On the down side, if you forgot to cover up while the shot-puttin’ paper boy road past you risked getting very tiny cuts in very sensitive places. Oh the memories. While we’re on the topic you should know it was in a nude-theatre that we first took in that Harry Potter film.

We should probably recommend that place to Rupert Grint, him apparently being a recently converted nudist and all.

Oh you read that right.

Outside of Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe has only been taking roles where his genitalia gets referenced at least three times in the script. This doesn’t make sense until you realise he’s most likely getting two pay checks for it. Seriously, we heard his left nut has a five bedroom house somewhere in the Alps – complete with a neutered butler, which is just so ironic.

Rich nuts forget where they’re from, you know?

Now Rupert Grint, who’s mannana has been famous every bit as long as Radcliffe’s except under several layers of clothing, is letting the sweet sun warm every single circumcised part of his body while a nearby film director shouts things at it like ‘Hey! Hey! I said stop staring at the floor! Good, now show me frightened.’

We mean Grint is getting naked in a movie.

This is true because we don’t think the Malaysia Sun would ever lie to us:

“English actor Daniel Radcliffe, who played the role of Harry Potter in the film series …shed off his clothes on stage in Equus. Now, Grint, 20, who shot to fame with his role as Ron Weasley, has shed off his clothes in the new movie. The film is about three teenagers who embark on a debauched weekend of drink, drugs, shoplifting and stealing cars.”

When asked about his first nude roll Grint simply joked about how they were gonna need a much longer camera. Bad-um-bum.

He never said that. Nobody said that.

Although the young red headed actor refuses to say exactly how much his penis will get paid for the film, Forbes would likely assure us it’s a shoe-in for 2009’s Top 50 Richest Young Hollywood Schlongs list, right behind a few penises you’ve never heard of and something oblong and sticky that’s growing on Oprah’s foot.

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But now Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson have emerged as figureheads on opposing sides of a dispute over whether actors should go on strike because there aren’t enough fame-blinded young nymphomaniacs who’ll indulge their every fleeting sexual whim or whatever.

Mel Gibson is for the strike, Tom Hanks is against it. Sadly Mel Gibson will win, because the dispute will be settled by charging at each other across a field. Poor Tom Hanks – if only it involved growing a crap mullet and ranting about Jesus.

Our favourite part of this year, hands down, was the writers’ strike. It was brilliant – fed up with not being paid enough royalties for material shown on the internet, film and television writers all put their tools down and deliberately crippled the industry.

Except what actually happened in the writers’ strike was this a) the Golden Globes got cancelled, b) Lost got to make a shorter-than-usual season that wasn’t full of guffy episodes about nothing and c) 24 was forced to take a year off, allowing its producers to think of a way to make it less embarrassingly rubbish. In short, only brilliant things came from the writers’ strike.

And that’s why the actors have decided to have a go too – the Screen Actors Guild has long been brewing over whether or not to go on strike for similar reasons to the actors and, despite George Clooney’s efforts, ballots will be sent out to members first thing next year.

Imagine what’ll happen if the actors do go on strike – not only will your favourite shows get screwed for another season, but actors will have to spend most of their time sitting around not doing any real work. We genuinely can’t imagine what that’d be like.

But some actors don’t want to go on strike. They’re claiming, quite sensibly, that another strike-crippled winter wouldn’t be fair on all the piecemeal crew members forced out of work and that, with a global recession looming ever closer, the last thing that the public wants to see is a load of manicured moviestars stamping their feet because they only got $18 million for pretending to be a hard-bitten policeman who doesn’t follow the rules instead of $19 million.

And that’s why these actors have taken a stand and, um, written a strongly-worded letter. The New York Times reports:

“We support our union and we support the issues we’re fighting for, but we do not believe in all good conscience that now is the time to be putting people out of work.” Beneath that was what might have been the cast list for a tentpole blockbuster: George Clooney, Glenn Close, Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman and Tom Hanks.

That’s quite a list of names – who’d be stupid enough to argue with nice guys like George Clooney and Tom Hanks, powerful girls like Glenn Close and Charlize Theron, the actual voice of God in Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, a man who once made a comedy about some cojoined twins?

Actually, Mel Gibson would. And so would Sandra Oh. And Holly Hunter. And Jerry O’Connell. And this disagreement has driven a wedge through the middle of Hollywood, a community which usually prefers to publicly rub its own tummy until it gets a hardon.

What happens next remains to be seen, but there is one obvious solution staring everyone in the face here – let Mel Gibson and Sandra Oh and Holly Hunter and Jerry O’Connell go on strike and everyone else doesn’t have to.

That way the striking actors get to make the point they so firmly believe in, and we get to go a few months without having to watch Grey’s Anatomy, Saving Grace, any new Mel Gibson films at all or Kangaroo Jack 2: Jack Bounces Back. Everyone’s happy.

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You want a comparison? OK. Onscreen, the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy revolved around a bunch of doctors wondering who’d be asked to perform some surgery on a patient. For approximately the billionth time.

But off-screen? Off-screen the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy revolved around dollop-faced actor TR Knight throwing the mother of all strops and walking off the show because nobody’s giving him the attention that he obviously deserves. See – which one would you watch? Oh, neither? Actually, us too.

We’d love to be a fly on the wall behind the scenes of Grey’s Anatomy. That’s mostly because we’d love to vomit on everyone’s lunch and give them all food poisoning, but because it’d allow us to see the extent of the rumours that the actors all hate the writers, the producers all hate the actors and the actors all hate each other.

It certainly seems that way, what with actors fighting, actors screaming homophobic slurs at each other, actors turning down awards because they thought their scripts were terrible and producers firing actors because everything was getting a bit gay. And now, the cherry on the cake – there’s been a Grey’s Anatomy walk-off.

TR Knight – who plays, um, someone on Grey’s Anatomy - has apparently decided to leave the show because producers refused to change the title of the show to The TR Knight Medicine And Meaningful Looks Hour, change all the characters’ names to ‘TR Knight’ and make everyone walk around the hospital in TR Knight masks singing a song of TR Knight’s composition entitled Ooh Yeah TR Knight Is So Flipping Great. Or, you know, something. People reports:

Why does Knight, who remains a fan favorite, want to leave? “Have you seen the show lately?” says a source. Knight has received little screen time this season, with the show focusing on controversial storylines like the romance between Katherine Heigl’s Izzie and her long-dead lover, Denny.

We can’t help feeling that TR Knight is acting like a little bit of a petulant brat here. After all, Grey’s Anatomy is an ensemble show, and sometimes everyone can come to the forefront with a storyline about hardcore necrophilia. It happened with Cheers and it’s damn well going to happen with Grey’s Anatomy.

But still, you can see why TR Knight is so keen to quit Grey’s Anatomy – stars like Sandra Oh and Katherine Heigl and Patrick Dempsey have long since started to make the transition to movies, and there’s little doubt that TR Knight wants to follow suit.

True, he’ll have to wait until someone writes a movie script about a tubby-faced Little Lord Fauntleroy who looks like he’s about 12 years old, and then cross his fingers and pray that the director’s top 35 choices for the role all turn it down. But that day will come, we’re sure of it.

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It seems to work for Vince Vaughn, because he’s just been named as Forbes‘ most valuable actor. For every dollar that Vince Vaughn was paid for Dodgeball, The Break-Up and Wedding Crashers, he pulled in $14.71 of gross income for his studios.

That’s impressive stuff, and Vince Vaughn should be incredibly proud of his achievements. Speaking of which, Vince Vaughn should also be incredibly proud next year when Forbes calculates his salary against Fred Claus and that awful-looking Christmas movie he’s making with Reese Witherspoon and names him as its most overpaid one-note, off-script, pointlessly rambling unfunny egobeast.

Goodness, when did Hollywood get so money-fixated? This week we haven’t been able to turn around without seeing Hollywood’s smug face crowing about The Dark Knight being the biggest film ever or how much money Will Smith makes. It upsets us, especially since we think this obsession with money will eventually drive out smaller movies that deal with serious social issues, like all the little Eddie Murphys who live inside the head of a bigger Eddie Murphy.

But when every little aspect of filmmaking is analysed and cost-calculated to within an inch of its life, you’re bound to throw up an anomaly or two. Which brings us along nicely to the fact that Vince Vaughn has just been named as the most valuable star in Hollywood.

It’s a simple enough idea – you take the salary of an actor and the gross of the films they’ve starred in and see how many audience dollars you can get for every one that the actor was paid. Last year Matt Damon was named as the most valuable star, for example. And this year it’s Vince Vaughn.

Why? Because Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up were all huge hits, despite one of them being suicide-inducingly crap, and they were made when Vince Vaughn couldn’t demand ridiculously large fees just to turn up and tediously ad-lib through every scene ignoring everything in the script. The Associated Press reports:

Vaughn raked in $14.73 of gross income for studios for every dollar he was paid for “The Break-up,” “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball.” “That’s because until recently his salary was relatively low, and the films he was in had modest budgets yet did extremely well at the box office worldwide,” Forbes said.

That’s likely to be the only taste of success that Vince Vaughn will get in this field, because now he’s one of the most highly-paid actors in Hollywood, and he makes dreck like Fred Claus – pretty much a failure on all counts – and the dreadful-sounding Four Christmases, chances are his score is going to bottom out quite spectacularly soon.

Still, if that happens Vince Vaughn shouldn’t worry – math-based formulas like this are no indication of acting talent. Look at the bottom of the list – Nicole Kidman only brings in $1.01 for every dollar she’s paid, and she’s won an Oscar. True, we wouldn’t pay to see any of her movies if you waterboarded us into it, but that’s not the point. Is it?

By which we, of course, mean acting. Just a few short months after the Hollywood writers strike came bumbling to an end, the two big actor unions are squabbling over whether or not they should go on strike too. And in times as troubled as these a wise, near-biblical hero figure is needed to set everything back on course.

And, with thudding inevitability, that figure is George Clooney. George Clooney has written a letter to both the Screen Actors Guild (which wants to strike) and the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists (which doesn't) proclaiming his clear and ineffably correct opinion on who's right and who's wrong. Turns out he thinks that everyone's right. Nice going George, that could have got nasty.

Oh, for god's sake. All we want to do is watch a new season of 24 – is that too much to ask? Is that too difficult for you Hollywood bigshots to understand? We wanted to see Jack Bauer torturing as many brown people as possible within the space of a day because of an arbitrarily preposterous, rightwing, wildly xenophobic terrorist scare this January, but the writer's strike arsed that up. 

And now it looks as if the actors are going to go on strike as well, potentially scuppering another season. Damn you, actors! At this rate the next time we'll get to watch a new season of 24, three quarters of it will be about Jack Bauer having a lovely nap in front of the television with a blanket over his elderly legs. Damn you!

But, anyway, the actors might be going on strike because… oh, who cares why the actors might be going on strike? They're just actors, after all. But the potential of an actor strike has divided the acting community into those who definitely want to strike and those who probably want to strike. The whole industry's on the brink of a civil war! The Baldwins could be torn asunder! Will nobody think of the Baldwins?

However, one man has made it his duty to unite both SAG and AFTRA. He's a lion of man, a man who can't be hurt by freaky-looking male models or hard slabs of asphalt, a man who can get Danny DeVito hammered and live to tell the tale. That man, as if you needed to be told, is George Clooney.

George Clooney is Hollywood's golden boy. He can make any kind of movie you like – searing political thrillers, smug heist movies, horribly unpopular sports comedies – and so he's absolutely best placed to look down on the squabbling actor's unions and cast forth his opinion. Which he has, in the form of a letter.

So who does George Clooney think is right? The union that wants to strike hard now or the union that wants to negotiate because people are already pissed off that this last season of Lost was slightly shorter than usual? E! Online has the details:

"Both are, of course, right. AFTRA feels that a work stoppage would be devastating to its members and SAG believes that if they don't draw a line in the sand, the studios will repeat what they did with DVDs… I've been very lucky in my career, which has put me in the place that I don't need a union to check on my residuals, or my pension, or protect my 12-hour turnaround."

So George Clooney isn't going to take sides. That's fine, we guess – he's still got involved, and that's what's important. Let's just hope that George Clooney's letter makes a difference, because it's not as if the world is full of wannabe actors who'll take badly-paid non-union jobs just because they'll end up famous, is it?