Tox Report 63. Blake Lively and the death of the sassy starlet

That now-unpopular thing you did that people used to like is, alas, on tape

I was watching a Parkinson retrospective on BBC4 (because I was staying in a hotel, and apparently when I stay in a hotel I become the kind of person who actually watches BBC4 rather than the kind of person who thinks she ought to). It was made in 2021, very close to the end of Michael Parkinson’s life, and his tone is reflective — lucid but detached, and equally sanguine about his triumphs and his failures. One of those failures is, of course, the infamous 1975 Helen Mirren interview.

He starts the interview by calling her the “sex queen of the Royal Shakespeare Company” (or rather, quoting someone else calling her that, which is potentially important in how you take what follows). The interview becomes increasingly fraught from there. Parkinson wants to talk about the conflict between her serious acting career, and her sex appeal; but he can’t bring himself to name the thing under discussion, so resorts to referring bumptiously to her “equipment”. She, in turn, is unwilling to ease his discomfort by letting the euphemism slide: “I’d like you to explain what you mean by my equipment,” she says.

It’s great TV, because it’s a gripping mini-play of power and who can wield it. Parkinson is ostensibly in control: it’s his show and he’s asking the questions. But Mirren carries herself with the confidence of the talent: without her, there’s only dead air, and she’s able to temper her compliance in the knowledge that a full-scale confrontation would be very undesirable to Parkinson. Chat show interviews are usually a waltz, two people graciously performing conversion in concert. This is more like a paso doble: it bristles with mutual aggression. (It is, however, still mostly a dance.)

By 2021, Parkinson acknowledged that he’d played his part badly, although in the retrospective he also points out that it was a different time. And it was. In 1975, The Benny Hill Show was still on TV — and would be for another 14 years. My childhood favourite, The Two Ronnies, would run till 1987. And the Carry On series reached its 27th installment with Carry On Behind. In all these, women with what Parkinson called “equipment” and Mirren called “large bosoms” were objects of lascivious comedy.

The idea that you could be both big-titted and not a laughable moron was inaccessible to the public at large. The attitude expressed by film critic Pauline Kael (not, it goes without saying, a booby woman as far as I can tell from pictures) in her 1962 essay “Fantasies of an Art House Audience” stood. According to Kael, the curvaceous bombshells of fifties and sixties cinema were:

“a parody of woman — lascivious face, wet open mouth, gigantic drooping breasts. She has no character, no individuality… these spongy, subhuman sex images reduce women to the lowest animal level.”

Kael both has a point (Marilyn Monroe would probably have agreed that this was how she was treated) and no point at all: her analysis leaves no avenue for the woman who is both intelligent and stacked.¹ Thirteen years later, this is the argument that Parkinson and Mirren are fractiously tilting around. They both know what objectification does to a woman. Parkinson is attempting to ask the object how it feels to be an object (he did not just make up those review quotes at the top — this was how serious theatre critics were talking about Mirren!), and Mirren is resisting her designation as an object at all.

In Mirren’s recollection, the contemporary reaction was against her. “I mean after that Parkinson interview, I was the one who got the shit,” she told an interviewer in 2019. “He didn’t. I got the shit. I got the shit for being argumentative.” Forty years after first broadcast, the public had flipped. #MeToo was in the air, and when the Parkinson clip resurfaced via YouTube in 2016, people were appalled by the host and thrilled by the guest.

“Helen Mirren has been shutting down sexist bulls**t since 1975” raved Indy100 (that’s the headline in the search results and URL, anyway — the site displays a slightly less inflammatory version). “Turns Out Young Helen Mirren Was the Sexism Crusader of Our 1970s Dreams” trilled Slate. “Watch A Young Dame Helen Mirren Stand Up For Women During Sexist Interview Questioning” cheered a headline on Elle’s website. “Mother of Zeus, how was this man allowed on television?” asked the copy, clearly written by someone who had never seen The Benny Hill Show or The Two Ronnies or any Carry On never mind Carry On Behind.² The vibe had shifted.

Do you enjoy intense close readings of pop culture? Then you will love my book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, which tells the stories of nine women who navigated celebrity in the 2000s: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Janet, Aaliyah, Amy, Kim, Chyna, Jen.

2016 was also the year that Blake Lively gave an interview that no one particularly noticed at the time. It was a standard junket for the Woody Allen movie Café Society. It didn’t go very well, although it didn’t go anywhere near as badly (or as interestingly) as Parkinson v Mirren. Lively had recently announced her second pregnancy. The interviewer (Kjersti Flaa) starts by congratulating Lively on her “little bump”; Lively shoots back with the sarcastic-sounding line “congratulations on your little bump”.

I’ve watched the interview a few times now and I’m still not really sure what this is supposed to mean, but it definitely doesn’t come off as a warm reaction to the interviewer’s gambit. Lively and her co-star Parker Posey then spend a minute riffing on the topic of “bumps” and “lumps”, before the interviewer cuts back in with a question about the look of the film and specifically Lively and Posey’s wardrobe. Lively doesn’t love this question either — she asks whether the male stars would be similarly quizzed about the clothes — but she and Posey nonetheless pick the subject up and bat it about between them for a while.

I’ve done a couple of junket interviews in my time, and know a little about them from the organisational side too. They are tough on both parties in the interview transaction. As the interviewer, your time is tight, and you are slotted into a schedule between other interviewers who probably want to ask the exact same questions as you (plus there’s a good chance your best question has been banned in advance by the PR). As the interviewee, you have to sit there and answer the same questions from a rotating cast of faces, concealing your rising annoyance and boredom. And all the interesting things you might want to talk about have probably been banned in advance by the PR.³

But, as the attitude to the revived Parkinson interview shows, by 2016 there was a public appetite to see female stars rebel against the constraints of the media machine and call out sexism. The queen of this approach was Jennifer Lawrence, who received rave press across 2015 and 2016 for being (in the words of Vanity Fair) “a star without a script”.⁴ That, I think, is the part Lively is trying to play here. She is establishing herself as a bullshit-resistant actor who wants to discuss her work the same way in which a man would be invited to discuss his work, without focus on reproductive status or looks.

Let us be honest and say that, while Flaa’s questions are rubbish, Lively is also not very good at the bit she’s attempting. She comes off brittle and lofty, rather than no-filter-relateable. If she was aiming for a J-Law style viral moment, it didn’t take — or at least, it didn’t generate any headlines until this month. And when the headlines came, they weren’t the kind of headlines any celebrity would hope for. The context is that Lively has been receiving bad press recently over her promotion of the movie It Ends With Us: there have been rumours of a feud with her costar, and accusations of crassness for promoting her own brands off the back of a film with domestic violence themes (Rachel Richardson has a good roundup of the many, many missteps).

Just over two weeks ago now, Flaa uploaded a recording of the junket encounter to her own YouTube channel, with the title “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job” and a description calling it “the most uncomfortable interview situation I have ever experienced”. The press, primed for negative Lively stories, ran hard with this framing: “Blake Lively drama deepens as ANOTHER interview resurfaces years after It Ends With Us star made a reporter ‘want to quit her job’” (the Mail), “‘Blake Lively interview made me want to quit my job’: Journalist shares ‘rude’ clip amid It Ends With Us drama” (the Independent).

Flaa claims the timing of the upload, which is now her third most popular video ever, is pure coincidence and she knew nothing about the curdling mood around Lively. On which point, I call bullshit — as well as on the claim that the interview make her consider quitting her job (I mean, she clearly did not quit her job). If you want to talk about “traumatising” interviews, look up someone who has survived Steve Coogan.⁵ I am also unimpressed by her sob story that the bump comment was “like a bullet” because she was dealing with infertility at the time. Come off it. If you can’t bear to have conversations about pregnancy, don’t ask famous women questions about being pregnant.

In the post I linked to above, Richardson said “It’s difficult to watch the footage and feel anything but sympathy for Flaa”. Actually I think people would have been a lot less sympathetic if this had been widely viewed in the early #MeToo days when it was recorded, before the general tide of dislike for Lively. But what was bad content for Flaa in 2016 has become good content in 2024, and she is rinsing it for all it’s worth. (Inevitably, she has a merch store. If people aren’t allowed to shill for business via It Ends With Us, surely this is off limits too.)

The era of celebrating stars for sassy clapbacks is done, for now at least. In 2016, when people revisited the Parkinson/Mirren interview, they saw the male interviewer as powerful, the female celebrity as the subaltern. Rewatching Flaa/Lively in 2024, the roles seem reversed: Flaa is the oppressed one, Lively the one abusing her privilege. And Lively is a particularly tempting target, because through her marriage to Ryan Reynolds and her BFF-ship with Taylor Swift, she’s associated with the two most untouchably beloved celebrities in the world. They can’t be taken down, but she makes a satisfying proxy.

When Parkinson had his set-to with Mirren, permanence in media was not a particular concern for for those in the public eye: things went out once and maybe never again, and until the late seventies, the BBC still routinely wiped shows after airing. Even in 2003, when Parkinson had his deeply uncomfortable encounter with Meg Ryan — yes, another frosty interview with an actress in which he quizzed her about her seriousness — journalists wrote about the frustration of not being able to comment first-hand because they’d missed the broadcast and the BBC refused to hand out tapes of Parkinson. (It is especially poignant that the journalist here is Frank Skinner, who would end up on the wrong side of the media permanence process himself with Fantasy Football.)

The idea that you would be answerable, not only to the original audience, but also to future audiences with a wholly different set of values, would have seemed a little bizarre to Parkinson and Mirren in 1975. Now, it’s a prospect that celebrities like Lively neglect at their peril, and it’s a process that moves at an increasingly hectic pace. It took 40 years for Parkinson to find himself in the wrong, and only eight for Lively. For Flaas, the backlash to her cynical trendbaiting is probably just days away.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• Alain Delon: what a piece of work and, indeed, ass. (Me for the Times.)

• For UnHerd: how Candace Owens went from aspiring bratty liberal blogger to the world’s premier black alt-right commentator and antisemitic conspiracist. Think of this as an extended play on last week’s newsletter about the cancelled-to-extremist pipeline.

• Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the “deaf, Muslim, queer, disabled, gamer nerd” who blew up on Twitter and… appears to have never existed.

• Max Read’s guide to the dipshit streamers Trump keeps appearing with also functions as a handy guide to the dipshit streamer-sphere if you, like me, have kept your head clear of that sewer.

• I don’t want to jinx America (flashback to filing Madam President pieces ahead of the 2016 election result and then having to stay up all night refiling with apocalyptic pieces about Trump), but it is very heartening to see the Democrats being so normal: Helen Lewis reports from the convention on how they found the centre ground on abortion (and stopped saying “pregnant people”, praise Jesus).

• Rip Bennifer, you burned too brightly (Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times).

• “You’re never going to please everyone, or do everything, or accomplish anything perfectly. So what would you like to do with your life instead?” Extract from Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

• Chappell Roan has set her boundary with fans: “I feel more love than I ever have in my life. I feel the most unsafe I have ever felt in my life.” I hope it works. There’s a big question mark over how stars who emerge from stan culture can manage their followings when capital-F fame arrives.

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1. I think I quote this essay a lot because I read it when I was 18 and was traumatised by it — it’s just so cruel. And yes, sure, Kael is accurately describing a way in which women were represented. But she was also describing actual women and it’s horrible! She says Jayne Mansfield’s breasts look like “long strips of cooked tripe”! I don’t believe that Kael knew anything about breasts or tripe!

2. I do sometimes worry about what level of number my childhood light entertainment viewing did on me. Maybe there needs to be a Tox Report special/therapy session on “The Worm That Turned”:

3. When I did this interview with Marjane Satrapi, for example, I was dispatched into the interview room with a firm instruction from the PR to ask no questions about Donald Trump, and an equally firm instruction from my editor to get a news line on Donald Trump. Luckily I had just enough time to let the subject come up semi-organically — and it turned out that Satrapi did indeed have things to say about him, as you might expect.

4. In this house we do not love Jennifer Lawrence, because of the story told by Helen Lewis in vol 266 of the Bluestocking about a press call for the film Red Sparrow in which the male stars wore suits and Lawrence wore a revealing gown: “I got CALLED OUT by Jennifer Lawrence by noting that she’d catch her bloody death of cold if she wasn’t careful. ‘Everything you see me wear is my choice,’ she posted on Facebook. ‘And if I want to be cold THATS MY CHOICE TOO!’ Inspirational words.”

The Bluestocking, vol 266

5. For the record, even though Coogan is held by journalists to be a notoriously “difficult” interviewee, he was a complete lamb when I did him and Sarah Solemani for Chivalry.