LAKE FOREST, Ill. (AP) — Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams sought to quiet the controversy about how he hadn’t wanted to come to his current team prior to the 2024 draft.
Williams admitted an ESPN story about an upcoming book by Seth Wickersham on quarterbacks was true in that he did like the idea of going to the Minnesota Vikings initially, but this was prior to his first visit to Chicago. Then, Williams said, he wanted to be with the Bears.
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Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams talks to media at a news conference after NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams talks to media at a news conference after NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams (18) smiles as he warms up during NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams throws a ball during NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
“Yeah, I had a good visit at the other place — Minnesota, with (coach) Kevin O’Connell,” Williams said. “Good staff and all of that obviously. He just won the coach of the year award and things like that. Obviously, good staff and things like that.
“But something that keeps getting lost, something that keeps getting, I think, not being addressed the way it needs to be is the fact that I went on that visit first, came here and then after I came here, I went back home and talked to my dad.”
His comment to his father, Carl Williams, was he wanted to play for the Bears and become the quarterback who leads them out of a history of struggling quarterbacks.
“This whole storm that happened, it wasn’t something that we wanted to have happen at this point,” Williams said during a news conference Wednesday during the Bears OTAs. “We’re focused on the present, we’re focused on now, we’re focused on trying to get this ship moving in the right direction. And I think so far that’s what we’ve been doing.
“But for this to come out it’s been a distraction.”
The book, “American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback,” looks at many QBs but Williams’ part details how he and his father thought about the possibility of finding a way to circumvent the NFL draft in 2024 to avoid coming to Chicago. Williams labeled any of the early discussion as mere thoughts, not action.
“Those are thoughts that go throughout your head in those situations,” Williams said. “All of those are thoughts. And then after I came on my visit here, it was a deliberate answer and deliberate and determined answer that I had is that I wanted to come here.”
The Bears quarterback saw most of what had been written as ancient history, but did label one aspect of an ESPN story on the book as false or misinterpreted. It was a claim he didn’t know how to watch film and the Bears staff under former coach Matt Eberflus failed to help him.
“So that was a funny one that came out, that in context, in how that was trying to be portrayed, didn’t get portrayed that way,” Williams said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to watch film, it was trying to figure on the best ways and more efficient ways.”
Williams expects new coach Ben Johnson will make a difference in his film watching.
“He’s been in this offense for six years,” Williams said. “He’s really been on top of it and we’re really only trying to catch up, I’m only trying to catch up to him and be on top of the details as much as possible.”
Williams said his father’s input was valued and always is, but in the case of the book he probably went too far or wasn’t entirely clear with some comments made.
“Definitely a grown man, I shut him down quite a lot just because in season and out of season, it’s something you have to do,” Williams said. “He cares so much about me and my future and we have been along this journey so long together, all he wants is the best for me.
“So if anything happens and he’s super hot-headed and it’s more of like ‘All right, go ahead and go away. Go reset.’ Things like that. Love him to death and things like that, super fortunate to have him. We have talked about it. Understanding that there’s a right place and a right time and there are times that there is not.”
The book is scheduled to be released Sept. 9, a day after the Bears open the season against the Vikings in a home Monday night game to be televised by ESPN.
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Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams talks to media at a news conference after NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams talks to media at a news conference after NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams (18) smiles as he warms up during NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams throws a ball during NFL football practice in Lake Forest, Ill., Wednesday, May 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
NEW YORK (AP) — Christine Baranski was in the playground outside St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford, New York, about three years ago when she came across Matthew Guard, artistic director of the Grammy-nominated Skylark Vocal Ensemble.
“I love choral music,” she told him.
An Emmy- and Tony-Award winning actor, Baranski went on to attend some of his concerts.
“I was a fangirl basically,” she recalled. “And I think we just said, `Wouldn’t it be fun to do something together?’”
Baranski agreed to narrate a music-and-spoken word version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” last December at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which owns the original manuscript of the 1843 classic. A recording was made last June at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and released Dec. 4 on the LSO Live label.
She will perform it again with the group on Thursday night at the Morgan, which is displaying the manuscript through Jan. 11, and again the following night at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, where she will again portray the acerbic Agnes van Rhijn when Season 4 of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” starts filming season four on Feb. 23.
“I have this thing about keeping language alive, keeping beautiful, well-written language,” she said. “Dickens, Stoppard, Shakespeare. We’re getting awfully lazy in our use of the English language.”
She compliments Julian Fellowes, creator of “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey,” for distinguished prose.
“I think he’d play Agnes if he could,” she said. “He gives her the witty stuff.”
Baranski leaned on the skills that earned her an Emmy for “Cybill” and Tonys for “The Real Thing” and “Rumors.”
“You get to bring to life a lot of different characters, none the least of which is Ebenezer,” she said at the library this month. “It’s wonderful for an actor to differentiate in as subtle a way as possible these different characters. As an acting piece, it’s wonderful. And not many women have done it. It’s been done by Alistair Cooke and Patrick Stewart and Patrick Page and all these great actors — but I get to do it with a chorus.”
Guard weaves in underscoring by composer Benedict Sheehan with Baranski’s words and 10 carols that include “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls” plus “Auld Lang Syne.”
Reciting the entire story would have created a Wagnerian-length evening.
“This manuscript itself is about 30,000 words and we needed about 5,000 to make it a concert length,” Guard said. “I tried to create space in the narrative for obvious musical exclamation points or emotional feelings, almost like arias in an opera.”
Sheehan had worked together with Guard on a 2020 recording “Once Upon a Time” that weaved together the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
“I said why don’t you commission me to write choral underscoring for the narrative that can kind of stitch together these different choral pieces?” Sheehan said.
Baranski got narration experience in 2023 when she replaced Liev Schreiber with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall for Beethoven’s “Egmont.”
“I could do this the rest of my career,” she thought at the time. “Just put me in a concert hall surrounded by great musicians.”
After working with dialect coach Howard Samuelsohn, Baranski practiced on Zoom to hone a 19th-century voice and avoid cliché.
“I said this is a good warm up for Aunt Agnes because it’s that kind of speech we were taught at Juilliard,” the 73-year-old Baranski said, recalling lessons from Edith Skinner decades ago.
“Sometimes it’s just a question of modulating your voice, just different rhythms and staccato or legato,” she said. “I want the voice of the Ghost of Christmas past to be disembodied… ethereal.”
She didn’t have an urge to join in on the carols.
“We take from each other,” she said. “When the chorus first heard my version of it, I think it subtly influenced the feeling of it and I take from the mood of the carol and bring it into my interpretation.”
“It’s a really exciting back-and-forth actually,” Guard said. “It’s not really totally clear who’s driving the bus at times.”
Baranski hopes the project has a future.
“We want to film this someday in the Morgan,” she said. “Make this a yearly event at the Morgan, because here’s the manuscript and people. It’s just one of those things like Handel’s `Messiah’ or `The Nutcracker.’”
She’s going to gift the CD to her grandchildren, four boys ranging from ages 2 to 12. Among her previous holiday experiences was portraying Martha May Whovier in the 2000 movie “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“They’re curiously not interested in my even being Martha May in `The Grinch,’” Baranski explained. “Their friends sometimes say: `That’s your grandmother.’ But I just want to be their grandma — do you know what I mean — and not somebody?”
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
