The Core Four (and more): The Post-Creek Gossip Thread

[IssieCol]

Charlize was primarily who I was thinking of, too. I don't know if they ever disclosed where she adopted from, though. And it seems celebs are automatically granted adoption rights and are usually fast tracked through the process so if DK and The J are trying to, I'd think they'd be successful pretty soon.

As for The J's eating habits, someone snagged a pic with him at that Chipotle the other day and he looks hilarious. Clearly, DK is out of town because he's not bothering to comb his hair.

[LaaLaa]

Bwa! That is one short shirt, sir.

[ophy]

I was just thinking that DK must have missed that shirt the last time she purged his closet. I'll bet he waits until she's out of town, and then pulls it out from under the mattress to wear around.

Loving the fluffy, unemployment hair and scruffy, unemployment face.

He looks happy and rested. Well played, sir!

And it seems celebs are automatically granted adoption rights and are usually fast tracked through the process so if DK and The J are trying to, I'd think they'd be successful pretty soon.

Well . . .

There's only so much of the process which *can* be expedited, although many home study agencies will let you pay extra to speed up the visit scheduling. Like, if your state requires three home visits and two office visits, some home study agencies will fudge that by doing all three home visits in the same day (so they will come over and hang out for three hours, instead of coming to your house three separate times). Or they will do all visits in the same week, instead of spreading them out, etc. And I've known some home study places that will speed up compiling their reports, too. Most agencies take a few weeks to do it, but if you pay a little extra, they will get it done in a few days.

That's the part you can expedite most easily with cash (and I'm sure fame doesn't hurt). But if the state requires you to live *in the state* year round for a full 12 months, then you can't expedite that. Not all states do, though. And there are a zillion other steps and bits of paper to do which cannot be expedited. There is no box to check that says, 'I'm famous -- do it fast'.

Charlize's process was NOT expedited in any way from what I can see. It took her 28 months to finalize her adoption of Jackson. Sandra Bullock's process took four years for Louis. These things only seem fast to us, because the stars do such a great job of keeping the process quiet.

The only 'quick' process I can recall, was Madonna's adoptions in Africa, and that's because she didn't quite go through the right and proper channels. And she was castigated for it all throughout the adoption community.

[IssieCol]

That's interesting, I never knew Sandra Bullock was in the process for 4 years! Now it makes me feel even worse for her that people were so mean about her decision to adopt with her scumbag husband because I bet she had no clue he was so gross when they initiated the adoption.

[emmaleigh]

I really want to say that's the Chipotle near my office. I don't know enough about Chipotle to know if every location looks identical or just similar but that really, really looks like it. If he was in Hollywood, then I'm kicking myself because the J obviously trumps my Nick Kroll sighting during lunch a couple weeks ago.

[IssieCol]

Ugh, this thread keeps making me expose the mega creeper in me! Is your office near the Chipotle on Vine? 'Cause...wait for it...that's near their house.

I'm off to find a life, bye!

[emmaleigh]

Well then... um, yes. Yes, it is. It's Sunset & Vine. The Chipotle that is. My office is a few blocks away.

It's okay, Issie. I know where R/K live. And, y'know, *lots* of other creeper info about them.

[IssieCol]

I don't actually know where their house is, but not for lack of trying! I just know they live within walking distance of this coffee shop that's a few minutes away from Sunset/Vine because it was mentioned in an interview and they do live in the Hills. The Gelson's they're always papped at is on Franklin if you know where that is, so they roam around the same general area when they're in town.

DK's new interview with Flare is up and she brought her kitty to the shoot. Until we get an actual baby, ophy'll just have to imagine one in the cat's place. There's video, too and she's very kissy with it.



The interview makes their life sound like a Pinterest board. They travel and cook and garden and ski! Jeepers, if I didn't love them so much, I'd hate them for their super cool life. Pasted for the lazies and for my own scrapbook, which I'm like 5 seconds away from creating.

"Really pleasantly terrifying." That's how Stephanie Meyer characterizes Diane Kruger's turn as a parasitic alien with a steely personality in the film adaptation of her first post-Twilight adult novel, The Host. "Diane just can do this icy thing," says Meyer, "but at the same time cover it up with, like, that warm, Oh, how are you?"

Meyer wasn't the only one wowed by Kruger's otherworldly talent in The Host, in theatres March 29th. When the film's screenwriter-director Andrew Niccol first gathered his cast together for a table read last year, one of the key actors was absent. Kruger volunteered to read the part, that of a teenage boy hiding in a cave. Though Niccol knew that she had the right sort of elegant bone structure and air of cool unattainability to pull off her own character—known only as The Seeker—he was surprised that she could be equally convincing as a 14-year-old male. “I was shocked at how versatile she was,” says Niccol of Kruger, whose star ascended with her scene-stealing performance as a German movie star/allied spy in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Second World War drama, Inglourious Basterds, and whose career has been further bolstered by her red carpet glamour, as well as the fact that she dates Pacey of Dawson’s Creek fame (a.k.a. Joshua Jackson—the man many Canadian women of a certain age grew up wishing would save them from high school).

In The Host, Kruger gets to kick down doors, drive a chrome Lotus sports car, and roar across the desolate Arizona desert on a motorcycle in pursuit of a runaway soul (Saoirse Ronan)—all the while finding small dramatic moments to convey that her glamorous antagonist might be wrestling with internal demons. Kruger revelled in the action, as well as being part of a production based on a book by Meyer. “I actually happen to be a big Twilight fan, which I’m not embarrassed to say,” she says. “It sort of appeals to my inner teenage girl.” But what most attracted Kruger to the film is the emotional turbulence of her character, which isn’t revealed until the film’s final moments. “She’s so complex,” says Kruger of the first true villain role in her 11-year film career. “She has that Stepford Wife-y kind of niceness yet there is so much more underlying there: rage and anger.”

Kruger’s prep work for a performer’s life began in Algermissen, Germany, where she was born Diane Heidkrüger. Her hometown was the kind of northern village so small it would be difficult to find a local unversed in every detail of her early years, from rocky home life (her dad was an alcoholic; her parents have since divorced) to dashed ballerina dreams (she suffered a leg injury after auditioning for the Royal Ballet in London). Kruger fell upon her next career path in 1992 when a friend entered her in a local Elite modelling contest and she won first place. Though she felt overwhelmed and out of her element by the international phase of the competition—“I didn’t win; I didn’t make even 50th place”—she fared better when an agency invited her to Paris for a trial photo shoot. Soon her school holidays were devoted to landing high-profile jobs—her first, an ad campaign for Cacharel perfume.

Kruger had always been hard-working and reliable at home—often caring for her younger brother, Stefan—but she knew modelling was her ticket out. While her mother wouldn’t allow her to move to New York to model, she agreed to let her leave high school and try living in Paris for a year. “I felt really trapped in my hometown. My mom could sense it and to this day, without her trust in me, I don’t know what I would have become,” says Kruger.

The local gossip mill went into overdrive. “People just thought I was—not turning into a prostitute, but kind of. Everyone was furious. My dad was furious. My school thought I was making the biggest mistake of my life. I knew this was not the life that was meant for me,” says Kruger, who discovered that bunking in a model-packed City of Light apartment complex made her feel like she’d finally found her place in the world. “An entire building full of girls under the age of 25? It was amazing. It was everything I hoped life would be—and more,” says Kruger of being almost totally unsupervised and professionally in-demand. “I was really good. I certainly went out, but I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs,” she says. “I made money—I could pay for a nice coat. Life was amazing.”

Modelling also led, as it sometimes does, to acting: Kruger made her feature-film debut in 2002’s The Piano Player soon after graduating from the prestigious French drama school, the Cours Florent, and marrying actor and director Guillaume Canet. (The couple divorced in 2006, and Canet now has a child with fellow actress Marion Cotillard.) In that film, Kruger played Dennis Hopper’s rebellious daughter, and though the iconic actor fed the newbie ingenue a steady stream of movie-making tips, he neglected to tell her how to approach her first sobbing scene. “It was such a personal victory for me to get there as an actor,” says Kruger. “Then it was like, ‘Take two,’ and I was like ‘Wait a minute. There’s no frigging way.’ [Dennis] was so sweet. He said, ‘Honey, you’ve got to pace yourself.’”

A decade later, as Kruger stands in front of a shrimp-pink backdrop at Hollywood’s Siren Studios, it’s clear she hasn’t forgotten how to strike a pose. When a barrage of conflicting instructions are issued forth from a knot of people huddled around her, she doesn’t become unglued. “Let me see,” she says, with a raised eyebrow and a smile. “Don’t cross my ankles. Keep my legs apart. Don’t touch my dress. Act like I’m at a picnic.” Between takes, she studies the shots on a monitor and makes incisive observations. “I come from modelling, right?” she says later. “I’ve done it long enough to know what’s good in a picture on me.”

These days, she splits her time between Los Angeles and Paris, where she lives in an apartment close to German fashion legend and dear friend, Karl Lagerfeld. When Kruger was researching her role as Marie Antoinette in last year’s French costume drama, Farewell, My Queen, Lagerfeld, a French history and culture buff, loaned her books on the ill-fated royal. “He’s very kind and can be very funny and ironic and silly,” says Kruger. While the self-styled star claims to be just like “any other girl” who visits Style.com and goes shopping “to see what’s what,” she’s one of a select few who can count Lagerfeld as her go-to red carpet designer— and confidante. “In difficult moments in my life when I don’t really know who to talk to, I sort of drop by his studio and he knows me well enough to pick up on weird things,” she says. “He really is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

Until J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi conspiracy series Fringe—in which Jackson played troubled genius Peter Bishop— shot its last-ever episode in December of last year, Kruger spent whatever free time she had in Vancouver. On date nights, the couple of seven years would head over to the Italian restaurant Il Giardino, and on weekends, to Whistler. This evening, as she phones in from the back of a limousine that is ferrying the couple through the rainy streets of Berlin toward the Hotel de Rome, she happily sketches out a three-day European ski trip they’re taking. But she’s also eager to get back to Los Angeles, where she’s enrolled in a pasta-making class at Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali’s legendary Italian restaurant, Osteria Mozza, in which she’ll learn how to master ricotta and egg raviolo with browned butter. “A passion” is how Kruger refers to the culinary arts, something she loves so much that she admits to “dragging” Jackson to courses in pork and salmon prep at Vancouver’s Dirty Apron Cooking School. “We have a big garden in L.A. and we started canning jam and pickling. It sounds a little kooky,” says Kruger. “But the pickles we make are insane.” (OMG, cucumber! Maybe they do bring them from home!)

Though Kruger would probably flunk a trivia contest about Jackson’s place in pop culture—she’s never seen The Mighty Ducks, nor a single frame of Dawson’s Creek—she’s not really to blame. “He doesn’t want me to watch [his early work],” she says, adding that Jackson’s not wild about the fact that his blooming adolescent years have been captured for eternity on TV. “He grew up in front of the camera with pimples and bloatiness.” (Again with the lies, DK!)

It’s hard to imagine Kruger, on the other hand, suffering from either. She seems clear-eyed about the niche she fills in Hollywood—she’s good at playing smart, slightly frosty women—but keeps pushing the boundaries. Currently, she’s gearing up for her first major television role, playing a socially eccentric Texan detective in FX’s The Bridge, an adaptation of the acclaimed Danish/Swedish crime drama, Bron/Broen.

(Its pilot was written by the same woman behind some of our favourite Homeland episodes, suggesting this is another show we’ll soon be mainlining.) And later this year, she’ll appear as Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah, in the Terrence Malick–produced historical drama, The Green Blade Rises. “It’s a beautiful project,” says Kruger about the entirely black and white film, for which she spent a month and a half “running around the woods of upstate New York.”

What she really longs for, though, is to show off her witty side, as she does in her starring role as a love-seeking dentist in Un plan parfait, a French rom-com that will be released in Europe this spring. (Fluent in German and French, Kruger does her own dubbing.) “When you first start out as an actress, especially when you come from a modelling background, you want to prove that [you’re] capable of emotional depths. Now, having been around the block for 10 years really, it felt like the timing was right,” says Kruger, excitedly. “I’m not scared to be light-hearted anymore.”

[LaaLaa]

I seriously. flove her. The part about her knowing she was doing well because she could afford a nice coat warms my cold soul, and I still cannot WAIT to see a lighthearted DK in a rom-com. Maybe now she can get The J to pick a lighthearted project that doesn't blow quite as hard as Lay the Favorite apparently did. The only real flaw I can ever find is that she either refuses to watch or denies watching his "bloaty" work - just because it kinda reminds me of those people who are proud they don't watch any television. We know she enjoys fluff like Rizzoli & Isles and Say Yes to the Dress, so why not a Ducks movie or three? As for DC, The J definitely doesn't want her to watch aaaaanything in a boathouse, duh.

And wow, dude, I'm so dreambaby-eyed that my first reaction to the pickling was NOT cucumbers! It was how if she is raving about their homemade pickles now, and they were not going the adoption route, pregnancy cravings would probs make her insane. /majah creep

[ophy]

Ha! My brain went first to the dirty. I didn't even think about the preggo aspect!

But yeah, floving on her hard.

[IssieCol]

Lainey wrote about her Flare shoot and I guess her kitty's name is Hobbes. IIRC, The J used to have a cat named Calvin, right? Help me out, fellow creepers! If so, that is adorbs that they have a Hobbes now. She also said this about The J which made me LOL:

On valuing Joshua Jackson’s career input: “Nobody knows me better than he does. He knows exactly when I’m faking it and when I’m being sincere.

Oh, I bet he does, DK! I bet he DOES.

[LaaLaa]

YOU are the TRUE SISTERWIFE!

Love,
Fellow Creeper

[IssieCol]

JSegs is trying to move on, you guys. Oddly, he looks better in these pictures than he ever has to me. Depression induced weight loss, maybe?

[LaaLaa]

I still call MW sabotage, as opposed to lack o' love. She's got to be scared of feels in general now.

So sad to see the happy giant all mopey!

[IssieCol]

DK is among THR's group of "mocktresses," basically chicks who are better known for their fashion and public appearances then their acting work. I guess this answers Is's question about their ritzy lifestyle. If she got paid for all 31 of those events, The J could have just sat out Fringe's last season altogether and eaten takeout from Chipotle at home instead.

Maybe they weren't paid to attend Chanel shows -- they just got to keep 15 grand worth of clothes and bags -- but they were no doubt monetized for attending the Giffoni Film Festival in Italy, the opening of the Montblanc concept store in Beijing, the Audi Aspen Holiday party and the Topshop/Topman store opening in L.A. Alba alone attended about 43 events in 2012 -- the old "opening of an envelope" line comes to mind -- and for tres chic Diane Kruger, it was 31 events. Kruger is becoming better known for being well-dressed than her occasional yet interesting acting choices. No doubt she makes more money that way.