this: 

 

Maybe all this time we’ve compared Rihanna incorrectly to other female singers of her age and ‘brand’, like Beyonce or Katy Perry or whomever, when we should have been comparing her to a different contemporary entirely, one who similarly has made an entire brand out of not giving a single f-ck and is absolutely more iconic for it. (If you click nothing else, click that link.)  

And we’re reading some of the best emails you’ve sent recently, covering work lingo, work journeys, shutting down bros on Facebook, and our viewing homework for our summer vacation, including Fleabag (for Lainey), Fosse/Verdon (for me) and whatever else you guys think we need to watch… 

We cannot thank you enough for your support of our best season of #ShowYourWork yet, and have big plans to bring you even more incredible guests next year. Please keep your emails coming, telling us about your life, your work, and what you want to hear us cover next season; we love to hear from you so much more than you know. You can find us on Twitter @laineygossip and @duanaelise or on Instagram @laineygossip and @duanataha, and we will be back in the fall with a whole lot more celebrity work!