Nervous Reporter Has The Best Chat With Mila Kunis And Other Cool Interview Stories
By Gaby Dunn
Mila Kunis is beautiful, smart, funny, a gamer, and she gives hilarious, strong interviews with the press, generally. She’s shut someone down in Russian on behalf of co-star Justin Timberlake, showed true knowledge of World of Warcraft, and agreed to go to the Marine Corp ball with a military man fan. But no one gets awesomeness out of Mila Kunis like this recent reporter.
A nervous Hugh Grant-a-like admits his nerves to Mila during the press tour for her new film, “Oz the Great and Powerful.” As soon as he does, Kunis derails the interview and gets him talking about his quirky mates down at the pub, his favorite alcoholic beverage and his local football club.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Ezruu1oeQ&w=640&h=360]
Chris Stark of Radio 1 starts off asking Kunis about her role as Theodora in “Oz” but Kunis is more interested in having a normal conversation. Even when directed by a publicist off-camera to answer questions about the movie, Kunis sarcastically starts anticipating what Stark is planning to ask and spouting off the boring answers she’s been giving all day. She only perks up, and even begs Stark to continue abandoning his questions, when he talks about taking her to a football match, and a wedding, with his friends.
Speaking as someone who used to do these press days with celebrities, I have always found that the actors are SUPER bored. They sit in a hotel room all day and “journalists” come in and ask them the same, boring, safe questions. It’s not reporting. It’s bullshit, fake PR. It takes forever and it is so, so lame. Like Stark, the best interviews I’ve had with celebrities have always been when I didn’t stick to a script. These types of interviews, (see: Josh Horowitz of MTV for example) where we see the actor being a real person, are way more interesting, fun and promotional for the movie than the cookie-cutter questions. Unfortunately, the media outlet I worked for when I did celeb interviews (no names) trashed the ones I did because they didn’t cover enough about the films. The editors were scared of making the movie studios mad. (It was so dumb.)
Warning: I’m about to brag. These are some interviews I did during shitty press days that the place I was working for at the time didn’t appreciate.
1. An interview with Eddie Izzard in which we mostly talked about the “It Gets Better” project and times he was gay-bashed when he was younger. (This was for “Cars 2” and the publicists felt it was too much of a downer.)
2. An interview with Larry The Cable Guy talking about whether he’d ever go on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. (Also for “Cars 2,” also deemed too weird.)
3. An interview with Owen Wilson where we talked about a reference from “Seinfeld” and the one time his brother Luke almost drowned him in a swimming pool when they were kids. (For “How Do You Know?” These parts were in the beginning and ultimately cut from the interview.)
4. A phoner with Glenn Close where I told her she was my favorite on-screen villain. She said, “Who? Alex from ‘Fatal Attraction?'” and I said, “No, Cruella Deville.” And then she laughed for like 30 seconds and told me I “must be very young, darling.”
5. A phoner with Harrison Ford where I asked him if he liked the “Star Wars” prequels and he asked me if that was a trick question. Ha! HA!
6. And lastly, an interview with Paul Rudd where I didn’t know I was going to be on camera and when I sat down I was freaking out. He asked me what was wrong. I told him I didn’t expect to be on camera. He told me I looked beautiful and I yelled, “Don’t patronize me, Paul Rudd!” before apologizing profusely.
You get it. Brag, brag, brag. What I’m saying though is: Good job, Chris Stark. More interviews like this, please celebrity media outlets! These are way more real and fun — for both actor and reporter.