Roar of words
Why we love it when celebrity interviews go awry,
Nicki Minaj has always been famed for her nimble juggling of multiple personalities, whether it’s her flame-haired gay Brit character Roman Zolanski, her coy coquette Harajuku Barbie or the staunchly raunchy Nicki Lewinsky.
Then, there’s the character more familiar to hapless interviewers: the guarded Minaj who will not suffer fools for a moment.
That’s the demeanour the dexterous rapper donned when she shut down a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine after a “stupid question” about her supposed penchant for “drama.”
Of course, as the clicks stack up, it’s looking increasingly like Minaj did that reporter a great favour.
“I think that’s what they were hoping for,” said ET Canada reporter Roz Weston. “If you interview Nicki Minaj and go back to your editor with a plain, regular, nice interview, I don’t think you’ve done your job.”
Well, Minaj isn’t the only celebrity recently baited into an irritable interview.
Increasingly, celebrity interviews are becoming like the weather or traffic: they’re only newsworthy when they go disastrously wrong.
Consider a few examples from the past few weeks alone. Robert De Niro petulantly grimaced his way to international headlines after freezing out a Radio Times reporter for her supposed negativity.
Then there was Chrissie Hynde, whose testy exchange with NPR’s David Greene drew the most interest by far of anything in her protracted press tour. Or look at Tom Hardy, who summoned Bane’s fleeting fuse with a withering response to a question about his sexuality that now stands as the only thing anyone remembers from the glut of bloated TIFF press conferences.
Now consider how much you heard about, say, the presumably placid press devoted to the recent Hotel Transylvania 2 or Sicario. But when did junked junkets transition from gaffe to goal?
“People genuinely feel that these shiny, happy people are actually miserable SOBs,” mused Weston. “So it’s validation for all the horrible things you think about famous people.
“And today, (stars) are so scripted and so media-trained that it’s very rare when you see a glimpse of something off-script. So it really, really stands out.”
Online, awkward-gawking fans have assembled supercuts of squirming celebrity exchanges. Sometimes, journalists thrive on the attention; before his fall, for instance, Jian Ghomeshi gathered much momentum for his back-andforth with a cantankerous Billy Bob Thornton.
While it’s obvious that an irritable interview can now generate more traffic than a long weekend in cottage country, orchestrating celebrity blow-ups can be a dangerous game.
“Sometimes people go out of their way to attack stars and I don’t find that fair,” said Weston, citing a quarrelsome exchange recently endured by Cara Delevingne.
“I felt the hosts took advantage of her and tried to make a name for themselves by getting a viral interview out of something that was nothing.”
“That’s absolutely not the way I’d want to position my career,” agreed Danielle Graham, co-anchor of CTV’s nightly eTalk. “When things don’t go well, it’s not something I’m keen to put online or have eTalk use as a top story.
“It does happen, but I don’t think it’s something you want to hang your hat on.”
It’s not that interviews didn’t keel sideways before, by the way. It’s just there wasn’t the same ravenous enthusiasm for embarrassment.
Now that most major celebrity announcements occur on social media, the entertainment media is left trawling deeper for a hook.
“When you go into an interview, the only thing a lot of people think is, ‘Just get something different,’ ” Weston said. “There’s stuff people put on television now — awkward moments, arguments — that back in the day would never have made it because you couldn’t jeopardize that relationship with the star.
“Stars save things for the giant platforms,” he added, “and it makes reporters feel they’re not worthy when they don’t give you everything. (So) when stars go off the handle, sometimes that’s the best an interview is going to get.”