When you turn up to do a celebrity interview, you never know how it’s going to go. A famous actor known for their openness and jollity might greet you four hours into their film junket with a headache and growling list of notes on the conduct of your newspaper. They might be exhausted after fielding six previous interviewers’ questions about their divorce, and unwilling or unable to perform warmth for even one more journalist. Even with decent wifi, Zoom might lead to a lack of connection. Or they might simply not like the interview process, admittedly a deeply weird experience for everyone involved, where two strangers meet in a hotel room and are forced to immediately talk about, for example, the death of the prettier one’s father.
Even when it works, you never really get to know who a person is – at best you get to know who they want to be. But I’ve noticed recently how very occasionally, even under these oddly pressurised circumstances – perhaps in fact because of them – an interview can reshape itself into something else entirely.
