It’s a rictus grin that not even Botox can smooth out.
The unhappy smile of the movie star forced into a false and ingratiating chummery with the next media schmuck who sits before them in an endless round of promotional interviews.
Years after the press junket first established itself as an uneasy contract of minimal civility met with borderline interest, these manifold encounters have morphed into a false friendliness that has made my teeth ache, and turned watching the odd, light chat with this or that star into something almost unbearable.
Have you felt the same? Why is it that every interviewer, big, small or insignificant, now feels that they must arrive to their four minute-long encounter with a gift, a scrapbook, or a movie stub they’ve hung onto for decades, or a tearful personal confession that links them forever with the celebrity who won’t remember their name even before their time together is up?
And then, rather than eschew this false intimacy, who decided that any celebrity fawned over in this way must emote and gush as if they’ve been reunited with their best friend from kindergarten?
Now, any wannabe with an old movie poster, a tatty LP, or a vague memory of watching a star’s movie when they were home sick in bed at the age of five, is marvelled over and embraced while we sit there wondering when they’ll be asked something meaningful about their performance.
It’s so weird. So false. And shows no signs of fading.
The recent juggernaut press tour for The Devil Wears Prada 2 was a startling recent example. Dressed in couture, each piece of which costs in five digits, stars like Emily Blunt and Simone Ashley oohed and aaahed over the mid-price shoes that their questioners pointed out as wearing “specially” for the interview, their eyes widening in fresh wonder as they were asked the same question for the 30th time. They are very good actors.
Who asked them to do this?
These epic performances reached their apogee during the grand tour of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo for Wicked one and two — staged entertainments that were surely rivalled only by Hannibal’s’ crossing of the alps in scale, drama and histrionics. If it was exhausting for us to watch the two fine singers clutch, claw and gasp in awe over any and every banal question tossed at them in over-lit hotel rooms across four continents, imagine how miserable it was for them?
So, where did this convention of mutual fawning come from? Who asked them to do this?
Did it start when Anne Hathaway was mercilessly mown down by social media when she arrived pissy and bad humoured for a now-notorious interview to promote Les Miserables? Her non-compliance became legendary, for all the wrong reasons, as social media bared its teeth and showed it would lock its jaws on the stars who won’t play nice.
Podcast host Kevin McCarthy kicked off the movie stub trend with his lifelong collection of old theatre tickets that he dragged out for any interview he did, and to which a celeb can only respond in one, utterly charmed way unless they are a sociopath.
Loading Instagram content
Then the bringing of gifts started, along with the breathlessly shared experiences, and I suppose media advisers quickly realised that everyone had to play happy families if this wasn’t to end badly for the sole purpose of the encounter: selling the star and selling tickets.
There’s a line to stay south of
I get why this is embraced, sort of. I don’t want to go back to the bad old days of Australian entertainment journalism when mostly male, and seemingly bored, snooty and snarky reporters slumped at Tullamarine airport to lob questions like grenades at a bunch of singers still shell-shocked that they had not gone off the edge of the world after flying more than 30 hours to be here. I’m sure you’ve seen the examples online if you don’t remember them.
But there’s a line to stay south of, even with something as anodyne as a promotional movie chat, and that’s surely the art of that brief encounter?
I’ve been thinking about this recently as I realise how many times I’ve sat across from a star, even as a fan, but with my hand held near my dagger, just in case I need it.
As a viewer, I don’t get anything more from the encounter when the journalist or podcaster brings so much of themselves into the meeting, and I wonder if this wearying trend is now responsible for the proliferation of the high profile “actors on actors” interviews that have now made an independent interlocutor entirely redundant.
In these interviews, like in a recent one between Peter Dinklage and Kit Harington, they even groan about the misery of doing “the press”.
Well, in these formats, they don’t have to do so much of it anymore and we, the media, and our fake encounters with our four-minute fake best friends, might just be part of the reason why.
This weekend don’t look away as the true horror that was Rolf Harris is revealed, hidden in plain sight.
And if you think I wasn’t going to share Madonna’s unwittingly hilarious, but nonetheless irresistible new 10-minute film and song, Confessions II, then you don’t know me. Skip to the middle if you just want to dance (with a whole lot of those celebs), you’ll love it. Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.
