Skarsgard, 33, who plays brooding vampire Eric Northman on the HBO hit series True Blood, will begin shooting season three along with the rest of the cast later this month. The actor told RadarOnline.com that fans can expect a lot more from Eric this time around. “There’s a lot of nudity,” he said. “As far as Eric goes, there’s going to be a lot violence and a lot of sex — with women and men! So it should be interesting.” At 6-foot-four, Alexander’s model good looks are just as striking in person as they are on the small screen. Last season, he had to get up close and personal with True Blood co-star Anna Paquin — who in real life is engaged to co-star Stephen Moyer. But Skarsgard says there’s no tension on set. “No. I mean, I can’t wait to get back to my L.A. family,” he said referring to the True Blood cast. “I love Stephen, we’re friends and I love Anna. They’re great together. I actually think it makes things easier that way.” So there were absolutely no sparks flying between Skarsgard and Paquin during last season’s steamy love scenes? “Not at all,” he said. “Anna and I are completely platonic, and Stephen knows that.”

“A lot of nudity” — yeah, that is *just* what I was hopin’ to hear ;) I love Skarsgård and I’m always glad to see him out and about at these types of events … he seems like such a nice, approachable guy. As far as the other guests, well, it looks like GQ took grain pains to ensure that their event was a classy affair (Levi Johnston’s attendance notwithstanding). I’m all for celebrating Men of any Year no matter the occasion … especially hotties like these :)

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… as is Tom Brady (Comeback of the Year), Clint Eastwood (Badass of the Year), Bradley Cooper/Zach Galifiankis/Andy Bernard (Funnymen of the Year) and President Barack Obama (Leader of the Year). That’s right folks … GQ is ready to announce their men of the year. After the jump, check out the alternate covers of the new issue of GQ which features all of these winning men …

All of these coverphotos are really fantastic (even the super gnarly one of Clint Eastwood) but my fave is deffo the one of Chris Fine (who, you may recall, was already featured in GQ magazine back in May). I’m not sure if any of y’all are interested in collecting all of these magazine covers for your taping up on your wall but you do have a lot to choose from. Happy hunting!!

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There were a few celebs in attendance last night, including party host Neil Patrick Harris … who I finally got to meet last night :) After the jump, check out my pic with NPH and find out who else was at the shindig last night …

Now, I’ve been a huge Neil Patrick Harris fan for years so I was thrilled to finally get to meet him last night. While he played host, folks like Kellen Lutz, Gilles Marini and others (um, Ron Moss from The Bold and the Beautiful lookin’ like he walked in off the street from 1987) were in attendance to party … and shop. David and I also ran into new friends Emma and Josh who we first met at Alyson and Alexis’s Hallowe’en party on Saturday night. Here are a couple of fun Polaroids with NPH and our new friends Emma and Josh:

NPH was really cool and David and I got to chat with his boyfriend David Burtka as well. It was a really fun night … mostly because we got to spend more time with Emma and Josh. Unfortch, I was too bizzy socializing to do any shopping (boo!) but David and I did have a great time nonetheless :)

Tonight, David and I will be attending the LA premiere of the new film Dare which stars Emmy Rossum and Zach Gilford. Dare was written by our friend David Brind so we are really excited to see the movie. Should be another fun night in Hollywood :)

Chances are you never saw Twilight, because chances are you’re not a 15-year-old girl (or her mom). But here’s the thing about the blockbuster and its sequel, New Moon—and for that matter, all the yet-to-come films in the teen-vampire series: They feature Taylor Lautner, a 17-year-old kid who is one of the luckiest actors in Hollywood. Two years ago, he was an unknown with credits in flicks like Cheaper by the Dozen 2. But then he landed a small part in Twilight, a movie based on a book he’d never heard of. He had four scenes, a few lines in each, and looked like a scrawny kid in a big movie. Then something happened that Lautner didn’t see coming. He nearly lost his job. The studio didn’t believe he had the stones (or the bulk) to play a convincing boy-turned-werewolf-turned-romantic-lead in the sequel. “They needed to understand he had that aggression,” says director Chris Weitz (who, by the way, made a film you did see, About a Boy). So Lautner hit the gym, hard, eating every two hours, packing on thirty pounds. “I tried to stay focused on the things I could control,” he says. Well done. Lautner kept his job, and the film’s entire marketing campaign was built around his new abs. “When a man transforms into a wolf,” Lautner clarifies, “all of his clothes get shredded. When he comes back to human form, he’s wearing ripped jeans, and that’s about it. It’s the way it was written. The great thing about this series is we stay true to the books.” Ah, to be 17.

HMMM … isn’t it cute that Taylor’s Twilight character, Jacob Black, has prolly never worn a fitted dress shirt in his entire fictional life and, yet, Taylor was chosen to model these shirts for a major men’s fashion magazine. I wonder why that is. Oh yes, prolly because the young guy is überhawt. After the jump, check out 8 more photos of Taylor in the new issue of GQ — including one photo where he is showing off what he’s got going on under these shirts …

I think these photos are really great mainly because Taylor injects so much personality into his facial expressions (the fact that he showed some skin doesn’t hurt either). I really don’t like the expressionless, pouty photos … the ones where he looks like he’s having fun are the best photos, I think. It’s a great shoot, yes? What do y’all think?

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In season one of HBO’s True Blood, actor Ryan Kwanten had sex by a Dumpster, suffered a drug-induced perma-erection, was accused of murdering four women, and got swept up by a religious cult. Oh, and he was naked (at least partially) in eleven of twelve episodes. “I led the way in the sexual-shenanigans department in the first season,” says the 32-year-old Australian native, who first made a name for himself playing a lifeguard on an Aussie soap. Kwanten may play a dim womanizer on-screen, but offscreen he’s smart enough to suffer the indignities of his nude scenes with a smile. While other TV networks are struggling to keep the lights on, True Blood’s viewership has doubled, easing HBO out of its post-Sopranos slump and assuring Kwanten that he’ll remain taken care of through the global meltdown. Besides, Kwanten says, “This season, Anna Paquin is far more naked than I am.”

‘Tis true, Anna Paquin may be more nekkid overall but, to be honest, I don’t really pay much attetion … for obvs reasons. Ryan has that hot/dumb look that tends to suck people in immediately. He seems to get more interesting the less clothing that he’s wearing. After the jump, check out all the photos from Ryan’s GQ photospread — yes, he’s shirtless in at least one of the photos …

HMMM … well look at that … he even looks good with clothes on. To be honest, I’d prefer less clothing but I’ll take all the Ryan Kwanten I can get ;)

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Begin not with the miniseries childhood of father Joseph’s endless practice sessions but with the later and, it seems, just as formative Motown childhood, from, say, 11 to 14—years spent, when not on the road, most often alone, behind security walls, with private tutors and secret sketchbooks. A dreamy child, he collects exotic animals. He likes rainbows and reading. He starts collecting exotic animals now. His eldest brothers were at one time children who dreamed of child stardom. Michael never knows this sensation. By the time he achieves something like self-awareness, he is a child star. The child star dreams of being an artist. Alone, he puts on classical records, because he finds they soothe his mind. He also likes the old southern stuff his uncle Luther sings. His uncle looks back at him and thinks he seems sad for his age. This is in California, so poor, brown Gary, with its poisonous air you could smell from leagues away—a decade’s exposure to which may already have damaged his immune system in fateful ways—is the past. He thinks about things and sometimes talks them over with his friends Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross when they are hanging out. He listens to albums and compares. The albums he and his brothers make have a few nice tunes, to sell records, then a lot of consciously second-rate numbers, to satisfy the format. Whereas Tchaikovsky and people like that, they didn’t handle slack material. But you have to write your own songs. Michael has always made melodies in his head, little riffs and beats, but that isn’t the same. The way Motown deals with the Jackson 5, finished songs are delivered to the group, from songwriting teams in various cities. The brothers are brought in to sing and add accents. Michael wants access to the “anatomy” of the music. That’s the word he uses repeatedly. Anatomy. What’s inside its structure that makes it move? When he’s 17, he asks Stevie Wonder to let him spy while Songs in the Key of Life gets made. There’s Michael, self-consciously shy and deferential, flattening himself mothlike against the Motown studio wall. Somehow Stevie’s blindness becomes moving in this context. No doubt he is for long stretches unaware of Michael’s presence. Never asks him to play a shaker or anything. Never mentions Michael. But Michael hears him.

After the jump, read the rest of this excerpt …

His art will later depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to hear his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier, Off the Wall-era demo of the eventual Thriller hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting. He will always be at his worst when making what he thinks of as “big” music, which he invariably associates with military imagery. 1979, the year of Off the Wall and his first nose job, marks an obscure crisis. Around the start of that year, they offer him the gay lead in the film version of A Chorus Line, but he declines the role, explaining, “I’m excited about it, but if I do it, people will link me with the part. Because of my voice, some people already think I’m that way—homo—though I’m actually not at all.” … On the Internet, you can see a picture of him near the end of his life, juxtaposed with a digital projection of what he would have looked like at the same age without the surgeries and makeup and wigs. A smiling middle-aged black guy, handsome in an everyday way. We are meant, of course, to feel a connection with this lost neverbeing, and pity for the strange, self-mutilated creature beside him. I can’t be alone, however, in feeling just the opposite, that there’s something metaphysically revolting about the mock-up. It’s an abomination. Michael chose his true face. What is, is natural. His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the single greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture. It must be carefully preserved. It’s fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years … He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different. Not that the scenario was any more journalistically pure. The John H. Johnson publishing family, which puts out Jet and Ebony, had Michael’s back, faithfully repairing and maintaining his complicated relations with the community, assuring readers that, in the presence of Michael, “you quickly look past the enigmatic icon’s light, almost translucent skin and realize that this African-American legend is more than just skin deep.” At times, especially when the “homo” issue came up, the straining required could turn comical, as in Ebony in 1982, talking about his obsessive male fans:

Even so, to hear Michael laid-back and talking unpretentiously about art, the thing he most loved—that is a new Michael, a person utterly absent from, for example, Martin Bashir’s infamous documentary, in which Michael admitted sharing his bedroom with children. It’s only after reading Jet and Ebony that one can understand how otherwise straightforward-seeming people of all races have stayed good friends with Michael Jackson these many years. He is charming; his mind is alive.

Of the tribute articles written about Michael Jackson and his life, this article from GQ is the most surprising for me. I had no idea he was offered the lead role in A Chorus Line back in the day. To read the way MJ worked to create his music in this context is so enlightening … I really think the author of this piece, John Jeremiah Sullivan, really hits the nail squarely on the head. The full online version of the article can be read HERE and, of course, the print version in the issue when it hits newsstands this week. MJ fans and detractors alike should read this article, I think everyone will learn something new about the late King of Pop.

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Man … it should be a crime to not post all of the available photos of his man whenever he deigns to grace us with a new magazine photospread. In my haste to post the other hawt photos, I failed to share his coverphoto. All apologies … and I sincerely hope they’re aren’t any hard feelings. Tho, if there are a few hard feelings, I guess it’s understandable ;)

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I’m not expecting a cell-phone message from Channing Tatum when I land in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sweet day in June. The plan was to hook up at his uncle Bruce’s ranch, forty-five minutes from the airport, each of us arriving separately. But Chan (”Nobody calls me Channing”), being at that stage of celebrity when he doesn’t mind spending time with a reporter, has taken it upon himself to redo the plans his publicist made. Even if that means sitting in the Montgomery airport, where he has flown from L.A., an extra hour until my flight gets in from New York City. “I hope it’s okay that I canceled your car so you can ride with me,” he says. “There’s only one bar in the airport, so you should be able to find me.” That’s easy. He’s the only person there. Well, aside from the bartender and a lovely woman in her forties with one arm who, much to his embarrassment, has just paid for his fourth Coors Light. (It is close to five o’clock Alabama time.) “Aw, man, you shouldn’t have done that,” says Chan, going over to her table, where she is sitting alone with her Subway sandwich. “But, um, thanks.” It’s hard to tell whether she knows he’s somebody or just thinks he’s cute. He has her all shy and giggling, though. His driver, from Touch of Class limo service, is waiting by the door. “This is Thomas,” says Chan. Thomas, who’s decked out in a pressed black suit and cap befitting the royal guard, and who speaks with a proper Scottish accent, tips his hat. “He just moved here from Scotland,” says Chan, clearly impressed. “It’s quite…different,” says Thomas. Chan slouches down in the backseat of the black town car. He has an iPhone in his hand and a Kindle poking out of his bag. What are you reading? “I got two books on this thing,” he says, “about the start and finish of the Roman Empire. I don’t have to read this stuff, but I love it.” (It’s in preparation, he says, for a role.) He’s wearing the standard young-guy-in-Hollywood uniform—ripped jeans hanging off his butt, sideways baseball hat, cotton button-down shirt—which, oddly, also turns out to be pretty close to the standard young-guy-in-rural-Alabama uniform. “You ready to get all country?” he asks. We’re headed thirty-three miles northeast, to what Chan calls his “favorite place on the planet, by far”: his uncle Bruce’s ranch. Three hundred acres in the middle of nowhere. Wetumpka, to be precise. It’s where his mama was raised. And though his formative years were spent in Tampa, Wetumpka is what Channing Tatum calls home. He escapes here every chance he gets, and that’s not bullshit. ” ‘Cause it’s real, you know? You’ll see.” But first, he needs to “take a pee” and pick up a couple of six-packs for his uncle Bruce. Thomas steers the town car into a Citgo station with a minimart. While Chan is in the loo, a few truckers buying chew at the cash register size up his ride. “Good-lookin’ black car sittin’ there,” says one. “Is that there yer limo-zeen?” says the other. Not mine, I say. It’s Channing Tatum’s. “Hmmph. We don’t see a whole lotta those round here. Who’d you say that was?” Channing Tatum. He’s an actor. Blank stares. You ever see A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints? Or…Step Up? Blank stares. He’s gonna be in G.I. Joe this summer. Ah, okay, him they’ve heard of.

The pretty interesting interview can be read in full HERE. I love that Channing has a Kindle but I cannot FOR THE LIFE OF ME call him Chan. Sorry. After the jump, check out a few more photos from Channing’s GQ magazine photospread …

In all honesty, I really respond to photos of Channing rather than interviews with him … and this batch of photos is NO exception. He looks really good. But, I do love how down-to-Earth Tatum comes across in his interview with GQ. You can tell he was just a regular guy who got lucky in the right place at the right time. He is really one of my fave actors … clearly not because he’s a stunning actor but because he’s got that great nice guy vibe about him. The fact that he is ridiculously hot doesn’t hurt, either ;) As I’ve said many times before, I’ll see any movie he appears in on the off chance of some bit of half-to-mostly nekkidness. Not all films have to be Academy Award contenders … just as long as they are entertaining. And Channing Tatum deffo entertains me … and how!

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On the first-ever episode of the outrageously hyped television sensation Gossip Girl, Ed Westwick’s character, Chuck Bass, bookended a pair of date-rape scenes with a weed reference and the memorable zinger—delivered to the show’s principal, Serena—“Your life is over, slut!” “Villain is such a harsh word,” Westwick says from a hotel room in Washington, D.C., where he has just attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s hard to imagine what a recently minted 22-year-old television antagonist from England was doing pressing the flesh with Beltway muckrackers. But Westwick, who looks like Jude Law crossed with a pre-psychotropic-meltdown Joaquin Phoenix, assures us in his assured British way that “everyone who is anyone was there.” If that makes Westwick sound like a bit of a dick, surrender now—it’s part of his appeal. Just ask Gossip Girl’s freakishly wide-ranging demographic of religious watchers, many of whom are as entertained by the incestuous nature of the cast as by the show itself. Westwick dates co-star Jessica Szohr (they played kissy face at our shoot) and is roommates (cute!) with Chace Crawford. When pushed to dish, Westwick minimizes the thin line between work and play, and fair enough. You’d date a co-worker if she looked like Jessica Szohr. Still, is there a downside to all that Gossip glare? What happens when TV’s latest prep-school bad boy tours Arlington Cemetery with his real-life parents? “Every time the tram would stop, these girls would come up, giggle, then run off,” Westwick says. “You feel like the kid in school that everyone’s laughing at.”

Fully clothed AND hawt … these pics are great. You’ll forgive me if I prefer this GQ photospread over the one of Brüno. The hair, the clothes, the styling … Ed looks really fantastic in these photos. See folks, proof that sometimes folks look heaps better when they are fully clothed rather than when they are not.

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Hey, Brüno, I recently started collecting unemployment. Any style tips for someone on a tight budget?
Times are hard, but if you shop around und are prepared to vear some things twice before throwing zem avay, it is still possible to look good on a clothing budget of about $20,000 a veek. Ich mean, obwiously you vill need a bit more zan zat if you are planning on leaving ze house.

Dear Brüno, the United States military is constantly trying to update its battle gear in the field. Are there ways you would modify the current uniform?
In mein country it’s verboten for ze soldiers to shtup each other—as ein result, to keep ze cravings at bay, over 80 percent of ze Austrian army vear Dickorette patches as part of zeir uniform. Army uniforms have to change; camo zese days ist ein total nicht nicht. I mean come on, it hasn’t been on ze runvays for over fourteen seasons now! For spring-summer 2010, ich vould put ze U.S. Army in bright pastels und slogan T-shirts, stuff like “Soldier Boy” or “Shoot Me from Behind.”

Yes, yes … cute. Cohen, in character, giving men style tips in GQ magazine is kinda cute but — in my honest opinion — not terribly funny. He does give a few zingers but … meh, I’ve read funnier. After the jump, check out a whole slew of photos from Brüno’s GQ photospread — including a few snaps with the Birmingham High School football team (from Van Nuys, CA) …

Again … cute but not terribly funny. In addition to his regular “fashion” photoshoot, Brüno ventured out to Van Nuys, CA to pose for a few photos with the Birmingham High School football team there … behold:

I’m told that the actual Brüno movie is riotously funny. I must admit, I laughed at the trailer but I’m absolutely reserving judgment until I can see the damn thing for myself. I have no doubt it’ll be funny … but the funniest movie ever? We’ll see. Are any of y’all really looking forward to seeing Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male or are you already over it already?

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