'I fear for them' - pundits lament 'desperate times' for Pakistan
Figure caption,
Highlights: England ease to huge win against Pakistan on day three at Headingley
ByMatthew Henry
BBC Sport journalist at Headingley
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Former England captain Michael Vaughan says he "really fears" for Pakistan and felt "quite sad" watching their heavy defeat by England in the first Test at Headingley.
Pakistan were thrashed by an innings and 103 runs in the series opener - batting for 85.4 overs across both innings combined.
A side that has produced some of the sport's most fearsome bowlers were also meek with the ball and poor in the field.
"They've been absolutely blown away," Vaughan told BBC Test Match Special. "They've been hammered. I've never seen them look so timid.
"The tactical side wasn't there. The skill level and the class between the sides, Pakistan look a long way short.
"I hope they can find something over the next couple of days.
"They'll get criticised and rightly so, hopefully that will force them to find something."
Pakistan have long been known for their turmoil off the field and their current struggles were perhaps best summed up in the post-match news conference.
Stand-in skipper Salman Agha laughed he is "more than happy" to hand the captaincy back to Babar Azam for the second Test, which starts at Lord's on Thursday.
A decade ago they were top of the Test rankings while iconic teams in the late 1980s and 1990s, featuring all-time greats such as Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, won three Test series in a row in England.
Now they are bottom of the World Test Championship, have lost five of their past six Tests and 14 defeats from 19 Tests going back to December 2023.
Former captain Ramiz Raja told TMS he "fears the worst".
"The first pillar has fallen, and that's the fans, they are disenchanted, they aren't going to back this team and who would?" Raja said.
"If you lose 17 Test matches in the last 20 you've played nobody's going to back this team."
Vaughan added: "I look at this side and feel quite sad watching them this week.
"I've seen many Pakistan sides play and this side just seem to be lacking all that spirit and fight we've come accustomed to seeing."
'What's the point in playing?' - where has it gone wrong?
Babar, who missed this Test with a hand injury, is the only Pakistan batter in the top 25 of the International Cricket Council's Test batting rankings.
Their bowling attack is without the likes of Shaheen Afridi and Naseem Shah, who have impressed at times in Tests but have often been used in shorter formats or struggled for form and fitness.
Four of their five victories since 2023 have come at home, where spinning pitches have often been prioritised in pursuit of wins.
Industrial fans, heaters and windbreaks were used to prepare a pitch during the series win over England in 2024.
"You try to produce a one-dimensional team that can only win on select surfaces," Raja said.
"You've discouraged pace bowling and because so many players want to play T20 cricket because it's a route to success, they're just not bothered about playing Test-match cricket.
"These are desperate times for Pakistan cricket to make a comeback through pace.
"It's always been our thing, if you discourage the DNA that completes us, what's the point in then playing Test cricket?"
Figure caption,
Three wickets in six balls - Tongue's terrific spell after lunch
'We are rebuilding' - captain calls for calm
Salman played down the worries around the future, instead suggesting this is a team undergoing a "rebuild".
Their top seven have each played at least 24 Tests - Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Abdullah Shafique and Saud Shakeel have also all played for Yorkshire - but only Muhammad Abbas in their bowling attack had played a Test in England before.
"We are a rebuild kind of team," Salman said. "It is not about worrying about the future. It is about making a future."
He added: "We didn't execute our plans at Headingley, but that doesn't mean we can't do the same in the next matches.
"We will sit down and think about the performance. And we will come back for sure."
Babar is expected to be fit to return at Lord's while Ubaid Shah, the younger brother of Naseem who can bowl greater pace than Abbas, Mohammad Ali and Khurram Shazad, is a candidate to come in.
Raja suggested there are further troubles below the Test team.
"The batting is below par, even at the Under-19 level and the Under-17 level.
"The bowling, yes, they've got two or three quicks [but] they aren't being exposed to this type of cricket. In the field they are still brittle."
Before we talk about Sandustry, the excellent new spelunking factory builder from Lantto Games and Hooded Horse, we need to revisit that most quintessentially vidyagame of topics, the post-industrial countryside of Wales. Early on in my recent 105-mile "review" of the MSI Cyborg 14 laptop, I walked through the old slate quarries near the village of Aberllefenni – the longest continually operated slate mining setup in the world until its closure in 2003.
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After passing some overgrown roofless cottages, I stopped for a tactical Seabrooks at the foot of a massive spoil pile: a hill of chopped and broken slate that must have begun with one man tipping over a wheelbarrow centuries ago, and then another barrow, and then another, while other men added bolsters and pounded paths through the mounting shards, until at last, their labour all but overshadowed the village beneath – a miraculously static expanse of slippery, plate-sized pieces, a geolithic coin drop machine right on the edge of paying out.
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun
There has been huge loss of life when spoil heaps lose their shape. In 1966, coal heaps over Aberfan in South Wales collapsed after becoming saturated with rainwater, killing 144 people. Looking up at the piled slate, I felt as though I were inside a photograph of a landslide. I find it unnerving to think of spoil piles just swelling up near villages, compacting and blurring till they are naturalised as 'landscape', ultimately treated as though they were of the same order of creation as the slopes scooped out by glaciers.
Something similar happens in Sandustry, and something of the associated dread spills over into that game, mixing with the usual factory genre emotions of decreasing fuss and apocalyptic perfectionism. The game casts you as an alien prospector sent to a planet full of buried ruins, with the objective of turning all the sand into gold. Where the likes of Satisfactory play a little like survival games, with creatures to battle and constrained traversal, in Sandustry you're more of a glorified cursor, able to glide through your own buildings together with any materials you've excavated, though you'll need to dig a passage through the solid rocks beneath.
There are boss monsters down there, but no endemic smaller threats, and in the current early access build, at least, you don't need resources for construction, in itself, save for gold to unlock new types of machine. Challenge comes, instead, from the fact that the game's materials break down into pixels that have individual physics. Amongst other things, it gives great heap.
Image credit: Hooded Horse / Rock Paper Shotgun
Here's how the enheapening starts: you set up a small network of conveyors and elevators to first dunk sand in water, then transport it to a line of automated sifting trays to jostle out flecks of gold. Doing this also produces a sandy residue, however, which settles like dandruff on your collection hopper. So you carelessly stretch out a stack of launchers over your sifting trays, to intercept the reside and fling it off-screen. Then you find an auspicious cave and burrow down in search of special upgrade crystals, piston-punching your way into luminous caverns, while gold tinkles into the counter on your HUD. You return after a few moments, and find that your gold-mining operation now cowers beside a rising mountain of debris.
Sandustry is probably the first factory game I've played that really communicates the physicality of industrial waste, the appalling magnificence of it, for all the dinkiness of its 2D artstyle. It's the only factory game that really makes me think of post-industrial landscapes, like those colossal spoil piles above Aberllefenni. It also engineers a weird exuberance inside the concept of 'byproduct'.
Factory games pretty much always simulate the effects of excessive production, but the representation of these things is often clinically organised by the HUD and interface design – spreadsheets full of scrapmetal icons, neatly blocked-out 3D storage pallets, 100/100 indicators over warehouses, intangible pollution gauges. In Sandustry, by contrast, a pile of superfluous crap is an exquisite, granular entity that forms peaks and valleys and undulating plateaus; that finds its way into any crevices beneath; that chases you down tunnels as you excavate them, separating into smaller runnels and pockets of dirt; that will eventually overflow and choke your whirring machines.
Within the heap, different kinds of material form scatty seams of yellow, brown and green. The strata tell a story. You soon learn to understand how the heap was made at a glance, the forces that acted upon it, the mechanisms each grain moved through. This is useful, because your factories will likely be imperfect, at first, with gaps and bottlenecks and badly planned intersections that knock the pixels out of flow, leaving stray mounds in odd places. When you return from a foray into the caves - perhaps searching for fresh supplies of water, the game's first major resource pressure - you'll anatomise these heaps to understand your own errors.
Image credit: Hooded Horse / Rock Paper Shotgun
It makes for bizarrely captivating scenery, as utilitarian as Sandustry's presentation may be, and as bleak as it feels to be strip-mining a planet full of tapering, ancient structures that are infinitely more elegant and in tune with their surroundings than your impromptu conveyor labyrinths. The loosened matter that pools across the surface has a kind of splendour; it's tempting to finesse every pile of refuse with your auto-filtering Grabber. The other reason you might want to sculpt the refuse piles is that "waste" is not a permanent designation. As with realworld 'junk' slate, which may eventually be gathered and processed to make driveway gravel, garden mulch or drainage, so Sandustry keeps turning refuse into raw material.
You'll soon unlock other uses for sand residue, for example: it can be burnt and compressed to produce seed alongside additional gold. The unlocking of the tech tree accompanies a further revisiting of your heaps. Suddenly all that garbage you piled up near your initial gold-panning operation has value – ugh, if only you'd known that, before you stacked all those filtering belts on top of it! So expansion becomes a process of tracking and tending to dispersed and unruly hummocks of stuff that remain pleasantly fiddly to manipulate, even once you unlock a larger reticule for your Grabber and other ways of streamlining collection.
It's satisfying, and kind of horrifying. I'm very early on in Sandustry, in case you hadn't guessed, so I can't tell you how elaborate and hierarchical the production networks become. But I'm entertaining the suspicion that some things are never quite lost or destroyed in the game, only transformed and transformed and transformed. The Midasian premise might seem like a bog-standard narrative of space capitalism running amok, but there's a desperation to it. Sandustry wants everything to become gold not because gold is desirable, but because gold is one of the few factory products that vanishes completely once you make use of it, converting to unlocks and upgrades without leaving any terrible mountains of spoil behind.
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The first deportation flight to Haiti since the US supreme court upheld Donald Trump’s power to strip 350,000 Haitians – and others – of a key type of legal status in the US landed in the troubled nation on Thursday.
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The flight was carrying more that 160 Haitian nationals and landed in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter.
The arrival point was selected because the main international airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is considered too dangerous. The US government currently has a ban on US commercial flights to Haiti’s capital through early September because of ongoing gang violence.
The deportees were clad in white, and many covered their faces out of safety concerns as journalists filmed their arrival. Nearly all declined to talk with the media, with some indicating they fear being targeted by gangs that control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince and swathes of land beyond.
The US Department of State’s travel advisory for US citizens is at the highest alert level, its website saying: “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason. US citizens are at risk due to crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.”
The deportation flight was the first since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for those Haitians living and working in the US with that protection, and comes after US officials warned Haitian authorities to expect an increase in removals.
ICE is believed to have carried out eight flights from the US to Haiti so far this year, including a flight on 16 July carrying deportees with criminal records.
Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s national office of migration, told the Miami Herald that the flight also included people who were born in Chile and the Dominican Republic, but were sent to Haiti because they had a Haitian parent.
The deportees from the US were reportedly given the equivalent of US$76.40 to get home – less than the price of a ticket to the Caribbean nation’s capital Port-au-Prince from Cap-Haïtien but enough to get through some gang-controlled roads.
The end of TPS status for Haitian nationals came earlier this month when Washington DC district judge Ana Reyes removed a stay on deportations, following a decision by the US supreme court backing the Trump administration’s efforts to end the program.
Enacted by Congress in 1990, TPS in theory protects people who are already in the US when a natural disaster, epidemic, armed conflict or other extraordinary and temporary circumstance affects their country of origin. The Trump administration has been stripping protections from nation after nation and the supreme court ruling gives little chance for redress.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant-serving non-profit Global Refuge, said that it was a “stunning contradiction” that an administration that advises Americans against all travel to Haiti would “compel hundreds of thousands of Haitians into such dire circumstances is an unconscionable abdication of our moral responsibility”.
Overlooked also, say critics, are the contributions Haitian nationals under TPS make the the US. “We work hard, we pay our taxes, we give back to our communities and we are a big part of the engine that keeps the United States workforce in many essential industries moving,” Josiane Valsaint, a Haitian who had TPS, wrote for the Guardian. “We deserve to stay here, with our families and loved ones.”
But amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said earlier this month: “These individuals can either self-deport or we’ll arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple.” %!s()
TOPSHOT - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan welcomes US Vice President JD Vance prior to their meeting in Yerevan on February 9, 2026. (Photo by KAREN MINASYAN / AFP via Getty Images)
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AFP via Getty Images
As the United States rolls out a new global geostrategy centered on burden-sharing and burden-shifting, it is discovering that many of its allies and partners lack the capabilities to assume greater responsibility for regional security. France is a case in point, with its international influence eroding as its ability to shape the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has fallen short of its ambitions and rhetoric. This decline is particularly evident in the Middle East, where President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly clashed with Donald Trump on Gaza, the Persian Gulf and Lebanon, and in the South Caucasus, where the geopolitical consequences of both conflicts are converging. For Paris, the region has thus become a revealing test of the limits of French power and its ability to act as a meaningful security provider beyond Europe.
France said on Aug. 8 that Baku and Yerevan had taken “important and courageous steps” toward peace, while calling for a formal agreement, the reopening of borders, and regional connectivity, and reaffirming European support for their sovereignty and territorial integrity. On Aug. 18, 2026, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Yerevan with U.S. Congressman Abraham Hamadeh (R-AZ) to discuss deepening Armenia-U.S. ties across the political, economic, and technological spheres, as well as implementation of the TRIPP transport project. The meeting came amid growing pressure from Moscow, after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin warned on Aug. 11 that Armenia needed to hold a referendum by December 2026 to choose between EU and EAEU membership, or face Kremlin-led countermeasures. On the same day, marking the first anniversary of the Aug. 2025 Trump-hosted White House summit, the United States, Armenia, and Azerbaijan credited the meeting with ending decades of conflict and highlighted progress toward border normalization.
Despite its official support for the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, France has been largely missing in action in the South Caucasus, especially since the end of the 2020 Karabakh War. This reflects Paris’ difficulty adapting to the region’s new strategic realities, particularly Azerbaijan’s emergence as the preeminent regional actor and Turkey’s expanding role. France has not only failed to improve ties with Baku, but its traditionally close relationship with Yerevan has also suffered as Armenia has sought to diversify its partnerships beyond Europe and Russia to the U.S. As a result, Paris has found itself with limited leverage in a region where its diplomatic ambitions have outpaced its ability to shape events.
France’s post-Soviet role in the South Caucasus began as a formal, balanced mediator – its unique seat as the only European member of the OSCE Minsk Group gave it institutional standing on the Karabakh conflict for three decades. Critics argued this format let Russia manage and freeze the “cold conflict”, inserting itself into the strategic region rather than resolving the dispute, and even during this period ties with Baku were consistently strained by Azerbaijani suspicion of French bias toward Yerevan.
After 2018, driven by Pashinyan’s rise, deteriorating Armenia-Russia relations, the Second Karabakh War, and a large domestic Armenian diaspora, France’s posture shifted sharply toward Armenia, producing largely symbolic gestures like the 2020 Senate resolution and public criticism of Azerbaijan’s 2023 offensive that further soured relations with Baku. This tilt left Paris looking partisan and irrelevant rather than balanced, just as Baku and Yerevan began pursuing direct normalization. By 2025-2026, France’s influence appeared to be waning further still, with reports that Pashinyan had moved to curb French sway within his own government in favor of closer ties with Washington, leaving France with poor relations with Azerbaijan and diminishing leverage with Armenia alike.
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In late July 2026, Pashinyan removed Araik Harutyunyan, who had headed his office since 2021, officially citing the need to adjust the government’s priorities and transition to a new phase. European and Ukrainian sources, however, allege that Harutyunyan had been recruited by French intelligence and was passing political assessments and information about Pashinyan’s plans to Paris – claims that remain unverified but, if accurate, would cast the dismissal in a very different light.
The appointment of Lilit Makunts, Pashinyan’s former ambassador to Washington and chief adviser, as Harutyunyan’s replacement further suggests a shift in the prime minister’s inner circle away from French influence and toward the United States. Taken together, the reshuffle may signal that Pashinyan is recalibrating Armenia’s external partnerships as the regional balance changes, with Washington increasingly displacing Paris as Yerevan’s preferred Western interlocutor.
The episode in Armenia is therefore less important for what it says about one official than for what it reveals about the broader erosion of French strategic influence. Paris has spent years trying to preserve a global role that increasingly exceeds its ability to shape events, leaving it poorly positioned to adapt when regional power balances shift. The pattern is evident not only in the South Caucasus but also in Africa, where France has been pushed out of several traditional post-colonial spheres of influence, particularly in the Sahel, forcing it to recast its approach toward the continent.
The Middle East has presented a subtler version of the same problem, with Paris retaining diplomatic and economic ties but struggling to translate them into commensurate strategic leverage, underscoring the widening gap between France’s strategic ambitions and its ability to shape outcomes beyond Europe.
Even within Europe, France has struggled to translate its political weight into continental leadership, despite Brexit and Germany’s prolonged economic and political difficulties creating an apparent opening for Paris. The problem is compounded by an EU that has passed its post-Cold War peak and is increasingly divided and incoherent, limiting France’s ability to mobilize the bloc behind any strategic agenda, let alone Paris’s. To a significant extent, this flies in the face of the new U.S. geostrategy, which is pressing European allies to assume greater responsibility for their own security rather than relying on Washington to underwrite the continent, a shift that has intensified debates over burden-sharing and strategic autonomy. The ongoing war in Ukraine has magnified these pressures by exposing Europe’s military shortcomings, straining national finances and political cohesion, and forcing European governments to confront security challenges that they had long assumed the United States would manage.
The war in Iran is also reshaping the South Caucasus by accelerating Armenia’s departure from the geopolitical order centered on Moscow and Tehran. As Iran weakens under U.S. and Israeli pressure, Yerevan has fewer incentives to preserve its traditional alignment with Tehran and greater reason to deepen ties with Washington while normalizing relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey. This is producing a broader realignment in which the United States, Israel and Turkey are increasingly shaping the South Caucasus through their expanding influence in the Middle East. France and other European allies, despite their relative geographic proximity, are largely absent from this process, constrained by the war in Ukraine and the resources and political attention it continues to consume.
The broader lesson is that the South Caucasus illustrates the central challenge of America’s new geostrategy: Washington increasingly expects allies and partners to shoulder primary security responsibilities in their respective regions rather than relying on the United States to do so. In the strategically vital South Caucasus, wedged between two of America’s three principal adversaries – Russia and Iran – Washington is still a relative newcomer and therefore needs capable regional partners to translate its growing engagement into lasting influence. Yet the paradox is that some of America’s most advanced allies, such as France, Germany, and U.K, have proved less able to fill that role. %!s()
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 21: Lil Rel Howery attends the 53rd Annie Awards at Royce Hall on February 21, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
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Lil Rel Howery has been in the game for nearly two decades, and he’s spent that time making a strong case that being funny is just the beginning. His early comedy credits date back to 2007, but Howery has never been content to stay in one lane, moving from stand-up into television, film, writing and producing along the way. For plenty of moviegoers, his breakout as TSA agent Rod Williams in Get Out made him impossible to forget—a role that turned him into the friend everybody wanted in their group chat during a horror movie.
Now, with Haunted Heist, his feature directorial debut, Howery is stepping behind the camera while also starring in and executive producing the horror comedy. For him, directing doesn’t feel like a career pivot so much as the natural next move. After nearly two decades in Hollywood, he’s learned that longevity means knowing how to do more than one thing. Directing isn’t a new direction so much as another part of the toolkit he’s been building all along.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA - JULY 15: Lil Rel Howery speaks onstage during the premiere of "Haunted Heist" at Regal Atlanta Station on July 15, 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for Haunted Heist)
Getty Images for Haunted Heist
Lil Rel Howery Found His First Love In Horror
Howery’s love for filmmaking started long before he was making movies. He grew up watching horror, with Michael Myers among his favorite icons, along with the early A Nightmare on Elm Street films and Halloween. But the original It really got him.
When the television adaptation aired, Howery remembers it becoming a full-on cultural moment, with kids showing up to school the next day comparing notes about who was scared, who was terrified and who was definitely not sleeping with their feet hanging off the bed. At the time, clowns were supposed to mean happiness. Birthday parties. Balloons. Somebody handing you a cupcake. Then Pennywise showed up and ruined the whole concept. “It was an event,” Howery recalls.
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That love of cinema is also why Howery takes the moviegoing experience seriously — concessions included. Unlike the people who arrive with a purse full of snacks like they’re preparing for a six-hour flight, Howery says he buys his food at the theater. He gets there early and times his concession run with the trailers because, unlike a lot of us, he actually enjoys watching them. “I earn my pay,” he jokes.
It’s a small detail, but it says a lot about how genuinely Howery loves movies. He isn’t just somebody who makes them; he still approaches the theater like an audience member. He respects the ritual. He wants his snacks. He wants to see the trailers. He wants the whole experience — no shortcuts, no sneaking in contraband, just vibes and a properly timed concession run.
Howery Turns Collaboration Into His Directing Philosophy
That same enthusiasm carried onto the set of Haunted Heist, where Howery took a hands-on approach to directing. He wasn’t just directing and producing; he was also rewriting the script and starring in the movie.
He says he would take the script home every night, making adjustments based on what the actors were bringing to the production. The goal wasn’t simply to get through the pages. He wanted everyone on set to feel “seen and heard,” particularly on a lower-budget production where every person has to be fully invested in making the movie work. “These are your collaborators,” he says.
That collaborative mindset carried into casting, too. Some of Howery’s longtime friends, including Tiffany Haddish, came into the film through offers, but he still wanted auditions for several other roles. Among them were Detroit comedians Tara Terry, Joe Blunt and Martini Harris.
Terry, who plays the grandmother, already opens for Howery on the road, making her casting another example of his interest in bringing people from his comedy circle into the filmmaking family. Howery says he personally watches auditions, even when an actor has only one line. “I’m a very proactive person,” he says.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA - JULY 15: Lil Rel Howery attends the premiere of "Haunted Heist" at Regal Atlanta Station on July 15, 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for Haunted Heist)
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Why Howery Let Detroit Become Part Of The Cast
Detroit wasn’t just where Haunted Heist happened to shoot. Several of the producers live in the city, but Howery says the locations ultimately helped seal the deal. The production filmed at Berry Gordy’s first mansion and the Detroit Masonic Temple, while also drawing on local crews and talent.
For a movie about a group of people making some very questionable decisions, the city brought plenty of personality to the frame. “Detroit just has so much personality for what we’re trying to do,” Howery says.
That was part of the appeal. Howery wanted the city to feel like more than a backdrop — its architecture, people and energy all helping shape the identity of the movie.
How Howery Learned From the Greats, Then Got Personal
As a first-time director, Howery also leaned on filmmakers he admires. He calls himself a film and television nerd — a fair assessment for somebody who can rattle off Rob Reiner, John Singleton, Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler as influences without missing a beat. Ava DuVernay and Shawn Levy also offered guidance as he prepared for the project.
But studying other directors, Howery says, isn’t about trying to become the next version of somebody else. You can take the notes, study the greats and borrow a little inspiration. Eventually, though, you have to determine what’s yours. “You have to figure out what your own style is and bring what you think you can do better.”
One of those instincts was making room for emotional vulnerability between Black men. A scene between Howery and Karlous Miller’s characters centers on two friends confronting their relationship, apologizing and reconnecting. Howery wanted the moment to feel genuine, including the way the two friends embrace. Rather than the quick dap or shoulder pat that often stands in for affection between Black men on screen, he wanted them to actually be vulnerable with each other.
It’s a small moment, but an intentional one. Howery wanted to show Black men being open with one another without the moment immediately becoming a joke or somebody feeling the need to pull back. The friendship gets to be tender. The emotion gets to sit there. And nobody has to apologize for it.
Friendship Keeps Howery Grounded Beyond The Spotlight
That theme of friendship hits close to home for Howery, too. He and Tiffany Haddish have been friends for roughly 20 years, and with their birthdays only a couple of weeks apart, they’ve had plenty of reasons to celebrate.
Over the years, that has included trips to Hawaii with friends. But Howery remembers those getaways less for the celebrity factor than for the chance to simply hang out—hit the gym, spend the holidays together and, for a few days at least, just be regular people.
That’s the kind of community Howery seems to value most: the people you can laugh with, grow with and still call when the cameras are off. He’s built his career alongside comedians he came up with, stayed close to the people who helped him along the way and now looks for ways to bring more people into the circle.
JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE! "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" airs every weeknight at 11:35 p.m. ET and features a diverse lineup of guests that include celebrities, athletes, musical acts, comedians and human interest subjects, along with comedy bits and a house band. The guests for Wednesday, July 8 included guest host Tiffany Haddish, Lil Rel Howery, and Shameik Moore ("Power Book III: Raising Kanan"). (Disney/Randy Holmes)LIL REL HOWERY, TIFFANY HADDISH (Photo by Randy Holmes/Disney via Getty Images)
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From Breaking Through To Opening Doors With Howery
That commitment to community extends beyond Haunted Heist and into Howery’s work in comedy. He is entering the third year of the What’s Funny? Comedy Festival, which he created to give Black and Brown comedians a bigger platform.
After experiencing festival circuits where comedians of color could sometimes feel relegated to separate or secondary showcases, Howery wanted to build something different: a space where comedians could show up as themselves without having to water down their style or explain why their comedy works.
The festival is also Howery’s way of giving back to stand-up, the art form he credits with changing his life. He says he and his partner, Knowledge Beckom, have funded the festival out of pocket, and this year’s programming will include a master class and an honor for Bill Bellamy. “I want to make sure we give flowers to people who paved the way,” he says.
For Howery, giving back means honoring the people who came before him while making room for those coming next. He knows what it means to benefit from someone else opening a door. Now, he’s focused on making sure there are more doors to walk through.
How Independent Filmmakers Are Taking Back Control
That belief in creating new opportunities also shapes how Howery thinks about independent film.
Haunted Heist reached roughly 390 theaters through direct relationships with exhibitors, with Howery describing a 50/50 split with theater owners as an important part of the deal. He sees the arrangement as proof that filmmakers can build stronger relationships with theaters without always having to go through a major studio. He credits distributor Variance Films for being willing to invest in the filmmakers and their vision.
Howery believes there is an appetite for independent movies, particularly when filmmakers are willing to take risks. “I just think you get hungrier filmmakers when it’s not balloon budgets,” he says.
That hunger is part of what makes Haunted Heist meaningful to him. The movie’s success isn’t simply about getting one film into theaters; it’s about proving there are other ways to get movies in front of audiences—and that filmmakers can build those paths without waiting for a major studio to open the door.
A Movie Fan’s Next Chapter Behind The Camera
That willingness to build outside the traditional system is consistent with Howery’s larger career philosophy. He still loves performing and acting, but says he has become more selective about his on-camera work. These days, writing, producing and directing feel less like separate jobs and more like different parts of the same creative process.
Jonathan Simon, a writer and director at 369 Curated, sees being a multi-hyphenate as a way to take control of the stories being told. “I think we have the ability to bring a perspective and nuance to stories that get overlooked regularly,” he says. He believes specificity is a strength, particularly in representation: “For so long, Black characters have been seen through someone else’s lens, so there is power in being able to control how we are represented.” As a creative working across multiple disciplines, Simon adds, “Each facet has made me better at the others. These days, you wear multiple hats because you have to.”
Directing, in particular, is the part he’s most excited to keep exploring. But he’s also very much a movie fan—even when his own name is in the credits.
Howery saw Haunted Heist in theaters and says he’s watched it several times at home since its release, just as he has with other films he’s made. It’s a fitting detail for someone who spent years loving movies before he ever started making them. After all the work that goes into getting a film from script to screen, Howery still wants to do what he’s always done: sit down, get his snacks and watch the movie.
More Than One Title, One Vision For Howery
Howery’s career has always been about being multidimensional. But with Haunted Heist, he’s taking that idea a step further. He isn’t simply looking for another lane in Hollywood; he’s making more room for himself, his collaborators and the people coming behind him.
He’s directing. He’s producing. He’s mentoring. He’s creating opportunities. But underneath it all, the mission hasn’t changed: make people laugh, tell good stories and keep finding new ways to do both.
Maybe that’s the real evolution. He isn’t reinventing himself so much as expanding what Lil Rel Howery can be. The comedian is still there. The actor is still there. Now there’s a director in the mix, too. And if his career has taught him anything, it’s that there’s no reason to stop at one title when you can build a career that holds them all.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 13: Lil Rel Howery speaks onstage during the 28th Annual Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on May 13, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images for The Webby Awards)
