It’s been a long time since we read a sentence that started with “Meryl Streep has attended…” but here we go :-) On Wednesday and Thursday, Meryl Streep has attended two Los Angeles screenings and Q&As for “Don’t Look Up”, hosted by Tastemaker and BAFTA L.A. While there aren’t many pictures from both screenings, there are some, and you can find them in the photo gallery. Edit: A third screening took place at the Bruin Theater in West Hollywood. Pictures have been added as well.

Adam McKay, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep participate in a Q&A after a screening of “Don’t Look Up” at L.A.’s BRegency Bruin Theater. “I’m a Debbie Downer when it comes to this issue,” DiCaprio said at a Q&A following the screening. “I really, really, am. I could go off for an hour,” DiCaprio added, to which his co-star Jennifer Lawrence jokingly balked, “An hour?” “I’m not going to be Debbie Downer tonight,” DiCaprio said. “Hopefully, films like this that recreate the narrative, and start to create different conversations and more people talking about it will push the private sector and the powers that be to make massive changes. But right now though, we have such a limited amount of time and there’s such massive scale that needs to happen so quickly. And if we don’t do something, we know the outcome. We know the outcome.” The film’s director Adam McKay was also in attendance, as was Meryl Streep, who plays the President of the United States in Don’t Look Up opposite DiCaprio’s science professor character and Lawrence’s PhD student. McKay said he’d been toying with how to write a climate change movie for years and was having a hard time cracking it – until one fateful conversation with journalist David Sirota, who gets a “story by” credit on the film. “I have written up a bunch of different ideas of how to enter the idea of the greatest, most important story in the history of mankind the climate crisis. I have written ones that – I wrote one-page treatments that were dramatic. I wrote some that were thrillers, and all credit to David Sirota, who’s a brilliant journalist,” McKay said. DiCaprio described McKay’s comet metaphor in Don’t Look Up as a “brilliant stroke of genius.” “By creating a comet that was going to make impact within a year’s time: how do we as a species, as a society, as a culture, politically, deal with imminent Armageddon?” he said. “He had cracked the code, so to speak, on how to bring all the insanity that we as the human race are responding to this crisis in a two-hour format.”

Netflix has released the full trailer for the upcoming “Don’t Look Up”, and it looks like we’re in for a very entertaining ride this Christmas Day. Two upcoming screenings for the film have been announced to take place in Los Angeles on November 17 and 18, which will be followed by Q&As attended by Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. Alongside the trailer, we also have the full synopsis and official poster.

Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. The problem – it’s on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care. Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate. With the help of Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), Kate and Randall embark on a media tour that takes them from the office of an indifferent President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic son and Chief of Staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), to the airwaves of The Daily Rip, an upbeat morning show hosted by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry). With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media obsessed public before it’s too late proves shockingly comical — what will it take to get the world to just look up?!

“Extrapolations”, the climate change anthology series that will be coming to Apple TV+, has added even more stars to its cast. Today, it was announced that Edward Norton, Indira Varma, Keri Russell, Cherry Jones, and Michael Gandolfini will be joining the cast of this Scott Z. Burns show, Variety reports. Norton will play a scientist named Jonathan Chopin. Playing the role of Jonathan’s son, Rowan Chopin, will be Gandolfini. Varma will portray an inventor named Gita Mishra. Russell, known for her starring roles in The Americans and Felicity, will play Olivia Drew, a gun for hire. Jones will portray the president of the United States, Elizabeth Burdick. The new list of cast members comes hot on the heels of the original announcement that Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller, Kit Harrington, Tahar Rahim, Matthew Rhys, Daveed Diggs, Gemma Chan, David Schwimmer, and Adarsh Gourav would be the leading stars in the series. Extrapolations will take 8 interconnected episodes to delve into how impending changes to the planet will ultimately affect every aspect of the way people experience life in ways such as love, faith, work, and family.

We don’t know yet what Streep’s role will be in the series, but we do know about the others. Miller will play a marine biologist named Rebecca Shearer, Harrington will portray CEO Nick Bilton who will be the head of an industrial behemoth, Rahim will play Ezra Haddad who is a man struggling with memory loss, while Rhys will portray Junior, a real estate developer. Diggs will take over the part of Marshall Zucher, a rabbi in South Florida, Chan will play Natasha Alper, a single mother and micro-finance banker, and Schwimmer will play Harris Goldblatt. All we know about Schwimmer’s character is that he is a man with a teenage daughter. Gourav will play a driver for hire ironically named Gaurav. The series sounds like it will tie everyone together by the end as they all grapple with the constant changes in climate and what that means for their own lives. Extrapolations does not yet have a release date.

In today’s The New York Times, Meryl Streep explains how she prepared to play a fictional (and not especially competent) U.S. president in Adam McKay’s apocalyptic satire “Don’t Look Up.” Who would you turn to if you learned a comet was on a collision course with Earth and decisive action was required to prevent the extinction of all life on this planet? If your first thought was Meryl Streep, you have made both an excellent and terrible choice. In “Don’t Look Up,” from the writer-director Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”), two scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence find themselves facing this end-of-the-world scenario and must turn to a United States government led by the fictional President Orlean for assistance. The good news (for the movie, which will reach theaters on Dec. 10 and Netflix on Dec. 24) is that Orlean is played by Streep, the venerated film and TV star; the bad news (for humanity) is that Orlean is a self-centered scoundrel who cares a great deal about her public image but little to nothing about running the country. Orlean is one of several malefactors in “Don’t Look Up,” a social satire that McKay wrote about climate change but that he fully expects will be interpreted as a commentary on the pandemic. The president is also a character whose many faults and shortcomings Streep delighted in bringing to life, and she credits McKay for giving her and her co-stars the latitude to indulge in awfulness. The complete article can be read over at The New York Times. Two pictures from the article and another new picture from Empire Magazine have been added to the photo gallery.