What I like about this month’s On The Couch interview with Juliette Binoche is that she is an actress who actually says what she thinks. Quelle horreur! It really is pretty unusual these days to get any kind of celebrity to talk honestly and unguardedly about things that they are genuinely interested in, such as politics, rather than their (sponsored) beauty regime.
When I started in journalism, I mostly talked to rock stars (lucky me, eh?). There might have been a manager or record company rep, but for years I never met a personal publicist or a rep from a sponsoring watch company or anyone who was employed simply to keep control of the star’s public image. I just turned on my tape recorder and my interviewees (from Stevie Nicks to The Ramones to Duran Duran) regurgitated their thoughts on their music, world events, hotel food, women’s lib, whatever.
Watching the meltdown that was Tiger Woods, reading this week about the teenage Beatles fan who used to visit their homes in the Sixties, I was struck by how much has been lost with the rise of super-spin in journalism. ‘The Talent’ is so protected that their stories become impossibly bland and not remotely personal. We don’t have to know exactly what goes on in a celebrity’s personal life — we probably know more than we need to know about Jordan, for example — but it’s wonderful to hear the voice of a real woman, and a great actress, saying something like ‘I’ve earned my wrinkles, earned my mind’ rather than falsely protesting that it really doesn’t bother her. Yeah, right.
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