A Tribute To Andre Braugher, Who Was Awesome

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – This one is a bummer

Andre Braugher passed away this week after a brief battle with lung cancer. That stinks. He was only 61 years old, too, which seems much younger than you’d think. The man carried himself with such force and gravitas for so long that it felt like he should be older than that, like he’s been 50 years old for the last 20 years. I remember watching him on Homicide: Life on the Street — maybe the first real grown-up drama I watched on TV — and being blown away by how powerful he was. He had one of those faces and voices that could turn you into a blubbering child if he ever expressed disappointment in your general direction. I don’t want to get too into the weeds here with a tribute, in part because I’m not great at them and in part because there are better ones out there by people like Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone and Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair. Mostly, I just want to point out that Andre Braugher was awesome.

He was awesome in a few ways, too. He was awesome for the reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, where he played authority figures as well as anyone ever has, and where he was usually the best part of whatever drama he was in. But he was also awesome because then he turned around and used all that gravitas and well-earned respect to become the funniest part of a silly network comedy, too. That’s not easy to do, to use an instrument finely tuned for one thing to do a different task. But he did it. His performance as Captain Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine was a damn comedic masterpiece.

You know this, though. Or you should, at least. Or maybe you never watched the show and this will push you into an overdue binge. It’s not even really the point. The point is that he was willing to take a decade of playing gruff cops and use it to be just as silly as you could ever imagine. Go look at Captain Holt highlight compilations of him on YouTube this weekend. Spend an hour on it. Watch a master at his craft. Hell, you don’t even need the actual video for some of it. I can just post these screencaps and I bet you can hear it in his exact voice without even trying.

So, yeah. Just a real bummer. And even more so because it means we lost him and Lance Reddick in the same calendar year. Two of our best television authority figures, both willing to use their dramatic history on-screen to deliver laughs at times, both gone way too soon. They would have been great on a show together, just glaring at some poor punks and thundering away at them. Or maybe at each other. God, can you imagine that? Andre Braugher and Lance Reddick as adversaries on camera together? It might have been too powerful. It might have just cracked the screen. I’m sad it won’t have a chance to happen.

I’ll close with this clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, one of the rare serious — or at least serious-ish — moments on the show and a reminder that Andre Braugher could deliver a damn speech as well as anyone ever could.

Rest in peace, man. I’m legitimately sad about this one.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – There’s no easy transition here but, still, Julia Roberts seems fun

Julia Roberts has been famous for basically my entire life. That’s wild to think about, which I say with apologies to Julia Roberts if she’s reading this (hi, Julia!), only because my intention is not to make her sound old. Quite the opposite, actually. I mostly just want to point out how cool it is. Maintaining a long career in the public eye is tough. You have to have a lot of arrows in your quiver. Mostly, you have to be talented and charming or so talented you don’t have to be charming. Julia Roberts is definitely the first of those, and could probably be the second of those if she didn’t have a natural charm. And that smile. Which she does. I never really thought about it too much before I started typing this paragraph, but Julia Roberts kind of rules.

I bring this up today in part because it’s good to say these things sometimes but mostly because Julia just did this the other day.

Julia Roberts sat down for a pow-wow with CBS Mornings to talk about the lengthy apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind. The subject of her big breakthrough came up, with interviewer Gayle King asking her what she thinks her and Richard Gere’s characters would be up to today. Are they still a thing? Did they break up? Roberts had another idea about their fate.

“I think he passed away peacefully in his sleep from a heart attack, smiling,” Roberts replied. “And now she runs his business.”

That’s really funny. Julia Roberts just up and declared Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman dead. She didn’t have to do that. She could have played it cool and left the door open for some cash-grab sequel on some streaming network, but nope. He’s dead now. That’s that. I choose to believe there’s some writer out there who was like 80 percent done with a script for this hypothetical sequel and just had their whole Christmas ruined.

The other fun thing here is that it reminded me that Julia Roberts has always had this little rascal streak in her, whether most of the world realizes it or not. Watch this video of her going on Rosie O’Donnell’s show in like 1997 and just cooking Rosie — with receipts — over a joke Rosie made at her expense in an old standup special. Watch the twinkle in her eye as Rosie squirms. She is loving this.

Perhaps you watched that and were skeptical. Perhaps you said, “Oh, sweet naive Brian, this was probably planned out and coordinated with teams of publicists days before.” Well, here’s my response to that: I considered it and chose to disregard it because my version is better and funnier. It’s okay to do that sometimes, to just take the win and move on. Which is what I’m doing… now.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – Hey, speaking of people that were in the Ocean’s movies…

Good news and bad news here…

GOOD: My colleague here at Uproxx Mike Ryan interviewed George Clooney. And he got a mini-scoop that there’s a solid script going around that would get the whole Ocean’s gang back together for something resembling Ocean’s 14. And they had this exchange, which is just about perfect.

So, we’ve actually met once before. It was at The Monuments Men premiere party. You were in a conga line…

George Clooney: [Laughing] Yeah…

The music stops right where I’m just minding my own business. You look at me, you give me a nod, then give this roundabout, put ‘er there handshake. Then the music starts again, and you conga it off into the night.

George Clooney: And it was Bill Murray leading that conga line, too!

That part I don’t remember.

George Clooney: Yeah, it was Bill. By the way, in general, every conga line is led by Bill Murray. A good rule of thumb in general.

What I like about this is that you can see the whole scene in 4k in your brain if you think about it for 10 seconds. Do it now. Bill Murray leading a conga line, George Clooney somewhere in the middle, that little smile on his face, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and dangling around his neck, all of it. I wonder how many people George Clooney has met in a conga line in his life. I really don’t think any number you spit out could surprise me. It’s a good story. But, unfortunately, it also brings us to…

BAD: Despite my SPECIFIC REQUEST in the Uproxx chat, Mike did not ask George Clooney about his performances in the short-lived television show Sunset Beat, in which he looked like this…

I actually did some investigative journalism and tracked down the pilot episode of this show a few years back. I wrote a whole thing about it. This is the most important chunk, though.

The first thing you need to know about Sunset Beat is that George Clooney plays a Harley-riding undercover cop named Chic Chesbro who moonlights as the lead guitarist in a rock band called Private Prayer and wears a leather jacket over a denim jacket despite living in Southern California. You can tell he’s good at guitar because people are always asking him how he played and he always replies “Great. I always play great.” All of that is true, I promise, as is the fact that his ex-girlfriend used to be the group’s lead singer before she got hooked on drugs. She storms the stage in the opening scene. A riot breaks out outside the China Club. As she is getting arrested, she says — I’m almost sure of it — “Don’t be a hero, nosewipe” to the cop. Sunset Beat was a good show.

Forget Ocean’s 14. I need to know what Chic Chesbro is up to. Today. Right now. I hope he’s dressed exactly the same.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Hey, speaking of heist movies…

Let’s be fast here:

• The Black List is an annual collection of the best unsold screenplays floating around Hollywood
• The 2023 edition dropped this week
• You can look at them all but I need to highlight two in particular

First, one called Stakehorse, written by Justin Piasecki, which is described thusly:

A racetrack veterinarian who runs an off-the-books ER for criminals finds his practice and life in jeopardy when he’s recruited for his patient’s heist.

A few things:

• I must see this movie
• Someone please make it
• What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?

The second screenplay I must bring to your attention is called Bad Boy and is written by a man named Travis Braun and is described thusly:

A rescue dog suspects his loving new owner is a serial killer.

A few things:

• I must see this movie
• Someone please make it
• What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?

I know I said the same thing about both movies. That doesn’t make anything I said less true. Jesus Christ. Come on, guys. Help me out here.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This might be the most relatable thing a celebrity has ever said

This is a tricky one.

On one hand, it’s hard to be considered relatable when your dad is Don Johnson and your mom is Melanie Griffith and your grandmother starred in The Birds and your stepdad is Antonio Banderas and you’re running around doing interviews with the Wall Street Journal to promote a movie that you star in as a spider-adjacent superhero with Sydney Sweeney and Adam Scott. That’s a tough hill to climb. More of a mountain, really. In many ways, it’s hard to be less relatable than that.

BUT

On the other hand, in the aforementioned interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dakota Johnson, the Madame Web star and daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren and stepdaughter of Antonio Banderas, went ahead and said… well, this.

What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?

I don’t have a regular [wake-up] time. It depends on what’s happening in my life. If I’m not working, if I have a day off on a Monday, then I will sleep as long as I can. Sleep is my number one priority in life.

I love this. Sleep is great. I am terrible at it (up and down, tossing and turning), but it is just a lovely thing when you get it. You ever have like three crappy nights of sleep in a row and then zonk out for 10 clean hours some night? You wake up feeling like a superhero. It’s stupid that the body still needs it, kind of. You would think evolution could have knocked out the need to be vulnerable to predators for a third of the day. But still. Just great. I wish I could all go to sleep right now. Even just a nap. Naps are great, too. Maybe 90 minutes mid-afternoon on a weekend. Let’s all go ahead and pencil that into the schedule. You, me, Dakota Johnson, all of us.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Matt:

I know you mention Bosch a lot. Is it… good? It’s hard to tell with you sometimes because you get equally excited about shows that are really, actually good and shows that are dumb as hell. (I promise I mean this in a nice way.) I’m open to watching it in either scenario but I guess I want to know what to expect heading into it. If I’m just watching to see a loose cannon get yelled at by his supervisors and put his hands in his pockets weird, I want to be prepared for that.

Okay, here’s the thing… both are true. Bosch is a legitimately good cop show. Better than any network junk. It’s made by Eric Overmeyer, whose resume includes The Wire and Homicide and Treme. The cast is littered with veterans of these shows, like Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick and more. Both the original and the spinoff, Bosch: Legacy, are massively bingeable shows where Bosch runs off on his loose cannon shenanigans to get justice regardless of what the damn fat cats in city hall say. I enjoy it a lot.

It is also, sometimes, a little silly, what with everyone grumbling Bosch’s name and the plots sometimes getting a little extra and, yes, Bosch putting his hands in his pockets like this…

I would absolutely recommend it, though, especially if you’re looking for a show to watch for 2-3 hours at a time on those dumb winter nights when it gets dark at 4:30pm and you want to kill some time before bed. You need those kinds of shows sometimes, too.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Kentucky!

Abraham Lincoln’s top hat is missing from a bronze sculpture along the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky.

Folks…

We have a top hat heist.

The sculptor, Ed Hamilton, posted photos of his artwork at Waterfront Park on Facebook on Saturday and said someone stole the hat from the sculpture.

“They had to be strong and determined to pry bronze from a base, good grief!” his post said.

Couple important notes here:

• I choose to believe these thieves are working for whoever masterminded the golden toilet heist and the end goal is to be using a golden toilet while wearing a bronze top hat
• I need to start using “good grief” more

Moving on.

The 12-foot (3.6-meter) statue of Lincoln seated on a rock looking out at the Ohio River was dedicated in 2009. The top hat had rested on a rock beside the former president, who was born in rural Kentucky.

You almost have to appreciate that someone saw this lovely tribute to Abraham Lincoln just chilling by a river in Kentucky for the last 15 years and came away from it thinking “I’m going to steal that bronze top hat.” What a stupid and ambitious goal. I can’t wait to see this guy — absolutely a guy, 100 percent — explain this all to his fellow inmates in prison.

“What’re you in for?”

“Okay… so there’s this bronze top hat…”

I want to see video just to look at all the faces he’s saying this to.