Entertainment reporters tend to quickly learn a lot of harsh truths when they start interviewing celebrities for a living. For instance, when a glamorous movie star says, “That’s a great question,” it’s often meant less as a compliment on the reporter’s inquisitive mind than as a way to vamp for time while thinking of a tactful evasion.
The harshest truth of all, though, might be the most obvious: that a reporter’s big, exciting interview with a telegenic zillionaire is actually just a pesky part of that person’s day—one they might be quietly gritting their teeth to get through.
An entertainment reporter will be made keenly aware of that reality in some interviews more than others, but being a professional means trying not to take it personally. That’s the job.
Recently, interviewer Kjersti Flaa made waves by recirculating old footage on TikTok of an uncomfortable interview with Anne Hathaway. In it, the star is promoting her Oscar-winning turn in 2012’s Les Misérables with short, clipped answers and an unamused expression. Though it’s difficult to watch, the video has racked up 10.4 million views in four days. It provoked a strong enough negative reaction that Hathaway has since sent a personal apology to Flaa.
But the backlash seems to have this situation backward. Ultimately, it’s more unprofessional for a reporter to behave the way Flaa does in the video—not to mention attempt to shame the star for it years later—than it was for Hathaway to give an ungenerous interview in the first place.
The clip begins with Flaa asking Hathaway if she can sing her questions and further asking if the star wouldn’t mind singing her answers back. Hathaway’s response, unsurprisingly, is: “Well, I won’t be doing that but you’re more than welcome to sing.”
The rest of the 30-second clip shows the actress answering questions about life in 19th-century France and whether she remembers her first crush—both with curt noes. Whether Hathaway answered the several minutes’ worth of other questions more thoughtfully remains unclear for now.
What is absolutely unambiguous, however, is that this is a terrible way for any interviewer to start an interview.
Les Miz might be a musical, but did that give Flaa the right to ask Hathaway to sing for her supper? At best, it’s a corny request; at worst, it’s dehumanizing, reducing the actor to a dancing monkey who performs on cue. It would be like asking a comedian to conduct an interview exclusively in improvised knock-knock jokes. That the interview went less than smoothly after such an opening gambit should not be a shock, much less a mini-scandal.
Flaa herself seems to understand as much. In a far longer clip on her YouTube channel—throughout which she dons a baby blue shirt that reads, “Being polite is easy”—the interviewer details extensively how she landed on the singing gambit. If this current desire to justify that part of the interview didn’t suggest she now thinks it was a bad idea, she goes a step further later. “I’ve learned throughout the years,” she eventually says, “to not try to be funny or do a stunt during interviews, because most of the time, it just turns out really awkward.”
You know, it’s almost as if she has perfectly diagnosed where the interview went wrong.
Press junkets: speed dating for Hollywood
Hathaway’s reaction may have been sharper than Flaa expected at the time, but with some distance and some perspective, it should also be understandable. It certainly shouldn’t be circulated 12 years later with an unflattering edit as an example of traumatizing rudeness.
Especially not with the added context that the interview occurred during a junket.
For anyone who doesn’t know what a junket is, it’s when the talent from an upcoming film or TV show commandeers a bunch of hotel suites in New York or Los Angeles for a precisely scheduled gauntlet of interviews. Some of these are filmed; others are not. Some feature one-on-ones with each of the leads or the filmmakers; others put the cast in pairs or other configurations.
The interviews run anywhere from 7 to 30 minutes, often back-to-back, with not even enough time in between to check one’s email. It seems like kind of a grind. And even though the stars are extraordinarily well-compensated for it, a grind is still a grind.
Any reporter who does enough junkets is bound to eventually either catch a star at their breaking point for the day, or ruin an interview with a dumb question. (As a seasoned veteran of the junket circuit, I have personally experienced both outcomes several times.) If it’s part of a well-documented pattern of rude behavior, it might indeed mean that the celebrity is just a junket-jerk. In most instances, though, it’s more likely that this famous person was having a natural and human reaction to the deeply unnatural, inhuman experience of being grilled for hours on end by a cavalcade of strangers, some of whom want to get weirdly personal.
As long as those icy interviews aren’t outright antagonistic, they demand grace—not an eventual shaming campaign.
Uncomfortable moments as engagement bait
Perhaps the reason the Hathaway clip got so much traction is because Flaa has been carving out a name for herself lately in the influencer space, spilling celebrity tea to her many followers. She went viral back in August for dredging up a 2016 interview with Blake Lively and Parker Posey that, Flaa claims, made her want to quit her job.
The video begins with the interviewer congratulating a not-visibly-pregnant Lively on her “little bump,” to which a smiling Lively blithely replies, “Congrats on your little bump!” (Flaa is not pregnant in the video; Lively’s comment appears to be a taste-of-your-own-medicine kind of thing, rather than a comment on Flaa’s appearance.) The rest of the interview goes on in pretty much the same tone, and ends with Posey rolling her eyes at what just occurred.
Perhaps instead of making her want to quit her job, this experience should have made Flaa want to reconsider her approach to kicking off interviews. Apparently, however, she has instead taken to making videos like this TikTok, in which she declares of Lively: “It’s not okay to behave like that, and I think it needs to be called out.”
It’s difficult to parse what sort of social change Flaa hopes to accomplish by calling out such behavior. Forcing celebrities in the 2010s to avoid reacting when an interviewer rubs them the wrong way? If anything, this cynical mining of uncomfortable moments only diminishes the impact of more legitimate callouts around microagressions.
Still, making hay out of regrettable celebrity behavior certainly seems to be working out for Flaa. While Lively rode out the ensuing social media storm from the interviewer’s videos, Hathaway not only apologized to Flaa for the “awful” interview but also offered to make it up to her while promoting one of her upcoming projects in 2025.
“I’m really looking forward to that, Anne,” Flaa said in a video about receiving the apology.
Hathaway almost certainly won’t be looking forward to it, but she’ll likely show up anyway, with her famous smile plastered on her face and gracious answers this time. Being polite is easy, after all. And so is being professional. Flaa should try it sometime.