1.In The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel has a poster on her wall for the Hectic Glow, a fictional band referenced throughout the John Green novel on which the film is based.
On his website, Green explains that the band name is a reference to a Henry David Thoreau quote about disease, specifically "the hectic glow of consumption," or what's today known as tuberculosis. Apparently, Green originally wanted to name the novel The Hectic Glow, but decided not to because "A. it wasn’t the right title for the book, and B. it’s pretty hard to say out loud if you’re trying to recommend it to a friend."
2.Alfonso Cuarón, who directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, told SFGate that he added references to his Mexican heritage throughout the film. For instance, you can spot skulls in the background in some shots, like this one in the candy store Honeydukes. This is an homage to the Day of the Dead.
Additionally, the fountain in the courtyard of Hogwarts features statues of eagles with snakes in their beaks. The same motif can be found on the Mexican flag.
Despite these more direct Easter eggs, Cuarón clarified that his heritage and filmmaking style influenced the film in invisible but still essential ways. He said, "I don't think it's about specifics. I think it's about a Mexican sensibility. It's who I am, and I'm tinted by that."
3.Nicola Coughlan, who plays Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton, revealed on Twitter that a prop she held in the first episode of the series was a "massive Easter Egg" about Penelope's secret identity: the influential gossip writer Lady Whistledown.
When a user pointed it out, Coughlan confirmed their guess. She wrote that she got a chance to choose her prop for Penelope's first scene, and that she went with a "massive massive feather" that resembled a quill.
4.In Looking for Alaska, some of the doodles on the wall surrounding the payphone are shoutouts to author John Green's other works. For instance, we've got a "HL + AW" heart, presumably for Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters from The Fault in Our Stars. There's also a "Katherine <3 You," for An Abundance of Katherines.
5.Julie Berghoff, the production designer for The Handmaid's Tale, told Architectural Digest that certain elements of Offred's room in the Waterford house amount to taunts about the life she enjoyed prior to Gilead.
Berghoff said, "We put a desk there, but she can't write. So it's almost like a remnant, a remembrance of ‘Oh, I was a writer, an editor. I can't even sit and write anymore.'" Before the takeover, June was a book editor; in Gilead, women are forbidden from reading and writing.
Another furnishing forbidden to June is a mirror, though the production team purposely left evidence of one that was taken away. Berghoff said, "They don’t want you to be vain anymore, so we basically put the shape of a mirror on the wall to make it feel like at one point there was a mirror there."
6.The Umbrella Academy is based on the comic series written by Gerard Way, of My Chemical Romance fame. Way makes an extremely low-key cameo (of a sort) in the first season of the adaptation.
In the series, Vanya Hargreeves (Elliot Page) writes a memoir that exposes the cruelty of the Umbrella Academy's upbringing. When Vanya examines the book in Episode 1...
...you can spot a blurb written by none other than Gerard Way on its back cover. He calls Extra Ordinary an "incredible read."
7.During the series finale of Orange Is the New Black, the real-life Piper Kerman (who was renamed Piper Chapman in the series) and Larry make a cameo in a scene where Piper visits Alex in prison.
Kerman told the Hollywood Reporter, "That’s the first time I’ve put on a prison uniform since I was released from prison."
Also, while the show's versions of Piper and Larry break up, the real ones are still together. Kerman said, "The story of Piper Chapman has diverged so wildly. Larry and I are still married, we are parents. But that Orange’s Piper and Alex get to be together is a tribute to all of the prison families, whether it’s romantic partners or parents or children, who fight to stay connected to their loved ones who are behind bars."
8.In Love, Simon, there's a Hufflepuff badge and a playbill from Hamilton on the bulletin board in Simon's bedroom.
9.In It Chapter Two, the pattern on the bottom of Dean's skateboard resembles the iconic carpet featured in The Shining, another adaptation of a Stephen King novel.
10.Jon M. Chu, the director of Crazy Rich Asians, snuck an homage to author Kevin Kwan's writing process into the movie. On Twitter, Chu wrote that "every day [Kwan] wrote the book he looked at a Post-it note he wrote to himself that said 'joy' on it to remind him what this story was truly about. So we put it in the movie..." Chu didn't reveal where the Post-it is hidden, but my money's on that it's somewhere on this mood board.
11.Author Jenny Han appears as a chaperone in a flashback to a school dance in To All the Boys I've Loved Before.
12.In Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, the two screenplays sitting next to aspiring filmmaker Greg's desk were chosen by director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon as an ode to two filmmaking legends: Martin Scorsese and Nora Ephron. You can't quite see the whole titles in this photo, but the scripts are Casino (directed by Scorsese) and Heartburn (written by Ephron).
According to NPR, Gomez-Rejon chose these two screenplays because he's worked with both Scorsese and Ephron. In an interview with the outlet, the director said, "I love the script on so many levels, and one of them was it was a chance for me to pay homage and celebrate the films of all my heroes and some of the mentors I've been lucky to have in my life."
13.Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton told the Hollywood Reporter that the embroidery on the wedding dress Sansa Stark wears when she marries Tyrion Lannister tells the story of the different houses to which Sansa has allegiance.
Clapton said, "You can see the influence of her mother, Catelyn Stark, in the House of Tully fish that swim around her body, then the emergence of the Stark direwolf and eventually the heavy stamp of the Lannister lion on the back of her neck." The dress took the show's master embroiderer, Michele Carragher, two weeks to embroider.
14.Little Women director Greta Gerwig told Vanity Fair that since Jo and Laurie are each other's "androgynous other half," they swap vests throughout the film.
Costume designer Jacqueline Durran told Harper's Bazaar, "What we were trying to achieve was to emphasize a back and forth of fluidity between the two of them in a way that they were just best friends, and they identified with each other, and they wanted to be the other person, and they shared clothes."
15.Gabriele Binder, the costume designer behind The Queen's Gambit, told BuzzFeed that she gave a cardigan to one of the elderly Russian men Beth plays chess against in the last scene of the series. That cardigan was worn by her first mentor, Mr. Shaibel, earlier in the series.
Binder said, "So I don't think anybody will ever really see this, but I thought it was enough to have this emotional moment where Mr. Shaibel is there and maybe somebody will recognize it." She went on, "When she is now sitting down with the old men and, for the first time after a very long time, starts playing chess not for competition, but for fun. So, just playing chess, not for competition, just for the fun of it, we need Mr. Shaibel to come back in some way."
16.And finally: In the last scene of Season 1 of Alex Rider, Alex's friend Tom wears a T-shirt that reads, "The book was better." Well then, Tom.
