What's Going On With This Celebrity Profile Dry Spell?
To quote B*thenny Frankel: "This is a crisis."
“I think everybody can agree I have the personality of a vegan,” Anne Hathaway told Vanity Fair in a recent cover profile penned by VF’s Hollywood correspondent Julie Miller. It’s the kind of just-clippable-enough word salad that a certain kind of celebrity tends to offer up these days in the hope of saying something Dakota Johnson-level unhinged. Like clockwork, PopCrave picked up the quote and it went semi-viral.
Naturally, I then devoured the profile, somewhat curious about Anne and more-so curious if this was the best quote of the batch. It begins: “It’s a gray Manhattan morning, but Anne Hathaway and I are sitting in a restaurant so dazzlingly white, it looks like the afterlife scene in a movie.” It didn’t pack the punch or ignite the intrigue of the lede from the New Yorker’s 2008 profile of Alec Baldwin (“Alec Baldwin, who stars in 30 Rock, the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin”) or the lede from GQ’s 2016 profile of Justin Bieber (“The chicken-finger platter that has just been placed before Justin Bieber is like something out of a children’s book — an illustration from a story about a boy who becomes king, whose first and last royal decree is that it’s chicken-finger time”) or the lede from the Daily Beast’s 2017 profile of Lana Del Rey (“I’ve been listening to Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence since its June release and here’s my review: gay conversion therapy is notoriously ineffective, but if I hear another Lana Del Rey song, I might switch teams on my own”).
These examples highlight the importance of distinguishing the writer’s perspective from the outlet’s when presenting a profile of a celebrity. In each of those examples, the writer is making an observation about their subject that informs their perspective. Anne Hathaway sitting in a dazzling white restaurant isn’t surprising or interesting at all, really. Surely sentence two will pick up, I thought. “The Oscar winner is warm and considerate.” Okay, maybe sentence three! “I arrive 10 minutes early and she is already seated, in a white sweater and pale blue jeans, at a table she thought would be best for my recording purposes.”
I gave up on the lede and decided to go quote digging. What I found is a bunch of self-assessments offered up to a tape recorder. The introspection was all framed around this quote given early on: “You don’t want to say anything to provoke any kind of reaction, but you also don’t want to say something that could be misinterpreted… I’m feeling a little goldfishy.” That guardedness, something I’ve dealt with increasingly through the years, is never desirable in this form of interview. The result is a whole lot of the kind of quotes an AI Anne Hathaway interview might cook up with no attempt by the journalist to go deep.
Example 1: “This is the first time I’ve known myself this well. I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings… I’m way quicker to laugh now.”
Example 2: “You can tell from that story —” (she sent an agent her headshot at 15, if you can believe, which I can believe) “— I don’t do things by half measure… when I love something, I imagine myself doing it to the hilt.”
Example 3: “I make a lot of my lifestyle choices in service of supporting mental health… I stopped participating in things that I know to be draining or can cause spirals.”
Example 4: “What I feel more comfortable with is letting things happen.”
And look, I don’t blame Anne here. It’s not part of her job description to offer up provocative, harrowing or even compelling thoughts. But it is the job of the person profiling the talent to try to lead the reader to some sort of conclusion about who they feel the person is based off of the time they’ve spent with them. The interview talks about Hathaway requesting 20 takes to film “I Dreamed a Dream” in Les Misérables, being on the receiving end of Internet hate, infertility and “conception hell,” no longer drinking alcohol and being told she had no sex appeal, but nowhere does it make any kind of assessment about who she is other than namaste. Like, what if the Internet were to turn on Hathaway again like it did all those years ago? Sure, we’re in this “reimagining,” as I once called it, but what does that say about fan culture that the temperature can fluctuate so easily?
This got me thinking about the overall state of the celebrity profile.