How to do a real (fake) interview

Hadley Freeman makes the case for standardizing the practice of faking interviews with celebrities (as apparently happened when a Cosmopolitan journalist interviewed Scarlett Johansson herself):

For all their narcissism, celebrities, by and large, hate doing interviews and journalists, for all their hack-like nature, hate doing them too. The former are expected to discuss issues that they might not even mention to their shrink, let alone a total stranger, while the latter has to sit there with a straight face while the celebrity says things like, “Working on this $100m movie/record/TV series really helped me grow as a person, y’know?” Celebrities go through this farrago to keep up their “exposure”. Meanwhile, magazines believe that a month without Anne Hathaway on the cover is a month half-lived.

So fake interviews look like a smashing solution: the celebrity gets the coverage, the magazine gets the story and embarrassment is spared all round. Just jigsaw together phrases like “it’s my family and friends that keep me grounded”, and “I feel very lucky”, the likes of which are all in the Cosmo piece, and you’re good to go. Seeing as the photo on the cover has been unrecognisably airbrushed, why not apply the same fakery to the interview?

Well, isn’t that why they invented E!?  All the benefits of the interview, without the actual interview.

(image from flickr user MK Media Productions under a Creative Commons license)