Tomi Adeyemi is in her defiant era. While her fans have sent each release of her Orisha trilogy to the top of bestseller lists, the author went viral like never before when she posted a TikTok in July, publicly severing ties with the forthcoming Children of Blood and Bone adaptation. Months earlier, she also challenged book industry conventions when she revealed the divisive cover for her new novel, The Siren, featuring a photo of her face. Adeyemi sees the choice as a way of looking directly at the reader with a message: "I dare you not to see me this time."

"It’s fitting,” Adeyemi tells Marie Claire over Zoom, ahead of The Siren’s September 29th release. “My first work started with me wanting to see myself in the story. Now I’m literally right there. We're not even illustrated at this point.”

The author sees the choice less as main-character energy and more as an act of reclamation. Since 2018, Adeyemi’s Orisha trilogy has sold over 3 million copies worldwide and created a cultural phenomenon that opened the door for other Black female writers to find success in YA fantasy. But the author explains that becoming a near-overnight literary success at 23 also left her wrestling with fame, public scrutiny, and how depersonalizing it can be to feel like little more than a symbol after breaking the concrete ceiling.

It’s not just the cover of The Siren that makes a statement. The campus-set thriller—Adeyemi’s first contemporary novel and first standalone—puts a feral woman of color in the typically white genre of dark academia. It centers on Emery, a Black girl from Detroit hoping to reinvent herself during her freshman year at Dartmouth. Emery struggles to see herself thriving in a world of keggers and bids until she encounters the Sirens, a magnetic self-made sorority that promises true transformation, if you can survive the sacrifice.

“I put almost everything I used to be in this work,” says Adeyemi, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs before graduating from Harvard. While the book’s moonlit, psychedelic rituals are pure fiction, she likens crafting Emery's journey to her own—rejecting the box she’s been placed in and embracing her boundless self.

“You cannot erase me this time,” she declares. “ You cannot expand this to represent the plight of all people. If [Orisha] was for all, this was for one.”

Below, Adeyemi chats with Marie Claire about taking inspiration from the “rich teen” subgenre, the importance of autonomy, and whether we can expect to see The Siren on the big screen.

Marie Claire: What inspired you to pivot to dark academia? Are there any books from that genre that you thought of while writing The Siren?

Tomi Adeyemi: It's funny because if I think of dark academia, I don't really think of anything that's come out in the last 10 to 15 years. I think about more of that Gossip Girl, Private era of books: A new girl goes to a boarding school, and suddenly she's brought into this new world. I do like to go back to the stories that I loved when I was younger. I find there's something untouched about it [that’s lost] once you become a part of the world. When you go from reading 19 Minutes borrowed from your seventh-grade best friend's bookshelf to sitting with Jodi Picoult at BookCon and being like, Whoa, how did this happen? So it's really freeing for me to go back to those works, and I find they still really hit. I love joining someone as they step into a new world and decide that they might want a part in it. Because they come from a different grit, there's something underestimated and raw, and quite beautiful.

MC: Do you hope that this book will maybe help bring back that vein of dark academia YA, versus what it has become?

TA: Jean Feiwel is the head publisher at my imprint. She worked on The Babysitters Club and Goosebumps. She is a titan in this industry. Something she helped me understand is, when I did my first work, I actually changed things. When I go into a Barnes & Noble, the dream used to be to see someone like me. Now there's a whole shelf.

If I was going to hope for anything [with The Siren], it would be for us to no longer be asking for seats at tables or asking to be on screens, but just asking for authentic, raw, full, complex individuation. To me, true progress would be the next time someone's called “the next Tomi Adeyemi,” she doesn't feel the need to carry the weight of her people. She just carries the weight of who she is. It's meaningful to me that both my fiction and my reality can allow us and those who look like us to be free to be us in a world that taught us we weren't allowed to.

MC: The Siren touches on serious topics regarding mental health and abuse. How did you prepare yourself to write about those issues?

TA: I don't think it was about preparation as something external. It was more about how deeply I feel. [My preparation] was about taking a screenshot of the pain, and how it’s carved in the crevices. It's almost like it becomes a geological formation, and then that's what you bring to the page. I think I have evolved as a creator and evolved in my craft. The compass with which I navigate a new story has always been what I'm feeling. So—as opposed to painting while I'm in the midst of feeling all these things—it's like a snapshot, and now we're going to bring that up.

I know it's very simple for people to be like, ‘Yes, this is a book that touches on mental health.’ I think it touches on pain. We all know pain so intrinsically, and so specifically. Anyone who was going to paint a picture of their pain, it would not look like anything else, because none of us process the same way. It was more like an excavation of what it feels like to be in that deep of sorrow. That's traveled across all the characters, when we learn the backstories of even the ones we thought were just glamorous and perfect, and you're like, Oh, you've been through that? Because that's always what it is when you learn what someone's been through. You're always like, ‘What? But you seem so fine.’ And they're like, ‘Well, am I supposed to seem something different? I still have to get up the next day.’ I think there's something beautiful about rediscovering who you can be after pain.

MC: How would you describe Emory’s journey throughout the book?

TA: We're all born into a really rigid sense of who we're meant to be, and it almost doesn't leave room for you to actually [explore]. What does it feel like when my lungs actually expand and contract? Who am I? Those big questions. I think the story is about taking an active role, because we all know what it is to go through something internally or externally and then change because you're forced to. I think it's something else to be like, Actually, I want to start spinning some of this thread. I want to be a part of my own fate, and what's possible if I start touching the loom?

If you think about what someone can take away from that story, it’s the idea that, Okay, I might not want to be a siren, but do I want to be a mystic? Do I want to make room for my intuition? Do I want to embrace my ambition? Do I want to create who I am, not just be who I thought I was supposed to be?

MC: Are you open to The Siren, or any other of your future works, being adapted into a show or movie?

TA: No. I think it's really valuable to do things. Something I am routinely brought to is the fact that, Whoa, you made it. You're 33-years-old. You had 2,012 dreams, and you actually achieved all of them. I am so grateful to have experienced everything I have ever dreamed of. My childhood energy was like the Tasmanian Devil of Dreams, and I followed it. Once you have those experiences, whether they're the best things ever or you're like, Wow, this was awful, you still have yourself at the end of it, but you also don't have these dreams and what-ifs. I don't think I would've felt okay to not see what I embarked on to its conclusion. That would've made it difficult to carry forth and feel like every new day has exciting, infinite possibilities. So I'm proud of it—but in terms of doing it again, I don't really care. That's not where the joy is for me. The joy is in that beautiful internal space where only you know about this world. It's not all the logistics and the coordination. When you bring it all to fruition, and suddenly you're on sets with 400 people, I find that overwhelming. So I asked myself, If you're not doing this for you, why would you do it? And if you don't enjoy the process, what would be the point?

When I started writing years ago, I was so obsessed with the fantastical. Now that I'm at some form of a conclusion, I don't understand what happens next, but I don't need to understand. I can feel peace that has come from going through the journey with all four of my books, from having this insane vision and seeing it through to the end. I'm in awe of myself. It doesn't really matter if I loved it, if it went well, if it didn't. I did what I dreamed of doing. The most mystical thing to me now isn't that you could have a big celebrity embody a character. It's more that I can ask life for what I want, and I can undergo the trials, hardship, and triumph to actually manifest it into the three-dimensional reality.

MC: The book does seem like a declaration of agency in a way.

TA: I don't know why anyone would work this hard if not to leave the journey with agency. I think the process of becoming who you actually are is something that you need years to grow into. Some of us are blessed to know that really early. Shout out to my Capricorn suns. I meet 16-year-olds who are like, 'Well, here's my book, and yes, I accept Venmo, PayPal.' And I'm like, 'Girl, you got it. I love that.' For others of us, if we're given the time and space, and if we're courageous enough to consistently be like, What do you need? What do you want? What do you desire? What do you want a morning to look like and feel like?

I think after you’ve done all the things, you've also earned the right to be who you want to be and live how you want to live. As someone who has worked insanely hard for 14 years on everything, I'm enjoying the stillness. It's really satisfying to finally feel like you can chill and you're not carrying a huge mission or a goal. There's a gentleness that I'm finally being able to experience, and I'm obsessed with it, and I'm excited that it will grow exponentially. If I do decide, Hey, maybe you do want to write a series like Private, that's beautiful, but it can come from a really still, gentle place. It doesn't have to come from the Tasmanian Devil of Dreams. She did a lot. I'm proud of her, but I'm more excited to be who I am after all of that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Megan Thee Stallion is disappointed she couldn't put out an album in time for another hot girl summer—but Act III will be worth the wait.

For Marie Claire's September 2026 Legends Issue, the icon talks to writer Brittany Spanos about her upcoming album and what the hotties—a.k.a. her loyal fans—can expect. "I do make music that reflects the way I feel," she says. "But I could be having a terrible, terrible, terrible day, and then I would go write something like 'Freak Nasty' just because I feel inspired to go write something hard. So in my new album, I feel like I went through all the feelings."

Whatever the final result, Megan made the album without the haters in mind. "I’m not fighting for validation," she says. "I just had to learn, when somebody makes their mind up about you, that’s what it is. I feel like I was able to be a little more free in making music and making decisions because I feel like, for a long point in life, I was definitely trying to make people like me."

With that said, she has listened to one piece of criticism: the oft-leveled accusation that all her songs sound too similar.

"I think I have such a distinct voice, such a distinct sound, such a distinct accent," she tells Marie Claire. "I feel like sometimes people are interpreting it as 'She sounds the same on all her songs.'"

For Act III, she made some changes accordingly. "It was a little bit out of my comfort zone to try my voice in a different way or over a different kind of beat," she says. "I was a little shy this go-round, but everybody has been so supportive in hyping me up. I feel like the hotties are gonna appreciate this."

Megan Thee Stallion was a week into her run as Zidler in Moulin Rouge on Broadway when she was rushed to the hospital.

"I didn’t want to let anyone down," the rapper tells Brittany Spanos for Marie Claire's September 2026 Legends Issue.

But Megan was overextending herself: In addition to performing in eight shows a week, she was still working on her music career. In hindsight, she says, she wasn't eating properly, nor drinking enough water.

"She was burning the candle at both ends," her castmate and friend Kelsie Watts tells Marie Claire. "If she wasn’t in rehearsals, then she was going to work on her album, or she was going to do press or a photo shoot. A lot of people don’t realize, eight shows a week is just different. Until you do it, you can’t describe it, but it’s really freaking hard, and I think she was just exhausted."

Describing the incident that led to her being rushed from the theater to the hospital, the rapper says, "I thought I was having a stroke. I wasn’t getting any oxygen to my brain, so my hands had froze. My face had froze. I was trying to tell everybody that I don’t think I’m okay. They only thought I was dehydrated."

Of her mindset before Moulin Rouge started, the "Hot Girl Summer" singer says, "I don’t think I was aware of how much I was going to be putting my body through."

When she got to the hospital, she was told she was suffering from exhaustion and having a panic attack. She returned to the stage two days afterwards, cut her schedule down to seven shows a week, and stopped doing so much for her music on top of the show.

These days, the star is doing her best to take good care of herself. "I’m definitely trying to stay more hydrated and be more calm," she says.

Megan Thee Stallion knows her fans are growing impatient. So is she. While I wait for her at New York’s Ludlow House on a perfect July Sunday, she’s on X, assuring the hotties—her fiercely loyal fan base—that Act III is coming soon. “I really appreciate how passionate they are, and it makes me feel good knowing that I have a fan base that cares about rap as much as I do,” she says when she arrives. “They’re very serious about my career.”

She’d wanted to give them another Hot Girl Summer. Instead, she spent much of the season in Miami with her producers, recording and rewriting until the album felt right. “I was very sad because I came to the realization that I was not gonna drop a summer album,” she says. “I wanted to take my time and record and really write and figure it out.”

We’re seated at two tables in front of the curtained screen of Ludlow House’s otherwise empty private cinema. Her bodyguard is just down the hall, eating lunch at a table facing the open door of the theater; her publicist and a patient waiter hover nearby. “I feel like I’m happy about this album, even though it didn’t come [out] in the summertime. But that’s okay, because it’s Tina Snow,” she adds, referring to her Pimp C– inspired alter ego.

The album is one reason she’s in New York this weekend. She’s here to put the finishing touches on it, with hopes of releasing it soon. But all that work should also come with a little bit of fun: She spent the previous two nights in the Bronx, attending Jay-Z’s Yankee Stadium shows. The second night turned into a bit of a rager for Meg, who didn’t get back to her hotel until dawn.

“When I go out, I have to make it a movie because I barely get the chance
to go out,” she says. After the show, she ended up at a comedy club with her friends (“I was like, ‘Wow, this what y’all are saying in the New York comedy club?’ They better not put that on social media!”). “New York is giving Alice in Wonderland,” she says of the nightlife scene. “You could end up going through a washing machine and end up in a club.”

Looking at the glammed-up rapper, you couldn’t tell that her weekend plans had led her down a late-night rabbit hole. Her makeup is flawless as ever, with a glowy matte finish. Her cropped gray T-shirt bears the word LUXURY, displayed like a baseball-team logo, revealing her enviable abs. She pairs it with a Yankees cap, ripped skinny jeans, a chrome Louis Vuitton monogram bag, and a pair of strappy heels that add several inches to her 5’10” frame. She looks like she’s ready for another night out, but all she really wants is lunch.

“I’m hungry,” she says, the first real tell of the night before. She’s low-energy but not disengaged, ordering a grapefruit juice for herself and spinach artichoke dip for us to share.

Given the year Megan has had, a late night followed by a quiet recovery lunch feels well-earned. Her career hit a massive turning point this year as she expanded her brand and name outside of rap. She’s been exploring her creative side, making her Broadway debut as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical and appearing as Daniel Radcliffe’s love interest, a divorced mail carrier named Denise, on the NBC series The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. She even took a role in the Adam Sandler–produced Netflix film Roommates, as a prisoner named Louise. And beyond entertainment, the business of being a hot girl never stops. She opened her first Popeyes franchise in Miami’s South Beach at the start of the year and launched a Hot Girl Summer perfume.

For all that expansion, though, music remains a nonnegotiable. “I don’t ever see a world in which I [leave] music or let music be the backseat to anything I do,” the 31-year-old says, in case her fans were worried that the Act III delay meant she was pivoting away from it. “I don’t want to ever be just a product or an artist that doesn’t feel relatable. I am a person at the end of the day. I want to resonate with people. I feel like that’s how you have longevity, when you really connect with your audience.”

After a year in which the demands of being Megan Thee Stallion have repeatedly collided with the needs of the person underneath, that distinction feels like a necessity. Both Megan’s health and love life took massive hits this year, and she’s just starting to piece them all together again. “No matter what’s going on, I always pick myself up and go, ‘Girl, hot-girl shit,’" she says. And she doesn’t wish away those parts either. “I was supposed to learn. I was supposed to grow. I was supposed to do all the things, from my best moments and my worst moments,” she says. “I was supposed to go through that, learn from it, and survive it. It’s hard sometimes to get up and keep going, but I have to.” Clearly, she has.

This spring, Megan was in New York for what was scheduled to be an eight-week run as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. The show's emcee doubles as the owner of the titular club, and Megan was the first female-identifying actor to play the role. It was an honor for the theater fan, who had dabbled in performing back in college. “It was one of the best experiences, as a performer, in my life,” she says, adding that she had been nervous going into it. She knows how to perform as Megan Thee Stallion every day, on tour and off—but in this role, she needed to be prepared to slip into another character eight times a week.

“I don’t think I was aware of how much I was going to be putting my body through,” she admits. When she’s in Stallion mode, she’s already pretty strict with herself. She’s never late for her shows and always tries to do everything— recording, touring, visuals—to the best of her abilities. But Broadway was a whole new experience. Megan was working alongside a cast and crew who had been putting on this show for years, and for the first time, she was just one part of a much larger machine. “These people are working hard, like anybody in theater,” she says. “They’re working all week except for Mondays. I know they tired. Like, when I walked in that bitch, I be tired. And they be so happy and just upbeat. I stopped complaining.”

Kelsie Watts, who played Satine in the production, remembers having multiple conversations with Megan during rehearsals and the first week of their run together about how overwhelmed the Grammy winner was. “She was burning the candle at both ends,” Watts says. “If she wasn’t in rehearsals, then she was going to work on her album, or she was going to do press or a photo shoot. A lot of people don’t realize, eight shows a week is just different. Until you do it, you can’t describe it, but it’s really freaking hard, and I think she was just exhausted.”

Megan gave her first performance in Moulin Rouge! on March 24 to an audience full of her passionate hotties who had traveled far and wide to see her debut. She was ecstatic, moved, and already growing close with the cast. But the pressure and stress were beginning to take their toll on her physically. During her March 31 performance, just one week into her run, she was rushed to the hospital.

“I didn’t want to let anyone down,” she says. Her eyes have begun welling up, and she dabs them carefully with a napkin as she recalls the incident. At the time, Megan was aware of how depleted she had become. In spite of the demands of the musical, she hadn’t been eating properly and was dehydrated. She admits she had been showing up to the job every day “a little bit mentally not okay.”

“I thought I was having a stroke,” she says. “I wasn’t getting any oxygen to my brain, so my hands had froze. My face had froze. I was trying to tell everybody that I don’t think I’m okay. They only thought I was dehydrated.”

Watts remembers observing how different Megan looked at the beginning of that performance. “The very first time that we interact is after the song ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ and we come out onto what’s called the passerelle. It’s right next to the front row, and we have this little interaction scene with each other. I looked at her, and she had barely any color in her face, was shaking, was sweating, and I was like, ‘This is not normal,’ especially for her and for someone who does work as hard as she does and wants to push through. When I got offstage, I was like, ‘Something’s gonna happen. She’s not okay.’”

The production paused for about 20 minutes. Watts recalls how much convincing it took to get Megan, who wanted to keep performing, to go to the hospital. “She wanted to keep doing the show because she knew that so many hotties were there and so many people were excited to see her, but she had to [go],” Watts says. At the hospital, Megan was exhausted and having a panic attack.

But for someone whose body had just forced her to stop, Megan didn’t stay stopped for long. She was back onstage just two days later and stayed with the show for another month before ending her run two weeks early on May 1. Within months, she was back in the studio.

“I’m definitely trying to stay more hydrated and be more calm,” she says when I ask her how she’s been taking care of herself since. Watts saw some of those changes firsthand: Megan cut her schedule from eight shows a week to seven and stopped packing her days with work outside the theater. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, when Moulin Rouge! puts on two shows a day, Megan and Watts would spend some downtime together between performances, then grab low-key dinners together after the shows.

“It was like a little bit of a better balance instead of her trying to put so much into one day and so much on her plate,” Watts says.

After taking some time to settle back into being Megan Thee Stallion rather than Zidler, she was able to return to the role on very different terms. In June, just over a month after leaving the show, she reprised the character at the Tony Awards, alongside host P!nk. “It was amazing,” she says. “I was so happy.”

But Broadway wasn’t the only thing weighing on Megan that spring. In late April, before announcing her early departure from Moulin Rouge!, Megan took to her Instagram story to announce that she and her then-boyfriend, Dallas Mavericks star Klay Thompson, had ended their relationship.

On Instagram, she accused Thompson of cheating, getting “cold feet” and having “HORRIBLE mood swings” during the basketball season, all while he had her “playing house” with his entire family. She further indicated that Thompson had claimed to her that monogamy might not be for him. In a later statement, she said, “Trust, fidelity and respect are non-negotiable for me in a relationship, and when those values are compromised, there’s no real path forward. I’m taking this time to prioritize myself and move ahead with peace and clarity.”

The pair had gone public with their relationship in 2025 and let the world in on what felt like a romantic fantasy. They posted joint workout videos and pictures of large dinners with Thompson’s family, including meals Megan appeared to have cooked for the entire clan. Last October, she had hinted at the two moving in together, sharing a photo of their two hands forming a heart and holding a set of keys in front of a home.

When I ask how she is thinking about love at this point in her life, she takes a long pause. “I’m not thinking about anything romantic,” she says after ordering more water. “I’m definitely not thinking about no damn relationship.”

It’s clear the subject is still tender. The typically extroverted, bawdy star is quiet, careful, and, again, trying to stave off tears as she speaks. She says she has been letting herself feel it rather than trying to rush past the heartbreak. “I’m not pretending I’m 100 percent okay,” she says. “I ain’t never been through nothing like that in my whole life. I’ve never, ever, ever been in a relationship like that, ever. So I’m definitely not worried about another one for a long time.”

She is still grieving the loss of the future she thought she had found, she adds. “It was so abrupt. I’m in shock still.” But from where she is now, Megan believes she’s better off on her own—and shies away from further details on what transpired.

“When something is meant for you, it’s gonna be easy,” she says. “It’s gonna be right. It’s not gonna feel like a panic all the time. I feel like that’s what I was in, constantly on edge. My nervous system needed to calm down. I feel like I was in a panic 24/7. I’m still not eating all the way right. I’m feeling all the feelings. I’m not trying to take no shortcuts.”

The breakup, she says, was also a reminder to trust her intuition. “Sometimes I be knowing in my gut and in my heart, then you give so much benefit of the doubt,” she says. “No, the gut is always right. Listen.”

We start discussing the onslaught of hard lessons we’ve both experienced in our early 30s, the realization that making it through the messiness of your 20s does not exempt you from entirely new messes. She had spent so much of her life begging God for signs that someone was right for her. At this point, she’s over it. “No more signs,” she laughs. “Send us an email. Call, please! They never, ever stop. Sorry I asked. I ain’t asking for shit right now.”

This year had plenty of hard lessons, but they all taught Megan that she can—and should—take back control of her life. She’s more conscious of how she spends her days: focusing on one job at a time, making art with people she trusts, spending time with people who make her feel safe, and limiting external noise and critique. The only social media apps she has on her phone these days are Pinterest and TikTok. (She only got access to her X account by borrowing her social media manager’s phone earlier in the day.) “I’m not looking at anything anybody is saying, because I would be in my feelings all day,” she says.

“Anything you create, you feel sensitive about. If somebody don’t compliment your food, you’re gonna be upset about that. If you put on an outfit you really put thought into and somebody has something to say, you’ll be like, ‘Damn, I thought my shit was fire.’ I had to realize one of the things that makes me sensitive is social media.”

She’s carefully curated a TikTok algorithm that maintains her peace. Her For You page serves up videos on aliens, the ocean, Frenchies, Dobermans, and mukbangs. She’s big on BookTok too, and she consumes murder mysteries and thrillers on her phone, every free moment she has. “I really love reading, and I’m trying to figure out what I can do in that space,” she says, mulling a book club or a Kindle partnership. “I want to engage the hotties in reading.”

She pulls out her phone, secured inside a teddy-bear-shaped case, to list off her recent favorites: Nita Prose’s The Maid, Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister, anything by Ruth Ware. After picking up One of Us Is Dead, she dove into all of author Jeneva Rose’s work.

“If she is making a movie, please put me in it. Because whatever I gotta do to be a part of that...” Megan says. “That book was so good. I could finish a book in probably like two days. I’m staying through it, top to bottom all day, through glam, through a shoot, on a break, on a plane. I’m finishing the book. That was a good book. Jenny ate that.”

Megan was an early Colleen Hoover fan too but is so offline that she didn’t realize how popular the author’s books had become until the drama around the 2024 film adaptation of It Ends With Us blew up. “I had nobody to talk about it with because none of my friends read these kinds of books,” she says. “I’m keeping up with the movie and the drama. It was tea for me.” Even celebrities escape through other celebrities’ drama.

Her friends may not share her taste in books, but they have been a constant for Megan through a difficult year. As she talks about her chosen family, her face lights up. She does everything with her hairstylist Kellon Deryck. “As soon as I met him, I feel like we just connected instantly, barely any words,” she says. “He read my mind, and I feel like I was reading his.” She considers her manager T. Farris to be family. “He’s like my brother,” she says. “That’s not even a friend, that’s family. After my mama passed, he took me in, and he’s been with me ever since.” Then there’s Jayla, her best friend since college, whom she met back in Houston in 2013. Though Jayla now lives in Dallas, Megan still sees her as a steady, reliable “ride or die.”

With them, she rarely has to ask for support. “When I’m having a bad day, I damn near forget I’m having a bad day because they’re just there, and it just takes my mind off of it immediately,” she adds. That circle has grown alongside her newer creative pursuits, including Watts, who bonded with Megan over their Texas roots while working together on Broadway. The two have kept in touch all summer.

“She FaceTimed me while I was in a show the other day,” Watts says. “Conveniently, it was during intermission. We talked the whole intermission.” On the call, Megan invited her out to Miami to work on a song together after Moulin Rouge! closes in August. “She’s an international superstar. I didn’t expect to make a friend,” Watts adds, noting that Megan had already made plans to come to the closing party for the show. “She is just 100 percent a girl’s girl. What you see is what you get. She’s real. She’s honest. She’s a really hard worker. She’s fun. She’s kind and loving and energetic. She really is what you would want in a friend.”

Megan clearly knows how to find the right work families. She gushes about the entire cast of Reggie Dinkins, especially her primary scene partner, Radcliffe. “I was on that set, calling that man Harry Potter all day,” she exclaims. He clearly took it in stride. “Daniel made me feel so, so, so comfortable. We were literally talking and joking the whole time. I think that’s why the chemistry was so good.”

“We were honestly so lucky to get Megan to be on the show,” Radcliffe says. “Normally, it takes a few seasons for people as famous as she is to guest-star. But Megan dived in and was totally game, from the first moment she stepped on set. She’s a total pro, a delight to work with, and really fucking funny.” Megan had such a good time on set that she’s hoping they call her back for season two. “They have to,” she says. “They did not give my girl enough time. That love story needs to develop.”

Work has pushed Megan hard this year, but the studio also remains a place where she can make sense of what she’s going through—or simply find some relief from it. She unleashes everything through her music, either by explicitly detailing what she is going through in her lyrics or by making songs that allow her to escape in the moment. “I do make music that reflects the way I feel,” she explains. “But I could be having a terrible, terrible, terrible day, and then I would go write something like ‘Freak Nasty’ just because I feel inspired to go write something hard. So in my new album, I feel like I went through all the feelings.”

We barely make a dent in the spinach-artichoke dip before we have to clear out for a screening in the cinema. We move to a small table in the room where her bodyguard had been stationed. “I have the [same] ring,” she says, noticing the giant pink bauble I got from Mondo Mondo now that we’re sitting closer. “The girls don’t have that. They don’t know.”

Once we’re settled, the conversation turns back to Act III. Megan makes it clear there is still a lot left she wants to prove to herself. She says she stopped caring about making people like her after releasing her album Traumazine. “I’m not fighting for validation,” she says. She thinks back to being young, still discovering her voice, and being genuinely unconcerned with what anyone thought. Fame complicated that. At some point, she says, keeping the career she had built began to feel tangled up with keeping everyone on her side. “I just had to learn, when somebody makes their mind up about you, that’s what it is,” she says. “I feel like I was able to be a little more free in making music and making decisions because I feel like, for a long point in life, I was definitely trying to make people like me.”

Working with many of the same people from her recent projects has given her enough familiarity to experiment, and one piece of outside criticism has given that experimentation a target: the claim that every Megan Thee Stallion song has the same flow. “I think I have such a distinct voice, such a distinct sound, such a distinct accent. I feel like sometimes people are interpreting it as ‘She sounds the same on all her songs.’”

For the record, Megan would push back on that characterization; she believes she switches up both her flow and style plenty. But she has started wondering whether her “thick-ass accent” makes those differences harder to hear, so this time around, she began stretching her voice in new directions. “It was a little bit out of my comfort zone to try my voice in a different way or over a different kind of beat,” she says. “I was a little shy this go-round, but everybody has been so supportive in hyping me up. I feel like the hotties are gonna appreciate this.”

If Act III is where Megan has gone “through all the feelings,” she doesn’t seem interested in making the result sound solemn. In a June preview of a new song, she rapped, “All that wifey shit is dead/Put that shit to bed.” For Megan, all that healing leaves even more room for hot-girl shit. “It’s always hot-girl shit,” she confirms, with a big, bright smile. She remains coy about the sound but not the attitude; any longtime listener knows that when Megan says it’s time for hot-girl shit, it means that good vibes are coming. “No matter what’s going on, I definitely always pick myself up,” she assures.

Megan’s learning how to move forward without pretending everything is behind her. Act III, it turns out, is being made from somewhere in the middle.

Stylist Dione Davis | Hairstylist Kellon Deryck | Makeup artist Priscilla Ono | Manicurist Jay | Set designer WayOut Studio

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

The unspoken contract of being a Black woman on reality TV usually goes something like this: Be yourself but not too much. For a handful of Black women occupying space on the predominantly white shows of Bravo TV, the feeling of having to shrink is commonplace—some might even say it’s their job. While they may carry it with grace, seemingly meshing well with friend groups and doing so with a smile most of the time, those of us who understand the complexities of being Black women know there is always more happening beneath the surface.

For me, that awareness came early. I was 5 years old and one of only two Black girls in my kindergarten class when I first realized what it meant to be seen as different. And while at the time I couldn’t have begun to comprehend what that feeling of incongruousness would mean for the rest of my life, it was palpable.

To understand the experience of having that feeling play out for millions of viewers every week, I sat down with four of Bravo’s most prominent Black cast members on a late June afternoon in Brooklyn: Lake Rucker of Southern Hospitality, Jasmine Goode of The Valley, Venita Aspen of Southern Charm, and Mia Calabrese of Summer House. Together, we unpacked what it means to exist so publicly in a universe that rarely includes or uplifts Black women. For the first time ever, they said out loud what they’ve only ever said in private.

Marie Claire: Do you feel like you’ve been given the space to be messy, angry, vulnerable, all of it, on reality TV?

Mia Calabrese: I mean, we can do it, but we just know the backlash is going to be very different than our white counterparts.

Venita Aspen: At the end of the day, the backlash doesn’t feel worth it. You know, you sit with that for however long the show’s on. So say it’s like three months—every week for the next three months, someone’s going to tell you that you shouldn’t act like that. “You acted like this” or “You’re looking bad for the community” or “Of course the Black girl’s acting like this; of course the Black girl’s angry.”

Jasmine Goode: The other cast members, they’re allowed to act that way. They can act up, get loud, do this and that—everyone will still listen to them. But the moment I show some emotion, it’s looked at like, “Oh, you’re doing too much. You need to calm down.” That’s frustrating.

Lake Rucker: Growing up, especially growing up in the South, my parents always taught me that I have to work 10 times as hard as the white people around me because I went to PWIs [predominantly white institutions]. So it was always hard, having to navigate that. Not being able to fully express my emotions because you’re either deemed as aggressive or overly emotional, and sometimes you just want to be vulnerable and be yourself.

MC: How have you all been received by the Black community as Black women on these predominantly white shows?

JG: I’ve been getting a lot of “Get new friends, you don’t need to be on this show.” And it’s like, But this is literally my life. I’ve been in this friend group. These are my friends; I can’t leave my friends because you think I need to have only Black friends. So I’m getting some support, but then it’s these people always saying, “Why are you in this group? This is your fault, you did it to yourself.”

VA: Or like when you post a picture with them and they’re always like, “Oh my God, do you not have Black friends?”

MC: Lake, your mom’s advice about not involving non-Black people in Black people’s business went viral this season. Do you wish you’d listened sooner?

LR: Oh, 100 percent. I love my mom’s advice, that’s why I speak to her about it. She’s always giving me the best advice with counseling me, being there for me, helping me be the amazing woman that she is raising me to be. I feel like I made so many mistakes this past season, but I’m also growing and learning. I joined this business when I was 21 years old. I’m 23, and I’m allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. Going back to the Black community, responding back to those mistakes, it’s been a struggle because seeing the feedback and the backlash from this past season, it’s been kind of hurtful. But, you know, it’s only making me stronger and want to learn from those mistakes and come out on top.

MC: Do you feel pressure to defend your castmates when they say something that the Black community takes issue with?

VA: They make it very hard not to see it. And when it’s happening, like when the whole Emmy [Sharrett], Leva [Bonaparte], Brad [Carter] situation was happening, the amount of messages I received on Threads being like, “You should speak up, you should say this, you should say that.” And at the end of the day, do I have my thoughts? Yes. But I’m not going to put myself in a crossfire when I’m not the main one in it. Why do I have to do it? Why can’t Madison [LeCroy] speak up about it? Madison and Leva are also friends. Why can’t Austen [Kroll] speak up? Why can’t anyone else do it? Why does it have to be me?

LR: I had several conversations with Emmy, telling her that what she said was wrong. I made it very clear to her my feelings on it, and I made it clear to Brad. I made it clear to Leva as well. Leva is a very strong businesswoman, and she can hold her own. And when it comes to Emmy, it was just very disheartening to see how long it took her to realize what she had done was wrong. As someone who has viewed her as my closest friend on the cast, when your closest friends are Black, it’s kind of like, Well, how do you see me if you saw Brad this way?

MC: Mia, you were called aggressive at the Summer House reunion. What was that like?

MC: Yes, after the reunion, someone called me aggressive. I won’t say his name. But I was asking maybe uncomfortable questions, direct questions. But being direct, does it make someone aggressive? That makes me sure of myself. We cannot confuse those two. It’s okay to ask hard questions, because those questions need to be asked and answered.

JG: The fact that you were even called that is crazy to me, because I feel like other people on your cast have been reckless and no one’s ever calling them aggressive.

MC: Even when we’re looking at the reunion, I typically don’t raise my voice, and there’s not an aggressive bone in my body. I’m not aggressive. It was actually like one of the first times I’ve been called that, and, of course, it’s by a white man. I found that fascinating because I’m watching this and I’m like, Okay, well, let me watch this back. And I’m watching my white friends onstage, who to me were a lot more aggressive than I was, and those words never came out of his mouth about them.

MC: In which ways have you all censored yourself for the show?

VA: I kept myself kind of cookie-cutter, in a box. I had to be the perfect Black girl, if you will. But even Mia knows, I cut up. I think that this is the first year I’m allowing myself to fully be who I am and not care what my castmates have to say about it on the other end of it, when they see it back in a few months. I can’t worry about how they feel because it is true, I haven’t been fully myself. And now I’m just like, you either like it or not, take it or leave it.

JG: I’ve always been tiptoeing and being careful with what I say around the group. Sometimes I’m worried they’re going to perceive me this way if I say something, so it’s like, Okay, don’t act that way, Jasmine, because the world is going to look at you crazy. So it’s been a struggle. Hopefully one day, I’ll get there, where I don’t give a shit. I think I’m starting to get there slowly. Like, this season, I’m starting to have those tough conversations and letting people know, “Look, this is how I’m feeling.” But in the beginning, it was really hard to be my true self. I was always nervous that somebody was going to be judging me.

VA: They’ll judge us regardless.

MC: It’s also kind of like a push and pull constantly, being a Black woman. It’s like, how far can I really go without being called aggressive? It’s like, how far can I push this?

JG: And then you see other cast members doing something, and I’m like, I act that way too, right? Because they’re doing it. But I’m like, No, you can’t do it. It’s not the same for you.

MC: What has your experience of dating on TV been like as Black women— and, for Jasmine and Lake, queer women?

LR: You know, I’m Gen Z so it’s a lot more lax when it comes to sexuality, fluidity, and dating outside of your race. But I’ve always just dated who I vibe with.

JG: Me and Melissa, we were dating before the show even was a thing. So it’s like, yeah, this is my relationship. We live in L.A., thank God, in a state that’s accepting. So I think it’s been great that we can show representation.

VA: I think I’m in a place in my life where I truly don’t care about what people think, because who I fall in love with doesn’t have shit to do with you. When I’m dating somebody, that’s who I’m with. My mom never raised me to be like, “Oh, you can only take one type of man.”

MC: My relationship was not typical, right? We were in a long-distance relationship. In the beginning, it worked—until it didn’t. People were like, “You should do this.” And I hear everything you’re saying, but I care about how someone treats me. Are you kind to me? Are you respectful to me? Do you listen to me? It’s not the perfect relationship; whose relationship is perfect? But if the foundation is there, that’s what matters to me. I think that’s not always shown, Summer House is not a show about my romantic life. So that part was not shown. I was getting a lot of blowback about that, and while everyone’s entitled to their opinion, it doesn’t mean I have to listen to it.

MC: Do you think reality TV has a problem with not addressing racially charged moments when they happen?

MC: Yes, and I also think we don’t always know how to have those conversations with our white counterparts. Like, we can sit here right now and have this conversation for hours and hours and hours and hours. But if this was a mixed group, I don’t know. Would we be able to have the conversation so comfortably? And also, would they be receptive towards it? When we had our conversation, me, KJ, and Ciara, last summer, what I took from that was, Wow, they sat there and listened to us. Nobody was interrupting. Nobody was saying, “Well, it’s actually not like that.” Which, in my past when I’ve tried to have those conversations with white friends, that’s kind of where the conversation goes.

JG: And like you said, I think especially for me this season, the fact that they’re airing the tough conversations I’m having with my friends is, like, a big deal for me. I’m like, Thank you, because that’s what I want. I feel like a lot of my cast members love everything being out there and open. I think that’s really big. And you know, it’s hard.

MC: Would you say it’s worth it, being a Black woman on Bravo?

JG: I think we talked about that last night—about how, with all the struggles and the things that we deal with, the trolls and comments, it’s still worth it.

MC: It’s also representation. It is so important for little kids or young women or young men, whomever, to look at what we’re doing and say, “That person looks like me, that person has gone through similar life experiences that I’ve gone through.” And that, to me, makes it all worth it. I get a percentage of viewers that don’t like me, but the larger percentage that does, that sees me, that’s what matters.

MC: What have you learned about yourself through this journey?

MC: When I was given this opportunity, I said I wanted to be 100 percent myself, no matter what that looked like. My lesson is that I just have to continue to be me. And if people don’t like you, that’s okay, but at least you’re being true to yourself.

VA: The greatest lesson I’ve learned about myself is that even on my worst days, I’m still showing up better than my counterparts.

LR: I feel like I’m learning a lesson every single day; I feel like I’m growing every single day. I’m so young, and I have so much more life and lessons to live. But what I tell myself every day is, It’s okay.

JG: I’m so proud of all of us. I think being a Black woman on TV is hard. I’ve been on a couple shows. It’s not easy. So I’m just proud of all of us being proud of ourselves.

Stylist Cassy Meier | Goode's hairstylist Anari LaBoard | Goode's makeup artist Billie Gene | Rucker's hairstylist Nika Pearl-Edwards | Rucker's makeup artist Renee Garnes | Calabrese's hairstylist Ester Rojas | Calabrese's makeup artist Renee Sanganoo | Aspen's hairstylist Karen Miller | Aspen's makeup artist Brittany Whitfield

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

Bassam Tariq's action-drama Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is led by a cast of legends, including Mahershala Ali, John Cho, and Giancarlo Esposito. But its true scene-stealer—and the heart of the film—is newcomer Adia. In between scenes of brutal violence and conflict, she grounds the film with her tender examination of a girlhood interrupted by grief.

You’d never know that Adia stumbled into acting. The 25-year-old turned to the craft when she found herself at a crossroads and depressed after a hip injury derailed her plans to become a professional dancer. Eager to continue performing, she took a community-college theater class during her senior year of high school and felt it filled a void.

Adia decided to swing big and moved to L.A. with one thought on her mind: “Let me full send it for shits and giggles. I’m going to see what happens.”

She landed her first roles working for bona fide auteurs Mike Flanagan (The Midnight Club) and Steven Soderbergh (Full Circle). But her biggest gig to date is in the acclaimed Mahershala Ali action vehicle.

In Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Adia plays Fatiha, a 15-year-old going through her own personal crisis. The Orion Pictures film follows Latif (Ali), a devout Muslim hitman and recent widow who’s now a single father to three kids. As the eldest daughter, Fatiha has to step up to fill the family’s maternal hole, watching over her siblings as her father runs across Houston in search of breast milk. Adia gives a captivating performance as a teenager balancing faith, grief, burgeoning independence, and probing rebellion. Latif’s daughter is both his caustic critic and emotional anchor, forcing him to evaluate what he’s fighting for.

While Adia's character wrestles with different pathways, the star herself is a role model for going off the beaten path. In fact, the rising actress is balancing her breakout moment with a second passion entirely: birth work. Speaking to Marie Claire ahead of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the now-certified birth and postpartum doula recalls attending an intense training course amid filming.

“There would be days where I had class online, so I would have my phone with me. I would be on set in rehearsal and have one headphone on my ear, one off,” she says. “I'm listening to the class; I'm listening to Bassam. I was like, This is insane. But I passed the class; we finished the film, no one died.”

Adia’s unapologetic about having more than one calling, and she’s determined to stay connected to life outside of Hollywood. She still lives in Washington, D.C., where she grew up, and she has no public social media. Right after she graced the third red carpet of her career at TIFF, she went right back to her birth work.

“While I want to keep working in Hollywood—it's been really cool to see how my career has blossomed in a way I never imagined—I also always want to make sure that I'm staying close to the community and the crux of life,” she says. “That's what I keep trying to instill in myself. It's okay if you don't get every job. Find the things that make you happy…I do the things that bring me joy, and that's it.”

Below, Adia chats with Marie Claire about the personal experiences she drew on to play Fatiha, bonding with Ali, and her dreams of being a midwife.

Marie Claire: Did you relate to Fatiha when you first read the Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother screenplay?

A: The first thing that I related to was Fatiha’s strong force of spirit. I feel like I've always been a very intense and forward person, and I've had to learn how to manage it. She's also learning how to manage it in her teenhood, and it's tough. I’m also the oldest of my siblings. A lot of independence was given to me, and I had to take that on and take things into my own hands in the way that Fatiha had to as well. And we were both homeschooled. I was only homeschooled in middle school and high school, but still I understand.

MC: What was your process in preparing to play Fathia?

A: I broke down every single scene. Bassam probably thought I was insane because I would be coming into our rehearsals for scenes with my little notebook and being like, Okay, so this and this has happened, and this is what she's feeling, and this is what's going on, and these are the things that are happening around them. I wrote down this flow of every scene that I was in so I could understand her story. I also journal in [my characters’] voice for certain scenes or pivotal moments to tap into their feelings a little bit more. And then I let it go. I have almost like a one-liner of what's happening each day and scene, so that I can jog my memory, but then I try to be super present. I'm allowing things to flow in that improvisational way to inform my work. We get the rehearsal to practice the scene, try it out, and then I'm like, Okay, cool. Got it.

I didn't have a lot of time to work on it [on set], because I was also in class. I was doing a whole other course outside of shooting, so I was kind of split-brained, but I would try to take as much time to focus on, Okay, this is what she's feeling, do my warm-up, and then just be present—just be present to hold the energy of the work, and whatever comes is what comes.

MC: You were simultaneously balancing this huge role with a doula program. How did you balance the two?

A: It was wild. I asked to take time off [for the shoot], and they were like, 'If you take more than three days, you're getting booted from this class.' And they only do this course every few years or so. It was ridiculous, but I made it work. I honestly don't really have much FOMO at all, but people would be going to the wrap party, and I was like, 'I can't come. I have to go back home to DC and do my skills class.' There would be some times where I would miss out on hanging out with everybody because I would be like, 'No, I have this five-page paper I have to turn in, and I also have to do peer review.' I'm really happy the film is reaching people, because I had a lot of faith that the work I did in preparation prior to filming was going to carry me through. I couldn’t dwell on whether or not I did a good job or bad job. I was just like, Trust that you did it. Trust that Bassam got what he wanted. Let it go, because you have class.

MC: What was it like working with Mahershala Ali as a scene partner, and depicting that complicated father-daughter relationship?

A: I had a wonderful time working with Mahershala. He really took on the role of almost a quasi-uncle to me, in the sense that he was so down-to-earth and genuinely wanted me to succeed. He gave me so many tips and words of encouragement, and would check in on me on a human level, like, 'How are you doing?' He was present, and I really appreciated that.

We were joning on each other, cracking up. There was one scene where we're both outside crying, and we shot that quite a few times. I remember every time in between our resets, we were kiki-ing it up and laughing. It was just like hanging out with a family member.

I felt like I had a comrade-in-arms with me while we were working on this, and I had no intentions of that happening. I was very much like, I'm just going to go in, do my work, go home. But it just organically happened, and I had such a wonderful time.

MC: Even though this is your breakout moment in film, you've already worked with celebrated actors and auteur filmmakers. What is the biggest lesson about building a career in Hollywood that you've taken from the people you've worked with?

A: Do you. Stay true to yourself. Because the minute you start trying to embellish, change, modify, or redefine yourself to fit what you think they want of you, then you’re no longer the reason why people really wanted you to begin with. We all have this as actors. We audition, and we get rejected, and we audition, and we get rejected. We think, Oh, well, if I just do this and that, maybe it'll be better. And it might be, but are you better off as a person? That's where I have this sit-down conversation with myself, always, because you always have these pulls where you're like, Oh, if I could do this a little bit different, or I could change this about my look or my hair or how I present myself, maybe I'll get more roles. But it's like, Is that what you really want? Will you be happy? Will you be content and satisfied? Never be content with mediocrity. Always strive for the best of yourself—not of somebody else's idea of yourself, but of yourself. How you wish yourself to be viewed.

MC: It’s really impressive to hear you speak about your passion for birth work, and having another calling in addition to acting. What is your ideal life of balancing your Hollywood career and your doula career?

A: I always said I would give myself a good 10 years dedicated to acting. I'm about six years in, so I have four more years to see how it goes. But I've always had this dream that I really want to be a midwife. That's something that I feel like I must do in this lifetime. I mean, we'll see how it unfolds.

I do know that as we're doing this press tour for this film, I'm on call. I literally have a client who is due the first week of October. As soon as I get back from TIFF, I'm back into my postpartum work. My work as a doula is just as important, if not more important than my work as an actor. [Awards] campaigning and going to these red carpets are an added bonus and flourish to the world of performing, and it’s great, but that's not how I got into this. I want to act. I want to do birth work. I'm still figuring it out as I go, and constantly reminding myself to be close to real life. Whether that's through my birth work, going solo camping a lot with my dog, or going diving and swimming—doing things in life outside of this Hollywood world, because it can be a bubble.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A good book can whisk you away to a different time, far-off places, and even inside someone else’s head. And if that person’s perspective is clouded by bad judgment, warped by invisible forces, and/or downright unreliable, you've hit the jackpot: That's a psychological thriller just waiting to be unraveled.

Though there’s quite a bit of overlap between mystery thrillers, suspense novels, and psychological thrillers—which typically revolve around some mysterious event or circumstance—the latter is usually defined less by the mystery and more by the inner instability, fear, turmoil, or paranoia experienced by the characters. That makes for incredibly gripping, twisty, and often unsettling stories where you simply can’t trust anything you read until you’ve made it all the way through. So, consider it an absolutely perfect genre to explore as spooky season approaches.

Here, we’ve rounded up some of the very best psychological thriller books out there, from all-time classics (Gone Girl, anyone?) to newer offerings that have already shaken us to the core. Enjoy the ride, and remember: Trust no one.

Classic Psychological Thriller Books Worth Reading

New Psychological Thriller Books Worth Reading

Watching Physical: 100 can often be a bittersweet experience for female viewers. Netflix's international reality franchise has amazed a passionate global fanbase, with its jaw-dropping athletic challenges and heartwarming depictions of determination and sportsmanship. Each season includes several female athletes who become inspiring fan-favorites, but—whether due to challenge design or being disadvantaged in team rounds—these women often fall short of reaching the finale. That is, until Physical 100: Mexico.

The survival show's first North American installment, which debuted on September 16, found an early standout in Mariana Khalil, a CrossFit athlete who was both a fierce competitor in the individual matches and an essential teammate in the group rounds. The first seven episodes ended with a literal cliffhanger during the Gate to the Underworld challenge, as Khalil and Iván Guerrera hung on bars suspended four meters above water pits.

Eventually, Khalil stayed hanging the longest and became the first-ever woman to make it to the finale in a Physical: 100 individual season. (This doesn't include Physical: Asia, which had entirely team challenges, or Physical 100: Italy, which is still airing through October 2.) Though she didn't ultimately win Physical 100: Mexico's prize of 3 million pesos (about $175,000 USD), Khalil represented the women of the show and proved that she was a tough opponent to beat.

Read on to learn more about Mariana Khalil, from the personal tragedy that left her with a scarred arm to her biggest supporter throughout the competition.

Mariana Khalil has won some of the toughest competitions in modern-day sports.

Mariana Khalil is a athlete and fitness coach who does CrossFit, HYROX, kabaddi, and yoga. Per The Cinemaholic, Khalil spent 13 years training as a jazz dancer before discovering CrossFit in college. The sport became a core part of her life, with Khalil even meeting her husband at a competition. She ranked among the top 30 female CrossFit athletes in Mexico across four years, since her competitive debut in 2017.

Khalil is a co-founder and Head Coach of the gym CrossFit Voltage in Aguascalientes, where she coaches and specializes in pregnancy and postpartum fitness. She also has TV experience outside of Netflix. She appeared on the Mexican reality TV show Exatlón in 2021 and earlier this year, competing under the nickname "Voltage."

Mariana Khalil is an outspoken women's-rights activist and burn survivor.

During the Gate to the Underworld challenge in episode 7, Khalil shared the origin of the scars covering her entire left arm and part of her right arm, midriff, and legs. When she was 7-years-old, a gas leak triggered an explosion that left her, her sister, and her mother with severe burns.

"I love my scars," she said in an interview. "I think they make me a very unique person, and they remind me that there's no greater challenge that I've been through."

When she's not sharing fitness tips or personal updates, Khalil also uses her Instagram to speak out about social causes. Earlier this year, she partnered with Telemundo's Mujeres Imparables. The athlete called on women to cultivate their physical and mental strength, saying, "Society has done a lot of harm by making us believe that strength and femininity are contrary."

Mariana Khalil welcomed her first child in 2024.

Khalil has been married to her husband, Rodrigo Guerra, for nine years. On the show, she shared her husband's reaction to seeing her for the first time during a competition. "Why is she standing there so confidently despite her scars, and wearing shorts and a top? I mean, I have to meet her," she recalls him saying to a mutual friend.

Today, the couple work together as coaches at CrossFit Voltage. They welcomed their first child, a son, in early 2024.

In the Physical 100: Mexico finale, Khalil revealed that she worried her relationship to sports would change after she became a mother. When asked if she had seen herself making it to the end of the competition, she said, "Honestly, since my baby was born, I thought there was no room for sports left in my life."

"At some point I said, 'Okay. I'll focus on being a mom. I won't be able to perform at that level," she continued. "[But] I think that as I completed the challenges, I was, like, 'Mariana the athlete still has so much to give.

During The Love Hypothesis press tour, Lili Reinhart's red carpet and street style looks paid tribute to some of the most iconic fashion moments from '90s and 2000s rom-coms. But the Prime Video film, based on Ali Hazelwood's popular romance book, features a swoon-worthy wardrobe of its own.

In the movie adaptation, Reinhart plays Olive Smith, a biology PhD candidate at Stanford University. While lab coats are a fixture of her character's fashion (she wears one for almost half of the film's duration), outfits with splashes of personality emerge from beneath the coat's crisp white collar. "Science plays a role [in Olive's closet], but she's still a young student," costume designer Myriam Hanahem tells Marie Claire.

Whether Olive is working in the biology lab or faking her relationship with Professor Adam Carlsen, crop tops, feminine florals, romantic color trends, Adidas Samba sneakers, and linen-looking blouses are part of her regular rotation.

According to Hanahem, effortless French-girl fashion became the blueprint. "The mood board was a mix of vintage inspiration, like Jane Birkin on a bike, vintage dresses, the jeans and a T-shirt [uniform], just comfortable," she says.

Hanahem and Reinhart created "an organic collaboration" inside the film's fitting room: "She's been doing this for a while, so she knows her body, she knows what she wants, which is great," Hanahem adds. "She would try something on and then it [brought] us to something else, and then we mixed and matched things that we didn't think of at the beginning."

While the costume designer was, of course, inspired by the book, Hazelwood kept her characters' outfit descriptions to a minimum. Chapter 16's unicorn socks (IYKYK) scored a starring role in the film's sauciest scene, but beyond that, Hanahem trusted the actors to choose costumes that they felt their characters would wear in real life. "[It was important to] honor the people who play [the parts] so they're the most comfortable they can be," she says.

Receiving Reinhart's input led Hanahem to Olive's signature shade: red. The film's romance genre didn't inspire the 26-year-old character's go-to color, though. "It all started with the Isabel Marant cardigan," she says, remembering the strawberry-dyed sweater that Olive wears the first time we see her in the lab. (By the way, the Newton Cardigan is still available in a slightly darker shade.) "Then it became a red world," Hanahem adds. "In the fitting, we just kept going towards the red pieces."

On her first (faux) coffee date with Dr. Carlsen, Reinhart's Olive layers a ruby raglan tee beneath an identical crocheted cardigan. Later, at the faculty cocktail party, she makes quite an impression in a crimson-colored midi dress, courtesy of Reformation (Hanahem's preferred retailer for Olive's dresses).

"We would buy from [Reformation] and then just make [the look] our own, [either by] shortening it or changing a strap," she says. "We had more expensive pieces and then pieces that people could relate to because she's also a student with basically no money."

Speaking of Hanahem's favorite outfit from the film, during a picturesque post-party stroll with Dr. Carlsen, Olive layers a dark denim jacket over the spaghetti-strap, floral-print slip. "We tried a bunch of different jackets, [including] blazers, and yet we ended up with denim, because it's relatable and you can put higher-end pieces underneath and it looks like it's still something that people can afford," she says.

Olive wears red for some of the love story's most pivotal scenes, but the color wasn't right for a major moment in her career. So, Hanahem went with black. "At first, she wasn't supposed to be in black," she says. "We tried green and red [before deciding] that she should be in black, I think two or three days before the scene."

But because they were filming in Montreal, which "doesn't have that many stores," Hanahem flew to New York City for 24 hours to buy 15 black dresses. In the end, Reformation came to the rescue again, as the foundation of the look: "We changed it a lot—the length, the straps—we changed almost everything."

While presenting her research, Olive wears a "classic" black blazer by Theory over the LBD's V-neck. But why—after wearing bold blues, greens, and reds on repeat—did she switch to all-black attire? "Adam is always wearing black, so it's kind of like she meets him in his world," Hanahem says, reflecting on their (accidentally) romantic dinner scene.

Just like in any rom-com, all of these looks led up to the grand finale. "Everyone has the ending in their mind," Hanahem says. So, she asked herself, "How would most people picture Olive [during] the final kiss?" Once again, Hanahem went with a red Reformation dress, "but with a sleeve and something more casual compared to the other dresses she wore, because she knows her place now." And her wardrobe reflects that.

As the founder of Sportsish, Lily Shimbashi has plenty to say about the influencer controversy at this year's U.S. Open.

Sportsish is a sports media company for women that, according to Shimbashi, "is a safe space for women—new fans, but also old fans, casual fans, rabid fans—to just converse, and be a community, and talk about sports in a way that maybe traditional media [does] not." In practice, that means covering all of the major goings-on in sports, while also posting sports memes about missing out on Harry Styles tickets or highlighting a beauty brand/Formula 1 crossover.

Basically, the influencer scandal at the U.S. Open—in which some attendees caused distractions by posing for photos and videos, including with ring lights, during gameplay—is right up Sportsish's alley. Shimbashi shares her thoughts on the matter on the latest episode of Marie Claire's "Nice Talk" podcast.

"I am not a traditional influencer, so it's hard for me to speak about," Shimbashi says. "But let's say a brand invited me to Fashion Week. I'm not the biggest fashionista and I don't know the fashion landscape very well, but I would try to figure it out before I went to a runway show, because it's an honor to be invited to these things."

The founder and CEO says that influencers should be welcomed at events like the U.S. Open, because "they are really driving the pulse on what is cool right now, and I want more women coming to more sporting events," but, she goes on, "I just want them to realize ... when the ball is bouncing, don't do anything. Don't get a drink. Don't go to the bathroom. Don't take a picture. Don't talk. That is tennis etiquette. I would try and learn fashion etiquette before I went to Fashion Week."

Shimbashi is clear that influencers should absolutely not be barred from attending events. "Let's not chase them out the way we would have done 10 years ago and say never come back to a sporting event," she says. "That's gross behavior."

In response to the situation at the U.S. Open, Wimbledon is attempting to crack down on influencers at the tournament. As reported by Sports Illustrated, the 2027 event will not provide official accreditation for influencers and items like ring lights will be confiscated.

But as Shimbashi sees it, there's a clear benefit to having influencers attend these sort of events, because they can help promote true sports fandom, particularly to women.

"When you see someone go enjoy themselves at the U.S. Open, like clicking through their stories or their TikTok, and they have a Honey Deuce, and they're getting the merch, and it looks magical. It makes you want to go," she says. "So influencers at sporting events, yes, always. Just a soft reminder to try and read the rules before we go."

For more from Shimbashi—including the best way to get into sports as a total newbie—check out this week's installment of "Nice Talk." The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.

The central couple in The Love Hypothesis may be biologists, but chemistry was the most important factor in adapting Ali Hazelwood's beloved romance novel. Thankfully for #BookTok fans, Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman's joint charm is off the charts.

Reinhart and Bateman play Olive, a third-year Ph.D. candidate seeking funding for her personal study, and Adam, an exacting professor the department has collectively dubbed "Dr. Evil." How the pair end up in a fake-dating relationship is less important than the swoon-worthy love story that follows, and the film from Amazon MGM Studios brings every sweet and steamy minute off the page and onto the screen.

So, how's the chemistry between the real-life Olive and Adam? Based on our time with the faux couple, the Riverdale and Behind Her Eyes alums are lovers onscreen and besties off-screen.

To celebrate the film's release on Prime Video, Bateman and Reinhart sat down with Marie Claire to test their friendship with a game of How Well Do You Know Your Co-Star?. They breezed through questions about their on-set rituals, hyper-fixations, favorite romance tropes, and biggest relationship green flags, and even surprised each other a bit along the way. Though they were in the middle of a whirlwind press tour, the pair were buoyed by Bateman's surprisingly animated real-life personality. Hollywood, feel free to cast these two again in a rom-com that lets them get silly.

Watch the challenge above to get the scoop on Reinhart's love of a good slow burn and Bateman's epic book recommendation. Then, head to Prime Video to catch The Love Hypothesis.

Lizzie Borden’s life was never the same after she was accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892, and Borden lived a mostly private life in the aftermath of the trial in which she was acquitted of the charges. In that time, she became close friends with stage actress Nance O’Neil—a friendship that, among other details of Borden’s life, has been fictionalized in the latest iteration of Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series on Netflix.

Ella Beatty and Jessica Barden play Borden and O’Neil in the crime series, respectively, and Beatty has acknowledged some of the exaggerations of the Netflix creation. “I could take all the source material about the real person’s life and translate that into the very fictionalized version of the woman that we created for the show. I was exploring a person that we were imagining and creating using details from the real person’s life to animate and fill in the blanks,” she told Netflix’s Tudum.

The “source material” of Borden’s life includes a real friendship with O’Neil, which was rumored to have been romantic (though Monster does not portray it as such). Ahead, we break down who O'Neil was and what her real relationship with Borden might have been like.

What to Know About Nance O'Neil—And Her Relationship with Lizzie Borden

Borden and O'Neil met in 1904 after one of O'Neil’s performances in Boston.

After her acquittal, public sentiment toward Borden was unfavorable, and she often traveled to cities like Boston and New York to escape the cruelty of her hometown, Fall River, Massachusetts. On one of these fateful trips to Boston, Borden met O’Neil after attending one of her plays. Borden allegedly sent a note backstage asking O’Neil to meet with her, and O’Neil obliged. The two became extremely close following that meeting.

Many believed Borden and O’Neil were romantically involved.

They soon began spending a large amount of time together, fueling rumors of a lesbian relationship. Like Borden’s rumored relationship with her family’s maid Bridget Sullivan, this relationship was never confirmed by Borden, O’Neil, or anyone in their circles. However, their closeness only increased speculation about Borden’s perceived motives for the accused murders, as many believed her parents may have caught her with another woman.

After Borden died in 1927, O’Neil gave an interview with the New Bedford Standard, calling her friend "distinctively attractive" though a “frail, little gentlewoman,” and describing their relationship as “ships that pass in the night and speak [to] each other in passing.” While there’s no outward admission in those words, it could be read as a romantic description of their friendship. But as neither Borden nor O’Neil left behind any diaries, love letters, or other artifacts that would confirm a romantic relationship, this part of Borden’s life remains speculative.

Borden and O'Neil's friendship might have led to Borden's estrangement from her sister, Emma.

Lizzie and Emma Borden (played by Billie Lourd in Monster) used their inheritance from their murdered father to buy a house in Maplewood, Massachusetts, and it’s believed that the parties thrown there for O’Neil’s theater group were the root cause of the sisters’ definitive fight. Many years later, Emma confirmed that something happened at their house, though she never provided details. “The happenings in the French Street house that caused me to leave, I must refuse to talk about,” she said in a 1913 interview with The Boston Post. The sisters never spoke again.

Some thought Borden's wealth was the basis of their friendship.

As Borden spent more time with O’Neil and her artistic circle, she began hosting parties at her Maplewood residence for O’Neil’s theater troupe (though O’Neil later refuted this after Borden’s death, claiming she never visited her home). Borden reportedly also lent money to O’Neil and her friends for various debts.

A San Francisco Call article from the time also suggested that O’Neil and Borden were creative collaborators, with Borden allegedly penning a play for O’Neil, but this never came to fruition. When Borden and O’Neil’s friendship later ended, some believed it was because O’Neil refused to pay back.

Borden and O'Neil were also estranged at the end of Borden's

Money very well could have caused their estrangement, but it's equally likely that their life circumstances did. O’Neil’s career eventually expanded beyond the Boston area, and the women naturally spent less time together; staying in touch was decidedly different from today.

O’Neil later married actor Alfred Hickman in 1916. In her interview with the New Bedford Standard after Lizzie died in 1927, she confirmed that they never spoke about the murders and that their correspondence stopped after their friendship drifted apart.

Some authors write one book every eight years. Lauren Blakely, on the other hand, averages roughly eight books per year.

A former journalist, Blakely doesn’t believe in writer’s block, and it shows: She’s penned more than 120 titles since self-publishing her first romance novel, Caught Up in Us, in 2013. And she’s not showing any signs of slowing down; she’s got three more books set for release before the end of 2026 alone.

Blakely isn't just extremely prolific, but her books are diverse, tackling every kind of romance trope you can think of, from sports romances (she’s got several hockey series to dive into) to tropes galore (friends-to-lovers fans, you're in for some treats). And those love stories are extremely inclusive, featuring steamy scenes for both heterosexual and queer characters across her multiple series.

“We all want to fall in love, we all want to give love and feel love, and I think that's what [I] delivers on,” she has said.

If you’re ready to dive into the author’s swoon-worthy universe, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for the best Lauren Blakely books, ranked—and everything else you need to know about the beloved romance novelist.

The Best Lauren Blakely Books, Ranked

How many books has Lauren Blakely written?

Blakely has 128 romance novels listed on her official website, but has penned even more. Before finding success in her current niche, Blakely wrote YA several titles under an undisclosed pen name, as she revealed in a 2018 interview. She has also published several novellas.

How spicy are Lauren Blakely's books?

Readers tend to think Blakely’s books are "medium spicy."

While she describes intimate acts in her book, it’s not gratuitously physical. Her scenes tend to focus on the feelings each kiss, caress, or anything else might provoke. “Are you going up in flames? Does it feel like fireworks are igniting in your chest?" she once told Cosmopolitan are things she considers. "Those are the things that I certainly try to do when I'm writing sexy-times scenes so that it doesn't just feel like a manual.”

What is Lauren Blakely’s most popular book?

Blakely first tasted critical success with her first romance novel, Caught Up in Us, in 2013. However, her popularity was cemented with the 2016 release of Big Rock, which secured a recurring spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list. 2017’s Full Package also earned a top spot for E-Book fiction.

How to read Lauren Blakely’s books in order

Many of Blakely’s books can be read as standalone novels, even if they’re part of a larger series.

If you’re looking to check out our selections, one of Blakely’s oldest gems is Forbidden Nights (2015), which is one of two Joy Delivered books. Both are standalone novels featuring rich heroes.

The Joy Delivered Duet

• Nights With Him (2014)
• Forbidden Nights (2015)

Next up is Blakely’s romantic comedy series Big Rock, which includes Big Rock and Mister O. The books in this series can be read in any order, though many share a light-hearted tone and a fake relationship or friends-to-lovers plot.

The Big Rock Series

• Big Rock (2016)
• Mister O. (2016)
• Well Hung (2016)
• Full Package (2017)
• Joy Ride (2017)
• Hard Wood (2017)
• Find Me a Match (2027)

Blakely’s most lauded novel, 2018’s The Real Deal , is about a boyfriend-for-hire and stands completely on its own.

Those with the travel bug might prefer to start with the Paris With Love series, however. The series features two standalone novels about forbidden romance overseas, starting with Wanderlust.

The From Paris With Love Series

• Wanderlust (2018)
• Part Time Lover (2018)

The popular 2020 novel A Guy Walks Into My Bar is part of Blakely’s The Guys Who Got Away series. As you might expect, they feature second-chance romances.

These books aren’t linked, so you can read them in any order. They also include both MF and MM leads, depending on the title.

The Guys Who Got Away Series

• Birthday Suit (2019)
• Lucky Suit (2019)
• Dear Sexy Ex-Boyfriend (2020)
• The What If Guy (2020)
• A Guy Walks Into My Bar (2020)
• Thanks for Last Night (2020)
• The Dream Guy Next Door (2021)

All In With Him, published in 2021, is the final book in the forbidden MM sports romance Men of Summer series. Though the finale is our top 10 pick, you’ll want to read its predecessors, Scoring With Him and Winning With Him, to get the most out of this read.

The Men of Summer Series

• Scoring With Him (2021)
• Winning With Him (2021)
• All in With Him (2021)

The Best Men, co-published with Bowen in 2022, is one of Blakely’s eight standalone romances, with no adjacent series to explore more of its queer enemies-to-lovers trope.

2022’s Here Comes My Man, on the other hand, is the MM sequel to Hopelessly Bromantic about an American and British roommate who bunk together in more ways than one.

Hopelessly Bromantic Duet

• Hopelessly Bromantic (2022)
• Here Comes My Man (2022)

Last but not least on our list? The Boyfriend Goal. Published in 2024, it’s the first of seven standalone sports romances revolving around the ice.

Love and Hockey series

• The Boyfriend Goal (2024)
• The Romance Line (2024)
• The Proposal Play (2025)
• The Girlfriend Zone (2025)
• The Overtime Kiss (2025)
• The Flirting Game (2025)
• The Rival Upgrade (2026)

Check out Blakely’s full list of romance novels here.

Are any of Lauren Blakely's books being adapted into movies or TV shows?

As of now, none of Blakely’s books are being developed into film or television projects. But with the number of adaptations in the works, it feels like it's only a matter of time. In the meantime, there's certainly no harm in assembling your dream fan casts!

Why Trust Us

No one could ever possibly get through all the great books the world has to offer—but we’ve made it our mission to try. Love romance? There’s a book ranking for that. Can't get enough gothic lit? We’ve got you covered. Missing the mythology you loved as a kid? We’ve found the adult version. No matter what you like to read, Marie Claire has a review, an interview, or an adaptation for you to check out—and our library is always expanding.

With the rise of #BookTok and other bookish online platforms, the romance genre has skyrocketed to unfathomable heights of popularity—which only continues to grow. Key to the category’s ongoing success is that there’s truly a subgenre for every reader, no matter what gets your eyes on the page and your heart a-flutter. Case in point: One of #BookTok’s favorite subgenres is "dark romance," which typically features morally gray characters, high stakes, power imbalances, lots of spice, and, often, problematic or taboo themes. But don't worry: Dark romance books typically still end with the same happily-ever-after that general romance readers are accustomed to.

If you’re looking to dabble in the sultry subgenre, we’ve rounded up some of the best, most beloved dark romance books out there. But before you dive in, be aware that some of these books feature intense scenes and themes, so you may want to look up any content warnings.

The Best Collegiate Dark Romance Books

The Best Crime Dark Romance Books

The Best Fantasy Dark Romance Books

The Best Thriller Dark Romance Books

The Best Rom-Com Dark Romance Books

Calling all Traitors fans—our favorite game of social deception is back early! As we wait for the next star-studded celebrity season, NBC has tapped into the franchise's British roots with the first American non-celebrity season, titled The Traitors: New Blood.

The new spinoff—once again hosted by Alan Cumming and airing through November 19—tests its cast's capacity for bargaining and backstabbing through several exciting twists, including new civilian Accomplices(!) for the Traitors. The lucky contestants vying for up to $250,000 range from everyday healthcare workers, teachers, and realtors to semi-famous podcasters and content creators. Wherever you land on the debate over whether someone with 1 million IG followers counts as a "normie," you can't deny this cast has some great potential for a good Traitors season.

Read on for everything you need to know about the inaugural cast of The Traitors: New Blood, from their game plans for the castle to their initial assignments of Traitor or Faithful.

Abbey Benjamin

Instagram: @abbeybenj

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 37

Hometown: Mangham, Louisiana

Occupation: Nurse

Game Plan: "I love people, and I think that in the game of Traitors, where trust is currency, my biggest strategy is to be myself and to gain as much trust as possible with the Traitors and the Faithful so I'm able to stay until the very end."

Abby Lee

Instagram: @abbylee_.7

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 29

Hometown: St. Paul, Minnesota

Occupation: Astrophysicist

Game Plan: "My role model is Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, and I would love to play like him. There's a lot of strategies I want to adopt."

Arisa Thomas

Instagram: @arisathegroomer

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 36

Hometown: Los Angeles, California

Occupation: Dog groomer

Game Plan: "I think me working with animals will make people naturally trust me, and that's what I'm banking on. They wouldn't suspect someone like me, who has golden retriever energy, to be a naughty little chihuahua."

Ben McDonnell

Instagram: @mcdonnellben

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 34

Hometown: Granbury, Texas

Occupation: Barrel racer, actor, and podcaster

Game Plan: "I'm gonna go in and probably be the girls' gay best friend, and they're gonna love me. And then the guys, they're gonna see me as an asset. I mean, I'm a 6'3" Sasquatch. So just because I might have designer shoes, I'm ranch-y as shit. So I can go out there...I think I'll be an asset to both sides."

Clyde Moser

Instagram: @astoldbyclyde

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 32

Hometown: Charleston, South Carolina

Occupation: Teacher

Game Plan: "My strategy going into this is to be as likable and as friendly as possible, because you want to keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Jay Vinnedge

Instagram: @wellroundedphysician

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 36

Hometown: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Occupation: Physician

Game Plan: "I'm willing to do what it takes to get to the end. I find that when I'm watching other programs, people sometimes don't prioritize winning the way they should, and as somebody who loves things like this show, I can't have that."

Joe Vanella

Instagram: @thejoevanella

Affiliation: Traitor

Age: 44

Hometown: Wantagh, New York

Occupation: Funeral director

Game Plan: "I'm everybody's friend until I don't need them. And then that's it. I'm not going to say I don't care about them, but in the show, I'm going to be friendly to everybody...I'll be on their side until the game dictates otherwise."

Katie Fites

Instagram: @katie.fites

Affiliation: Accomplice

Age: 32

Hometown: Jacksonville, Florida

Occupation: Marketing manager

Game Plan: "I'm going to give them hell. I am ready to do what feels natural. I'm going to trust my gut going into this, and I think that I have the potential to make a really fun environment while also reading people, connecting with people, and then, if necessary, backstabbing people if it saves me."

Kim Daly

Instagram: @iamkimdaily

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 37

Hometown: Houston, Texas

Occupation: Lawyer

Game Plan: "This is a game that requires massive amounts of adaptability. Adaptability is my strength. Adaptability is my skill. Once I get to know people, what their motivations are, what drives them, what their reasons are, I want to help them with their reasons as long as it helps me with mine."

Kriste Lewis

Instagram: @kr1ste

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 52

Hometown: Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Occupation: Realtor

Game Plan: "I hope that they see kindness. That's the first thing that I want them to see. So whether I'm a Traitor or a Faithful, I'll definitely use my kindness just to get close with the other contestants."

Logan Smith

Instagram: @realtywithsmitty

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 26

Hometown: Gatlinburg, Tennessee

Occupation: Realtor

Game Plan: "I say all the time, 'I'm a representative of your best interest. I'm not a salesman. I don't sell houses. I make sure that you get what you need.' I know how to negotiate, and I'm really good at getting what I want. So, we'll see if I can relate that to this show or not."

Madeline Kostopulos

Instagram: @madelinekostopulos

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 26

Hometown: San Diego, California

Occupation: Construction manager

Game Plan: "I want them distracted. I want them wondering where I got my outfit, not where I just was."

Mark Zgoda

Instagram: @markzgoda

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 26

Hometown: Phillipsburg, New Jersey

Occupation: Personal trainer

Game Plan: "At some point, you got to step up, and I want to go down guns blazing. I would like to be the person making shots. If it comes down to five or four of us, split the group up and just take home the money."

Michael Foote

Instagram: @michael_foote__

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 38

Hometown: New York, New York

Occupation: Lawyer, podcaster, and influencer

Game Plan: "I think I'm great at deception and will be excellent in this game, because as a criminal defense attorney, I have to go to court every day and oftentimes represent people who are not innocent. I'm ready to put on that same performance that I have in the courtroom in the castle."

Morgan Cook

Instagram: @morganevelyncook

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 30

Hometown: Midland, Michigan

Occupation: Content creator and influencer

Game Plan: "I think I've developed a bit of a knack for deciphering which ones are lying, overconfident manipulators, and which ones are truthful, overconfident manipulators. That's not really something I want the Traitors to be aware of. I would rather everyone just think, 'Morgan is a content creator. She makes videos of herself.' And whatever they want to deduce about my intelligence from that, they are free to do so."

Niyyah Hayes

Instagram: @niyyahx

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 29

Hometown: Indianapolis, Indiana

Occupation: Therapist

Game Plan: "I talk for a living, so one of my strategies is going to be to shut up because I tend to talk a lot. I plan to watch and listen and be a chameleon—to be whoever I need to be to get to the end."

Shane Beatty

Instagram: @shanebeatty_

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 32

Hometown: Staten Island, New York

Occupation: Ironworker

Game Plan: "I'm thinking that introducing new names to a conversation might be the smartest move. I'm looking to just play my own game, but I don't want to piggyback off of too many people. I want to separate myself from the crowd a little bit."

Sherry Kuehl

Instagram: @snarky.in.the.suburbs

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 65

Hometown: Leawood, Kansas

Occupation: Writer and influencer

Game Plan: "I think one of the best things I have going for me is that I'm an excellent listener. I learned a long time ago: You learn more from listening than talking."

Tomica Adams

Instagram: @ladyofthesky

Affiliation: Traitor

Age: 54

Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts

Occupation: Pilot

Game Plan: "I think being a mother will truly help me be intuitive about what's happening in the game. I think that that's a ninth sense. But then being a pilot, working with so many people and being very in control of things; being able to hold my stress level down will be an advantage for me in this game."

Victor Vollbrechthausen

Instagram: @victorvoll

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 26

Hometown: New York, New York

Occupation: Business executive

Game Plan: "I think you have to build a tribe and really have them vouch for you instead of you have to vouch for yourself. I'm gonna—hopefully—find four or five people that are gonna be my shooters, they're gonna be my ride-or-dies, and have them take me to the victory."

Wyatt Gillespie

Instagram: @wyatt_gillespie

Affiliation: Faithful

Age: 26

Hometown: Ligonier, Pennsylvania

Occupation: Designer

Game Plan: "I think I plan to play a little bit dumb and run circles around people when they underestimate me because I will just over-deliver at the end."

Xavier Scruggs

Instagram: @xavierscruggs

Affiliation: Accomplice

Age: 38

Hometown: Wesley Chapel, Florida

Occupation: MLB analyst

Game Plan: "I think that's where playing a long season in Major League Baseball helps you understand, there's going to be certain highs and certain lows, and you have to be strategic about how you're going to use your energy—exude your energy—at the right times."

Last week, Marie Claire had the pleasure of hosting an intimate event in the Cadillac Suite at the women's semifinals of the U.S. Open. The tournament is among the biggest moments in tennis all year, with New Yorkers and tourists alike flocking to the stadium. But fans aren't attending the U.S. Open just to watch tennis. They're coming for the full experience: Instagrammable food (we're looking at you, Honey Deuce), shopping, and a celebrity sighting or two. (Michelle Obama was in the crowd that night.)

Inside the Cadillac Suite, editor in chief Nikki Ogunnaike led a panel alongside two powerful voices in sports: founder and CEO of Sportsish Lily Shimbashi and sports host and commentator Ari Chambers. The conversation focused on the intersection of fashion and sports and the importance of athletes building a brand image. Shimbashi reflected on the state of fashion in sports saying "we see that people are not afraid to express themselves through fashion where maybe before they thought it was cringey." Chambers added that, "for so long it was about protecting women's sports...to make it digestible, but right now i'm excited to see how everyone's been so disruptive in the [fashion] space."

Guests enjoyed two women's matches: Aryna Sabalenka vs. Jessica Pegula and Coco Gauff vs. Elena Rybakina. Guests also enjoyed the fashion spotted both on and off the court. (We loved Gauff's all-yellow New Balance ensemble.) Many attendees in the Cadillac Suite sported chic looks, including stylist and fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, who wore a top from the Polo Ralph Lauren x U.S. Open collab. (The brand is the tournament's official outfitter.)

The U.S. Open stadium featured activations from a range of brands (Cadillac included!), pop-up shops, and famous food items. Dozens of Honey Deuces and boxes of Coqodaq chicken nuggets (served with caviar, of course) were consumed in the Cadillac Suite during the matches.

Dreams in Nightmares—a road movie about a trio of queer besties venturing cross-country to find their friend who seems to have disappeared—is one of the year's most acclaimed word-of-mouth successes. The dramedy from auteur Shatara Michelle Ford hit the festival circuit in 2024 before releasing in theaters this August, and has since won over cinephiles with its visionary direction and heartfelt story about found family and freedom.

It stars Denée Benton, Dezi Bing, and Sasha Compère—whose character, Tasha, has a path that parallels one she nearly took herself. The resident no-nonsense member of the central group, Tasha decided to forgo her acting aspirations to pursue a more stable, corporate career. Compère considered doing the same—but felt in her heart that she needed to pursue the arts, especially innovative projects like Dreams in Nightmares.

As Dreams in Nightmares continues to expand to theaters nationwide, Compère shared an exclusive essay with Marie Claire about how her life as a creative has affected her mental health, and vice versa.

I recently found an old journal entry I wrote in 2009. I had just seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and journaled about the moments that resonated with my loneliness and feeling like a misfit. In my tattered journal, I wrote: “I cried almost every five to 10 minutes, because every scene exerted a new form of beauty and thought that I’ve either never considered or never vocally expressed for fear that no one would understand or handle my thoughts…[A] movie quote: ‘Our lives are defined by our opportunities, even the ones we miss.’ The story of my life—and all of our lives. Love lost, scars, ups and downs; [they] all bring us to where we are. Sometimes I wish I could change one event from the past…but who knows where it would have left me.”

I’m not sure the movie would hold up, or that I’d see it the same way today—but I still think about my life journey, and how my creative path has affected my mental health. I often wonder what effects a different career might’ve had. Much like my character Tasha in Dreams in Nightmares, I have actually tried other paths.

I grew up in Detroit. Around age 6, we moved to Oak Park, a small suburb in Michigan about a mile north of Eight Mile. As a kid, I’d film short skits on a camcorder with my sister and whoever was around to take direction. My parents once drove me all the way to Buffalo, New York for a modeling/acting competition—one of those “agent search” things (that I’m still not sure wasn’t a pyramid scheme). I was selected to move on after the first round, elated. But in the next round, as I walked the “catwalk,” a sharp pain struck my stomach, and I ended up doubled over, walking hobbit-like down the runway.

Heartbreakingly, I was let go. As it turns out, I had a gas bubble the size of a fist in my stomach. However, I—ever the drama queen—thought my appendix was bursting, and sobbed uncontrollably until a huge fart of relief stopped my tears on the car ride back to Michigan.

After that experience, and recognizing the financial toll it took on my family to drive cross-state for a dream I couldn’t actualize, I vowed not to waste their time and to focus on my education. As a child of two Haitian immigrants who endured so much strife, and who each worked overtime at multiple jobs for my sister and me to attend private school, following the arts felt selfish. Despite having a treasure trove of emotions fit for an actor’s toolbox, I ended up attending the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business while taking drama classes for a theatre minor. My imposter syndrome and intense fear of disappointing my hardworking parents kept me from fully expressing my true wants and desires.

After college, I hustled for two years doing “real jobs” in New York, first at a magazine, then at various music television companies (VH1, MTV, Fuse Networks), all while working weekends at restaurants in order to pay my share of our insane Brooklyn rent (basically a shoebox, split with roommates). Working in the music business felt like a solid compromise, satisfying my passion for art and my desire to please my parents. I figured stable work over time would equal success and, eventually, happiness. It was a stable paycheck…but the happiness never came. I was overworked and still taking weekend jobs at restaurants to pay rent. While I still pursued acting, dance, and underground theatre at night, I didn’t feel creatively fulfilled; I knew that acting was where I fully wanted to be.

I flew out to L.A. on a one-way ticket and never looked back. But this path hasn’t been easy, and I spent years suppressing a constant feeling of unhappiness that I couldn’t quite describe. I was always smiling, and on the outside, I seemed to have a positive attitude & strong work ethic. I hustled, working multiple jobs, performing theatre, and wrote myself a SAG-eligible new-media short so I could get an agent and auditions. My friends were impressed, but I burned out fast.

After four years of waitressing and booking bit parts on various TV shows, I craved stability again. I had left my agents and gone back to corporate work, this time for companies like NBC and OWN. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I’d return to acting until a casting director reached out on C-mail (thank goodness I hadn’t canceled Actors Access!) and asked me to audition for a new gig. I booked it, and that hit of creativity reignited my hustle. I would go to work every day, looking towards the future, preemptively excited for that “one day” when I wouldn’t be at the office anymore and could finally be “happy.”

I remember subtle signs that something was wrong during the peak of a good year. After booking my second series regular on an HBO show, I noticed I was struggling with depth perception while driving, feeling as though the car would slam into a wall while parking, or that I might topple over when riding my bike. But I was moving to New York with only a few weeks' notice, and figured it would all work itself out.

It was an amazing blessing, but I didn’t feel like myself. One wintry morning on a jog across a bridge in Harlem, I found myself sobbing while experiencing intense vertigo, shaking to the point of having to crawl to cross the bridge. I found a therapist and learned I had high-functioning depression and had been having panic attacks. I was in shock: My entire life had changed just how I wanted, yet I was going through the motions, constantly scared about how long it would last. That fear was prohibiting me from being present enough to appreciate what would soon be a great period in my career.

My therapist warned me that healing from clinical depression is a lifelong journey; my understanding is that you learn to “cope” more than to “heal.” In my third year of diagnosis, I opted to start Zoloft. Ultimately, I decided medication wasn’t my favorite way to cope, yet I acknowledge it works so well for many. Instead, therapy became my lifeline. I’ve since learned tricks and tips to notice when the depression is taking over and how to self-regulate.

Let me just say: Writing about depression is hard, and the depression frequently gives me writer’s block. You overanalyze, thinking what you want to say will be too much, too personal, or at risk of being misunderstood. Those of us dealing with depression, especially when things look good, often sit in silence because we’re just too afraid to speak or bother anyone with our thoughts. That’s why I became an actor. Not because I’m some extroverted, “look-at-me” entertainer, but because digging into my character and exploring another's language is so much fun and liberating, especially when it can be too hard to explore my own. But after being in entertainment for 15 years, I’ve learned that being an actor and having depression go pretty hand-in-hand. To repeatedly volunteer to explore all the plausible highs and lows of emotions? And couple that vulnerability with the hundreds of rejections I get every year? It can take a toll on even the strongest minds. Yet, acting is my favorite thing to do.

To be clear, there is no meritocracy; no “work your way up the ladder” sense of stability. One can work consistently for a year (or several) and be completely jobless the next. The biggest challenge has been managing the toll of an unstable business and ensuring that stress doesn’t negatively impact my mental health or my chosen community.

My career has been filled with ups and downs: thousands of rejections, losing talent representation due to agency shutdowns, struggling with an eating disorder from the pressure to be thin or “pretty” enough to work, six blessed years working on amazing projects like Uncorked, Miracle Workers, Love Life, Single Drunk Female, Genius, a strike and two-year work drought, a second painful breakup with someone I thought I’d marry, selling a home, losing multiple loved ones to illness, returning to corporate America yet again while rebuilding my artist life…the toll on my mental health has been massive, and when you’re clinically depressed, it’s hard to be a good friend. But I’ve learned that having friends and a community, one that accepts you at every stage of depression, is not only a blessing but necessary for survival. And friendship isn’t perfect. My friends still get mad at me, especially when I pull away, disappointed by the way life is going (a perfectionist hates being vulnerable about their faults). But my community is often there when I find my way back to the present and remember that I can only take life one day at a time.

Like Tasha, I’m often scared of what the future holds. As a Black female in entertainment, precedent hasn’t painted a hopeful picture for us. Being a successful artist is often prohibited by not being enough of a “commodity.” Even as I start to produce my own projects, I’ve been told that no one would put up the money for an actor/director who they don’t deem as “bankable.” Sadly, dark-skinned Black women aren’t often cast in lead roles in American cinema and television. The catch-22 is that if you give more Black women an opportunity, they might become a commodity.

When Dreams in Nightmares came along, I was starved for a project that featured people who looked like me. Being able to play an anxious, depressed femme unhappy with neglecting an acting career was both kismet and by design; the script was a Mike Leigh-style outline, and with limited time to rehearse due to the WGA and SAG strikes, we had to infuse our characters’ improvisations with pieces of our lives.

The truth is, I don’t know the secret to dealing with depression as an artist, but I do know that I’m at my happiest when I find others who can understand and handle my thoughts. My community, my therapist, and my accepting family have been my saving grace when navigating the ups and downs of life. They guide me to stay present and to worry less about what tomorrow will bring. And when life gets a little too hard to handle, they give me the grace and space to take time alone, only rejoining them when I’ve had the time to heal.

The 1892 murders of Andrew and Abby Borden were shocking for the Fall River, Massachusetts community—especially when Andrew's daughter Lizzie was accused of the crimes. The story has since been mined for its parts, from a popular recited folk rhyme to novels, and now a Netflix miniseries under Ryan Murphy’s Monster franchise banner.

Ella Beatty stars in the titular role in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, and the series dramatizes the events and details surrounding the murders and Borden’s enduring legacy. That includes Borden’s alleged relationship with Bridget Sullivan, the family’s Irish live-in maid (also called Maggie) who was present the day of the fatal events. Vicky Krieps steps into Sullivan's shoes on Monster, embodying the key witness of the trial who was later also rumored to have a romantic relationship with the defendant. Here’s what we know about the true story behind Bridget Sullivan and Lizzie Borden's relationship.

What to Know About the Real Bridget Sullivan

A romantic relationship between the women was first suggested by novelist Evan Hunter (who wrote under the pen name Ed McBain).

Evan Hunter’s 1984 novel Lizzie suggested that Borden committed the murders after her relationship with Sullivan was discovered. His theory was that Abby, Lizzie’s stepmother, caught Borden and Sullivan together and reacted poorly, and Borden retaliated by hitting her with a candlestick. McBain further speculated that Borden confessed her relationship with Sullivan to her father, Andrew, later that day, but when he reacted just as poorly as Abby, she killed him too. None of this has been proven true.

The same storyline was dramatized in the 2018 Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart film 'Lizzie.'

In a script by Bryce Kass, Chloë Sevigny takes on the storied role of Borden, with Kristen Stewart as her paramour Sullivan. The film earned acclaim after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Rotten Tomatoes consensus called it “a new look at a widely known true-crime story,” though the events depicted in the film have never been confirmed.

Most likely, Borden and Sullivan were never more than employer and employee.

Despite all the stories—and Monster's depiction of Sullivan as a close mentor to Borden—it’s unlikely that they had anything more than a professional relationship. Similarly, Monster depicts Sullivan as being paid by Andrew Borden for sex, but there is no evidence of this ever happening.

In reality, after Sullivan arrived in the United States, she began working at the Borden household. Andrew and Abby employed her for almost three years before their murders. She lived in an attic room in their home, which gave her a first-hand view into the family’s life and interpersonal relationships. Monster depicts

Though she was a longtime employee of the family, Sullivan reportedly tried to quit on multiple occasions. According to the book Parallel Lives, which documents the history of Fall River, Sullivan sensed tension in the household between Emma, Lizzie, and their stepmother and tried to find work elsewhere. Abby allegedly convinced her to stay by offering higher wages, per The Herald News.

Sullivan’s testimony about that day in the Borden house revealed that she heard a laugh from the stairs, later claiming it to be Lizzie’s. Unbeknownst to Sullivan, Abby had already been murdered upstairs, creating suspicion around Lizzie, who later “found” Andrew’s body downstairs. However, Sullivan's witness testimony never provided concrete evidence to convict Borden. During the trial, Sullivan’s proximity to the murders and lack of knowledge about what actually happened in the Borden house made people speculate about her potential romantic involvement with Lizzie, but there is “no contemporary evidence” to suggest this was true.

Similarly,

Borden is believed to have been a lesbian.

Another element that has fueled the Borden-Sullivan romance rumors was the fact that many believed Borden was a lesbian, due to her close friendships with women (like actress Nance O’Neil, who is portrayed in Monster by Jessica Barden) and her lifelong spinsterhood. But just like her supposed romance with Sullivan, this theory has also not been proven.

Sullivan, meanwhile, left Fall River after Borden’s acquittal in 1983 and settled down in Montana. She married a man named John M. Sullivan in 1905 and largely disappeared from public life. Many years later, Sullivan’s friend Minnie Green spoke to author Victoria Lincoln, who wrote the 1967 book A Private Disgrace, revealing that Sullivan may not have told the full truth while on the stand. “Green said that Sullivan spoke to her about the Borden case late in life. Sullivan allegedly suggested that she had not told everything she knew about the murders and said she had ‘helped Lizzie out’ during the trial,” A&E summarized. What Sullivan may have meant by that will never be known.

When Physical: 100 premiered in 2023, the Netflix hit changed reality TV forever. The Korean survival show—which made 100 elite athletes compete to see who had the "perfect physique"—became a global phenomenon and spawned a new genre of cutthroat reality competition. So it was no surprise when the streaming giant decided to bring the series worldwide, with international spinoffs like the upcoming Physical 100: U.S.A., and the newly released Physical 100: Italy and Physical 100: Mexico.

The latter, also named Habilidad Física 100: México, debuted on Netflix on September 16 with a seven-episode(!) premiere week. Like the original series, Mexico's take on Physical: 100 integrates the nation's culture into its jaw-dropping challenges, with Mesoamerican-themed stages like The Infinite Pyramid and The Monolith. As for the competitors, several members of the show's roster of legendary soccer players, MMA fighters, Olympic athletes, and lucha libre wrestlers are also well-loved in the U.S.

With the season finale out on September 23, read on to get to know the standout contestants of Physical 100: Mexico. Warning: Spoilers for Quests 1-4 of Physical 100: Mexico ahead.

The Final Four of 'Physical 100: Mexico'

Aldo Gutiérrez

Aldo Gutiérrez is a retired Greco-Roman wrestler and former member of Mexico's national team. He currently works as a professor, researcher, and coordinator at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, where he "develops projects related to horticulture, applied microbiology, hydroponics, biostimulants, and sustainable food production," per the school's Instagram. He and his wife, Ale Romero Bonilla, a fellow wrestler and content creator, welcomed their first child in 2024.

Instagram: @aldin_gtz3_

Ángel Quintero

Ángel Quintero is an obstacle course racer who was one of the first Mexican athletes to popularize Spartan races in the country. Since his first race in 2014, Quintero has ranked among Mexico's top runners and placed 4th in the Spartan World Championship. Recently, the fitness coach and new dad has expanded into HYROX, competing alongside his doubles partner (and fellow Physical 100: Mexico contestant), Aldo Márquez.

Instagram: @angelquinterosr

Jesús Cárcamo

Jesús Cárcamo is part of a group of soldiers competing in Physical 100: Mexico. He's reportedly a Captain in the Armored Corps of the Mexican Army and a former member of the "Bats," a famed special forces group. In 2025, he was part of the team that represented Mexico (and placed second) at Fuerzas Comando, a competition featuring special forces from countries throughout North and South America.

Instagram: @jesuscarcamob

Mariana Khalil

Mariana Khalil is a CrossFit athlete and fitness coach who also does HYROX, kabaddi, and yoga, according to her Instagram bio. On Physical 100: Mexico, Khalil reveals that her family was in a house fire when she was 7-years-old. She says that her burn scars remind her that she's survived harder things.

Instagram: @marianakhaliljacott

The Eliminated Contestants of 'Physical 100: Mexico'

Ámbar Garnica

Ámbar Garnica is a freestyle wrestler who has won a gold medal in her weight class in Mexico's national championships. Since she began competing internationally in 2019, she's won a silver medal at the 2023 Senior Pan-American Championships and another silver medal at the 2026 Central American and Caribbean Games earlier this year.

Instagram: @ambarmgf

Carlos Salcido

Carlos Salcido is a retired soccer player and legend in Mexico. After making his pro debut in 2001, he went on to play on Mexico's national team for over 10 years and play in three World Cups. He was also part of the team that won the gold medal at the London 2012 Olympics.

Instagram: @carlossalcido30

Daniela Fainus

Daniela Fainus is a fitness and wellness influencer who arrived on Physical 100: Mexico with over 2 million Instagram followers and 1.5 million on TikTok. She also competes in hybrid fitness competitions like HYROX and Spartan DEKA. She also competes on the Netflix series alongside her husband, fellow influencer and fitness coach Omar Zamitiz.

Instagram: @danielafainus

Dominick Ficachi

Dominick Ficachi is a basketball player, model, and content creator. Since 2023, the Mexico City native has played in the semi-professional league Circuito de Baloncesto del Pacífico (CIBAPAC).

Instagram: @dominickdosue

Emmanuel Benítez

Emmanuel Benítez is a Greco-Roman wrestler. Earlier this year, he took home the bronze medal in his category at the Central American and Caribbean Games.

Instagram: @emma_nue1

George Herrera

Bodybuilder George Herrera holds several records for Mexico. He's the first Mexican athlete to turn pro in the IFBB Classic Physique category and the first Mexican to qualify for the Mr. Olympia international competition. He says on Physical 100: Mexico that he's ranked among the top 12 bodybuilders worldwide.

Instagram: @georgeherrerapro

Iván Guerra

Iván Guerrera is a construction worker and fitness influencer who gained fame online for training without gym equipment. Instead, the block maker from a humble background builds muscle through the physical demands of his job.

Instagram: @dethcorexmx

Jahir Ocampo

Jahir Ocampo is a retired Olympic diver who competed in the synchronized springboard event at the Rio 2016 Olympics. He and his partner, Rommel Pacheco, won gold at the 2015 Pan American Games and the bronze at the 2013 World Aquatics Championships. Ocampo was also part of the Mexican team that won silver at the World Championships in both 2023 and 2024.

Instagram: @jahir_ochampion

Jazmín Lira

Jazmín Lira is a bodybuilder and sports nutritionist who competes in the IFBB Pro Women’s Physique division. Outside of athletics, she's also a doctor who has worked on Red Cross USA missions and now has her own clinic.

Instagram: @jaz_ifbbpro

Karen Lara

Karen Lara is a fitness coach and HYROX champion who has ranked as the fastest woman in Mexico. This year, she and her doubles partner—fellow Physical 100: Mexico contestant Mariana Caballero—were among the first Mexican athletes to podium (or come in the top three) in a PRO category at the HYROX World Championships.

Instagram: @karen_cilla

Legendary Bricklayer

Like Iván Guerra, the Legendary Bricklayer (real name Freddy Bautista) is a bodybuilder and influencer known for building his muscles without gym equipment. Instead, the construction worker uses building materials for his strength training and calisthenics regimen.

Instagram: @elalbanillegendariooficial

Liliana Ibáñez

Liliana Ibáñez is a freestyle swimmer who competed in the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympics. She currently holds the Mexican national swimming records for the 50-meter, 100-meter, and 200-meter freestyle, and she's part of the team that holds the record for the 4x200-meter freestyle relay.

Instagram: @liliyaks

Luis Pride

Luis "Pride" Escudero is a pro MMA fighter in the featherweight class. He currently holds a record of four wins and three losses since his professional debut in 2021.

Instagram: @luispride23

Mau Otero

Mau Otero is an extreme athlete, surfer, and influencer with over 5 million TikTok followers. In his intro, he says he's best known for feats like crossing between two buildings on a tightrope and jet-skiing while being pulled by an airplane. He also founded the company Saturday Living, which runs surf and wakeboard camps.

Instagram: @mauu.otero

Místico

Místico (real name Luis Ignacio Urive Alvirde) is a luchador, or a professional wrestler who competes in Mexico's lucha libre tradition. The masked wrestler is considered an icon in lucha libre and "the greatest box office attraction of the 21st century in Mexico," according to Major League Wrestling.

Instagram: @caristico_official

Pascal Nadaud

Pascal Nadaud is a professional rugby player, model, and TV personality. He was on Mexico's national rugby team for over a decade, but he's best known for appearing on Mexican reality shows like Exatlón México and La Granja VIP.

Instagram: @pascalnadaud

Patrick Alexandre

Patrick Alexandre Loliger is a Swiss-Mexican rower who has won several medals at the World Rowing U23 Championships, the Pan American Games, and several international regattas. He also competed at the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics. He's also a devoted girl dad and the founder of the dog rescue and adoption agency Mexi Perro.

Instagram: @pato_remo

Sonrixs

Sonrixs (real name Jorge Hernández) is a taekwondo athlete and lifestyle influencer with over 23 million TikTok followers and over 14 million on YouTube. He's a former member of Mexico's national taekwondo team and previously ranked among the top 10 in the world in his category. He's also known for his public relationship with Canadian taekwondo athlete-turned-TikTok star, Kim Mingneault.

Instagram: @sonrixs1

Tony Gastelum

Tony Gastelum is a legend in the world of competitive calisthenics. He's a four-time world champion in the featherweight class and a two-time champion in the lightweight class. The athlete and coach recently announced his retirement after getting his sixth world title earlier this year.

Instagram: @tonygaste

Vanessa Huppenkothen

Vanessa Huppenkothen is a German-Mexican model and sportscaster who has worked for ESPN since 2016. She's currently an anchor for the Spanish-language edition of SportsCenter. Off-camera, the fitness enthusiast is also a triathlete who runs marathons and IRONMAN races.

Instagram: @vanehupp

Monster, Netflix's anthology series that retells and dramatizes headline-grabbing murders, returns for a fourth season on September 18, 2026, and will center on a female killer for the first time. The tale of Lizzie Borden, who was accused—and acquitted—of killing her father and stepmother in 1892 in Massachusetts, has been referenced and recreated many times in history, from folk rhymes to radio shows and now television.

Relative newcomer Ella Beatty will step into Borden’s shoes in her second-ever TV role, after appearing in a supporting capacity on another Ryan Murphy-helmed series, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. Beatty told The TODAY Show that she had “been a fan of the show before." She added, "I knew that Ryan [Murphy] and Ian Brennan were interested in exploring female rage and repression, so I just felt really excited to take on the part.” Ahead, get to know Beatty as you tune into Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

Everything to Know About 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story' Star Ella Beatty

Beatty grew up surrounded by Hollywood as the daughter of actors Annette Bening and Warren Beatty.

Ella Beatty was born in 2000, the youngest of the four children of iconic Hollywood couple Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, and the niece of actress Shirley MacLaine. She told The TODAY Show that her famous parents have given her a lot of acting advice over the years, but “listen” is the best tidbit yet. “What the other person is doing is always more interesting than what you could create,” she recounted to the daytime talk show hosts.

In an Interview Magazine interview, Beatty said she never considered changing her name, though she understands why others feel the pressure to do so. “I do feel a kind of responsibility towards an artistic legacy that I don’t feel ashamed of. I would hope that my work would be powerful enough to offer something specific. I’d hope that my work would be enough to make me separate, but I also understand why people do that,” she said.

She always wanted to be an actor.

Beatty reveals in Interview Magazine that she never acted professionally until after she graduated from school, but playing make-believe “was who I was before I knew it was going to be my profession.” She added, “Playing pretend, make-believe, that was the way that I contextualized the world. I think there was a part of me that thought everybody did that. When your friends come over, doesn’t everybody want to play make-believe?”

Beatty is best friends with her 'Monster' co-star Sarah Paulson.

Beatty attended The Juilliard School for drama and began her career on Broadway in 2024 in the play Appropriate. The star-studded ensemble also featured actors like Corey Stoll and Sarah Paulson—Beatty's future Monster co-star.

Beatty calls Paulson “one of my very best friends in the world” and says they “kind of fell in love immediately” after their experience together on Broadway. Paulson has reiterated that fact, mentioning in their Interview Magazine conversation that they fell in love “in a way that was incredibly real and powerful and magical.”

In that same interview, Paulson admitted that Beatty’s "nepo baby status" was not common knowledge when they met. “I had no idea who your parents were,” Paulson said to Beatty during their Zoom call. “My interest in you, my estimation of you as a performer, had nothing to do with that.” On The TODAY Show, Beatty also revealed that they call each other every 15 minutes and that she often goes to Paulson for advice.

She also starred opposite Hugh Jackman in a theater two-hander.

After wrapping her role on Appropriate, Beatty appeared in the play Ghosts before joining Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, which starred Hugh Jackman and ran twice in 2025 and 2026. She told Interview Magazine in 2025, “The closer we get to each other and the more familiar we become, I have thought about how important it is to maintain a certain amount of that awe that I have for him as a performer, because it’s in the play.”

Next, she’ll co-star in the film adaptation of 'The Bell Jar.'

Helmed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Sarah Polley, Beatty will star as Joan in the adaptation of Sylvia Plath's seminal novel The Bell Jar opposite Billie Eilish, Carey Mulligan, and Connor Storrie. She told The TODAY Show hosts that she “loved the book growing up” and that being part of the cast is “a dream come true.”

Production wrapped on the film in September 2026, but it does not yet have a release date.

While there was plenty to say about the actual sport at this year's U.S. Open—notably, two American women, Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula, made it to the women's singles semi-final, while Ben Shelton became the first Black American man to make it to the final since Arthur Ashe over 50 years ago—the tournament also made headlines for another reason. There was an influencer controversy when some attendees caused a commotion by taking photos, including with ring lights, during games.

Influencers at tennis matches are nothing new, but their mid-game photoshoots didn't go unnoticed. Some players voiced their thoughts on the matter, too.

On the latest episode of "Nice Talk," Australian tennis coach and former player Rennae Stubbs shares what she thinks about the controversy.

"I think it's really important to have people that aren't necessarily tennis experts or even interested, quote unquote, in tennis coming,” Stubbs tells editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike at the Asics House of Tennis during the tournament, “because it brings eyeballs to the tennis that we wouldn't have normally, right?"

But, the four-time Olympian goes on, when you're actually there, “have respect for what is happening on the court. That's really important. I'm fine for you being in there ... But at at the end of the day, this is a sporting event that those two competitors that are on that court are working their ass off, and they work their ass off every day to be there and just show them the respect that they deserve."

Stubbs really does think that tennis and influencers can be a great mix, though, and hugely beneficial for the sport. She points to how influencers like Paige Lorenze (who is married to tennis player Tommy Paul) and Morgan Riddle (who was in a relationship with player Taylor Fritz) helped promote the sport with tennis-centric content, covering their lifestyle and talking about what to wear to matches.

Stubbs also mentions Ayan Broomfield, a former player-turned-influencer, who has made it her mission to get more women of color into stadiums—spaces some have felt were inaccessible or where they might not feel welcome.

"She played tennis at UCLA. She was a very good tennis player in her own right. She travels and is with Francis Tiafoe. And she's bringing so many new eyeballs, particularly women of color, into the sport of tennis and showing them that you can be cool, this is a place where you can be and you are invited into that we are here for you," Stubbs says. "I mean, I can't stress to you enough how important that is."

And the impact of tennis becoming more diverse, and of more people becoming fans, is something she believes will be felt for years to come.

The six-time doubles majors champ continues, "What I've seen, particularly with, obviously, what Venus and Serena [Williams] brought to the sport, and the young women that now play tennis and are really good tennis players that are women of color, and the fact that Francis Tiafoe again is in the semi-finals of the U.S. Open, he's only going to bring other young boys of color into tennis. So the more people we have like this in the sport is only going to make the sport better and more interesting."

For more from Stubbs—including what she learned from coaching Serena Williams—check out this week's installment of "Nice Talk." The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.

If you ever wanted to know who is on your favorite singer's playlist, or what albums inspired the latest “it girl” the most, tune in for Marie Claire’s resident music franchise Listen Up. In this interview series, we ask musicians about their listening habits and the specific records that informed their taste—and inherently their journey as an artist.

When Carly Rae Jepsen debuted in the mainstream with the inescapable and polarizing “Call Me Maybe” in 2012, the world decided that she would be a one-hit wonder. Since then, she’s proven she’s anything but.

Although the song was successful across many metrics, the singer-songwriter from British Columbia, Canada, felt it didn’t do justice to her range and, for years, was left fighting against being a “singles artist.” But she took the challenge in stride, refusing to be boxed in by the industry. “There was always this idea, especially when I first came to L.A., you have to be one thing. I fight that idea,” says Jepsen, 40, from her sunlit home office in L.A.

“Especially as women, we’re so many things.” Three years after the success of “Call Me Maybe,” the musician proved as much by releasing E•MO•TION, a cult-beloved ’80s-inspired fantasia, which she created with a coterie of Grammy winners and indie favorites including Shellback, Devonté Hynes, and Ariel Rechtshaid. The LP gave her a new level of critical acclaim and a devout fan base that has followed her as she’s continued to experiment with genres, from 2019’s electro-pop playground Dedicated to 2022’s folk-tinged The Loneliest Time.

By defying another of pop’s litmus tests—that female artists have an expiration date—she has made her most authentic album to date, Day and Night. “I really was allowing myself to ask, ‘What’s my contribution to this genre of music?’ which I don’t think, on any album before this one, I ever nailed,” Jepsen says. But on this 24-track double album, she did so by embracing every part of herself. “I call myself a bit of a late bloomer in general. It took me a second to stand in my own confidence of being unapologetically myself.”

Day and Night feels like a snapshot of what it might’ve been like to turn the radio dial in the early ’70s, when four-on-the-floor music gleamed and songs on the folk station experimented with disco. The album, she says, was made possible by the “incredible, mind-altering, life-altering change” she’s experienced in the past four years—during which she got engaged to, married, and welcomed her first child with music producer Cole M.G.N.

While the pop star’s next few months are largely focused on taking Day and Night out on the road (with her newborn son in tow), she’s also in the throes of working on one of her greatest passion projects: scoring the Broadway musical adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You. “It has been the most gratifying, exciting new flavor of creativity that I've ever been a part of,” she says of the stage show opening in August 2027. (She’s partnering with Ethan Gruska on the music while Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang co-write the book.)

Jepsen says she and the Girls alum had been eager to work together in some capacity for years before theater producer Mike Bosner brought them together for the project. “If we’ve done our job right, it’s going to be funny,” she says of the musical to be directed by Christopher Wheeldon; she points to the Tony-winning Oh, Mary! as a comparison. “I go to work, and I leave in stitches from what their brains have come up with and how dark and twisty and silly we all get together.”

While Jepsen is known for embracing indulgence, it’s safe to say she’s doing so now more than ever—and flourishing.

In a candid May interview, Jepsen talks about the current stage of her life as well as the classics she grew up on, her little-known love for jazz, and what music she’s already sharing with her son.

James Taylor. I have a profound memory of one of the first times that I was left alone at the house; I had the record player, and I put on James Taylor, loud, and went up on the roof. He’s also the first artist I saw live, so that is going to be profound no matter what. I thought, Oh, my God. What could be a better career than this? How do I make that happen?

In terms of pop artists: Sinéad O’Connor. Holy shit, I thought, this is a once-in-a-lifetime voice.

It was by the Spice Girls. My girlfriends and I had our Lip Smackers and nail polish, and we would all trade [being the Spice Girls]—we all wanted to be Baby because she had the lollipop—and we would make up dances. It was a rite of passage.

I’m having a beautiful relationship with my record player again. In the morning, with my baby, I put on a different record for the week. Right now, I’m really blown away by Earth, Wind & Fire’s Greatest Hits. To me, it’s like watching a really good figure skater, where you’re like, “You’re making this look so easy, but I know it’s really hard.” Funk music—being so danceable and also so intelligent but so effortless feeling—I really am bowing down to how much I’m hearing that’s going on and how well it’s done.

A little-known fact about me is that I also have this deep love of jazz, which actually comes out in moments on this album, more so than any other before. I think the ’40s could also be really interesting because a lot of what I’m listening to at home is Billie Holiday. There’s something about hearing how those jazz songs are actually incredible pop songs too. To me, that is really, really wild.

More and more, what I’m loving is knowing two people who haven’t met and ought to meet. It’s almost like, “What’s your favorite color?” and I’m like, “Well, I like color combinations, actually.” I really have been obsessed with this band Say She She—I’ve never met them—but working with them and bringing them to [my frequent producer] Patrik Berger would be an incredible combination. That’s one of my dreams.

This Tegan and Sara T-shirt I bought when I first saw them, before they had broken into the U.S. [market.] It was luck. I was at a festival in Canada somewhere. I was an immediate fan. I went to the [merch tent], and I was like, “Who was that? I’m buying something.” It was a small enough festival that you felt like your contribution of $20 for a T-shirt might help them get to the next festival. I was in a similar place at the time, where I was like, “I need all the help I can get.” So I bought their shirt, and I still have it and cherish it deeply.

Then, fast-forward, they were on my dream list of people to collaborate with, and we got to work together. I waited until session number three, when I was like, “So, not to creep you out, I’m a huge fan.”

It would be all the people I have yet to see. Van Morrison—he's on my bucket list. I would love to see Say She She. I think Doja Cat is one of the most incredible performers of our generation. I really love Feist. I would also bring all my friends. I would bring Bleachers;. I would have Dev Hynes there, absolutely.

I don’t think there’s a better pop song than “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Prince [performed by Sinéad O’Connor]. It’s got everything, all the yearning in the world.

Laura Mvula’s “Show Me Love” was something I was really jealous of in a good way. It’s one of those songs—almost like a good Billie Holiday song—where you’re happy you’ve experienced heartbreak so you can relate to how good the song is.

Lykke Li. She does sad so beautifully. The lyrics [of “hard rain”]: “If you like the feeling of the hard rain falling / I have a sea full, I can give you an ocean.” When [the album so sad so sexy] came out, I remember being like, “Oh, good. I’m set for all my sad feelings this year. I have my playlist.”

The last time I went out was to the Lily Allen concert, and I was listening to her album [West End Girl] to get ready. You feel sassy, you feel vindicated. I don’t know a woman who can’t applaud that she said it for all of us, to that one ex we all know needed to hear it. That was such a satisfying art piece of an album.

That is too much pressure for me. I'd be a terrible DJ because I couldn't stay focused. I'd start somewhere, and then pretty soon we'd be listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. But if somebody hands it to me, I’ve been listening to The Temptations with the baby, and we’re having a great time, so that could be a nice party starter.

[They’re] from “Habits of Creatures”: “It’s nice the way you look at me / Daffodils grow on my street and awful free / I think you can be the one to plant my lemon tree.” It means, you’re the one I want to do this domesticated business with and be blissful, and we’ll slow things down. It feels like a romantic idea, like, when you know, you plant the lemon tree with a person.

I’m a new mom. My baby is fresh. So “All Night Long (All Night)" [by Lionel Richie].”

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

Katya Suvorova's coming-of-age story speaks volumes about her resilience—and about how broken immigration is in the U.S. In her equally poignant and witty debut memoir, Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter, the writer and activist unpacks her childhood living undocumented in Houston, Texas. A unique story of survival and complicated parent-child relationships, Suvorova explores how she lived precariously alongside her mother, who fought for their safety and citizenship as a Russian mail-order bride.

Suvorova writes about how she distanced herself from her mother (and later wrestled with their estrangement) after she realized the truth about her mother's profession at 17. Before the highly anticipated book hits shelves on September 29, the author has shared an exclusive excerpt with Marie Claire in which she recalls the moment she realized her mother was a mail-order bride and confronted her about it.

Eleventh Grade, 17 Years Old

It’s Houston humid and my skin is boiling off my bones. I hate being outside right now—it feels like you’re stuck in someone’s mouth and they’ve gargled with gasoline. And the worst part is that it’s not even summer yet.

My stepdad says I need to spend the day cleaning the garage. I hate being out here, but I like this chore because my nosiness is sanctioned for the sake of organization.

Halfway through rifling through his stuff I’ve decided my stepdad has never been interesting in his life. This whole four car garage is filled with his shit and all of it sucks. There is a box of Megan McLachlan CDs and posters, another box containing “Most Improved” awards from what looks like a summer camp he went to 100 years ago, and a binder with several emails printed out and put in plastic sleeves of other people giving him kudos at his job. I don’t know what I was hoping to find, but it’s not this garbage.

When I go to put everything on the curb for trash collection, I find a box belonging to Mom. It’s not marked as hers, but I can tell it is because it looks like a family of rats was living inside of it. The lid is torn, there is a weird, peppery smell coming from the opening that I’m sure is probably her Russian witch medicine. Everything Mom owns is disheveled, but it surprises me that she has a box in here, because she usually keeps all her things in her closet behind lock and key. After her last husband had torn and burned her clothes and the family photos, she is vigilant about her things.

I flip open the box, hungrily. There are some tiny Russian horoscope pamphlets, Houston newspapers from the '90s, and a magazine I would recognize anywhere. Mom showed it to me when I was little. I remember it as her modeling catalogue. I was so enthralled with it.

Rose Russians.

“Rose Russians,” I mumble. “Rose Russians?”

I scan the pages.

This does not look like Russian Vogue.

This doesn’t look like a fashion magazine at all.

This catalogue is clogged with women, but they don’t look like they’re advertising clothes. They’re posing in front of beds, in front of houses, up close, on chairs, crossing their legs.

My hands are buzzing as I slide down to the concrete floor of the garage.

I flip to a dog-eared page and find Mom’s face quickly. Her photo takes up a quarter of a page. It’s tiny compared to some of these other women’s photos. There is a smattering of text next to it. I read the words slowly, carefully. I’m looking for a family and eternal love.

My stomach drops.

“Son of a bitch,” I whisper. “She’s a mail-order bride.”

I walk out of the garage, my mind racing, and head to my room. I think back on where I had first seen the catalogue with my mother’s face looking out from the glossy pages. I remember going home to my mom after career day in first grade and asking her what she did for a job. She told me she was a model. She showed me the same magazine I have in my hands now. I didn’t know how to read, so I assumed she was holding the Russian equivalent of Vogue. My mom had always told me she modeled and waitressed in Russia. She had a degree, but she could make more money with her appearance than her brains.

I feel angry, thinking about all the weird details of my life. Details I knew weren’t normal for other kids but were normal for me. My stepdad is so much older than her. We have a huge house. I remember how she had a salary requirement when she was searching for a husband.

I scoff.

I think about Jen’s mom, who is a lawyer. Maritzia’s mom cleans houses, Layla’s mom raised Layla and her siblings.

All my friends have issues with their parents, but they have mothers they can respect.

A chilling feeling emerges in my gut.

I have to be better than my mom. If I’m not better than her, I will end up like her.

Dependent on a man.

I can’t have that life.

I go downstairs, ready to put the magazine back where I found it.

My hand is on the doorknob of the garage when I hear Mom’s bedroom door open.

“Katyusha,” she says. I look around me and realize I don’t have anywhere to hide the magazine. “Are you done cleaning the garage?”

She comes closer to me and her eyes brighten when she notices what’s in my hands.

“Where did you find this?” Mom asks, a crease in her forehead, her tone sharp.

When she asks me this, I realize I am so angry I could explode.

“In the garage, when I was cleaning.”

“I don’t appreciate you going through my stuff,” she says, back.

“You told me you were a model for Coke,” I say, “I didn’t know you were actually a mail-order bride.”

“A what?” she asks, like she is confused.

I point to the magazine. “Mail-order bride. That’s what we call women who sell themselves.” Mom is usually the mean one. Now it’s my turn.

Mom sighs, closing her eyes. I can’t read what she is thinking. I can hardly ever read what she was thinking.

Finally, she says, “Everyone I know was doing it,” in her chopped Russian accent.

I don’t respond.

She adds, gently, “It’s how we got out.”

Mom is wearing a mini skirt and a tight, hot pink, spaghetti-strapped shirt. When I was little, I remember asking her to wear pants and regular-sleeved shirts like my friend Dream’s mom. I always wanted my mom to be the same, and this just proves how different she is. I hate it.

Mom comes closer to me, her face red. I don’t know if she’s angry or if she’s ashamed.

“You could have had a more respectable occupation,” I say. I stand up taller; I feel better than her. More powerful.

“A what?”

“A job. You could have had a regular job. Come here on a worker visa or something.”

I am more American than she is. I’m not as low as she is. I speak in words she doesn’t understand.

“I— You don’t understand how it was back then. Besides, I didn’t marry anyone until later.”

“Who was Joe?” I ask.

Our story is clicking into place for me, and I hate it.

“He helped us cross the border. It was different with him.”

“Did you promise him sex to do it?” I spit the words, aiming them at her.

She looks away. “It’s none of your business,” she responds.

I bite down on my teeth. I want to call her a prostitute. I want to keep pummeling her. I want my words to hurt.

“Why did you tell me you were a model?” I seethed. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“What else did I have?” She shouts, her eyes watery. For a moment I think she is going to slap me. “You came back from school and talked about how everyone had a job for this fucking job fair. What did you want me to say? I show you the magazine. I—I had nothing else.”

I feel deflated. I want a normal mom. A mom who respects herself. An American mom, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a catalog, waiting to be bought.

I want her to be more than a mail-order bride. I want her to stand up for herself, to stand up for me, to not have had to sacrifice everything, including her own daughter.

I want her to be strong. I want to be proud of her. I want her to use her fucking voice instead of this chopped accent that she has, this accent that people label as whorish because she is Eastern European.

I slam the magazine down, leaving it for her.

“You sold me too!” I yell, walking away.

Excerpted from UNGRATEFUL IMMIGRANT DAUGHTER © 2026 by Katya Suvorova. Reprinted with permission from Alcove Press. All rights reserved

When you're looking to get lost in a book, sometimes you need your reading material to match your mood. With Marie Claire's series "Buy the Book," we do the heavy lifting for you. We're offering curated, highly specific recommendations for whatever you're looking for—whether you're in your feels or hooked on a subgenre trending on #BookTok.

In this author-curated rendition, R.F. Kuang—the scholar and best-selling author behind Babel, Katabasis, and Yellowface—shares which novels about language-learning inspired her seventh novel, Taipei Story.

R.F. Kuang’s fascination with language has made her a literary superstar. Her bestselling works—from historical epics with complex magic systems to a biting contemporary satire of the publishing industry—explore the ways words can be warped and co-opted in search of power, fame, and influence. For her latest release, Kuang turned to a place that can strike fear in the heart of any linguaphile: the immersion classroom.

Taipei Story, Kuang’s first contemporary coming-of-age novel, follows Yale student Lily through her summer attending an intensive Chinese-language program in Taiwan. The first half of the book is a travelogue of fumbling miscommunications inside and outside of the classroom, as Lily navigates inscrutable teachers, roommate woes, and that diasporic dissonance of feeling like an outsider in her ancestral homeland. In a way, the fictional Lily is walking in her creator’s footsteps; to write the novel, Kuang pulled from her own study-abroad era in the summer of 2023.

“While I went to many of the same places and did many of the same activities as Lily did, her reactions and interpretations are wholly invented,” Kuang tells Marie Claire. “I wanted to explore loss and alienation from the perspective of someone much younger and worse equipped to deal with it all.”

Though Kuang is best known for revitalizing the “dark academia” novel, with its innately gifted protagonists, the Cambridge, Oxford, and soon-to-be Yale graduate embraced the natural conflict that misapprehension brings for her latest novel. “You don’t speak the language. You keep blundering and violating cultural norms,” she describes. “You don’t know the right way to interpret anything you’re witnessing. All of that friction is hilarious.”

Kuang counts these types of novels, ones that explore the gap between intention and comprehension that foreign-language speakers face, among her biggest literary influences. The big question of Taipei Story is whether Lily will ever cross that chasm. When her grandfather passes away in the middle of her program—as Kuang’s did in real life—she has to parse through her family’s unspoken history without the complete fluency she’d been chasing. The lesson that comes from this struggle is one that Kuang would give to her young self today.

“Miscommunication is inevitable, and so is falling flat on your face,” she says. “The only way to get better at a language is to make mistakes over and over again, so just put yourself out on a limb and learn to laugh at yourself.”

To coincide with the release of her highly anticipated new book on September 8, we asked the author to share the books about miscommunication among language-learners that inspired Taipei Story, from globetrotting fiction to campus novels.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives fans have been through a lot over the past few months. Days after season 4 arrived on Hulu, production paused filming amid legal issues between Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen. (Paul's already-filmed season of The Bachelorette was soon shelved.) Despite the two-month hiatus, SLOMW maintained its twice-yearly schedule, with season 5 arriving on Hulu two years after the reality hit's September 2024 debut. (How has it only been two years!?)

The abridged, dour fifth season has left viewers wondering where the #MomTok show can go from here. Due to the show's breakneck production schedule, viewers were guaranteed more episodes before season 5 even arrived. But endless offscreen drama since the abridged installment's debut has left fans wondering if this is the beginning of the end for #MomTok.

Below, read on for everything we know so far about the future of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

Everything We Know About 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' Season 6 So Far

Will there be more episodes of 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' season 5?

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 5 ends on the ultimate cliffhanger. The show doesn't include any footage recorded following the production pause (outside of confessionals). The abrupt ending, paired with a "To Be Continued" graphic, left fans running to the internet to ask when the rest of season 5's episodes would drop.

Alas, a season 5, part 2 drop is not on the horizon. Hulu confirmed season 5's truncated length ahead of the show's return. In fact, an insider had revealed the filming timeline to PEOPLE back in May.

"Right now, they’re just filming confessionals for season 5,” the source said. "They’ve decided they’re not going to film the rest of season 5, but apparently they’re still going to film season 6."

Is 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' renewed for season 6?

#MomTok is officially too big to fail. On August 6, 2026, Layla Taylor revealed on Hulu's "Get Real" podcast that the cast had begun filming The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 6.

Later that same day, outlets reported that Hulu had ordered 20 more episodes of SLOMW, which will make up seasons 6 and 7. This follows the series' production pattern so far, with the renewals of seasons 2 and 3 in October 2024, and seasons 4 and 5 in November 2025.

When will 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' season 6 be released?

Hulu hasn't confirmed when season 6 will premiere, but SLOMW has proved its twice-yearly release schedule can work, come hell or high water. With production already filming new episodes, the reality phenomenon will likely be back in spring 2027.

Who in the cast will return for 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' season 6?

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has officially lost its biggest star. On September 21, 2026, Taylor Frankie Paul announced via Instagram that she is stepping away from Hulu's hit reality series.

"My gratitude goes to all the networks that supported me throughout this and gave me the chance to return," she wrote. "However I don’t desire to move forward like this. I originally was willing to be removed to let them all continue on with less stress and I’m back to that point."

The news comes amid an ongoing feud between Taylor and some of her cast members, following the show's filming hiatus in March. (The custody battle between Taylor and Dakota is ongoing). In her post, Taylor accuses the women of "bullying" her and including her kids in their online back-and-forths. She ends the post by saying that "it’s a pleasure to remove myself so they can continue...I’m just relieved to be out."

In the weeks after season 5 premiered, outlets like Page Six and Variety reported that Taylor was supposed to return for season 6. According to Page Six, the star had "the full support of ABC and Disney." Clearly, a lot has changed behind the scenes as the show prepares to pick up its cameras.

Taylor's exit came six days after fan-favorite Mikayla Matthews announced her own departure from the series. Matthews heavily alluded to the fact that she refused to stay on the series if Taylor returned for season 6. "I made my decision over a week ago, after hearing some news, that I will not be continuing the show at this moment," she wrote in a September 15 post.

"I’ve said from the beginning of this that I’m not comfortable being a part of something that continues to platform behavior I don’t agree [with] especially given my own experience growing up in a home with multiple forms of abuse," she continued. "There’s no amount of money worth going against my morals or changing the stance I’ve had since I first saw and heard the things that made me feel this strongly. And for me personally, continuing to directly profit from this behavior feels wrong and unethical. It feels like a disservice to the children, everyone’s healing and the millions of people watching."

A day after her initial post, Mikayla clarified her stance in an Instagram Story. Per The Wrap, she explained that she only began filming season 6 because of the unnamed person's absence, and that she hasn't filmed "a day since" she learned of their return.

"The ONLY reason I’m leaving the show is because I was told a certain person was coming back," she wrote. "I told them before agreeing to do 6 that I wasn’t going to film if that certain someone came back. Because it’s UNETHICAL and kids are involved. And I’m being put in an unfair position because of the things I’ve seen and heard that I don’t agree with."

It's currently unknown whether Mikayla could return to filming following Taylor's departure. At the time of her announcement, she said that she would only take part in "contractual obligations and [confessional] interviews for what I have filmed" moving forward. She also wrote on September 17 that she planned to donate the money she would have made for the rest of season 6 to "the National Children’s Alliance, which supports children and families affected by multiple forms of child abuse."

Other members of #MomTok admitted they've reconsidered their involvement with the series past season 6. Both Mayci Neeley and Layla Taylor responded to fans' questions on whether they will remain on the show, per PEOPLE. The stars confirmed they would finish out season 6, but admitted that their future with the show is, in Layla's words, "tbd."

Though season 7's roster remains to be seen, Jessi Draper and Miranda Hope will likely join Mayci and Layla in the main season 6 cast. Jen Affleck has also been spotted filming new episodes, but it's unclear how much screen time she'll get, since she has a lot going on. (Jen's currently pregnant with her fourth child, and has reportedly joined the spinoff The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County.) It's currently unknown whether Taylor Frankie Paul will rejoin the main cast or if she'll return in a guest role.

It's also (unfortunately) likely that the husbands of #DadTok will return for season 6. However, the men who are publicly on the outs with the women—including Dakota, Jordan Ngatikaura, and Chase McWhorter—could receive less screen time.

Meanwhile, original cast member Whitney Leavitt has also confirmed that she will not return to the series for season 6. The influencer-turned-Broadway star announced the news in May 2026, before marking the release of season 5 with a farewell tribute to her "forever momtok."

Leavitt opened up about her departure during her June 2026 appearance on Marie Claire's "Nice Talk" podcast. "This time is very different," she said, comparing the exit to her previous #MomTok hiatuses. "The times I'd left in the past were [because of] frustration and anger. It just wasn't a healthy way to leave. This time, I'm leaving with gratitude. Like, my cup is full. I don't feel like there's anything more for me there."

Will there be new cast members on 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' season 6?

Though nothing's been confirmed, the streets are saying that #MomTok has found some new members. Weeks after the season 6 renewal announcement, the show's stars were spotted filming in the Italian Riviera for the franchise's first international cast trip. It seems that the women were joined by two new Utah-based influencers: Kate Racker and Sarah Beeston.

Beeston may already be a familiar face to viewers who frequent certain corners of the internet. She already boasts 4.5 million followers on TikTok, while her family YouTube channel, the Beeston Fam, has over 2.9 million subscribers. Meanwhile, Kate Racker has already been in the background of SLOMW for years, as Chase McWhorter's on-again, off-again girlfriend. We'll have to see whether either steps into the spotlight on season 6.

What will 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' season 6 be about?

After five episodes—one for every week of filming the show got through before the pause—The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 5 only dedicates three minutes to the aftermath. Between clips of TikTok speculation and courthouse(!) footage, each of the show's stars (minus Taylor) sits down for confessionals in which they confirm that #MomTok is in shambles amid the rift in the friend group. The final question posed by season 5—where do we go from here—is answered by a simple graphic: "To be continued."

Thanks to #MomTok's ubiquity on social media, there are already several clues regarding what viewers will see in season 6. In addition to the Milan trip, developments in the cast's lives—like Jen's pregnancy and move to California, Layla coming out as bisexual and her new relationship, and Miranda also seemingly starting a new romance (with the former fling of a Love Island USA star)—all seem like potential storylines.

With Taylor's departure from the show, it's unknown whether drama will remain a subject of conversation whether or not she's on screen. (Though there's a good chance; just look at how much Demi Engemann is mentioned in season 5, despite not appearing once.) Though Taylor didn't film a final confessional for season 5, she did open up about feeling "betrayed" and "abandoned" by her friends in a July 2026 post.

"I’ll be the first to admit my wrong doing’s in the MomTok mess. We’re at each other’s throats and I’m removing myself from responding to any of it moving forward," she wrote on Instagram. "I’ve never discredited them. I’ve always supported all of them in their success. I’ve had their backs in times of need. I became defensive and let my ego take over when I heard…what I heard. I never felt so betrayed and abandoned by so many people I would have stood by no matter how exhausted."

Months later, it seems those complicated feelings still go both ways. As of season 5's release, only Taylor and Jessi have followed each other back on Instagram. Also, a Page Six report claimed that there's "still a lot of hurt” among the women following the production pause. "[Taylor] doesn’t necessarily feel like she’s been supported by the women throughout the last few months," they added. It's anyone's guess whether #MomTok will survive this.