Monday, December 08, 2025 |
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We've known Jason Bateman since the early '80s. Now we see him on the small and big screen and hear him every week on his podcast, Smartless. Still, how well do you really know this guy? We demystify Bateman in our latest cover story, which is told in his own words in the style of our What I've Learned interview series. You will come away knowing a lot more about the guy. Check it out below. Bateman is the first of two covers we'll be rolling out this week, along with several more What I've Learned interviews with various luminaries and people who've led fascinating lives. Stay tuned. —Michael Sebastian, editor-in-chief Plus: |
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At 56, the former child star has achieved success as an actor, director, and podcaster. He makes it look easy—even when it's not. So what's the secret? He explains it all, in his own words. |
Jason Bateman has been famous for nearly 50 years and has transformed himself from a child star into a Golden Globe–winning actor, an Emmy-winning director, and one third of the incredibly popular podcast Smartless. (His latest projects, Black Rabbit and Zootopia 2, are out now.) With his wife of 24 years, Bateman has two daughters, one of whom just went off to college. How did he reach this point in his life and career, and what hard-earned lessons has he learned along the way? Here, in owns words, he explains it all. This interview took place on October 7 in Los Angeles, where Bateman lives. "Starting at the age of ten, I was teaching myself how to be a professional liar. How to convince people that I was something other than what I was thinking inside." "I married a friend as opposed to a girlfriend. Since I only wanted to get married once, I thought, Find someone I'm sexually attracted to that's also a friend. That's the bull's-eye." "I am a people pleaser. I care about what people think about me. I read all the reviews. I am doing these projects for public consumption, so it matters to me what the public thinks about them. It matters to me what critics think about them. But what's most important is that the weather inside is 72 and breezy. It takes a lot of work to stay happy, to stay clear, and to be proud of yourself. You can try to drink through it, but you're sober in the morning and you got to live in those hours too." |
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Josh Hutcherson had a hell of a weekend. The 33-year-old actor stars in Five Night at Freddy's 2—the much-anticipated sequel to Blumhouse's 2023 horror hit—which debuted this weekend to the tune of $109 million worldwide. Over in Sunday night's episode of the HBO comedy series I Love LA, Hutcherson's character, Dylan, finally stood up to his girlfriend Maia, played by series creator Rachel Sennott. It's a shame that it took a catastrophic game night in front of Dylan's coworkers for him to get there. Baby steps! Call it a microcosm of Hutcherson's staying power in Hollywood. A two-decade-long career in film and TV isn't easy to keep up for anyone, let alone for a Kentucky kid who had little connection to Tinseltown to start with. The actor has a budding franchise on his hands with Five Nights at Freddy's, where he plays the tortured security guard of a haunted restaurant. But it's I Love LA that takes the actor back to familiar territory, which he traversed in many a Hunger Games film: Dream boyfriend. |
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The first time that the malevolent shapeshifter appears in Stephen King's 1986 novel It, the creature introduces itself not only as its infamous clown form, but also with a name that seems oddly … ordinary: Bob Gray. That name now takes on greater—and more tragic—meaning as a result of Sunday's episode of the HBO series It: Welcome To Derry. Andy Muschietti, the director of 2017's It and 2019's It: Chapter Two, and the guiding creative force behind the series, delved into the revelations of episode 7, titled "The Black Spot," to explain exactly how they filled in the blanks on this peculiar nom de bizarre. But before getting to the answers (and the spoilers,) let's start with the mystery itself. Who exactly is Bob Gray—and why does the creature occasionally call itself that? |
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 If I could come from breast touch alone, maybe it was a form of cheating that felt "less bad." No penetration, no kissing; just the one act where I felt competent. A loophole my conscience could almost tolerate. My wife knows, sort of. She understands she can't give me what I want and doesn't want me to live a life of resentment. She grew up in a home where sex wasn't exploration but obligation, and infidelity was handled quietly. "There used to be an old-fashioned way to deal with these things," she told me once. "What I don't know can't hurt me." She doesn't ask questions, and I don't volunteer answers. We orbit the silence. It isn't an agreement, but it behaves like one. |
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Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate—there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn't outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender. Santa was fiftyish, with a modest gut, gray hair, a lustrous beard, and a caddish gaze that followed the bartender up and down the rail. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. For the price of three beers, he told me his story. |
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Jake Lacy is no television critic, but there's one thing he's sick of hearing when you recommend a show to him: It really gets going by season 2. As a man with a busy acting career and two young children, Lacy can't fathom that type of commitment. "I gotta give you 12 hours of my life to get to act 1?" Lacy asks me, looking physically exhausted by the mere thought. We're sharing pastries in a boardroom buried within the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles, and Lacy is explaining why he signed up for his latest project, the twisty Peacock thriller All Her Fault, after reading the very first page. Debuting in early November, the adaptation of Andrea Mara's 2021 best-selling novel—which was an instant smash hit for the streamer—follows commodities trader Peter Irvine (Lacy) and his wealth-manager wife, Marissa (Sarah Snook), as they discover that their son has been kidnapped by the nanny of another family. "The fact that the script opens with the boy gone? Now we're talking!" Lacy says. |
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Every year new gadgets, watches, and little luxuries flood stores and online retailers, and consumers are presented with more options than they know what to do with. Every brand, large and small, begs you to scroll its gift guide. How can you keep up? What should you buy for people you love this year? That's where we come in. Esquire's editors spent the entire year testing products, visiting showrooms, and cataloging the best releases of the year. It's all led to this: the best gifts on Earth. After all we've seen, it was no small feat to narrow it down to the 26 hottest products of the year. But we managed. We found the best LED light mask of the year, one you'll want gift to someone close to you just so you can be sure to use it on a regular basis. We also found an e-reader that's barely bigger than your smart phone, a projector small enough to fit in your briefcase, and so much more. |
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Eloy Detention Center lies nine miles east of Interstate 10 in Arizona, amid a patchwork of windswept mesquite scrub, solar farms, and alfalfa and cotton fields, with the jagged ridgeline of the Picacho Mountains visible to the southeast. Beyond the truckers chapel and the sign at the corner—"CoreCivic: We're Hiring"—acres of ruddy, bare dirt surround a cluster of austere buildings linked by concrete walkways. Pass the reserved parking spots for the Employee of the Month, Supervisor of the Quarter, Officer of the Month, and Employee of the Year. Pass the little signs that say "Keep Off the Landscaping" and stop at a reinforced steel door painted blue, with an intercom button on the right. Employees may already be waiting there, carrying McDonald's bags and energy drinks. A sticker inside someone's see-through backpack: "I Don't Know, I Just Work Here." They will be grousing about how long it takes to get in. "Any fucking day now, Central." Look at the camera, announce yourself. The door opens past a twelve-foot fence ringed with razor wire and into a vestibule where a second button awaits. Past the second fence, electrified, fifteen feet high, a chain-link tunnel leads to the main entrance. |
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There are a lot of songs that Sheryl Crow is happy to explain. She can tell you all about the upheaval in her life when she penned "Leaving Las Vegas," and about the election night that sparked "Run Baby Run." She can even detail the heartbreak of watching her mother fade away to Alzheimer's disease that led to her more recent song "Forever." But everyone wants to know one thing: Who is the famous rocker that she immortalized in the wry semi-love song "My Favorite Mistake"? Crow reveals a lot in her episode of the new MGM+ storytelling series Words + Music, which airs December 7, but she says that's one secret she's keeping forever. |
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