William Shatner Is 95, Has Asked “What the F Is Heavy Metal?” and Is Now Fronting a Band Called The *uckers
Captain Kirk’s latest strange new world is loud, profane and unexpectedly committed — with a heavy metal album on the way and a Brad Paisley collaboration queued up behind it.
William Shatner has spent six decades boldly going where very few entertainers have gone before: from the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise to spoken-word versions of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” from a trip into space to, apparently, the front line of heavy metal.
At 95, the actor has found a new musical frontier — and his first question upon being invited into it was exactly the one you might expect from a beloved television legend who had not been keeping up with the mosh pit.
“When they said, ‘How’d you like to do a heavy metal album?’ I said, ‘What the F is heavy metal?’” Shatner told Page Six at the New York premiere of The Sixty-Year Mission: How Star Trek Changed Television and the World on Thursday.
Then came the plot twist: “And that’s the title of the album,” he revealed.
Captain Kirk Has Entered His Headbanger Era
There is something almost aggressively Shatner about this career turn. Heavy metal is built on theatricality, oversized emotion and a willingness to commit to a bit until the bit becomes an entire universe. Shatner, meanwhile, has spent years treating music less like a conventional singer’s lane and more like another stage on which to deliver a performance.
He is not pretending he was born with a leather jacket and a record collection full of obscure guitar bands. Shatner freely admitted that the genre was initially unfamiliar to him. But the unfamiliarity did not last. He told Page Six that he has since come to love heavy metal, praising its “energy and vitality.”
That enthusiasm has already moved beyond the recording studio. Shatner debuted his heavy metal band, The *uckers, at Riot Fest 2026 in Chicago, where he performed in September. The group is also planning tours in Australia and Florida, meaning this is not merely a studio experiment being announced with a dramatic flourish and then quietly abandoned.
It is, at least for now, a full-on new chapter: a nonagenarian Star Trek icon fronting a band with a name that looks like it was designed to make every headline editor pause for one delicious second.
The Man Has Been Making Unexpected Music Since the ’60s
Shatner’s heavy metal detour only seems to come from nowhere if you have forgotten that his relationship with music has always been gloriously strange.
His recording career began in 1968 with The Transformed Man, an album of dramatic spoken-word renditions of songs including Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The record has lived on as a pop-cultural curiosity because Shatner does not approach those songs like a traditional vocalist. He attacks them with the full Captain Kirk arsenal: pauses, declarations, sudden emotional weather and the sense that every syllable has just been beamed in from a more serious dimension.
Decades later, he teamed up with Ben Folds for 2004’s Has Been, a project that gave his theatrical delivery a more deliberate musical setting. He followed that with Seeking Major Tom, a collection of space-themed covers that included Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Because of course it did.
More recently, Shatner released 2024’s So Fragile, So Blue, inspired by his journey into space aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft and recorded with the National Symphony Orchestra. That album placed him in a grand, orchestral register. The heavy metal project swings in the opposite direction, at least sonically: less cosmic reflection, more amplified impact.
But the through line is obvious. Shatner has never treated genre as a fence. If a musical idea offers him a new atmosphere, a new voice or a new theatrical playground, he appears willing to step through the airlock.
Heavy Metal First, Country Next
The amusing part is that Shatner’s metal album is not even the only new music waiting in the wings.
He is also releasing Love & Other Mysteries, an album he worked on with country music icon Brad Paisley. So the current Shatner rollout appears to involve both heavy metal and country — two genres that do not exactly share a closet, unless that closet belongs to someone who has already performed dramatic Beatles covers and gone to space.
Paisley is a particularly intriguing collaborator for Shatner because the pairing gives the project a different kind of celebrity voltage. One album promises the spectacle of Captain Kirk embracing metal; the other comes with the polish and Nashville credibility of one of country music’s best-known guitarists. Shatner is not choosing one lane. He is building a small highway system.
There is also a mischievous logic to the timing. At 95, Shatner could be expected to coast comfortably on the cultural power of Captain Kirk. Instead, he is still introducing himself to new genres, taking the stage with a new band and talking about the process with the delighted disbelief of someone who has accidentally discovered an entirely new hobby — then booked an international tour.
Still Going Where No Kirk Has Gone Before
Shatner was at Thursday’s premiere to celebrate The Sixty-Year Mission, a documentary he executive produced about the enduring legacy of Star Trek. The film includes interviews with franchise figures including Jonathan Frakes, Simon Pegg, Robert Picardo, Brent Spiner and Ethan Peck, giving the evening a suitably intergenerational feel.
That backdrop makes his musical announcement even more entertaining. The event was about honoring a franchise that has spent 60 years imagining the future, and Shatner arrived with news that his own future includes heavy metal.
It is tempting to describe the whole thing as a novelty, because the facts are inherently funny: William Shatner, age 95, once asked what heavy metal was and now has a band called The *uckers. But the joke works because there is a real history underneath it. He has been recording for decades. He has collaborated with Ben Folds and Brad Paisley. He has made music about space, worked with an orchestra and performed live.
Shatner is not suddenly pretending to be someone else. He is doing what he has always done, only louder: taking a familiar persona, pushing it into an unexpected setting and seeing how far the performance can travel.
And if Captain Kirk’s latest mission involves Australia, Florida and a heavy metal album titled after his own initial confusion, well — that is a strange new world we are perfectly happy to visit.
Bob Mackie’s Final Days Were More Complicated Than the First Announcement Suggested
The legendary designer died after a fall and head injury, while also battling pneumonia. His death certificate fills in the quiet, heartbreaking timeline behind fashion’s most theatrical legacy.
Bob Mackie spent his career making entrances impossible to forget. Cher in glitter. Carol Burnett in a curtain rod. Diana Ross in a silhouette that seemed to arrive before she did. Dolly Parton in rhinestones, feathers and pure Dolly logic. His clothes did not simply decorate pop culture; they helped teach it how to be larger than life.
So the new details surrounding Mackie’s death feel unusually stark. According to a death certificate obtained by Us Weekly, the legendary designer suffered a fall at the Palm Springs-area home of his longtime design director, Joseph McFate, on Sept. 11. The document lists a subarachnoid hemorrhage and blunt head trauma as the cause of death. Mackie died three days later, on Sept. 14, at Desert Regional Medical Center. He was 87.
The information adds a painful second chapter to the initial announcement, which attributed his death to pneumonia. A representative later clarified that both things were part of Mackie’s final days: he had been battling pneumonia before the hospitalization and continued to suffer from it afterward. The rep told Us Weekly that Mackie was staying in a guest house at McFate’s home and that a healthcare professional was with him when he fell.
The timeline behind the headlines
Mackie’s death was announced on the day he died in a statement shared through his social media accounts. “He lived his 87 years to the fullest,” the statement said, describing fashion and costume design as the dream he had always wanted to fulfill. It was a fitting tribute to a man whose work rarely showed interest in understatement, even when the person wearing it did.
The death certificate states that Mackie was cremated on Sept. 17, three days after his death, and that his remains were scattered at sea off the coast of San Diego County. There is something quietly cinematic about that final image: the designer who spent decades creating spectacle leaving the world without one last red carpet, just the ocean and the people closest to him.
It also gives the first announcement a more complicated emotional shape. Pneumonia was not incorrect, according to the representative’s clarification, but it was not the entire story. The fall and resulting head injury were central to the final medical timeline, while the illness Mackie had already been fighting remained part of it.
A career built for the spotlight
Mackie’s genius was understanding that celebrity clothing is never just clothing. It is character development, mythology and a little bit of mischief stitched together. He designed for the women who turned performance into identity: Cher, Ross, Tina Turner, Beyoncé, Parton and Burnett among them. The outfits often looked outrageous in still photographs and completely inevitable once the star stepped into them.
For Cher, Mackie helped create the barely-there, feathered, beaded and body-conscious visual language that became inseparable from her image. For Burnett, he understood the comic power of a costume that could land a joke before she delivered a line. For Parton, he found a shared vocabulary of glamour that never treated sparkle as an apology.
That work earned Mackie a rare status in entertainment: he was famous beyond the fashion world because his designs were attached to moments people remembered. His name became shorthand for a certain kind of unapologetic showmanship, the kind that enters the room wearing its own lighting.
His last public chapter still looked like Bob
Mackie remained active and visible deep into his eighties. He appeared at events connected to the documentary Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, including its Los Angeles premiere in May 2024, and attended the Season 2 finale event for Palm Royale in January. He was also photographed at the Met Gala in 2019 and at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in February 2025.
Those appearances made clear that Mackie’s influence had outlived any single era of television or red-carpet dressing. He was not merely being celebrated as a vintage name. His ideas were still circulating everywhere: in the return of maximalist glamour, in performers treating the red carpet as theater, in the ongoing refusal to believe that a famous woman should ever wear just one rhinestone when 10,000 are available.
One of his final public gestures involved Parton. When she died at 80 in late August, Mackie posted a tribute alongside sketches of the outfits he had designed for her over the years. “Dolly was a lovely soul and spirit who was fair to everyone,” he wrote, calling her “a joy and pleasure to dress” and adding, “You will be missed. With love, Bob Mackie xo.”
The timing makes the tribute especially poignant. Mackie was honoring one of his most enduring creative collaborators only weeks before his own death. The sketches offered a glimpse of their partnership in its earliest, most essential form: line, shape, fantasy, then the transformation of a person into an icon.
Fashion loves to talk about legacy as if it is a polished archive, neatly labeled and safely behind glass. Mackie’s is messier and more alive than that. It is in the costumes people still imitate, the old clips that keep resurfacing, the red carpets that seem determined to get bigger, brighter and more theatrical. His final days were marked by illness, a fall and a devastating injury. His career, however, remains gloriously upright: sequined, feathered and refusing to leave quietly.
Jeremy Allen White Has a New York Soft Launch — and the Internet Is Already Reopening His Dating History
The Bear star was photographed holding hands and cuddling with model Lulu Tenney, sending the celebrity-romance cycle into its favorite phase: one suspiciously cozy outing and a full archive dive.
Jeremy Allen White appears to have entered a new chapter in the celebrity dating industrial complex: the New York City soft launch.
On Wednesday, October 7, The Bear star was photographed holding hands and cuddling with model Lulu Tenney during an outing in the city, according to Just Jared. Neither White nor Tenney has said they are dating, but the body language was intimate enough to send the internet into its favorite activity: turning one afternoon into a complete romantic timeline.
This is how modern celebrity relationships arrive now. Not with a red-carpet debut or a carefully coordinated magazine cover, but with a walk, a hand held in public and a few photos that instantly invite everyone to become a relationship historian. White and Tenney have not announced anything, yet their New York appearance has already been treated as a soft launch by fans who know that “just friends” rarely includes this much cuddling in a city full of discreet restaurants.
The Lulu Tenney moment is low-key, but not exactly invisible
Tenney is a model, and the sighting has the particular visual grammar of a celebrity romance people will keep watching: two attractive adults, casual clothes, close contact and no obvious attempt to turn the moment into content. That lack of ceremony is part of the appeal. There is no caption to decode, no matching vacation carousel and no public declaration to screenshot. Just a very public New York outing that looked private enough to be meaningful and visible enough to become a story.
White, 35, has become one of the most recognizable actors on television through The Bear, where his intense, tightly wound performance made him a major awards-season presence and an unlikely style-world favorite. He is also attached to the new movie The Social Reckoning, giving this latest romantic speculation a little extra celebrity oxygen. When someone is already having a high-profile professional moment, the public tends to examine the personal frame just as closely as the work itself.
And White’s particular appeal makes the scrutiny feel almost inevitable. He has the rare celebrity profile that is both mainstream and slightly elusive: famous enough to dominate a red carpet, low-key enough that a candid street photo can feel like an event. A hand-holding picture does not need a dramatic caption when the subject is already one of the internet’s preferred brooding leading men.
Why everyone is suddenly scrolling backward
Just Jared’s new roundup revisits White’s reported dating history, including his marriage to actress Addison Timlin. The former couple share two daughters, making this more than a simple parade of famous names: White’s romantic history includes a real family chapter and a public relationship that predates his current level of fame.
The roundup also points back to White’s reported links with women from different corners of his professional and celebrity orbit: one of his The Bear co-stars, a Grammy-winning singer and an actress he worked with on Shameless. The page’s dating-history package also flags names including Ashley Moore, Emma Greenwell, Molly Gordon and Rosalía, though the source does not present every name with the same level of detail or certainty.
That mix is exactly what makes a dating-history story so clickable. It turns a new sighting into a sprawling map of White’s public life: former spouse, co-stars, musicians, models and the inevitable question of whether Hollywood’s most attractive people are all connected by six degrees of excellent lighting. The internet does not simply want to know who someone is seeing now. It wants to know who was there before, which romance overlapped with which project and whether an old red-carpet clip suddenly looks different in hindsight.
There is also a special fascination with actors who date within their creative ecosystem. A co-star connection gives fans an entire season of scenes to reinterpret. A musician link adds the glamour of two different celebrity worlds colliding. A model sighting brings the clean, paparazzi-friendly visual of a new couple who may or may not be ready for a public label. White’s reported history has enough variety to keep all three fantasies alive.
The soft launch has replaced the official announcement
Celebrity couples used to have a recognizable rollout: a first red carpet, a coordinated interview, perhaps an unmistakable vacation photo posted at exactly the right moment. Now, the most effective announcement is often the absence of an announcement. A couple can let the public do the work while they remain technically silent, allowing a single street sighting to generate weeks of speculation without either person having to define the relationship.
That ambiguity is especially powerful with White, whose public image has always benefited from a little distance. He is visible, but not overexposed; fashionable, but not relentlessly online; famous enough to attract attention, yet not someone who appears to narrate every private development for followers. A new romance emerging through candid photographs rather than a social-media post feels consistent with that image.
For Tenney, the moment places her directly in the orbit of one of television’s biggest current stars without requiring a formal debut. For White, it creates a new romantic storyline just as audiences are already following his work, his fashion appearances and the larger cultural fascination with The Bear universe. The pairing has the kind of effortless visual logic that makes the internet impatient for a second sighting.
That second sighting is now the real story. Will there be another New York walk? A dinner photographed from across the street? A suspiciously similar vacation backdrop? A social post that does not tag anyone but somehow answers every question? At the moment, there is only the October 7 outing and the photos that started the conversation.
Still, in celebrity culture, one cozy afternoon can be a pilot episode. White and Tenney may be dating, or they may simply be two adults who were comfortable holding hands in public. Neither has said so. But the internet has already opened the files, and the new couple watch has officially begun.