How To Interview Celebrities

Writing Prompts - Interview Someone Famous - Pam Foster

Need to interview a celebrity?

As the founder of Contact Any Celebrity, I’ve been able to interview many celebrities, including Jane Fonda, Bethenny Frankel, Dr. Oz, Patti LuPone, Deborah Gibson, Lisa Ling, Morgan Fairchild, Nate Berkus, Honey Boo Boo, Kandi Burruss, Suze Orman, Leslie Jordan and more.

My goal with this post is to give you tips and tactics for interviewing celebrities from some of the world’s most prolific experts who interview celebrities daily.

Below are tips from top podcast interviewers like Tim Ferriss and Kara Swisher to best-selling nonfiction authors and journalists like Chuck Klosterman and Neil Strauss to television interviewers like Oprah Winfrey and Larry King.

How To Find Celebrity Contact Information

Step 1: Find the celebrity’s contact information.

Congrats, you’re in the right place!

Pam Foster, director of Copywriter Training at American Writers & Artists Institute, Inc. (AWAI) recommends using Contact Any Celebrity (us!) to find a celebrity’s contact information:

As a Write Now! challenge, Pam offers this writing prompt:

“Think about someone you admire.

Either in business, sports, entertainment, or even copywriting and marketing.

Pick one person and write a mini-script as if you were going to interview them, either by phone or in person.

Then, be brave!

Go to ContactAnyCelebrity.com, pick someone out and interview them.

Approach them and see if they’d be willing.

It’s great practice for writing articles and blog posts and all types of content.

How To Interview A Celebrity

There are many ways to approach an interview with a celebrity, and the specific approach you take may depend on the nature of the interview, the goals of the interview, and the preferences of the celebrity.

Here are some general steps you can follow when preparing to interview a celebrity:

1. Research the celebrity and their work: Familiarize yourself with their background, career, and any current projects or events they may be involved in. This will help you develop relevant questions and topics to discuss during the interview.
   
2. Determine the interview’s focus: Consider the interview’s purpose and what you want to achieve. Is the interview meant to be a profile piece, a promotional opportunity, or something else? This will help you tailor your questions and approach to the interview.
   
3. Plan your questions: Prepare a list of questions relevant to the celebrity and the focus of the interview. Avoid asking questions already asked in previous interviews, and try to develop unique and interesting angles to explore.
   
4. Consider the format and length of the interview: Will the interview be conducted in person, over the phone, or via video call? Will it be a long-form interview or a shorter segment? Ensure you have the necessary equipment and resources to conduct the interview smoothly.
   
5. Be prepared for unexpected twists: No matter how well you plan, there is always the possibility of something unexpected coming up during the interview. Be prepared to think on your feet and adapt to changing circumstances.
   
6. Show respect and professionalism: Remember that the celebrity is human and should be treated equally. Avoid asking intrusive or inappropriate questions, and be mindful of their time and energy.

AWAI also offers tips for interviewing celebrities:

“Boring questions lead to lackluster answers.

If you’re asking interesting questions and getting mundane answers, keep prodding.

Keep asking the same question in different ways until you get some interesting information.”

“To have the strongest interview possible, start and end strong.

Pick the most provocative questions and answers to be featured at the beginning and end.

Let your emotions guide you.

Do you feel it would be more appealing to let the reader know your famous person wears white underwear in the middle of the interview?

Maybe you want to leave it as the closing question.”

Chuck Klosterman’s Interview Tips

Chuck Klosterman was a newspaper reporter in the 90s who interviewed celebrities for a living.

He later turned his celebrity interviews into articles, essays, and bestselling books like ‘Chuck Klosterman X‘ and ‘Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.’

Some of his celebrity interviews include Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, Eddie Van Halen, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kobe Bryant, Billy Joel, and more.

On a Recode Media podcast with Peter Kafka, Klosterman says:

“Many people are trained or told or convinced or persuaded that the idea when you interview someone is just to make it a good conversation. Forget that you’re recording it. Convince the person that you’re just talking. Get some comfortable with them that it’s just two people sitting at a bar chatting. This is the way to get an authentic, realistic profile.

But I found that never really happens. I went through a period where I got interviewed a lot. I found out how fake that was and how annoying it is to be with someone who’s trying to create the illusion that you’re just comfortably chatting. That this isn’t recorded and there isn’t going to be some product at the end.

So now when I interview people, particularly if they’re very famous like Kobe Bryant or Taylor Swift, I will say at the beginning, ‘Look. I know the only reason you’re here is to promote some kind of product. That product may be yourself, but it’s something you are here to sell or produce. The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is that I’m a reporter.

I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends. So I’m not going to pretend that we are. I’m not going to create some fake thing where we have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about, and I hope you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you. I find that works much better.

There’s nothing natural about two people who have never met before with a tape recorder in between them where one person is asking probing questions about their life.

Some reporters spend a month with someone. I would never spend a month with someone, and I would never allow someone to spend a month with me. I think that it would be awful for someone to spend a month with me if I was being profiled. I do magazine profiles closer to the way newspaper profiles work. There’s no expectation that you’re going to have four days with this person or an entire weekend where you’ll go on a boat with this person.

The Taylor Swift story I did starts with her and me in her car. She gets a phone call from Justin Timberlake. But that’s not a constructed scene. I thought we were just going to her house. I was taking notes because the tape recorder was not on. That’s one thing. It’s another thing if I said, ‘It would be interesting to spend time with Taylor Swift in a hot air balloon.’ That seems dumb to me now.

The thing about celebrity profiling is there’s a formula to this. There’s a certain expectation the publication has of what the story is going to be like. So sometimes you still have to work within that construct.

The profiles that always drive me crazy are profiles that begin with the subject’s first name. Like ‘Peter Kafka overlooks the menu.’ I hate that. I will do anything to avoid it. Sometimes you’ll turn something in, and the editor will try to move it in that direction.

I think it sounds better to use a pronoun instead of the person’s first name. Certainly, the person reading this story knows what it’s about.

If the story starts with ‘she’, and Taylor Swift is pictured next to that story, no one is going to be like, ‘Who is he talking about?’

A failed interview in a profile is a problem, but a failed interview in an essay can be interesting.”

Celebrity Interview Resources & Examples

Want some examples from great celebrity interviewers?

Check out these books on how to interview a celebrity:

• All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Artists, Musicians, and Artists by Terry Gross, host of Public Radio’s ‘Fresh Air’
• Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys Into Fame & Madness by Neil Strauss, ‘Rolling Stone’ interviewer
• How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: The Secrets of Good Communication by Larry King
• If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda
• Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio by Jessica Abel, Foreword by Ira Glass

Ask This Question To Make Someone Feel Truly Special

Bonus Tips!

Difficult Subjects

What do you do when you have a difficult interview subject?

Here’s a tip from Oprah Winfrey she shared in WSJ Magazine’s ‘The Gospel According to Oprah‘:

“I could feel him tense up. I decided not to take on his tension, but to do the opposite, which was to lean in. This is the problem as I see it in public discourse: People become hysterical because you try and meet their energy, but you have to be bigger than that. You have to try and transcend – you can’t go toe-to-toe. I’m leaning in on this guy, I can feel that he is uncomfortable as hell, and I just stay on him. Every time I feel him bristle, I turn and say, ‘Tell me what you think, what do you say about that?’ That is how you hear people.”

Here’s one more bonus Oprah tip from the final episode of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show‘:

“I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation. If I could reach through this television and sit on your sofa or sit on a stool in your kitchen right now, I would tell you that every single person you will ever meet shares that common desire. They want to know: ‘Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?’

Understanding that one principle, that everybody wants to be heard, has allowed me to hold the microphone for you all these years with the least amount of judgment. Now I can’t say I wasn’t judging some days. Some days, I had to judge just a little bit. But it’s helped me to stand and to try to do that with an open mind and to do it with an open heart. It has worked for this platform, and I guarantee you it will work for yours. Try it with your children, your husband, your wife, your boss, your friends. Validate them. ‘I see you. I hear you. And what you say matters to me.'” — Oprah Winfrey, ‘The Gospel According to Oprah‘, May 25, 2011

What People Are Saying…

Join 500,000+ Authors, Businesses, Fans & Nonprofits Who Have Used Contact Any Celebrity Since 1997.

What People Are Saying…

Join 500,000+ Authors, Businesses, Fans & Nonprofits Who Have Used Contact Any Celebrity Since 1997.