Maybe you’ve already seen the links going around this morning but this interview between some Good Day Sacramento anchors and Taylor Swift’s BFF Cara Delevingne is really embarrassing.
First anchor Marianne McClary gets the British actress’s name wrong (“Carla”), but OK sometimes that happens and the wrong words trip out of your mouth on the air–fair enough.
It just all goes downhill from there, however–and fast.
McClary (at the desk with co-anchor Ken Rudulph) then ask Delevingne, who is starring in the new movie Paper Towns, if she’d read the book.
Listen, you’ve got to understand (and, I guess, appreciate), Delevingne’s dry British humor: “No, I never read the book or the script, actually–I just winged it.”
She follows this up with a very actorly “Of course I read the book … John Greene is amazing.”
And then she smiles. SHE SMILES. This is Taylor Swift’s best friend. This is the star of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” video. This is the lead soldier in the T-Swift Friendship Posse. Of course she smiles. Of course she’s kidding. EVERYTHING WILL BE OK, GOOD DAY SACRAMENTO.
Nope.
There are some awkward questions about Delevingne’s busy schedule and then, for some damn, unexplained reason, Mark S. Allen pops into the frame to basically lecture Delevingne about her alleged lack of enthusiasm for the interview.
McClary then pipes up to add that the actress seems “irritated.”
Ouch.
To be fair, I’ve done plenty of these celebrity interviews (although never on the air) and sure they’re weird–actors are paraded in and out of hotel rooms where they must chat with a reporter in person, on the phone or via satellite and be “on” for 10-15 minutes at a time before being whisked off to another interview.
The whole thing is probably a bit draining and even disorienting. It’s not necessarily fun for the reporter either. You know that nine times out of ten you’re getting a canned response and there’s no chance for any really in-depth questions about what it was like to work with so-and-so. (Mad props to Mark Ruffalo for once telling me that he would prefer not to talk about working with Jake Gyllenhaal because he didn’t want to lie.)
So, kudos to Delevingne for not just giving fake, canned responses to some questions she’d likely heard a million times over already.
The takeaway is that Good Day Sacramento is a show that thrives on celebrity culture. Cara Delevingne is a celebrity. Being rude to a young actress on the air because you don’t get her sense of humor or because you’re annoyed that she seems tired is pretty low.
Actually, maybe the real takeaway is that the story’s already gone viral, having been picked up by the likes of Entertainment Weekly, the Huffington Post, the A.V. Club and about a million other websites, the majority of which have come to the defense of Delevingne.
In the end, Taylor Swift’s army will rule the world.
