The TikTokification of the celebrity interview

Picture the scene: we’re at the London premiere for Dune: Part Two and Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldeberg has secured herself a minute or two with actor Stellan Skarsgård. “What’s your favourite day on set?” she asks him, following it up with “Do you have one that you remember that sticks out” when Skarsgård replies with a blank stare. “It’s such a TikTok question,” the actor finally offers her, “You want a question that has one short answer”. 

You probably didn’t have to use your imagination too much to conjure up this cringe-inducing interaction. If you’ve ever scrolled TikTok after something like a premiere or the Oscars, you’ll have seen video after video of celebrities being asked increasingly menial questions. Dimoldenberg is a prominent presence within this world, shoved down our throats in such a fashion that it’s easy to forget she was the harbinger of doom for this shallow brand of journalism. Lauded by many, she’s the prestige face of something which, at its worst, manifests as someone like Harry Daniels — the guy that forces a singing performance upon whatever hapless celebrity he can find. When Daniels attended the recent People’s Choice Awards, he asked everyone from Barbie Ferreira to Halle Bailey whether they’d rather have a “gay son” or a “thot daughter”. Through painstaking interactions like this, it becomes clear that while the space for in-depth, meaningful conversations is shrinking, the one reserved for those with the potential for TikTok-ready soundbites is seemingly ever-expanding.

Back in 2014, a viral moment came in the form of an interview with actress Shailene Woodley at The MTV Movie Awards. “Are you hungry right now?”, interviewer Jamie Lee asks her. “Not at all,” Woodley replies. The short clip occasionally resurfaces nearly ten years on, its enduring resonance stemming not just from Woodley’s annoyed demeanour, but the fact that, because of Lee’s redundant line of questioning, the actress probably had good right to be. When it made its way into the cultural imagination, the interaction was an anomaly, finding its way onto YouTube compilations along with a small handful of other clips where it was ordained that the interviewer had overstepped some kind of invisible line. Now, however, the interview format that we can chart the very beginnings of via the Woodley clip is the norm. By virtue of our obsession with short-form content, it’s these kinds of interactions that we desire. And bar people like Skarsgård or Hugh Grant, it seems that the vast majority of celebs have welcomed (or, at least, accepted) that times are a’changing when it comes to how they talk about their craft. Cate Blanchett has been on Hot Ones, the YouTube show where celebrities answer questions while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings, and Jennifer Lawrence has made an appearance on Chicken Shop Date. 

It might seem unfair to lump together things like Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date with the “work” of people like Harry Daniels and Haley Kalil, but it’s difficult not to see them as part of the same messy nexus. Though Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date do a much better job at obscuring that they’re designed to create these viral-ready moments, the chances are that most people will have first interacted with the shows via tiny snippets that have found their way onto platforms like TikTok and Reels. Sure, they’re a whole production rather than a TikTok personality traipsing around a red carpet with a comically small microphone, but you get the impression that a few people on-set exchanged smug smiles when, for example, Paul Rudd said, “Hey, look at us”. 

For film writer Darren Richman, it’s quasi-journalists like Sean Evans and Dimoldenberg that sum-up what’s wrong with the kinds of interviews that resonate with Gen Z. “My issue with those interviewers is it’s more about them,” he tells HUNGER. “It’s not dissimilar to watching an Ali G interview. You’re not in it for the subject. You’re watching it for the person doing the interview, which goes completely against what an interview is.” See also: Bobbi Althoff, the American podcaster who’s made a name for herself by, essentially, being awkward with the likes of everyone from Drake to Lil Yachty.

No matter what you make of Dimoldenberg – most notably, she’s provoked think pieces that query her involvement in Black British spaces – she’s found an audience. More than that, she’s overcome the obstacles that might have prevented her from doing so. For Bina, someone who “engages with pop culture in general”, something like Chicken Shop Date is intrinsically British: “It feels like the epitome of British humour. I feel like people abroad wouldn’t get it”. Clearly, though, they do. Or, at least, they don’t mind if they lack an understanding of the specific cultural references guiding Dimoldenberg. Not only have international guests like Cher and Shania Twain now appeared on Chicken Shop Date, but Dimoldenberg has made her way onto the red carpet for things like the Oscars and the GQ Men of the Year Awards. Does her awkward schtick quite work at these events? Not really, but it seemingly doesn’t matter. As a bonafide merchant of viral moments, she’s simply a required presence. When celebrities march on over to her to play rock paper scissors or talk about crisps, there’s a kind of exchange taking place. A few moments with Dimoldenberg and that celebrity is demarcated as one who doesn’t take themselves too seriously, and thus has all the makings of a Gen Z favourite.  

“There’s a way in which celebrities want to be seen as ‘game’. They want to be seen as ‘up for a laugh’,” says Richman. “A lot of the Barbie press junket was built around these two very beautiful people [Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie] being able to make a joke out themselves”. The director of Streamline PR, Joseph Hagan, echoes this: “Interviewers like Amelia Dimoldenberg and Bobbi Althoff shape contemporary celebrity discourse by bridging the gap between celebrities and their audience through more informal and spontaneous interactions. They generate answers and responses that a traditional interview could not,” he tells HUNGER. As you can probably tell, Hagan doesn’t think that the kinds of interviews now becoming the norm are necessarily a bad thing. He believes that the popularity of short-form content has “led to more dynamic and authentic interviews”. Really, though, it’s up for debate whether the authenticity on display in short-form celebrity interviews is any more “real” than that born out of the old-fashioned, long-form interviews now deemed outdated. “When the Oscar noms were released and Ryan Gosling put out that very serious statement about how ridiculous it was that Margot Robbie wasn’t nominated… It was like the mask slipped a bit,” says Richman. 

It’s hard not to hark back to the “good ol’ days” of interviewing. Inside the Actor’s Studio, or the life-long efforts of British interviewer Michael Parkinson. These had proto-viral moments (“If you watch the Robin Williams one, you get him giving impressions and going wild” says Richman) but they weren’t made solely with that in mind. There is a space carved out for something of this ilk – editorial celebrity profiles or web series like Variety’s Actors on Actors – but we interact with them in a way that makes them lose their potency. 

Take The Hollywood Reporter’s “Roundtable” that featured everyone from Sarah Paulson to Jennifer Lopez. Though it’s over an hour in length, promising in-depth (and, as THR put it themselves, “uncensored”) conversation, most people will have interacted with it via a clip of actress Kirsten Dunst chastising the other actresses when they say it’s been hard to work with women directors. When it makes the rounds on X every other week – usually thanks to an anonymous, self-posturing feminist looking to rack up some likes and retweets from other anonymous, self-posturing feminists on the platform – it becomes further and further abstracted from the context of the conversation it first took place in. Most people (myself included) know nothing of what was said by Regina King or Kerry Washington, or whether either of them offered a convincing rebuttal to Dunst. According to online discourse, all you need to know is that Dunst “gagged” everyone sitting at the roundtable. Though that might seem innocuous, it paints a depressing picture — no matter how poignant and complex something is to begin with, in the hands of the internet its dilution and simplification is inevitable.