Entertainment
Trump set to host Kennedy Center Honors, recognizing Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Kiss and more
President Trump on Sunday was set to host the Kennedy Center Honors after presenting the 2025 Kennedy Center honorees with their medals during a ceremony in the Oval Office on Saturday, hailing the slate of artists he was deeply involved in choosing as “perhaps the most accomplished and renowned class” ever assembled.
This year’s recipients are actor Sylvester Stallone, singers Gloria Gaynor and George Strait, the rock band Kiss and actor-singer Michael Crawford.
Mr. Trump said Saturday they are a group of “incredible people” who represent the “very best in American arts and culture” and that, “I know most of them and I’ve been a fan of all of them.”
Sunday marks the first time a president will command the stage for the ceremony instead of sitting in an Opera House box.
Asked when he arrived how he had found time to prepare, Mr. Trump said he “didn’t really prepare very much.”
“If you look at the great hosts, Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, those are the greats,” Mr. Trump said, while disparaging previous host Jimmy Kimmel, whom the president has criticized on multiple occasions, going so far as to urge ABC to remove him as host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“But no, I think you, you want to be just loose and not a lot to prepare for. You know what you have to be? You have to be yourself,” Mr. Trump said.
“I have a good memory, so I can remember things, which is very fortunate,” the president said. “But just, I wanted to just be myself. You have to be yourself. Johnny Carson, he was himself.”
Mr. Trump is assuming a role that has been held in the past by journalist Walter Cronkite and comedian Stephen Colbert, among others. Before Mr. Trump, presidents watched the show alongside the honorees.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, one of several Cabinet secretaries attending the ceremony, said he’s looking forward to Mr. Trump’s hosting job.
“Oh, this president, he is so relaxed in front of these cameras, as you know, and so funny, I can’t wait for tonight,” Lutnick said as he arrived with his wife, who is on the Kennedy Center board.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP
Mr. Trump said in August that he had agreed to host the show. He said Saturday at a State Department dinner for the honorees that he was doing so “at the request of a certain television network.” He predicted that the broadcast, scheduled to air Dec. 23 on CBS and Paramount+, would have its best ratings ever.
Since 1978, the honors have recognized stars for their influence on American culture and the arts. Members of this year’s class are pop-culture standouts, including Stallone for his “Rocky” and “Rambo” movies, Gaynor for her feminist anthem “I Will Survive” and Kiss for its flashy, cartoonish makeup and onstage displays of smoke and pyrotechnics. Country music superstar George Strait and Tony Award-winning actor Michael Crawford are also being honored.
The ceremony is expected to be emotional for the members of Kiss. The band’s original lead guitarist, Ace Frehley, died in October after he was injured during a fall. The band’s co-founder Gene Simmons, speaking on the red carpet when he and the other honorees arrived for the ceremony, said the president had assured him there would be an empty chair among the members of Kiss in memory of Frehley.
Stallone said being honored at the ceremony was like being in the “eye of a hurricane.”
“This is an amazing event,” he said. “But you’re caught up in the middle of it. It’s hard to take it in until the next day. … but I’m incredibly humbled by it.”
Crawford also said it was “humbling, especially at the end of a career.”
Gaynor said it “feels like a dream” to be honored. “To be recognized in this way is the pinnacle,” she said on the red carpet.
Mike Farris, an award-winning gospel singer who is performing for Gaynor, said she is a dear friend. “She truly did survive,” Farris said. “What an iconic song.”
Actor Neil McDonough said he’s presenting the award to Stallone, which he said was long over due for Stallone’s writing and acting. “But that isn’t even the best part,” McDonough said. “The best part is that Sly is one of he greatest guys I’ve ever met.”
Previous honorees have come from a broad range of art forms, whether dance (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham), theater (Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber), movies (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) or music (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell).
Mr. Trump upended decades of bipartisan support for the center by ousting its leadership and stacking the board of trustees with Republican supporters, who then elected him chair. He has criticized the center’s programming and the building’s appearance — and has said, perhaps jokingly, that he would rename it as the “Trump Kennedy Center.” He secured more than $250 million from Congress for renovations of the building.
Presidents of each political party have at times found themselves face-to-face with artists of opposing political views. Republican Ronald Reagan was there for honoree Arthur Miller, a playwright who championed liberal causes. Democrat Bill Clinton, who had signed an assault weapons ban into law, marked the honors for Charlton Heston, an actor and gun rights advocate.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, multiple honorees were openly critical of the president. In 2017, Mr. Trump’s first year in office, honors recipient and film producer Norman Lear threatened to boycott his own ceremony if Mr. Trump attended. Mr. Trump stayed away during that entire term.
Mr. Trump has said he was deeply involved in choosing the 2025 honorees and turned down some recommendations because they were “too woke.” While Stallone is one of Mr. Trump’s Hollywood “special ambassadors” and has likened Mr. Trump to George Washington, the political views of Sunday’s other guests are less clear.
Strait and Gaynor have said little about their politics, although Federal Election Commission records show that Gaynor has given money to Republican organizations in recent years.
Simmons spoke favorably of Mr. Trump when Mr. Trump ran for president in 2016. But in 2022, Simmons told Spin magazine that Mr. Trump was “out for himself” and criticized the president for encouraging conspiracy theories and public expressions of racism.
Fellow Kiss member Paul Stanley denounced Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden, and said Mr. Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “terrorists.” But after Mr. Trump won in 2024, Stanley urged unity.
“If your candidate lost, it’s time to learn from it, accept it and try to understand why,” Stanley wrote on X. “If your candidate won, it’s time to understand that those who don’t share your views also believe they are right and love this country as much as you do.”
It’s not all red carpet and applause for Barry Keoghan – and he’s not pretending otherwise.
The 33-year-old actor got candid during a recent chat on SiriusXM’s The Morning Mash Up, revealing that the internet’s darker corners are starting to take a real toll.
“I think I removed myself from online, but I’m still a curious human being that wants to go on and, if I attend an event or if I go somewhere, you want to see how it was received. And it’s not nice,” Barry said in a clip shared by Elite Daily.
“There’s a lot of hate online. It’s a lot of abuse of how I look.”
And it’s not just a passing annoyance – it’s changing how he lives.
“And I say this being absolute pure and honest to you. It’s becoming a problem,” he admitted.
“So yeah, I don’t have to hide away because I am hiding away. I don’t have to go to places because I actually don’t go to places because of these things. But when that starts leaking into your art, it becomes a problem because then you don’t even want to be on screen anymore.”
That last part hits hard – because when an actor starts avoiding the screen, we all lose.
But the most gut-punch moment? It’s not even about him.
“It is disappointing for the fans, but it’s also disappointing that my little boy has to read all of this stuff when he gets older,” Barry shared.
Justin Timberlake’s attempt to keep his DWI arrest footage out of the public eye has failed and the video is now out, showing the singer stumbling during sobriety tests and telling officers, “These are, like, hard tests.”
Timberlake, 45, had filed a lawsuit against the Long Island town of Sag Harbor earlier this month in a bid to prevent the footage from being released.
That effort was unsuccessful.
The video shows the SexyBack singer being pulled over in his grey 2025 BMW before being put through a series of field sobriety tests by officers.
He appeared confused and unsteady throughout. When asked to walk a straight line, he stumbled a couple of times. As the pressure of the situation mounted, he told the officers, “My heart’s racing.”
He was polite throughout the encounter, responding to officers with “yes, sir”, but declined to take a breathalyser test on multiple occasions.
A female companion arrived at the scene after he was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, offering to drive his vehicle away.
Timberlake was arrested in June 2024 and charged with one count of driving while intoxicated, along with two traffic citations for failing to stop at a stop sign and failing to keep right.
According to a source who spoke to Page Six at the time, he had been at the historic American Hotel in Sag Harbor for dinner with friends before being pulled over, with police reportedly stationed outside.
Friends on the scene pleaded with officers to let him go.
One detail that emerged at the time painted a particularly awkward picture of how the night unfolded.
“The cop didn’t know who he was at first,” a source told Page Six. “Justin said under his breath, ‘This is going to ruin the tour.’ The cop replied, ‘What tour?’ Justin said, ‘The world tour.'”
His mugshot, taken after he was brought into custody, showed visibly bloodshot eyes.
Timberlake subsequently took a plea deal, with his DWI charge reduced to a traffic violation rather than a criminal offence.
Jacob Young has spoken publicly for the first time about a seven-year opioid addiction that began with a routine dental prescription and spiralled in secret, hidden even from his own wife.
The General Hospital actor, 46, made the revelation on the Imperfectly Perfect Podcast, tracing the roots of his substance use back to a difficult childhood and describing how addiction eventually took hold of a significant portion of his adult life.
“I went through seven years of my life, wasted on opioids, still trying to figure out what was wrong with me, but I didn’t know,” he said.
“It was just needing to numb… It was the only thing that made me feel normal.”
The opioids came into his life through an unexpected route.
After he and his wife Christen Steward had bought a house and settled in together, Young underwent dental surgery and was prescribed Vicodin.
Apart from having his wisdom teeth out as a teenager, he had never taken opioids before. What followed was years of dependency that he kept entirely to himself.
Young’s history with substances had begun much earlier, though.
He started smoking marijuana around the age of 14, and it wasn’t until his mid-20s, when fame from roles on All My Children, General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful brought him into the orbit of New York City’s nightlife, that drinking and cocaine use entered the picture.
By the time he married, he had largely left those behind. The opioids were a different story.
He eventually sat his wife down and told her the truth, a conversation he credits as the turning point. From there, he sought counselling and medical support to work through his dependency.
Looking back, Young connects his substance use to a childhood defined by instability.
His parents divorced and he was shuffled between them in a way that left him unsettled. The family relied on welfare and food stamps, and Young grew up alongside three older siblings in what he described as a humble upbringing.
In his adolescence, he went to live with his father, which felt stable, until his stepmother, who had become like a second mother to him, died by suicide.
His relationship with his father broke down in the aftermath, and a difficult relationship with his mother at the time left him without a reliable parental figure during some of his most formative years.
“I was going through stuff that I didn’t realise that I was ever going to go through, emotionally,” he said, a quiet acknowledgement of just how much had been buried, long before the prescriptions began.
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