‘I told Henry Cavill’s PR to f**k off’: When interviews go wrong

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Setting up a celebrity interview is a long and complex dance. Each one you read stands atop the corpses of 100 that didn’t work out. They involve fraught discussions between journalists, brands, celebrities and formidable publicists, each with wildly conflicting interests.

It’s not unusual for email chains to spill into triple figures and include lists of extravagant stipulations (“Kelsey Grammar will walk out if you mention his ex wife!”). Usually, on the day, they go off without a hitch. Sometimes, however, they do not.

Poor old Henry Cavill

My interview with Henry Cavill, for instance, ended with me telling the event organiser to “f**k off” as I stormed out, Superman looking on with an expression somewhere between ‘shocked’ and ‘apologetic’.

That day, some time in 2016, had begun well enough. I arrived studiously early for my meeting with the Man of Steel, who had been pencilled in as the cover star for an issue of City A.M. – The Magazine. The interview was tied to the launch of a new handset by a Chinese mobile phone company, which Cavill was fronting. I was booked in for 30 minutes and had a long list of questions about his acting style and how his family’s ties to the armed forces might have influenced him. There was also an obligatory mention of the phone, which Cavill would inevitably answer with platitudes so predictable I could have written them in advance. That’s the game.

The venue was packed, with an influencer event unfolding in parallel to the junket, which saw journalists from around the world queuing for their slot. It was not well organised. People on Cavill’s team were stressed. At least one was in tears. My slot came and went. After an hour I was told I would not be getting 30 minutes; 20 would have to suffice. An hour later that 20 became 15, which became 10, which eventually became five. Three hours had gone by, over which time I had experienced all five stages of accepting one’s own death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance

Eventually I was called in. “You have four minutes,” said a Terrible Man from the phone company. 

“You must be f*****g kidding,” I replied, reverting from ‘acceptance’ back to ‘anger’. “Interviews are not divisible into units of less than five minutes.”

“You’re on the clock,” said the Terrible Man. Cavill was sitting across from me, gigantic and beautiful, clad in a neat-fitting suit.

“How do you prepare for your roles?” I asked.

“Well, I usually…” began Cavill.

“No,” interrupted the Terrible Man, “there’s only time for questions about the phone.”

“You must be f*****g kidding me,” I repeated, apoplectic that the universe would do this to me. The job of a journalist at this stage is, of course, to ignore the Terrible Man. 

“What was your childhood like?” I continued.

“Erm, well it was actually ver…” said a sheepish Cavill, unsure how to react.

The Terrible Man then jumped up and positioned himself between me and Cavill, splaying his arms in a star-shape in a futile attempt to block his massive bulk from my sight. I leaned around him: “Tell me about your father!”

“Enough!” screamed the Terrible Man. I stormed out, a string of expletives trailing in my wake. And with that, my cover feature was dead. They later sent me a free phone to apologise, which I flogged on eBay for a few hundred quid, so it wasn’t a total disaster.

The trouble with Idris Elba

Another time I interviewed Idris Elba in a loud  – very loud – Soho bar. I had scoped out an alcove where we could just about hear each other but Idris was having none of it. “Stand with me,” he instructed. Surrounded by people dancing, we had to huddle so close I could smell his aftershave. My dictaphone picked up about a third of the interview. I did write that one up but it wasn’t very good.

And don’t get me started on John Malkovich, who left a junket early after I had flown all the way to Los Angeles to speak to him. I ended up getting very drunk with a publicist who thumbed through her little black book and set me up for a chat the next morning with Billy Zane. I have never been so hungover conducting an interview but thankfully Zane was happy to get stuck into the bloody marys.

Why am I telling you all this? Mostly for the lolz, but also to pull back the curtain on the wild ride we go through to land a celebrity interview. It’s a tough job but somebody’s godda do it.