When a new movie is released, the stars do media junkets in which they sit down with one reporter after another for 5-10 minutes each. They’re usually asked the same questions over and over, to the point where they have their answers memorized and ready to spit out. It’s boring for them, and a challenge for good interviewers (those that care and want more than the same old responses) to break through. When I’ve done things like this on morning radio — where the guest is in a studio somewhere else doing one station after another, up to a dozen times in two hours — it has occasionally been tough to breach that cynical veneer, but by asking different questions or engaging them some other way, it’s possible for a host to bring them around.
Mila Kunis recently did one of these junkets for “Oz The Great and Powerful,” and one of the interviewers she encountered was Chris Stark, a contributor to a Morning Zoo-like show on BBC Radio One, who hasn’t had much (any?) experience doing these kind of interviews on camera. At first, Kunis was wary of him, but once she realized he wasn’t going to ask the same questions she’d been asked by everyone else, but was instead going to hit on her awkwardly, she got into the spirit and played along. After several minutes, a publicist off-camera insisted that they talk about the movie, so she just spewed several talking points to keep them happy, but you can see how she preferred the non-promotional parts of the conversation…