Movies from John Legend

Fruitvale Station

Oakland, California. Young Afro-American Oscar Grant crosses paths with family members, friends, enemies and strangers before facing his fate on the platform at Fruitvale Station, in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Just watched "Fruitvale Station". So powerful and heartbreaking. So good. Go see this.
Movies from John Legend

13th

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Just watched @13THFilm . @AVAETC does a powerful job of connecting history to today's mass incarceration problem. Please watch.
Movies from John Legend

Selma

"Selma," as in Alabama, the place where segregation in the South was at its worst, leading to a march that ended in violence, forcing a famous statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that ultimately led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Just watched @SelmaMovie . What a beautiful, powerful film! So relevant right now. Please see it when it comes to your city.
Movies from John Legend

What Happened, Miss Simone?

The film chronicles Nina Simone's journey from child piano prodigy to iconic musician and passionate activist, told in her own words.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Excellent film on one of my musical heroes.
Movies from John Legend

Sing Your Song

Most people know the lasting legacy of Harry Belafonte, the entertainer. This film unearths his significant contribution to and his leadership in the civil rights movement in America and to social justice globally.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Just watched this inspiring documentary on the bus. What a phenomenal man, Harry Belafonte.
Movies from John Legend

Moonlight

The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Congratulations to the Moonlight team. It truly is a beautiful film. Well done
Movies from John Legend

The Wizard of Oz

Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Favorite musical? Oooh, well you cannot go wrong with The Wizard of Oz. I watch it every year with my family.
Movies from John Legend

The Bodyguard

A former Secret Service agent grudgingly takes an assignment to protect a pop idol who's threatened by a crazed fan. At first, the safety-obsessed bodyguard and the self-indulgent diva totally clash. But before long, all that tension sparks fireworks of another sort, and the love-averse tough guy is torn between duty and romance.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
I was growing up in 90s, all those great movies had popular soundtracks, like Bodyguard.
Movies from John Legend

Frozen

Young princess Anna of Arendelle dreams about finding true love at her sister Elsa’s coronation. Fate takes her on a dangerous journey in an attempt to end the eternal winter that has fallen over the kingdom. She's accompanied by ice delivery man Kristoff, his reindeer Sven, and snowman Olaf. On an adventure where she will find out what friendship, courage, family, and true love really means.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
And although their daughter Luna is just 10 weeks old, Legend says he expects plenty family viewings of Disney’s animated musical sensation, Frozen.
Movies from John Legend

The 40 Year Old Virgin

Andy Stitzer has a pleasant life with a nice apartment and a job stamping invoices at an electronics store. But at age 40, there's one thing Andy hasn't done, and it's really bothering his sex-obsessed male co-workers: Andy is still a virgin. Determined to help Andy get laid, the guys make it their mission to de-virginize him. But it all seems hopeless until Andy meets small business owner Trish, a single mom.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Movie you've seen the most times? Coming to America, The 40 Year Old Virgin. I like to repeat watching movies that make me laugh.
Books from John Legend

The Underground Railroad

#1 New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the National Book Award • Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize One of the Best books of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, HuffPost, Esquire, Minneapolis Star Tribune Look for Whitehead’s acclaimed new novel, The Nickel Boys, available now!Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
John Legend mentioned this book on Twitter.
Books from John Legend

Killers of the Flower Moon

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, “one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE “A shocking whodunit…What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?”—USA Today“A masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery.” —The Boston GlobeIn the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!
John Legend
Actor, Musician
John Legend mentioned this book on Twitter.
Books from John Legend

An American Sickness

A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Vacation books: An American Sickness
Books from John Legend

The Gene

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle). “Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns“Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. “A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Currently reading The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. So interesting and well written.
Books from John Legend

Cravings: All Together

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her most personal cookbook yet, the bestselling author of Cravings shares food that will bring you joy and comfort—with a little help from her one-of-a-kind family.Chrissy Teigen has always found a big sense of fun in the kitchen, but more than ever, she turns to the stove for comfort and warmth. Now Chrissy shares the recipes that have sustained her and her family, the ones that made her feel like everything is going to be okay. Recipes for Cozy Classic Red Lentil Soup, ingenious Chrissy signatures like Stuffed PB&J French Toast and puff pastry–wrapped Meatloaf Wellington, and family favorites like her mom Pepper’s Thai-style Sloppy Joes and John’s Saturday-morning Blueberry Buttermilk Pancakes will have you feeling like you’re pulling up a chair to her table.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
Chrissy’s beautiful new book #CravingsAllTogether is finally out in the world! She put so much heart and soul into this book.
Books from John Legend

Let the Trumpet Sound

Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book AwardWinner of the Christopher AwardA New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year“Drawing on interviews with those who knew King, previously unutilized material at Presidential libraries, and the holdings of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, Mr. Oates has written the most comprehensive account of King’s life yet published. ... He displays a remarkable understanding of King’s individual role in the civil rights movement ... Oates’s biography helps us appreciate how sorely King is missed.” --Eric Foner, New York Times Book ReviewBy the acclaimed biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Nat Turner, and John Brown, Stephen B. Oates's prizewinning Let the Trumpet Sound is the definitive one-volume life of Martin Luther King, Jr. This brilliant examination of the great civil rights icon and the movement he led provides a lasting portrait of a man whose dream shaped American history.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
"I started developing a social conscious when I would read biographies about people like Dr. King and other leaders who put themselves on the line to make big change happen."
Books from John Legend

Just Mercy

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time, as seen in the HBO documentary True Justice “[Bryan Stevenson’s] dedication to fighting for justice and equality has inspired me and many others and made a lasting impact on our country.”—John LegendSOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN AND JAMIE FOXX • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Esquire • Time Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction • Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize • An American Library Association Notable Book“Every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so . . . a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.”—David Cole, The New York Review of Books “Searing, moving . . . Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela.”—Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times “You don’t have to read too long to start cheering for this man. . . . The message of this book . . . is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful.”—Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review “Inspiring . . . a work of style, substance and clarity . . . Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he’s also a gifted writer and storyteller.”—The Washington Post “As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.”—The Financial Times “Brilliant.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
John Legend
Actor, Musician
After Chicago, the couple is off to St. Barths for vacation. He spends most of his time in the air reading (Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson right now).
TV Shows from John Legend

Chappelle's Show



John Legend
Actor, Musician
And South Park, Chappelle. That’s why I go into the studio – it makes me focus. I’m like, “This place cost $200 an hour, so I’m not gonna fuck around.”
TV Shows from John Legend

Breaking Bad

When Walter White, a New Mexico chemistry teacher, is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of only two years left to live. He becomes filled with a sense of fearlessness and an unrelenting desire to secure his family's financial future at any cost as he enters the dangerous world of drugs and crime.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
I was a huge Breaking Bad fan. I just loved the whole thing. Always interesting, always urgent. The stakes were always high.
TV Shows from John Legend

Better Call Saul

Six years before Saul Goodman meets Walter White. We meet him when the man who will become Saul Goodman is known as Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer searching for his destiny, and, more immediately, hustling to make ends meet. Working alongside, and, often, against Jimmy, is “fixer” Mike Ehrmantraut. The series tracks Jimmy’s transformation into Saul Goodman, the man who puts “criminal” in “criminal lawyer".
John Legend
Actor, Musician
He spends most of his time in the air reading (Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson right now), or listening to music (new stuff from Drake and Azealia Banks), or watching hour-long dramas on his laptop (The Americans, Empire, Better Call Saul).
TV Shows from John Legend

Empire

A powerful family drama about the head of a music empire whose three sons and ex-wife all battle for his throne.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
He spends most of his time in the air reading (Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson right now), or listening to music (new stuff from Drake and Azealia Banks), or watching hour-long dramas on his laptop (The Americans, Empire, Better Call Saul).
TV Shows from John Legend

The Americans

Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and their neighbor, Stan Beeman, an FBI Counterintelligence agent.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
He spends most of his time in the air reading (Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson right now), or listening to music (new stuff from Drake and Azealia Banks), or watching hour-long dramas on his laptop (The Americans, Empire, Better Call Saul).
TV Shows from John Legend

South Park

Follows the misadventures of four irreverent grade-schoolers in the quiet, dysfunctional town of South Park, Colorado.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
I like political humor, or real political content, like Meet the Press. And South Park, Chappelle.
TV Shows from John Legend

Meet the Press

Meet the Press is a weekly American television news/interview program airing on NBC. It is the longest-running television series in American broadcasting history, despite bearing little resemblance to the original format of the program seen in its television debut on November 6, 1947. Meet the Press is the highest-rated of the American television Sunday morning talk shows. It has been hosted by 11 moderators, beginning with Martha Rountree. The current host is David Gregory, who assumed the role in December 2008. The show began using a new set on May 2, 2010, with video screens and a library-style set with bookshelves, and different, modified intro music, with David Gregory previewing the guests using a large video screen, and with the Meet the Press theme music in a shorter "modernized [style]... the beginning repeated with drum beats". Meet the Press and similar shows specialize in interviewing national leaders on issues of politics, economics, foreign policy and other public affairs. Over the past few years, the program's usual time slot over the NBC network is between 9-10 a.m. local time in most markets, though this may vary by markets due to commitments by affiliates to religious, E/I or local news and public affairs programming. It also varies several weeks in the summer due to morning coverage of French Open tennis or the Monaco Grand Prix by NBC Sports. In earlier years, the program would air at noon every Sunday. The program also re-airs Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m. ET and early Monday mornings at 4 a.m. ET on MSNBC, along with an early Monday morning replay as part of NBC's "All Night" lineup. The program is also distributed to radio stations via syndication by Dial Global, and aired as part of C-SPAN Radio's replay of the Sunday morning talk shows.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
I like political humor, or real political content, like Meet the Press.
TV Shows from John Legend

Real Time with Bill Maher

Each week Bill Maher surrounds himself with a panel of guests which include politicians, actors, comedians, musicians and the like to discuss what's going on in the world.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
When you’re writing, what’s your biggest distraction? I want to hang out with my girl, my friends. And the TV. I TiVo, so I got The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Bill Maher.
TV Shows from John Legend

The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report is an American satirical late night television program that airs Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central. It stars political humorist Stephen Colbert, a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The Colbert Report is a spin-off from and counterpart to The Daily Show that comments on politics and the media in a similar way. It satirizes conservative personality-driven political pundit programs, particularly Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor. The show focuses on a fictional anchorman character named Stephen Colbert, played by his real-life namesake. The character, described by Colbert as a "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot", is a caricature of televised political pundits. The Colbert Report has been nominated for seven Primetime Emmy Awards each in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, two Television Critics Association Awards Awards, and two Satellite Awards. In 2013, it won two Emmys. It has been presented as non-satirical journalism in several instances, including by the Tom DeLay Legal Defense Trust and by Robert Wexler following his interview on the program. The Report received considerable media coverage following its debut on October 17, 2005, for Colbert's coining of the term "truthiness", which dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster named its 2006 Word of the Year.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
When you’re writing, what’s your biggest distraction? I want to hang out with my girl, my friends. And the TV. I TiVo, so I got The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Bill Maher
TV Shows from John Legend

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah and The World's Fakest News Team tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture.
John Legend
Actor, Musician
When you’re writing, what’s your biggest distraction? I want to hang out with my girl, my friends. And the TV. I TiVo, so I got The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Bill Maher.
Music from John Legend

Wedding Songs, a playlist

John Legend
Actor, Musician
When you have a hit wedding song, it's only natural to have a few other favorites - check out my #WeddingSongs Playlist with @TheKnot on @Spotify.
Music from John Legend

Superfly

John Legend
Actor, Musician
I love Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly.
Music from John Legend

American Gangster

John Legend
Actor, Musician
I love Jay Z. My favorite of his is probably American Gangster.
Music from John Legend

Stevie Wonder

John Legend
Actor, Musician
On the albums every man should listen to: "Anything by Stevie Wonder, especially from the ’70s."
Music from John Legend

Ella Fitzgerald

John Legend
Actor, Musician
If you could invite four other musicians (dead or alive) to your holiday dinner, who would they be? Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald. All four are vocal heroes of mine and I wish I could have met them.
Music from John Legend

Marvin Gaye

John Legend
Actor, Musician
If you could invite four other musicians (dead or alive) to your holiday dinner, who would they be? Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald. All four are vocal heroes of mine and I wish I could have met them.
Music from John Legend

Nina Simone

John Legend
Actor, Musician
If you could invite four other musicians (dead or alive) to your holiday dinner, who would they be? Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald. All four are vocal heroes of mine and I wish I could have met them.
Music from John Legend

Nat King Cole

John Legend
Actor, Musician
If you could invite four other musicians (dead or alive) to your holiday dinner, who would they be? Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald. All four are vocal heroes of mine and I wish I could have met them.
Music from John Legend

What's Going On

John Legend
Actor, Musician
What’s the one anthem that has moved you as a listener? Marvin Gaye’s ”˜What’s Going On.’ All of Marvin’s albums are musically great but this album has always inspired me.
Restaurants from John Legend

Le Bernardin, New York City

John Legend
Actor, Musician
Legend and Teigen’s choice of dining out is similarly bicoastal. “In New York, we love Le Bernardin,” he says.
Restaurants from John Legend

Via Veneto, Santa Monica

John Legend
Actor, Musician
In L.A., the one place we usually end up going back to is kind of little-known. It’s called Via Veneto. It’s in Santa Monica and it’s an Italian restaurant. I think one of my managers told me about it years ago and we started going. It’s still not hugely well-known, but it’s one of the best meals when we go there. There’s something kind of emotionally significant about it, it’s like our place.