What Are Celebrities Really Like?
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
By Tim Isaac
It’s a question I get asked quite a lot after interviewing famous people – what are certain celebrities really like? While I might offer my opinions to friends when I’ve had a few drinks, there are a couple of reasons it’s often difficult to offer my thoughts more publicly. The first is the simple reason that if I sit down with someone for 15 minutes or speak to them on the phone, I genuinely don’t know what they’re really like, other than to be able to make a snap judgement. The second is more to do with the politics of the movie business. If I write in DVD Monthly that a certain person was a complete bastard, it’s likely to cause us so many problems that we’ll never get to interview anyone ever again.
The truth is that most of the time celebs are very nice when you interview them. I’m certain that most of them are decent people, but it’s also important to remember that for many of them, doing interviews and promotion is just as much part of their job as acting or directing. Many will have gone on courses and spent years honing the art of being interviewed. They know exactly what to say and how to say it, and are well aware that a lot of the time, if you come across well to the interviewer, you’re likely to get a better write-up. I remember reading about how Will Smith had made one interviewer feel very special by complimenting their questions and acting as if it was one of the most interesting interviews the actor had ever done. The interviewer was then a little dismayed to see a few days later that Will was doing exactly the same to another journalist asking very similar questions. In some respects that’s the difference between a famous movie actor and a star. An actors appears in and promotes a movie, a star promotes themselves just as much. People like Will Smith and Tom Cruise are aware that they are a brand and work very hard at cultivating that. It’s not just about making movies people enjoy, it’s about their public image as a movie star.
For example, while Tom Cruise might or might not like standing around for hours outside premieres signing autographs and talking on people’s mobile phones, the whole thing is pre-planned because he and his team know what it will do for his image and how many column inches he’ll get for it. I remember many moons ago before I was a journalist, standing across the road from the Mission: Impossible II premiere in Hollywood. While most premieres have a red carpet so journalists can ask questions and take photos, the crowds of fans and gawkers are normally kept off to one side. For Mission: Impossible II however, behind the red carpet were seemingly endless banks of raised seating filled with people who’d won tickets to be there (i.e. people who were likely to be Cruise fans). The result was that no one could get pictures or interviews with Cruise without a hoard of screaming people in the background trying to get his attention, to the point where it verged on hysteria. Whether the set-up was decided by the studio, Cruise or someone else, the result was the promotion of Tom’s status more than the movie itself. It was also interesting at that premiere that when Nicole Kidman turned up (remember the days when those two were married) a game of human chess took place. An army of minders and security moved the two stars around, apparently so that at no point could anybody get a picture of the two of them in the same frame. Quite why they bothered was a bit mysterious, although it was difficult not to wonder whether it was because this was Tom’s moment and not about the two as a couple.
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