We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how different the pitch for Pretty Woman – originally called 3000 – was from the film we know now.

Don’t get me started on the extremely unlikely source material for Dirty Dancing 2, either.

As it turns out, the first version of Pixar’s Monsters Inc was almost unrecognisable from the film that eventually hit cinemas as well.

For instance, the original script didn’t include lovable protagonist Sulley (at least not in his monster form).

Instead, an early plot focused on a 30-year-old accountant.

Speaking about the film’s origins, Pete Docter, the director of 2001’s Monsters Inc, said on Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting podcast: “Well, my idea was that what it was about was about a 30-year-old man who is like an accountant or something.

“He hates his job, and one day he gets a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid from his mum, and he doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them.

“He thinks he’s starting to go crazy; they follow him to his job and on his dates, and all this – and it turns out these monsters are fears that he never dealt with as a kid.”

A bit like fellow Pixar hit Inside Out, which includes personified emotions, each of these monsters would have represented a different one of the office worker’s fears.

As soon as he was healed from one of the fears these monsters symbolised, it would go away. This was actually a little bittersweet, as the original plot’s main character grew close to some of his new companions.

While I have you, here’s another fact about the first movie: Boo actually had a real name all along. Eagle-eyed fans spotted a detail suggesting she was called Mary, like the child actor Mary Gibbs, who voiced her.

Real-life Mary has since voiced characters in Inside Out, though she was only two years old when she starred in Monsters Inc.

Famed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has lamented what he sees as America’s demand for politicians who feel like the average Joe, calling for an end to the “glamorisation of dumbness”.

During a new interview with Esquire, Sorkin was asked if he still felt like the US is dealing with a “huge, huge dumb problem”, as he’d said back in 2019.

The politically-minded Hollywood veteran explained why he thought little has changed, stating: “We need to get over our infatuation with the outsider, with the plainspoken person that you want to have a beer with.”

Citing his own work, Sorkin continued: “The characters I write are all smarter than I am. I did not blaze any trails as a scholar. People who are smarter than I am don’t make me feel bad about myself, they don’t make me feel inferior. And certainly a president – I need the president to be smarter than I am.”

Sorkin added that, in his eyes, “there are millions upon millions of voters who seem to have a mass debilitating inferiority complex and feel like a smart president, Obama for instance, is looking down his nose at everyone else, or he’s a Poindexter, or he’s not a real man”.

“Right. He eats arugula,” interviewer Michael Sebastian cracked, harking back to one of the trifling complaints conservatives had about Barack Obama‘s alleged elitism.

“We got to knock that off,” Sorkin said. “There has been a glamorisation of dumbness.”

While the Oscar winner didn’t mention anyone in particular, his take definitely echoed the way he described US leader Donald Trump in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Explaining why he had no interest in putting a Trump-esque character in the reboot of The West Wing, Sorkin called the Republican president “a really dumb guy with an observable psychiatric disorder”.

Growing up, I always heard the same dietary advice: go for brown rice where possible, and if you can, choose low-fat dairy.

However, speaking to HuffPost UK previously, Melissa Jaeger, a registered dietitian at MyFitnessPal, said: “The nutritional gap between [brown and white rice] isn’t that huge.”

And a new paper has suggested that full-fat options might not be as bad for us as I first thought, either.

Published in the Journal of Nutrition, the study authors found that eating full-fat options seemed to confer benefits without expected negative side effects, like increased “bad” cholesterol and weight gain.

In this study, researchers split 74 participants with overweight or obesity into three groups:

• low-dairy, calorie-restricted diet,
• energy-neutral diet with three daily servings of dairy,
• unrestricted diet with three daily servings of dairy.

They also followed Canada’s food guide. All dairy consumed was full-fat.

After 12 weeks of observation, the scientists didn’t see any difference in weight gain or “bad” cholesterol levels between the low-dairy group and the one that consumed three full-fat servings a day.

In fact, those in the three-serving group had better blood pressure and improved levels of vitamin D, calcium, and protein.

This, despite the fact that full-fat dairy contains saturated fats – lipids which have been linked to higher rates of heart disease.

Another older review published in the European Journal of Nutrition found that those who consume full-fat dairy are no more likely to develop heart disease and type 2 diabetes than those who stick to a low-fat or fat-free dairy diet.

Study author Professor Harvey Anderson said that one answer could lie in the dairy matrix hypothesis, which suggests that the physical structure of the fats in dairy products affects how they’re absorbed.

“With dairy products, it’s got two proteins – casein and whey – that are bound together with fat and with nutrients mixed in,” he said.

The professor added that this structure leads to a slow, steady release of nutrients and could potentially make its health benefits bigger than the sum of its parts.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) said on its site that “the science around milk and dairy foods is more complex than once thought,” adding that the dairy matrix hypothesis seemed to hold in some research.

However, the BHF ended: “The evidence remains mixed, and choosing lower-fat milk can help if you’re cutting calories or trying to reduce saturated fat.”

Madonna is unquestionably one of the greatest and most impactful pop artists of all time – not to mention one of the most controversial.

One area that the Grammy winner has always managed to express herself is through her music videos, something which she’s carried on right up to the present day, with her recent Confessions II short film.

Sex, religion and occasionally even violence have all been featured prominently throughout her attention-grabbing music videos, sparking debate, inciting boycotts and opening up important conversations in the process.

As the Queen of Pop celebrates her 68th birthday, we’re looking back at all the times her music videos have been at the centre of controversy…

With her debut album, Madonna bagged herself a decent-sized fanbase thanks to her catchy tunes and unique sense of style, as showcased in the videos for Borderline and Lucky Star.

However, it was in the video for the title track from her second album, Like A Virgin that she’d show the world what she was really about.

Filmed in Venice, Like A Virgin shows Madonna singing and dancing provocatively in a gondola, while flirting with the ideas of sexuality and religion, which would go on to become recurring themes in her videos and photo-shoots.

If only the people up in arms back in 1984 knew what she would have in store just a few short years later…

Watch the Like A Virgin video in full here.

Conservatives in the US were unimpressed when they discovered that the biggest star in America was planning to release a track sung from the perspective of a pregnant teenager.

In the song’s accompanying clip, Madonna acts out the message of the song, playing a young woman struggling to pluck up the courage to tell her father she’s pregnant.

While some critics suggested the track and video promoted or encouraged teen pregnancy, it wound up being at the centre of a debate about whether or not it had anti-abortion sentiments.

Madonna herself refused to be drawn in on the debate at the time, with her long-suffering publicist Liz Rosenberg insisting: “She’s singing a song, not taking a stand. Her philosophy is people can think what they want to think.”

Watch the Papa Don’t Preach video in full here.

The Open Your Heart music video sees Madonna portraying a stripper at a peep show, dressed in one of the most memorable and recognisable outfits of her career, a black bustier and fishnet tights.

While MTV was initially reluctant to air the video because of its sexually suggestive content, it also provoked a debate among feminist critics about whether or not her portrayal of a sex worker was objectifying or empowering, because of the way it subverted the male gaze.

At the end of the video, Madonna befriends a young boy, with whom she runs away with, though the inclusion of a child in a video with otherwise sexual themes also proved divisive.

Watch the Open Your Heart video in full here.

When it comes to Madonna’s music videos, none have brewed up a controversy in the same way as Like A Prayer.

With Madonna performing in a negligee in front of burning crucifixes and having sex on an actual altar, interspersed with images of stigmata and crying saints, the video was condemned by the Vatican and famously cost the star a deal with Pepsi (which she was still paid for, even thanking them when Like A Prayer scooped the Viewers’ Choice at the 1989 VMAs).

Often lost in the discussion about Like A Prayer’s religious elements is the fact the video also deals with racial tensions, depicting a Black man who is falsely accused of murdering a white woman, who he had actually been trying to assist after she was attacked.

Watch the Like A Prayer video in full here.

In Justify My Love, Madonna is seen exploring a hotel – in which many guests are seen in a variety of sexual poses, including suggested BDSM and orgies – in a dream-like state, wandering the corridors and laughing as she goes.

The racy video was clearly too much for MTV, who announced that they would not be airing the clip, with many other networks following suit.

Madonna took the controversy all the way to the bank, though, releasing it on VHS as a “video single”.

She commented at the time: “Why is it that people are willing to go and watch a movie about someone getting blown to bits for no reason at all, and nobody wants to see two girls kissing and two men snuggling?”

Watch the Justify My Love video in full here.

We think Madonna might have sensed she was onto a winner with Justify My Love, and as the 90s continued, so did the singer’s pushing of the envelope when it came to sexual imagery and themes.

All of this came to a head with the release of her polarising photo book, titled simply Sex, which was accompanied by the album Erotica and the music video for its title track.

Like Justify My Love, Erotica ended up being banned by MTV after being played just three times.

Madonna – who performs the song as her alter-ego, Mistress Dita – said at the time: “MTV plays to a huge audience and a lot of them are children, and a lot of themes I’m exploring in my videos aren’t meant for children, so I understand that they say I can’t show it.”

Watch the Erotica video in full here.

By the mid-90s, public opinion of Madonna was at an all-time low, with her Erotica album, the film Body Of Evidence and the documentary Truth Or Dare (or In Bed With Madonna, as it was referred to in the UK) turning off a lot of her more casual fans.

What followed was a touch of image overhaul for the singer, which included the release of softer ballads like I’ll Remember, Secret and Take A Bow, as well as the more experimental Björk co-write Bedtime Story.

Once the dust was settled, though, Madonna stirred things up once again, lampooning the whole debacle and her public persona in the track Human Nature, and its latex-heavy music video.

Watch the Human Nature music video in full here.

After her Bedtime Stories album, Madonna went through some big professional and personal changes. Work-wise, she bagged a Golden Globe for her lead role in Evita, as well as her first ever Grammy for Ray Of Light, heralded by many critics as her best ever album.

Meanwhile, she also became a mother, and began living in the UK with husband Guy Ritchie, then best known for gangster films like Lock Stock and Snatch.

The two collaborated just twice, once on the ill-fated remake of Swept Away and a second time in the music video for What It Feels Like For A Girl, which saw Madonna picking up an elderly woman from a retirement home and giving her the car ride from hell, eventually intentionally crashing the car into a lamp-post.

Like Erotica and Justify My Love before it, the video wound up being banned by MTV, while Madonna said she intended for it to “open dialogues”.

Watch the What It Feels Like For A Girl video in full here.

Even Madonna clearly felt she’d crossed a line with the original cut of the American Life video, which centred around a fashion show laden with imagery relating to war and disaster.

Eventually, this supposed staged disaster becomes real, when the star crashes her car through the catwalk, wreaking chaos.

Finally, she hurls a grenade onto the runway, which is caught by a George W Bush lookalike (in one of two versions of the video which have since leaked online), who uses it to light a cigar.

Due to the political climate at that time, Madonna later decided to cancel the video altogether, saying at the time: “Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect to the armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.”

The uncut video was finally released on Madonna’s official YouTube channel 20 years later, in April 2023.

Watch the director’s cut of the American Life video here.

Even into her 50s, (or, you might argue, because she was in her 50s) Madonna was still sparking debates about censorship with her use of sexual imagery, as she discovered when she released the MDNA cut Girl Gone Wild in 2012.

The video, which depicts nude men in various situations, as well as imagery relating to S&M and the Catholic church, was censored not by MTV this time, but YouTube, who allowed only users over the age of 18 to watch it.

A full 20 years after Justify My Love, Madonna was still being forced to defend her provocative videos, saying of the backlash: “I’m supposed to be a Girl Gone Wild in the video… how can I go wild and not grind?”

Watch the Girl Gone Wild video in full here.

When it came to the video for a song that had already become the biggest talking point of her 14th album, Madame X, Madonna once again teamed up with Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, who previously helmed Ray Of Light, Music, Bitch I’m Madonna and, perhaps most crucially, the original American Life video.

On God Control, Madonna sings about the need for gun law reform in the US, illustrated in the song’s video, which shows the singer becoming the victim of a shooting at a disco, in scenes reminiscent of the Pulse night-club massacre in 2016.

The video’s graphic content ended up dividing opinion, with several survivors of real-life shootings, including Pulse, criticising Madonna for her choice to feature so much violence.

She said shortly after its release: “Seeing the reality, and the brutality of things makes you wake up. This is really happening. This is what it looks like.

“Does it make you feel bad? Good, ’cause then maybe you will do something about it.”

Watch the God Control music video in full here.

In a job where a regular day of work might involve bunching your genitals into a drawstring bag or spending 12 hours in a sweaty costume (not all of which allow you to pee easily), actors are pretty used to unusual requests.

Even among the most seasoned pros, however, some scenes are a step too far.

Some actors will never go nude for a role, for instance, while others won’t co-star alongside certain other big names. Often, the reasons are unique to a specific script or storyline.

Here, we rounded up seven scenes actors flat-out refused to film:

Charlotte Rampling stars as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies.

But the actor had previously been pitched the role of Paul Atreides’ mother, Lady Jessica, in director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed ’70s adaptation.

His version lasted 14 hours and was meant to have a star-studded cast including Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger, though it never got released.

Speaking to IndieWire, Frank Pavich, who made an award-winning documentary about the abandoned project, said Jodorowsky had seen Charlotte Rampling in a movie and “thought she would be perfect” for the part.

Charlotte, who met the director without having read the script, later found out about a scene where Harkonnen enemy Rabban the Beast “gets his army, the Algerian army, to pull down their pants in front of the [Atreides’] palace and shit.

“So there’s going to be a scene of 2,000 extras defecating at once,” Pavitch added. “So here’s Charlotte Rampling, she agrees to meet with [Jodorowsky], she gets the script, she reads the script, and she says, ‘I can’t be in a movie where there’s 2,000 extras defecating on screen! I need to be in a movie that people are actually going to see! Who the hell is going to see this movie?’.”

However, Charlotte hasn’t publicly spoken about the scene.

She told IndieWire: “I loved this book, and I loved the character of Jessica. [Jodorowsky] was unable to do it, and the next one was the David Lynch one, which I was not in”.

When Anna Kendrick’s character, Beca, leaves college in Pitch Perfect, she joins a record label where she works under music executive Theo.

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK about the film, she said: “Originally the music executive was supposed to be my romantic interest, but I said no to that, because I thought that would be kind of fucking problematic.”

She added that she also turned down an ending that involved the pair kissing: “I was like, ’Can no one else [see it]?’. Once I said it, everybody was like, ‘I guess so’. And they still wanted to have a version at the end when we kissed, and I still said no.”

He replied, “No. Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested. I said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that Aragorn isn’t in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?’.”

During an episode of Hot Ones, the actor recalled: “For some reason, [the filmmakers] caught a wild tiger shark. And they were like, ‘It’s in this cage, so it’s docile!’ And I’m like, ‘It’s a fucking tiger shark.’ And it was like a seven-foot tiger shark.”

She added: “I was on [dolphin movie] Flipper, we had fucking rubber dolphins. You can do this with a goddamn rubber dolphin; you don’t need a real-ass shark in the middle of the fucking ocean with chum in it. And maybe I lost my mind, and maybe I yelled all of that.”

Even as Nick in Gone Girl – the original book of which was recently voted the best thriller of the 21st century by a New York Times poll – Ben wouldn’t sacrifice his Boston Red Sox fandom.

Speaking to The New York Times, the actor said that he got into “a legitimate fight” over the cap with director David Fincher about the issue.

“I said, ‘David, I love you, I would do anything for you’,” the Oscar winner recalled. “’But I will not wear a Yankees hat. I just can’t. I can’t wear it because it’s going to become a thing… I will never hear the end of it. I can’t do it, and I couldn’t put it on my head’.”

As a compromise, he wore a New York Mets cap, neutral ground he likened to “Switzerland”.

Speaking on Waitrose’s podcast The Dish, Ian’s Ted Lasso co-star, Phil Dunsten, said: “It was in the script that [Ian would say], ‘You know, it’s gonna be a tough game for Richmond because Tottenham are a great side’.

“And [Ian] was like, ‘I can’t say it. I’m just not going to say it. I’m sorry.’ And he was really lovely. He was just like, ’You’re going to have to change it because I can’t say that.”

In an interview with The Daily News, the acting legend said that director Frank Darabont “thought I should be blowing that harmonica that Andy gave me” in jail. He said this was meant to draw his former fellow prisoner’s attention when the pair arrived on the beach of Zihuatanejo.

“And I refused,” he said, adding it was “sort of asinine, sort of cliched, sort of unnecessary and overkill”.

In my line of work, I come across a fair few parenting hacks – some of which occasionally make my eyebrows hit the ceiling (egg sock, looking at you).

And I have to admit, I did let slip a ‘yeah right’ when I came across a video on Instagram months ago suggesting that putting out a board with chopped veggies on could get kids to eat more of the stuff.

In fairness to my kids, they’re not terrible at eating veg. My toddler’s even quite partial to an olive. But they definitely prefer fruit, and if I’d previously offered them a bit of raw carrot or a cucumber stick, they’d look at me like I’d vomited on their favourite pair of Crocs.

But given how many people I’d seen banging on about these veggie boards online, I decided to give it a go.

The first time I tried it, I carefully arranged some cucumber sticks, carrot sticks and sliced peppers on a board like I was competing on MasterChef. My kids took one look at it and carried on playing. The youngest took a cucumber stick to appease me, but the rest went in Tupperware which I ended up grazing on for the next few days.

I left it a good few weeks before I tried it again (mainly because of time constraints and not wanting to waste perfectly good veg), but I know that kids need to have a few exposures to these things – or so I’d read somewhere – so, one day I chopped some cucumber sticks, a bit of cooked chicken and cherry tomatoes, and stuck them casually on a wooden board on our dining table.

It was about 3pm, so hunger levels were rising. And you know what? They cleared the lot. (I think the chicken helped entice them in and then it just became a race to finish the rest…)

Another time, I decided to cook vegetables 10 minutes ahead of dinnertime and left them in a bowl on the table. (We were having homemade pizza so I wasn’t worried about them finding room in their tummies for that.) Within minutes, both kids had inhaled a load of carrots, broccoli and baby corn.

According to baby and child nutritionist, Charlotte Stirling-Reed, popping a plate of chopped veg on the table before dinner or when the kids get in from school is “the easiest way to include more veg” in their diets.

It works for a couple of reasons: firstly, they’re usually hungrier at this time; and secondly, there’s no pressure attached to eating it (so less of a power struggle).

The expert also noted that even if they don’t eat it, seeing these foods regularly builds familiarity. “It’s not about perfection. It’s about making it available and taking off the pressure,” she added on social media.

In a separate video on the viral veggie boards, Dr Karan Rajan, a NHS doctor, explained that cutting up veg and popping it on a platter also works because it taps into something known as “unit bias” or the “tendency to want a portion of something”.

“A whole bell pepper feels like work, but snackable bite-size cuts feels gamified,” he said. “There’s no meal commitment, it becomes finger food and, dare I say it, fun.”

The doctor also pointed to a study that showed children eat more fruit and more vegetables when they’re precut and presented as snacks. “Think of fries versus potatoes: snackification works,” he added.

In the comments on Stirling-Reed’s post, plenty of parents swore it worked for them too.

“This genuinely works for my veggie phobes – must do it more!” said one. “Been using this hack for years! It’s such a win. They always eat more veg and complain less,” added another parent.

I tried it again the other night (I chopped tomatoes, cucumber and avocado, stuck it casually on the table and walked away) and, yet again, the kids ate most of the veg on the board before dinner. I left it out and whatever was left got swiped at the end of dinner, too.

I genuinely can’t believe my eldest, who once would pull a face of disgust over cucumber, now eats sticks of the savoury fruit like she’s munching crisps.

Mission accomplished. This hack gets the thumbs up from me. Just remember to give it time if it doesn’t work straight away.