One of my favourite things about Britain is Boxing Day. In the US, we don’t have a name for the day after Christmas, which is insane because it has such a distinctive feel to it, it so obviously deserves its own nomenclature. Moving here and discovering Boxing Day was like finding out there’s a specific name for 7pm on a Sunday, or 5pm on a Friday, as there absolutely should be, and Germany probably has this covered.
This week, as regular readers know, is my favourite of the year, and not entirely because it’s when, as Bridget Jones once put it, “normal service is suspended and it’s OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything into your mouth and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings”. It’s also a time to take stock of how the year has gone, and how the next one will look. For a while, the future seemed unfathomable. Now that the vaccines are a-coming, that’s not quite the case – but my job is still slightly lost in the fathoms.
A large part of this so-called job is interviewing celebrities face-to-face. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that the biggest tragedy of the coronavirus was that it put an end to such encounters, but it is true that being an interviewer at a time when in-person meetings are specifically banned has felt a little like being a streetlamp lighter at the beginning of the second world war: time to find a new skill set.
In the spring, I was snootily sceptical when my editors told me I’d now be doing interviews over the phone, or some completely made-up sounding thing called Zoom. The whole point of a celebrity profile is to give readers a sense of the person, and how can you do that by just talking to them over a broadband connection? Also – she whines, chucking all the toys out of the pram – where’s the fun in this for me? Some of the greatest experiences of my life have happened when interviewing famous people: going on Carl Hiaasen’s boat in Florida, walking around Key West with Judy Blume. I don’t want to knock my front room, but making a phone call from it isn’t quite as memorable.
My first Covid-era phone interview was with the novelist Anne Tyler. I had low expectations, but I was wrong: Tyler’s delightfulness beamed down the transatlantic line. In fact, interviews have been the one thing that I was wrongly pessimistic about this year: they have pretty much all been fine, despite not being in the same room.
Better than fine: they’ve been great. Interviewing is all about listening, and doing them from a distance has made me focus on that instead of getting distracted by the externals. Describing fashion editor André Leon Talley’s rather extraordinary way of speaking – all courtly southern manners with European accents – probably conveyed his personality at least as well as describing his similarly extraordinary physical appearance would have done. Talking to Geena Davis by phone late at night, her in her bed in LA, me in mine in London, gave our encounter an intimacy I can’t imagine we’d have managed had we met in person.
The circumstances have also helped. Everyone being locked down at home has been a leveller. There aren’t the usual hierarchies when talking to Tom Hanks or Ethan Hawke when we know we’re all just sitting at home in our pants. This has given proceedings a new kind of looseness, with celebrities willing to chat well beyond the allotted time (unheard of in normal circumstances) and forsake the usual publicist-approved spiel to talk about more personal stuff. If I’d met any of them in person, the interviews would have been different, sure: but I don’t know if they’d have been better.
A lot of magazine editors are now worrying that, vaccine schmaccine, this might be what interviews are like for ever. Now celebrities know they can get away with doing them by phone and Zoom, how will they ever be convinced to meet grubby journalists in person again? But I think they’re looking at this the wrong way round: celebrities will do what studios and record labels tell them to do. So the question isn’t, will the celebrities do face-to-face interviews once this pandemic is over – it’s, will I? Yes, I love having experiences, but do I love them more than working without having to leave my bed? Very much TBD. After all, it’s unlikely I’ll ever be faffed to schlep to a yoga studio again, now that I can do the classes by Zoom.
I always thought of myself as a sociable person, the one who didn’t consider it a party unless there were 150 people invited. But perhaps lockdown has revealed my true hermitty self? I’ve certainly taken to staying in on the sofa every night like one who was born to it. This raises a potentially bigger problem than Covid: if I am permanently, if only psychologically, locked down, how the hell am I going to do my job in the future? Happily, a celebrity may have resolved this problem: during that brief window between lockdowns this autumn, Helena Bonham Carter suggested we do the interview at my house rather than hers, which we did. So, Al Pacino, Madonna, Hilary Mantel? Go left at the newsagent and it’s the blue door on your right. I’ll see you on my sofa.
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