Is there an 'art' to the celebrity interview?

Yes – and I learned the hard way

The first time I was ejected from an interview was after I asked a director about a claim that his climate change documentary had received funding from a company involved in deforestation. (It sounds very noble but I’d been told to ask it by my editor, and actually I think the claim turned out to be wrong). I remember a fuming publicist asking me to leave the hotel room on account of my “grossly inappropriate” question, and by the time I got back to GQ in Hanover Square – where I had just started my first ever job in journalism as Features Assistant – my boss had already received a furious phone call from said publicist and I was sure I was going to be fired. 

But he was grinning happily. “BALLS!” he said (yes, this was my GQ nickname, yes, that’s male humour for you), “well done.” 

Throughout the rest of the week my mini beef was brought up by various colleagues like a badge of honour, while my absurd but affectionate nickname took on new meaning. I started to think that to become a ‘proper’ journalist each interview should be conducted like an interrogation: full of inflammatory questions about politics, controversies and celebrities’ deep, dark secrets. I believed I hadn’t done my job properly without asking the one question my interviewee really didn’t want to answer, and that I really didn’t want to ask. I still shudder thinking about the time I asked an actor whether he was dating a certain very famous actress five times in a row before he very politely told me to shut the fuck up. 

This bullishness was of course my own problem – in my early twenties I had a confrontational streak and a light social awkwardness that would sometimes lead me to saying things without realising quite how they sounded. 

But I also think I was influenced by an image of ‘gotcha’ journalism that has recently had its day, in which profiles saw celebrities taunted and exposed, with the journalist taking centre-stage. Relationships with publicists were there to be burned, the threat of a lawsuit proof you were doing things right. 

In fact while I was doing work experience I’d often hear editors complain about “fluffy” freelancers so enamoured with their subjects they wrote “puff pieces” and never “got the quotes”, and I was terrified of being lumped alongside them. 

As the only woman on the features desk – and with the gleaming possibility of a full time job after my six-month assistant placement – I was particularly desperate to be taken seriously.

Thankfully, I didn’t end up ruffling too many feathers (turns out you can’t really go full Maitlis when you’re mostly writing about Shearling jackets and Netflix comedies), and the only lawsuit I got threatened with was after a billionaire got cross that I’d got his height wrong by two inches. (He was five-foot-four, not five-foot-two, apparently.) 

But this utterly charmless method of interviewing didn’t win me any favours, and at times must have felt truly tedious for whoever had to endure it. In fact one of my most mortifying memories of my early career was when Stormzy’s very lovely publicist Rachel Campbell politely asked me to stop my manic line of questioning about his evening routine in the car home from an entire day’s worth of interviews – Stormzy was just giving me a lift. This being my first proper profile, I naively assumed I had to have every facet of his character and experience on this earth charted with a quote just in case my editor asked for it. I thought I was meant to pin his entire life and personality to paper. 

It wasn’t until I started podcasting at the end of 2019 that I realised my approach to interviewing was working against me. Although I’d heard myself while transcribing, I tended to skip over the audio of my own questions and any awkwardness could be glossed over in the write-up. How you asked a question didn’t matter so long as you got a good answer.

But you can’t hide a bad vibe in a podcast. And after the first few episodes of recording Straight Up, which interviews celebs over their favourite drink, my boyfriend gently told me that I needed to stop grilling my guests and simply ‘have a conversation’.

But it’s an interview! I remember saying. We have to get the LINES!

But listeners don’t want to listen to ‘gotcha’ moments on a podcast, he said. They just want to have a good time.

And maybe this sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, but as soon as I stopped conducting interviews like a member of the Spanish Inquisition and just had a normal conversation, I got more ‘lines’ from celebrities than I’d ever done before. And I didn’t even realise they were lines because I was too busy having a nice time. 

Obviously (and as I have ranted about in this newsletter before), some celebrities are so infuriatingly media trained they wouldn’t even tell you what day it is. And different interviews require different endgames (nobody wanted to hear Maitlis ‘have a nice time’ with Prince Andrew).

Neither should the ‘conversation’ be a tepid natter about what you had for breakfast (although readers of my last post will know how just exciting certain breakfasts can be). For instance, when I was hosting red carpet interviews at the GQ Men of the Year Awards and clearly in a particularly anodyne state of mind, Steve Coogan told me to “get better questions” after I asked him about his #lewk. Peggy Gou once also scolded me for beginning an interview with “her earliest memory of music”. Barely concealing a yawn, she said: “come on, you can do better than that”. (I almost threw myself out of the nearest window in shame).

But if I were to distill my biggest interviewing ‘tip’ from these experiences it would be to remove the formality of interviewee and interviewer and the power structures at play so as to level the playing field. Not only does it make you less nervous, it focusses you on what you genuinely find interesting (which is likely what the readers care about too) rather than what you think you should find interesting (buzz topics circling our journalistic bubble). And while trying to make your interviewee your best friend is a bad idea (there’s nothing worse than a sycophantic interview, and there’s a reason why editors don’t commission fans), leading with genuine curiosity and empathy goes a long way.

I have found that sharing my own personal anecdotes or insights with interviewees, and making myself vulnerable to them, encourages them to open up in return. I now preface many of my more personal questions with, “If I were in your shoes, I can imagine I might feel like this…”, or “I can imagine this must have been hard for you because when I…”

And while I don’t believe in “not preparing” for an interview (all of my best questions have stemmed from finding little known facts about a subject after going down rabbit holes of research and fully back-stalking their social media), but I do recommend looking up from your sheet of questions, forgetting what you ‘hoped’ they might say or the most digestible story to write and just seeing where the conversation takes you. You’d be amazed how many journalists go into an interview with the piece pre-written in their heads.

One of my best interviews took place one morning after I had cried for almost 12 hours straight due to some tragic news, and had turned up exhausted, totally unstable, without my questions written down and without a clue how I wanted it to go. The interview was with Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth, who spent the entire time reminiscing mad anecdotes about their friendship, and it was one of the most joyous celebrity encounters I’ve ever had.

My absolute favourite interviewer has always been Decca Aitkenhead, who is unparalleled when it comes to getting interviewees to open up to her on their own terms, and to really bring someone to life on the page. But she has also written candidly about the strategies at play, including going full Mindhunter by dressing in a similar way to her interviewee and mirroring their body language. “Often if I sense the interviewee is starting to dry up, it’s because they have shifted their position in their seat and I’ve failed to notice and adjust my own accordingly. It’s amazing how quickly the conversation starts to flow again as soon as I rearrange myself to mirror them,” she wrote in an interview about her work for the Sunday Times. 

My very brilliant editor at GQ once gave me a piece of advice that has always stayed with me (particularly when interviewing as part of a piece of longform), which is to always identify the bigger picture, and probe what runs adjacent to the narrative, rather than right through it. It’s amazing how much more interesting something or someone becomes once you put them in context. 

PS: I am now offering regular media training. If you are a publicist and have an artist/talent who needs help on crafting the best way to tell their story & present their brand to the media, email eleanorahalls@gmail.com

This week in links

I’ve been reading Mic Wright (aka Broken Bottle Boy) and his deliciously rude takedown of the Guardian’s new Saturday magazine in his excellent daily media newsletter The Conquest of the Useless, which is always full of slightly absurd creative insults (usually at Telegraph columnists) including, this week, describing the Guardian’s Tim Dowling as “a tick buried deep in the arse of column-writing.” (Nb: I actually really like Tim Dowling’s columns). For those partial to a rifle through an archive I recommend digging out his piece on how newspapers give murderers “the notoriety they crave” by putting their pictures on the front page and giving in to sensationalism. 

I’ve been watching Squid Game on Netflix – a highly disturbing South Korean drama about desperate people who sign up to play children’s games for the chance to win enormous sums of money to pay off their debts. But if they lose, they die. If you loved The Hunger Games but craved something darker, you’ll enjoy this. 

I’ve been interviewing Glass Animals’ frontman Dave Bayley about what life on the road is really like – do pop stars have to do wash their own pants? Other very important questions included: have you ever seen a baby pigeon? And why do so many pigeons only have one leg? Listen to our slightly unhinged chat here. 

I’ve been editing EVERYTHING JAMES BOND ahead of No Time to Die finally coming out on Thursday. I really liked a piece by Harriet Marsden on how Bond girls are often minimised as victims, sidekicks and conquests, when in fact Bond is a complete mess and they totally run the show. “And to me, the franchise has overall celebrated women far more than it has sexualised them. It’s us, the audience, that have drooled,” she writes. Read it here.

I can’t stop thinking about the ending of Oleanna, the excellent David Mamet play currently on at the Arts Theatre about a struggling student and her egomaniac professor. I don’t usually get emotional at the theatre, because I can never quite suspend disbelief long enough to forget I’m watching actors on stage, but there was something about this depiction of sexual abuse that completely got me. Maybe it’s because of what's going on in the news at the moment. I really recommend getting a ticket. 

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