No kidding!

Freddie Highmore

While most college students often use their year abroad to embrace the culture and nightlife of new countries, British actor Freddie Highmore opted to play one of the most notorious fictional serial killers, Norman Bates.
Highmore, 22, plays a teenage version of Norman Bates who helps his erratic mother run a hotel in modern-day Oregon in the A&E series Bates Motel, which returned for a second season last week.
Bates Motel is the first television series for Highmore, who is currently finishing up his final year at Cambridge University, where he studies Spanish and Arabic. The actor started out his career playing wide-eyed young boys in films such as 2004’s Finding Neverland and 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But playing Norman Bates has presented a new direction in Highmore’s career, playing an innocent, sensitive teenager who begins to transition into a psychologically disturbed young man with an abnormally intimate relationship with his mother, played by Vera Farmiga.
“I always did want to get to play a killer, so I guess that one’s ticked off,” the young actor said with a laugh.
“What’s fun about Bates Motel is that the characters change so much. The Norman that we see at the start of season one is markedly different to the end of season two,” he said.
After a dramatic finale in season one that culminated with the suspicious death of Norman’s attractive young female teacher, the second season opens with Norman trying to cope with her demise by embracing taxidermy. The hobby of stuffing dead animals may be an eerie foreshadowing of his future path.
“The biggest journey he’ll go on is this growing sense of self-awareness about who he is or who he might become,” Highmore said.

FRAUGHT RELATIONSHIPS

At the center of Bates Motel is the complex and at times, almost inappropriate relationship between Norman and his high-strung single mother Norma, which earned Farmiga an Emmy nod. In the first season, the two are dependent on each other for support and comfort as they try to start fresh with the purchase of the motel in a new hometown, but in the second season, Highmore said their bond will be more fraught with tension.
“Vera and I disagree, but I think our disagreements fall in line with our characters and she sees the relationship as more platonic,” Highmore said. The close relationship and fascination that Norman has with his mother was made famous in Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho that was adapted by director Alfred Hitchcock into a film of the same name in 1960, becoming one of his most famous films.
Norman Bates is based on real-life serial. killer Ed Gein.

 

Hollywood’s Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher engaged: reports

Hollywood stars Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis are engaged to be married, according to U.S. Weekly and the E! entertainment news website.
The two, who have been dating for about two years, appeared together on the popular television sitcom That ’70s Show. Photographs on the US Weekly and E! websites taken of Kunis in Los Angeles show her sporting a large diamond ring on her left hand.
Kutcher, 36, is divorced from actress Demi Moore. He appears in the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men and starred last year in the movie Jobs. Kunis, 30, appeared in the movies Ted in 2012, Black Swan in 2010 and Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008. She was the longtime girlfriend of actor Macauley Culkin.
Representatives for Kunis and Kutcher did not immediately respond to requests for comment.