Why Every Celebrity Interview Now Feels Like A Circus Act

Why is Brad Pitt talking about his divorce, alcoholism, and regret about missing out on having a “gay experience” on Dax Shepard’s podcast? Why are film auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson collaborating with Fortnite on a Leonardo DiCaprio film? Why are interviewers asking Pedro Pascal about characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe who are capital D “Daddies”? And why, for the love of Hollywood mystique, does it feel like every legendary actor is being dragged into the meme economy against their will?

Legends of Hollywood’s past may not have gotten to see what the world would look like in 2025, but some think that might be for the better. It’s beginning to look like if Marilyn Monroe rose to fame today instead of the 1950s, by some cruel twist of fate, she wouldn’t be sipping champagne at the Stork Club; she’d be gnawing on fried chicken in a YouTube studio while a twenty-something interviewer asked if she knows what a Labubu is or whether she’s having a BRAT summer.

Admittedly, I’m of two minds about this trend. On the one hand, my less mature shadow finds that the idea of subjecting Liam Neeson to the humiliation ritual of learning what a Labubu is, unfortunately, does bring a smirk to my face. But that doesn’t mean it’s dignified or that we haven’t lost the tact of the old ways of the obligatory press tour. This brings me to the current media landscape: paradoxically undignified in a way that allows stars to cut through the facade and truly be seen.

With Zoomers in control and new media eclipsing the success of old thanks to reduced viewership of cable TV and disinterest in the establishment base of late night hosts who all parrot the same tone of opinions before trotting out their pre-rehearsed questions to disinterested celebrities, it’s easy to understand the appeal of contrived, hyper specific interview predicaments (like chowing down on hot wings that paradoxically extract more sincere, off-the-cuff answers from celebrities.) 

Dwindling viewership of traditional talk shows is evidenced by their cancellations and reformatting. Ellen, Stephen Colbert, and Conan are all off air. The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon has cut Friday night live shows entirely, now just running reruns on that timeslot. Networks are clearly struggling to balance dwindling interest and budget cuts with the production cost of these shows. Seth Meyers had to axe the 8G band from Late Night With Seth Meyers, and fellow talk show hosts have voiced their concerns about the future of the television format as they fail to compete with the instant virality and popularity of podcasts and internet shows like Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date. 

As reported by Business Insider, the most viral YouTube uploads from these network shows, in line with the more gimmicky aspect of fried chicken-eating internet shows, are starting to rack up wrinkles. It’s been years since any late night show has truly garnered the internet's attention in a competitive capacity to its online contemporaries. Rihanna and Seth Meyers Go Day Drinking did numbers when it was uploaded, but that was six years ago, and it’s looking even worse for Jimmy Fallon, whose most viral video is nine years old. This might not seem surprising, given that network shows cater to older audiences who are less online, but it wasn’t so long ago that they still managed to capture the attention of Millennials and dominate internet culture.

The problem? What goes viral has changed immensely since then. “Gone are the days when an ultra-gimmicky setup (think: James Corden’s “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts” or Jimmy Fallon’s “Egg Roulette”) could guarantee clicks on its own,” writes Business Insider senior entertainment reporter Olivia Singh. “When it comes down to it, the moments that audiences latch onto are the ones that use a contrived setting to pull a genuine emotion out of their guest.”

That brings me back to Liam Neeson and the Labubu. 

As much as I can appreciate the memetic literacy of an internet native celebrity like Doja Cat or Iggy Azalea, there’s something that feels profoundly off-putting about subjecting the old guard to the same level of indignity you would a circus animal. There are the older Millennial celebrities who try to seem like they “get” what’s going on (I’m looking at you, Katy Perry, violently shouting “wig” at American Idol contestants), and then there are the unsuspecting industry titans getting pinned against the wall and forced to react like a monkey to some obscure new word or absurd twenty-layer, terminally-online inside joke.

A few years ago, online culture still had enough coherence that you could integrate a little “online humor” in an interview with an aristocratic celebrity like Cate Blanchett, and the contrast would be somewhat amusing but fall just short of feeling absurd to the point of cruelty. Now, marketing is just large-scale elder abuse. It’s forced people to confront the various ways the death of monoculture has led us to a place that’s maximally amusing in a circus freak sort of way, but lacking in dignity or artistic integrity. The sort of gimmicks that would make Harrison Ford homicidal. 

In a way, it’s sweet that we’re grasping at straws to find some cultural connection point: “Hey, you know that ugly, stupid, demonic-looking designer fur baby that’s trending? Let’s show that to this celebrity and talk about it, acknowledge it, share this moment in time.” But it feels a bit like asking Destiny’s Child what they think the government should be doing about the foot-and-mouth epidemic. “We don’t know anything about that; all we know is we just got here.” 

I can understand the yearning for a shared narrative, a shared culture, something that’s undoubtedly dead. We no longer watch the same news or the same TV shows at the same time, nor do we discuss the same handful of events. We don’t even follow the same influencers or have the same social media feeds. That’s why this attempt to get internet culture to fill the vacuum isn’t working. And if celebrity reactions are any indication, I’d say what’s a much better gimmick is genuine interest and curiosity about their craft. 

Others are starting to get fed up with the TikTokification of press tours. One user tweeted, “it’s gotta be so terrible being an older actor rn. they don’t even actually interview you. they just show you the latest trend and go ‘how does this make you feel white boy.’” With 203k likes, it seems to be what we’re all thinking. Some are grateful their favorite artists aren’t living to see the day. “In a way, I’m glad David Lynch passed before he could be shown a labubu,” another tweeted.

The lack of tact is rubbing off on the celebrities, too. They’re showing up on internet podcasts to overshare and seem “cool” or in the know, but it plays as desperate as the era of runway-thin models swearing they live on burgers and pizza. It’s part of a longer trend: the downfall of traditional celebrity, Hollywood, and old media, and the rise of the influencer class and the algorithm. Now there’s a nostalgic reverence for the era when artists had some actual mystique or when a press tour meant promoting your film or album, not getting ambushed by some low-level interviewer fishing for a viral clip or forcing Cillian Murphy to learn what a meme is. 

The latter, I’ll grant, is just good entertainment journalism. But dragging offline celebrities into the memetic ecosystem when they would’ve otherwise gone blissfully unaware kind of ruins the joke. Anything organically memeable quickly becomes grating once we start forcing meta commentary onto the people involved or even just adjacent to the moment. 

Barbenheimer was a genuine internet-born phenomenon that bled into the mainstream, but, of course, it had to be milked dry: press tours turned into self-aware cringe, with the stars of both films forced to interview each other and acknowledge it all so explicitly that we ended up wishing it had never happened. Archetypal cool guys like Ryan Gosling are ruining the “literally me” mythologization by creating on-the-nose break the fourth wall in-jokes about it at CinemaCon for nerds to soy face over.

More importantly, it misunderstands what specifically works about these bizarre interview formats and podcasts. It isn’t so much the shock and awe of your favorite celebrity drooling over hot wings as it is an environment conducive to vulnerability: real, authentic answers emerging from the soul, in real time, reacting to approximately what’s happening right here, right now. 

No pre-interview, no forced talking points, just a thoughtful interviewer like Sean Evans or Kevin McCarthy, asking deep-cut questions that often provoke pleasant surprise in their magnanimous subjects. “That’s a fantastic question,” or “how the hell do you know that,” are regular utterances when the format is honored to its best ability with an inquisitive interviewer who does his prep work and takes it seriously. Genuine curiosity about who they are, what drives them, the obscure backstory behind a project, their inspirations—the things people don’t ask them but for which they’re eager to talk about are what’s making “late night” obsolete. 

You’ll suddenly find a public figure, famously a man of few words, word-vomiting about his passion like his life depends on it. This is the real secret sauce of new media, not the distracting bells and whistles. And while even meme shows like Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date is itself a bit, the farcical setting gives these stars just enough plausible deniability to be themselves in a meaningful way. To break the fourth wall and offer commentary on their art or their career with an air of sincerity perhaps never seen before.

Sometimes, they bare so much of themselves it feels genuinely risky—something late-night TV never dared to touch. If it doesn’t land, they can chalk it up to the hot sauce doing the talking. But public figures, especially in show business, have a deep longing to be seen. Truly seen. It’s just never really been on the table before; not in any real way. 

They were expected to be Brad Pitt, the actor, the public figure, not whoever is actually living behind the eyes. Before the podcast era, no one really even thought to bother going down deep, obscure rabbit holes about a celebrity’s life, their work, or to ask them genuinely thought-provoking questions. 

So yes, if Marilyn Monroe were alive today, she’d probably have to participate in humiliating press junkets that would ruin her entire old Hollywood mystique, but the flip side of that coin is that this moment in culture might just give her the opportunity to truly be seen. Not as Marilyn, but as Norma Jean. When overeager Zoomer interviewers aren’t showing her AI-generated Shrek memes, at least.