Yahoo Movies 'Lupita Nyong'o says press junkets are torture - she's not wrong'
The Quiet Place star has vented her frustrations about the film junket tradition, but are her comments fair?
Lupita Nyong’o’s comments about press junkets highlight the frustrations of journalists
About five years ago, I was a journalist whose main job was to hit the press junket circuit, which meant that a handful of times a week, I would run between nice hotels to yap with celebrities. After sitting in a holding bay with other journos and regularly replacing the water content of my blood with filter coffee, I would be ushered to a room where a star would be sat, expertly framed in front of a poster for their project, while another chair, placed slightly too far away for normal, comfortable conversation, would be empty opposite.
The whole thing would be over in five minutes, and then, another journalist is there to take your place. And so it goes. Organised down to the second, a day of press junkets can go off the rails with just a rogue run-over bathroom break, so once you’ve been around the block a few times, you know that five minutes is subject to trimming.
It’s a weird gig. It’s the kind of job your grandparents will respond to your complaints about with “Back in my day, we used to work in mines” and, honestly, that’s valid. The job’s peculiarities fly mostly under the radar (because who wants to hear you moan about meeting Ryan Gosling?), although occasionally they come to light.
This week, Lupita Nyong’o, who is promoting A Quiet Place: Day One, described assembly line press junkets in an interview with Glamour as a “torture technique” where “different people are being ferried in” to ask the same questions over and over. “You have to give each one of them attention, focus, and an articulate answer that you just gave to the person before. That’s irritating,” she said.
Read more: Viral interviews
It’s understandable. While journalists are flicked through like an IRL selection of default Sims characters, celebrities remain a constant all day. One time, I walked into an interview and an actor told me I was his 42nd interview of the day. It was only 3pm.
Look at any selection of film interviews on YouTube you’ll notice that celebrities have to answer the same questions again and again and again. They’ll be lowball entry questions about their role or project as a whole, and it is commendable when they try to mix up their stock answer (and even more when they don’t a la Lady Gaga’s ‘There could be one hundred people in the room’ line from her A Star is Born promo trail).
No doubt having to feign that interest in something you’ve already said a million times that day is annoying, and it's natural to get short with journalists’ seeming lack of originality, but it’s worth zooming out for a birdseye view.
There are never just two people in the room when it comes to press junket interviews, both literally and metaphorically. As well as the ten or so technical staff that hide in the shadows, there’s also always someone from the film studio, someone from an external publicity company and the celebrity’s personal team.
Each of them has an objective, which is to make the film and/or celebrity look good. The journalist will have their own needs when it comes to coverage, too, so there’s an agreed-upon tightrope that’s walked when it comes to questions. Basically, you can have your own agenda, but you need to at least play the game first.
That’s fine in rarer lengthy interviews where those project-related questions are given the space to be explored thoughtfully, but when you have someone in your eyeline literally wrapping up your questions, there’s a rushed need to get something easy, quick and digestible out of the gate. It’s also worth noting that, while a celebrity may have heard the same question multiple times, the particular journalist in front of them will have only asked it once, and it’s probably because they have to.
In 2019, I interviewed Nyong’o for her role in the Jordan Peele horror movie Us. I’d been given an end-of-the-day slot, which immediately filled me with concern. I knew that everyone would be tired, everyone would be itching to get out and, likely, my allotted five minutes would be more of a pipedream than a promise. I clocked out at three and a half minutes. I imagine we were both fairly frustrated about the whole thing.
Junket frustrations are a no-win situation. It’s easy to call journalists lazy and no one particularly wants to hear a celebrity complain about having to talk about themselves, especially since that single day will likely earn them more money than the person in front of them will make in a year.
But there’s something decidedly anti-human about the way this type of communication works. There’s no build-up of trust or empathy because as soon as you’re in the room you’re out. You desperately want to convey some sense of humanity in the time it takes a camera to adjust to your height to the point where you have to stop yourself shouting ‘I’m normal and nice by the way!’ as reassurance.
From their point of view, it’s a lot to try and give your best zingers or most articulate thoughts when you don’t even remember the person’s name. You can’t manufacture intimacy, and that’s never more glaring than under the harsh lights of a junket room.
I often question whether junkets are fit for purpose anymore. Now that celebrities have more autonomy when it comes to promotion thanks to personal TikTok accounts and the troubling trend of having their friends interview them for glossy magazines, it’s easy to see why that once-silent job gripe is being more comfortably chastised.
But I don’t want to see the baby thrown out with the bathwater. Press should still have access to stars if we want to preserve entertainment reporting as something other than pure PR, but everyone needs to be better served.
Celebrities need to be able to see journalists as people instead of just a revolving door of faces, and journalists need to actually be able to do their jobs.
A Quiet Place: Day One is in UK cinemas from 27 June.
