I started working at the Guardian in the summer of 2000, not to write, but to look after a key. The key to the fashion wardrobe, to be exact, ensuring that no clothes were stolen for fashion shoots. That was my main role as a fashion assistant. Or, as I prefer to call myself, and call it with myself as one, other Ghostbusters fans, the keymaster. And I will never have a job with more responsibility or power.
However, shortly after I started, the editors of the section asked me which celebrities I would like to interview. I was too young and stupid to appreciate how amazing it was that the editors even knew the fashion assistant’s name, let alone cared who I wanted to interview. But that’s how the Guardian was, and my God, how lucky I was to be here. But my point in this, my latest piece of reporting for the Guardian, lies in all the various job titles I’ve had at this paper, from the far-fetched (northern news reporter) to the downright incredible (writer of World Cup features), one thing. that has never changed is that I always interviewed celebrities.
With Michael J Fox.
In some ways, this surprises me as much as being sent to follow Wayne Rooney around Brazil in 2014, because I was never that interested in famous people. I never went out to concerts as a teenager, I never wrote to fan clubs asking for autographs. I’m a geek, meaning I really like the little things I like (80s movies), but as a kid it never occurred to me to write, say, John Hughes and do- you ask him about his movies. Why would you talk to me?
Well, the one lesson I learned in college that has stuck with me is that famous people love to talk about themselves. I wrote for my college newspaper and every once in a while a famous person would come and talk to students and I would be sent to interview them. I learned that some famous people were surprisingly charming (Ben Affleck), some were surprisingly not (Stephen Fry, possibly having a bad day), but they were all completely fine with me, a random 18-year-old, asking them a lot personally questions, because I was interviewing them.
This was a real epiphany. Because as well as being an enthusiast, I’m nosy, and that has occasionally gotten me into trouble in Britain. In New York City, where I’m from, it’s almost normal for two strangers on the subway to talk about what prescription drugs they’re carrying; in London there are people I’ve known for over 20 years and I wouldn’t dare ask them if they dye their hair. Interviews, I quickly realized, are a context in which the rude shoulder is not only accepted, but expected. It’s where personal information is traded like a commodity for publicity, and while I’m still amazed that so many celebrities answer the most pointed questions about their unhappy childhood/deepest trauma/ugly divorce in exchange for mentioning their film in a newspaper, is a transaction I am continually delighted to exploit. It’s been the rare week in the last 22 years that I haven’t thought: I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.
With Rosamund Pike in 2015. Photograph: Hadley Freeman
It was thanks to two celebrity interviews that I got my job at the Guardian. My mum saw a writing competition in the Daily Telegraph and told me to enter it. So I dutifully submitted two interviews I had done for the college paper, one with Richard Whiteley, the hilarious and now sadly departed Countdown presenter, and the other with Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye. I won, and after that, I became the Guardian Keymaster. So the moral of this story, aspiring journalists, is always to enter writing competitions. And listen to your mother.
But I initially had some concerns about interviewing famous people for the Guardian. As I said, I’m an enthusiast, and while it felt good to write about my total love of countdowns in my college paper, I wasn’t sure if my tastes would really resonate with Guardian readers, the people who buy the paper to read Polly Toynbee on social housing and Jonathan Steele on foreign affairs. A bigger problem was that I had no idea what I was doing, as evidenced by a glance at the transcript of my first newspaper interview. It was with Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver, presenters of Channel 4’s show Popworld, which I loved, and luckily for me, as well as being my first interview, it was also theirs, so all three of us were equally clueless .
Me: Why did you want to be a TV presenter? Simon: Because it looked fun. Is that a good answer? what should i say I do not know. Was that a dumb question? Miquita: Yes. But it’s ok.
Others have been less understanding. When I made the rookie mistake of showing up to interview shoe designer Christian Louboutin in a really dirty pair of ballet flats, he smugly informed me that if I were a shoe, it would be “a DM boot.” To Robert Downey Jr. he was similarly unimpressed and looked at my twenty-five-year-old face and expressed surprise that the Guardian had sent “the work experience girl” to interview him (it seemed unlikely that I would tell him that, in reality, I was the fashion assistant would calm him down). As a people pleaser, these types of interactions bothered me initially. But I soon learned that they made good copy, and that helped me get over my childish, people-pleasing ways. Often the best interviews have some noise.
With Pete Doherty and members of the group Babyshambles in 2005. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
Aside from wanting to know what Marina Hyde looks like (terrifying), the most common question I get from readers is what the celebrities I’ve interviewed look like. That’s easy: they’re weird. All celebrities are a little weird, because wanting to be famous is a weird thing, and living your life as an object instead of a subject is a genuinely exciting way to exist. Some celebrities are so good at being celebrities, like George Clooney and Tom Hanks, who maintain a commitment to their brand images (the old shaker and the current Jimmy Stewart, respectively) that maintain the facade even during interviews. It must be exhausting being them, always on the go, but at least they make being famous seem more fun than most. Soon after I started my job, TV shows like Popstars, Pop Idol, Big Brother etc. they began their television dominance, with fame rather than money on offer as the real prize. I had already learned what a scam interviewing famous people was: I once went to Los Angeles to interview Nicole Richie, who was so frail at the time she could barely walk, and I watched her frantically take a huge cooked breakfast; or the time I was granted a five-minute interview in New York with Justin Timberlake, who looked so miserable I wondered if he was being held hostage. It was a lot of fun to write about, but it made me think that living in a cave as a hermit was perhaps an underrated lifestyle choice.
It took me a while to let readers know how weird I am. It happened unintentionally, when the then editor of G2 sent me to the US to interview Michael J Fox about his new sitcom. Reader, I loved him. I was so overwhelmed by my lifelong fandom of Marty McFly and my now deep love for Fox himself that I let my enthusiastic nature show in the article. I was a bit nervous the night before the article came out: would I be laughed at by the paper? Would CP Scott come back to haunt me in disgust?
With Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.
To my surprise, readers seemed to like the piece, and it was at this point that I learned one of the most useful lessons of my life: I am not unique. If I like someone, chances are others will too. I’m pretty basic that way. From then on, I went full steam ahead: I interviewed pretty much all of my childhood idols: Mel Brooks, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman, Frank Oz, and I loved how a) they were charming and b) how many . Guardian readers shared my love for them. When I was so overcome by Keanu Reeves’ beauty that I could barely ask him a question, Guardian readers gave me sympathy rather than the sarcasm I expected. And when I raced around the Academy Awards every year, asking Eddie Murphy for quotes in vain (although Kevin Hart always did it instead of his partner, thanks, Kevin), Guardian readers didn’t put the blank eyes It turned out that they may also be interested in social issues and the Oscars.
In addition to writing interviews, I also wrote columns, and as a columnist, the temptation is to be definitive about a subject, to focus on the black and white sounds rather than the more complicated grays. But people are rarely black and white, which is why they are so interesting. Charlie Sheen was a fascinatingly gray interviewee, someone who had done terrible things but was smart and surprisingly self-aware and trying to figure out how to live with HIV. Woody Allen is now widely painted as A Bad Man, usually by people who have only the barest knowledge of the 30-year-old allegations against him. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to interview him and later his son, Moses, and for giving me the space to re-examine the allegations. Journalism is about asking questions and refusing to accept whatever the currently accepted narrative is, whether it’s about politics or celebrity. It’s not about getting likes on Twitter.
With Kevin Hart.
Now there’s a mindset, popular in some progressive circles, that giving someone “a platform” (ie interviewing them) means you’re endorsing them. But that’s only true if you write interviews with snippets, whereas I like to have what Mrs. Merton used to call “a heated debate,” or what I call a conversation. So I argued with Jeff Koons in New York about politics and art, and Margaret Atwood in Toronto about gender. PRs, of course, hate this, because they think a reporter’s job is…