Maybe it’s time to let the old games die. Maybe it’s also time for someone to come collect Bradley Cooper, for the sake of Oprah’s much-needed vacation. On Monday’s episode of Ellen, Oprah let the audience in on a little life hack: “I’ll tell you, the thing to do is to find friends with boats.†The friend in this instance was David Geffen, who hosted Oprah, Bradley Cooper, Katy Perry, and Orlando Bloom on his boat this summer.
When Cooper wasn’t busy reapplying SPF, he was apparently pulling out the party games. “They like to play games. And I’m really not a game player … they played Balderdash a lot, and then Bradley Cooper had a game called Wolves and Villagers.†Oprah called it “a complicated game, filled with judgment,†and said that Perry and Cooper were the ones who got the most competitive. The game appears to be a more lycanthropic version of Mafia. Maybe it’s a regional thing, the region being David Geffen’s yacht. Wolves and Villagers is also, weirdly enough, the announced name of a new Quibi project starring Naomi Watts, because we’re living in a post-Tag world where we can do such things (last one to option Duck Duck Goose is a rotten egg). Bradley Cooper would be that one uncle who ropes everyone into playing Monopoly and then flips the table when he loses.
Oprah also announced that the first book in her new Apple TV+ series, Oprah’s Book Club, will be Ta-Nehisi Coates’s novel The Water Dancer. Oprah praised the book to Ellen, saying, “I haven’t felt this way since I read Beloved, actually. He has Toni Morrison qualities, in terms of being able to have the mastery of the language, in using words to transform the way you see somebody.†The series premieres on November 1 and will add new episodes every two months. Oprah then gave iPads and gift cards to Ellen’s audience, so that they can all read along. Oprah wants the book club to be global and inclusive, so even Cooper can join, so long as someone tells him it’s not a competition. Watch the clip below: You can practically taste the brand synergy!