Actress Rodriguez to join ‘Lost’ cast
Michelle Rodriguez is getting “Lost” full-time.
The 26-year-old actress will join the cast of the stranded-on-an-island drama when production resumes for its second season, ABC announced this week.
In a flashback scene on the season finale, Rodriguez played Ana-Lucia Cortez, a passenger on doomed Oceanic flight No. 815, who flirted with Jack Shepard, played by Matthew Fox, at an airport bar in Sydney, Australia.
Rodriguez first caught the attention of movie audiences as a boxer in 2000’s “Girlfight.” She also has starred in “S.W.A.T.,” “Resident Evil,” “Blue Crush” and “The Fast and the Furious.” This will be her first TV series.
ABC didn’t specify what Rodriguez’s role would be when the show returns, but many “Lost” theorists believe passengers in the back half of the plane, where Cortez said she was sitting, are alive and haven’t been discovered.
Costas covers for King
Veteran sportscaster Bob Costas will become a regular substitute host for Larry King on CNN, conducting prime-time interviews about 20 times a year, the network said Wednesday.
King, 71, celebrated the 20th anniversary of his show last week by interviewing former presidents Bush and Clinton, Watergate sleuths Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and CBS’ Dan Rather. Despite a swirl of change around him, he’s still CNN’s most popular personality.
But his May average of 970,000 viewers represented his worst month in four years, according to Nielsen Media Research. He regularly loses his time slot to Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.”
Costas, 53, currently is host of “Costas Now” on HBO. He has been a host for the Olympics and has covered the World Series, Super Bowl and National Basketball Association during his 25 years at NBC Sports. He also hosted the late-night talk show “Later with Bob Costas” for six years.
Court TV goes ‘Deep’
Court TV has pounced on the revelation of the identity of Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” announcing it will develop a movie based on the story.
W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the FBI in the early 1970s, reveals in a new Vanity Fair story that he was Deep Throat. His tips to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein fueled their investigation of the Watergate break-in and resulting political scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.
The identity of Deep Throat had been a Washington guessing game for three decades, as Woodward and Bernstein vowed not to reveal their source until after his death.
Court TV is in the earliest stages of development on the movie, according to several news reports – so early, in fact, that it hasn’t settled on source material. The cable network could likely base its film on media accounts of the case but hasn’t ruled out buying story rights from Felt or Vanity Fair.
The Watergate story has been previously dramatized in “All the President’s Men,” based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book of the same name. The 1976 film won four Oscars.