Lifestyle
U.S. women’s figure skaters could’ve been rivals. Instead, they’re the ‘Blade Angels’
Alysa Liu, Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito are representing Team USA in women’s figure skating.
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MILAN — The “Blade Angels” are about to take off.
That’s the official trio nickname for Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu and Isabeau Levito, the figure skaters representing Team USA in the individual women’s competition. They voted on the name last month (it was Liu’s suggestion) and were re-introduced to the world this week in a video narrated by none other than Taylor Swift.
Glenn, Liu and Levito are widely considered the country’s strongest female field in decades: Any one of them — or potentially multiple — could become the first U.S. woman to win an individual figure skating medal since 2006 .
“This is the first time in, I would say, about four Olympic cycles that we have three women who could realistically end up on the Olympic podium,” three-time national champion and 2014 Olympic medalist Ashley Wagner told NPR in January.
The trio — who might have been dubbed the “Powerpuff Girls” or “Babes of Glory” if not for copyright concerns — have an impressive array of accolades between them. Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, Liu is the reigning world champion and Levito is the 2024 world silver medalist.
But what makes them even more notable is their fierce friendship, which many see as a refreshing change from the dynamic of Olympics past.
“Something that [Liu has] been saying throughout all the press conferences and stuff is… ‘Why is it so shocking that we’re being friendly, that we’re friends?’ They obviously are much younger than I am,” said Glenn, who is 26. “So they don’t know what the atmosphere might have been like before. Not that it was all bad, but there was definitely some intensity.”
Liu is 20 — returning to the sport after her teenage retirement — and Levito is 18.
The three have talked about their friendship as a source of comfort and normalcy in such a high-stakes environment. They have showered praise on each other at every opportunity, including at a press conference at U.S. Figure Skating championships last month.
“I love Isabeau’s wittiness, I’m sure everybody says this, but truly she’s the funniest person I’ve ever met,” Liu said. “And then Amber … you have a lot of love and you give a lot of love. She just radiates that.”
Their support has shone through publicly on social media and in quieter moments. At nationals, Liu, the penultimate skater of the night, bucked tradition by standing rinkside to watch Glenn take the ice — and showered Glenn with hugs after she overtook her for gold. The three were then named to the Olympic team, and reflected on the dynamic they would bring to Italy.
“We all three of us know, OK, yes, we’re competing against each other, but we’re competing to go and do our programs the best we possibly can,” Glenn said. “And wherever that lands us, whatever the judges do, that’s none of our business. As long as we are happy with what we do, I think everyone will be happy.”
Glenn and Liu are already gold medalists, having contributed to the U.S.’ win in the team event — before the week’s series of podium disappointments in the ice dance and men’s categories. The women will compete for the last figure skating medals of these Olympics on Tuesday and Thursday.
Who are the Blade Angels?
Glenn is the three-time reigning U.S. champion, the first woman to hold that title since Michelle Kwan.
She’s also an outspoken mental health and LGBTQ+ advocate. Glenn has been open about her struggles with an eating disorder, anxiety and depression, including the break she took from skating about a decade ago to navigate a mental health crisis.
“I’ve been very outspoken about the ups and downs that I’ve had in my career because I want people to know that that’s okay,” Glenn said last month.
The Texas native has been skating since age 5, but didn’t win an international competition until she was 24. She reached her first Olympics two years later.
Glenn’s artistic power and technical skill — including her consistent triple Axel — make her both a threat and a delight on the ice. She has particularly won over fans with her “Like a Prayer” short program this season, which set a record score at the U.S. championships. Her mantra is “breathe and believe.”
Amber Glenn, pictured on the ice in January, is skating at her first Olympics at age 26.
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Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Off the ice, Glenn is credited with helping change the culture of the women’s sport by fostering a culture of support and inclusivity, particularly as the first openly queer U.S. women’s champion.
“I saw some of the tension between some of those athletes that are a bit older than me and how it affected their relationship with the sport, with each other, with themselves particularly, and the comparison just got really out of hand,” Glenn told reporters in December. “And I just wanted to be able to feel comfortable in the locker room.”
The younger members of Team USA say they have benefitted from that shift.
“I feel like we’re all so intelligent and mature. And I think it’s also why everyone gets so along in the locker room, because we all realize it’s not that deep,” Levito said at nationals. “And we’re all doing something that we’re passionate about and that we love.”
Liu has also been a positive force for change in that regard.
Alysa Liu (R) takes a selfie at the team event earlier in the Olympics.
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Wang Zhao/AFP
The California native broke onto the scene with her technical prowess at age 12 in 2018, becoming the youngest skater to land a triple Axel in international competition. The following year, she became the youngest-ever U.S. women’s champion. She made her Olympic debut in Beijing in 2022 — then abruptly retired from the sport at age 16, burnt out from years of nonstop training.
Liu used her time away to do regular teenage things like get her driver’s license, travel and enroll in college classes. But a ski trip in 2024 reminded her of what she loved about the sport, and she tentatively returned to the rink. But she hit a full-force comeback when she won the 2025 World Championships, the first American woman to do so since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
“Quitting was definitely still to this day, like one of my best decisions ever,” Liu said in October. “And coming back was also a really good decision.”
Liu has returned to competition with a renewed love of the sport and sense of self, taking more control over things like costumes and music. She’s stayed true to her own personal style, rocking a smiley piercing and halo hair (“I kind of want to be a tree, add a new ring every year”). And she’s spoken about newly enjoying competition as a chance to showcase her creative artistry.
“I want [the audience] to see my hair, my dress, my makeup, the way I skate,” Liu, now 20, said at the start of the Olympics. “I want people to see everything about me.”
Isabeau Levito channeled Audrey Hepburn’s character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” short program in the 2024-2025 season.
Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images
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Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images
Levito, 18, is the youngest member of the team — though has said she feels wiser after a foot injury forced her to take a break in the 2024-2025 season.
“It just made me more grateful for every opportunity I have to skate,” she said.
She is known for her poise and grace on the ice — earning her the name “Tinkerbeau” from some fans and her sense of humor off of it.
Levito, a New Jersey native whose mom hails from Milan, went viral just this week for her enthusiastic response to an interviewer’s question about how much fun she’s been having in the Olympic Village: “You can’t evict me.”
Who is their biggest competition?
Japan has been the U.S.’ closest challenger in the rink this Olympics, and that is poised to be the case for the women’s event too. The rivalry is a respectful one: Skaters from both countries have spoken highly of each other, and several Japanese skaters have gone viral for their wordless tribute to Glenn’s success at a 2024 competition.
Leading the Japanese trio is Kaori Sakamoto, looking to close out her career with Olympic gold. Sakamoto, 25, has said she will retire after these Games, and picked a fitting song for her short program: “Time to Say Goodbye.”
Silver medalist Mone Chiba, gold medalist Amber Glenn and bronze medalist Kaori Sakamoto pose after the women’s event at the 2024 ISU Grand Prix Finals.
Laurent Cipriani/AP
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Laurent Cipriani/AP
The three-time world champion and three-time Olympian won bronze in 2022, and helped Japan win silver in this year’s team event.
She is also seen as a “big sister” to her younger Olympic teammates, 2025 world bronze medalist Mone Chiba and 2026 Four Continents silver medalist Ami Nakai — both of whom are also considered strong podium contenders.
But if figure skating at these Olympics have shown us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected. Potential wildcards include Russia’s Adeliia Petrosian, who is competing as a neutral athlete.
Due to Russia’s exclusion from international competition over its war in the Ukraine, the three-time Russian champion has only taken the ice in one senior competition outside of her homeland: the qualifier that got her this spot in Milan.
Petrosian is coached by Eteri Tutberidze, the controversial and prolific women’s coach whose many former charges include Kamila Valieva — the Russian skater who was disqualified from the 2022 Olympics over a doping scandal.
Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Bruce Campbell
I’m Battling Cancer
Published
Bruce Campbell has revealed he has cancer, but says it’s a type that’s treatable, though not curable.
“The Evil Dead” actor shared the news Monday in a message to fans, writing, “Hi folks, these days, when someone is having a health issue, it’s referred to as an ‘opportunity,’ so let’s go with that — I’m having one of those.” He continued, “It’s also called a type of cancer that’s ‘treatable’ not ‘curable.’ I apologize if that’s a shock — it was to me too.”
Campbell said he wouldn’t go into further detail about his diagnosis, but explained his work schedule will be changing. “Appearances and cons and work in general need to take back seat to treatment,” he wrote, adding he plans to focus on getting “as well as I possibly can over the summer.”
As a result, Campbell says he has to cancel several convention appearances this summer, noting, “Treatment needs and professional obligations don’t always go hand-in-hand.”
He says his plan is to tour this fall in support of his new film, “Ernie & Emma,” which he stars in and directs.
Ending on a determined note, Campbell told fans, “I am a tough old son-of-a-bitch … and I expect to be around a while.”
Neve Campbell in Scream 7.
Paramount Pictures
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Paramount Pictures
The OG Scream Queen Neve Campbell returns. Scream 7 re-centers the franchise back on Sidney Prescott. She has a new life, a family, and lots of baggage. You know the drill: Someone dressing up as the masked slasher Ghostface comes for her, her family and friends. There’s lots of stabbing and murder and so many red herrings it’s practically a smorgasbord.
Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture
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