Stars are twinkling brightly in Italy right now—at least stars of the movie variety. Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Justin Bieber are all in country this week, and giving the paparazzi plenty of photo opps.
Bieber, the new kid on these cobblestoned streets, plays a male model in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander 2, in which Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, and Christine Taylor (Mrs. Ben Stiller) all reprise their roles from the original movie as well. The actors will be on set for about 12 weeks in Rome, and photos of Stiller as Derek (the goofy model whose signature look is named “Blue Steel”) and his polar-opposite son, Derek, Jr. (played by Cyrus Arnold) have been taken with a tiny, zippy red sports car.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, among others, visited Milan to honor the 40th anniversary of legendary designer Giorgio Armani. Armani was also opening his Expo Milano “Silos,” a 4,500-meter space that will house 600 pieces from his collections, but don’t call it a museum: “I don’t want this space to be static; [I] plan to renew the displays with pieces from the new collections every six months,” he explained. Early photos indicate that while the exhibition is structured and simple, it is also supremely elegant—much like Armani’s couture.
While Cruise et al posed for fashion media, Tom Hanks was busy behind a camera wielded by Ron Howard, taking up the role of Robert Langdon again in Dan Brown’s Inferno. Set for a December 2015 release, the new movie finds Langdon (who first appeared in The Da Vinci Code) in a Florence hospital suffering from short-term amnesia—although it’s not long before the fictional Harvard professor is drawn in to a mystery surrounding Dante Alighieri’s poetic masterwork The Inferno. First photos from the canals of Venice include beaming co-stars Hanks and Felicity Jones, as well as a grinning director Howard.
By Kathy McCabe
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