What Marina Asked Glen Powell

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1:21So good, so good, so good.

1:26Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond. Hello everyone. Hello Marina. Hello Richard. How are you? I'm very, very well. How are you? I'm very well. I mean I'm still heavily sedated after Traders last week and I'm gradually being brought back to sort of full consciousness. No spoilers. No spoilers. We have our Celebrity Traders podcast which people are very welcome to listen to if they've already watched it. I'm just implying that it's good. 100%. It's great. But I don't want people to switch off immediately because they're like, I'm just about to watch it.

1:57Oh, no, there's nothing about it in this particular podcast. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing apart from this. Tell you who we are going to talk a bit about. Yeah, I'm very excited about this. We're going to talk a little bit about Glenn Powell. So you, as we all remember, interviewed Glenn Powell a while ago. He did an introduction to the podcast for us. And that interview came out on Saturday. I know lots of people would have read it. So I want to talk a bit about that, but really we want to talk about why nobody says anything interesting in interviews anymore. And by the way, he said lots of interesting things in that interview.

2:28I think it's really significant. And I think what's happened to interviewing and what's happened really to people's celebrities' ability to say anything remotely interesting at all. And we'll talk about why. Also going to talk about the Saudis. Oh, I've heard of them. Heard of them as well. We know they've been moving to all sorts of different forms of entertainment. We talked about the Riyadh Comedy Festival. We've obviously talked about the golf before. And now they're going into video games. So we'll talk about the various deals that they've done and the way they're trying to... And they're basically kick-starting a movie studio in Hollywood as well.

3:00So we'll talk about... We'll talk about that too. We'll talk about war by other means. War by entertainment means. War by entertainment, which could be a tattoo on the shoulder of Mr. Glenn Powell. Yeah. So the interview I thought was fantastic. No, no. Well, that's very kind of you. Thank you. No, no, no. Do you know what? It was awful. Do you know what? I cannot write. Do you know what? I'm a hack. No. I was reading it. Honestly, I threw up when I was reading it. I hated it. It was interesting. And we'll talk a little bit about what the process of doing an interview like that is. Because as I say, and as I said in the interview, I don't do interviews very often.

3:39So the last one I did, I think was about 13 years ago, and was Nigel Farage. I met somebody yesterday who had interviewed Marilyn Monroe. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's very cool. Yeah, yeah. I digress. Did you tell her I'd done for us? Yes, I did. Yeah. You'll notice oftentimes he didn't sit with the PR in the interview at all, which I really liked. I had sort of 55 minutes with him, basically. And I went all the way to the cursed city of Los Angeles for that. And who did he think you were, if you know what I mean? Was he just walking into a room he doesn't know? Yeah, just thinks I'm doing an interview with him, which is what I am doing.

4:19It's just another thing that's been cited. So he's doing stuff for a movie. His publicist would have sent him 100 asks. Well, they would have had 200 asks. They would have knocked it down to about 30 that they think, oh, this is sort of acceptable for what we want in terms of demographics. fix some will be podcasts some will be print interviews some will be news some will be tv interviews things like that they will get it down to about 30 they will then send it to glenn's manager who will knock it and say oh no no not him no he won't do that because blah blah blah and he will knock it down to maybe 15 and then glenn will look at those and go yeah i'll do that okay i don't think he looks at them in my and i don't think most stars do either i think they they sort of vaguely trust the the many teams they have around them don't forget you don't have just your agent you've got management you've got obviously you've got the film company in this case paramount but paramount also would offer paramount would think well because they're in charge of this particular movie this movie being the running edgar wright's remake of the running man and so paramount might have said oh we would offer the offer them to the guardian or we would offer you know you're thinking where would we like to place something and in the uk by the way they'd be thinking okay we've got uk strategy we'll probably do one tv we'll probably do one newspaper and we'll do one big lead time magazine you'll do graham norton you'll do you know whatever it is but you'll and also obviously it's completely mandatory that you would have the cover otherwise you're not doing there's a certain point where you'll only do it if you have the cover yeah um and he's definitely at that stage i'd like to see who's on the cover if it wasn't him well many people will say oh you can't um you you know you can't say this you can't ask that and there is always a bit of that um i think the key is to not have any of that in writing but I mean I know some people who have done interviews where you've told in advance you can't talk about this you can't talk about that and there's so many different things and actually then in general I do think as a journalist also never sort of agree completely because you don't know what they might say and you can't sort of say oh well I just refuse to follow that line of questioning but also they may open up to you they may want to say all sorts of things you don't know where those demands come from two different places that he will not talk about X if there's ten of those nine of those will come from Paramount or whoever the company are, because they don't want it to be about certain things.

6:34They have a very clear idea of what they want it to be. And maybe one or two of them will come from Glenn or come from whoever you're interviewing. Just going, oh, actually, you know what? I've really had enough talking about this or this has been a thing that I've seen reported. And I just don't want to talk about it. And when you start interviewing them, you find out which is which. You might be able to get around it and you might be able to bring it up. So when journalists do celebrity interviews, what are typical things they're told the person might not want to talk about? Well, the PR is supposed to be looking after them and will think, OK, here are the liabilities.

7:04Has recently been in a film with someone who has recently been in a scandal. Won't want to talk about that. They're just trying to put guardrails so that they don't have to talk about anything, that every single word you've got to think on the hoof. Most journalists I know will still find a way near the end, because you don't want to make the walk away, of asking those things. I mean, there are all sorts of tricks. I only had a little bit of time. So I thought, well, it'd be good if I could go along to the photo shoot, because you don't have to say anything. He looked amazing. Yeah. Also, I noticed him wiping up after his own, because it was in this huge old warehouse and Brisket, his internet famous dog, he was wiping up after him.

7:40I thought, you know, Glenn Pilk helping himself after his own dog. That's good. It's just a little thing that you might see. The person I spoke to yesterday who interviewed Marilyn Monroe also said she met Senator Joseph McCarthy. This is an amazing conversation. And she said he was incredible. He was talking to a young child. And I thought, oh my God, he's like talking to a kid. And I thought, oh wow, oh, you know what, maybe I've misjudged him because he was being incredibly charming. So the child walked away. Senator McCarthy took his hand and just wiped it on his trousers. And she thought, oh, okay.

8:08Anyway, that's such a... Oh, my goodness. That might be our biggest sidebar of all time. I love that. Yeah. Okay, right. So you're trying to find extra joys. I do know people... I mean, Lynn Barber, who's a famous celebrity interviewer, always used to turn up at half. If they went... She'd always try and do it at their house because it's good to be on their turn. And she would always turn up at half an hour early. then they're not expecting it and it's just starting i know at least another i won't say because i think they're probably still using that particular technique but doing that i mean if they'll have you at their house or if they'll come to your house anywhere you know you can see that people will some people want that to happen i think that's unusual to want them in your house yeah personally i would not have one journalist in one's house yeah it's like having a film crew in your house.

8:55I'm like, listen, I love film crews. Yes. You know I love film crews, but I'd never have one in my house. So there will always be things that they don't really want you to talk about. Having said that, with Glenn Powell, he did not have a PR, which is now almost a common occurrence that at least two publicists sit on lots of interviews and say, no, you can't talk, he's not talking about that. You know, none of that happened. We sat at a picnic table and then passed it on the Paramount lot. None of that happened. But you know why? Yeah. They knew you're toothless. Yeah. Also, maybe because it's Glenn Powell, Richard.

9:23No. Have you ever thought about that? This is a soft soap, we know this. They're going, you know what, just before you walked in, they went, she's nice, she's no Lynn Barber, but she's nice. If you haven't read this interview, by the way, absolutely, you must read it, it is peak hide. You can imagine what people don't want to talk about. And the reason they don't want to talk about, and actually I think they, increasingly, stars themselves have, in the old days they would say, I don't want to talk about my love life. You know, I get all that, that's really kind of, you know, and maybe they would get onto it if you persuaded them or whatever.

9:53but you can see why they wouldn't want to talk about things like that. But actually it's widened so much more that, you know, you would think, Oh, I don't really want to have to talk about anyone who's caught up in, I don't want to talk about politics, especially if you're someone like Glenn Powell, who wants to be a multiplex guy and he wants to be for all America. And he's actually in many ways, I think one of the things I talked to him about in the interview was, is it quite hard to be an all American person, want to be an all American person when in a divided America, when the perception is that there are certain people who one side can like, and late night has become entirely that.

10:28It's become entirely siloed for, you know, I'm calling it the left, but it's not, you know, you know what I mean, not the Republicans. And in the old days when David Letterman was, or Jay Leno, everybody watched these shows. They were for everybody. And the stars, you know, and a lot more people went to the movies, which is interesting. But now all of those kinds of shows are perceived as political persuasion. and movie stars and all sorts of stars. I would say that there are really quite few people who people don't think, oh yeah, I know what you're about. Everyone can like The Rock. Everyone can like Travis Kelsey.

11:01Glenn Powell wants to be the sort of guy that everyone can like. I can tell you that I think Sidney Sweeney wanted to be someone who everyone can like and look what happened. So devil's advocate, if I'm sitting at home going, no, but look, these people, they want this free publicity. They want all this publicity and they must speak out. They should speak out. They should tell us what they think about things. What would your take on that be? My first take would be they don't really want to do this publicity. First of all, they don't want to do this publicity. My second take would be in the old days.

11:30Yes, of course, I thought, oh, you know, you want to be on the cover of a magazine. You want to be this or that. You should, to some degree, take a position on things. And if you ask the question and it's not completely rude or unreasonable, I think you could talk to me about, I don't know, Sidney Sweeney and the Culture Wars or something like that. I fully understand these days that it has changed totally. Talk us through your sensibility walking into there and why it would have been different to walking into there 15 years ago. Because 15 years ago, an interview with any star would be in what we used to call a colour supplement or be in a magazine.

12:04And that interview would sort of stay there. And if you read it, you'd think, oh, that was a brilliant interview. It's so cool. And they said fascinating things. Go back and read those, read interviews from 15, 20 years ago. Stars say incredibly interesting things. They talk about their co-stars. You look at them now, they are so on message. They speak like politicians. And there's a single reason for it all, which is because of what's happened with news distribution on the internet. Every interview, and by the way, I have to say that publications are as guilty of this and I'm not the Guardian, but lots of publications.

12:36I'm doing it as a general. But everybody always says, is there a news line? So you do an interview And what they mean by that is, can we have a story that could go on the news pages? Like, I'm just going to think of some random thing here. You know, say Glenn Powell had said, you know, I'm actually hardcore MAGA and that's who I am now. That would become a news story. So not only would it be in the interview and be an interesting part of the interview and an eye-popping part. By the way, he didn't say that. But what they want is then there to be a news story because news stories get clicks and eyeballs and drives it into the...

13:07And it's all about traffic. And everybody wants this now. You know, you see people going to TV festivals, like industry gatherings. I saw what happened, someone from Channel 4 or Channel 4 News said, I think lots of those people from adolescence sort of piggybacked on what Channel 4 News would do, or something like that. I can't remember what she said in a panel discussion at the Edinburgh Television Festival, an industry gathering, and it was reported around the world as, you know, like adolescence has sort of ripped off Channel 4 or something like that. And I just thought, you've had an absolute nightmare there.

13:35What you've tried to say is maybe something like we've made some interesting crime documentary or something. I don't even know. I didn't have time to investigate it. Or, by the way, you're trying to entertain people. In fact, you're in front of a live audience and you're talking to people. 300 people in a sort of hall in Edinburgh. Why can't you say anything? But you can't say anything because then you've got three days of firefighting and everybody's saying, coming to you for another quote. They've gone back to the adolescence people. What do you think about the fact that they just slagged you off?

14:00And it's just this absolute shitstorm all the time. and so you know that if you're a celebrity and you're being interviewed and you say anything that I mean even touches in the same postcode as something that's an ongoing news story you will be it will immediately say you know as I've said in the interview Glenn Powell sort of wades into the Sidney Sweeney discourse and he has to talk about that and then it's scraped by every clickbait news site and it's this thing just has a life of its own and it tears off across the internet and it's days and days and days of it now and sorry can I just say this which is if you know if people would hear that and just go well that's god that's a bit woe is me I mean who cares I mean no one cares other than you're just turning up to do your job which is to do this interview for something and your next three days is then incredibly boring because you're constantly you're constantly people say it's x it's y it's this it's that or the other and you just think oh as god I had a really nice chat to somebody i thought was really really nice and then suddenly i'm having to deal with this for four days and you know it's it's so it's not it's not like no one's kind of it's not destroying anyone's lives but it's definitely making you think oh next time i just won't say anything it's gonna be working for three days you have to just deal with that i'm not really getting anything out of it the only thing the reason you ever give anything in an interview is if you're having a fun time if you're chatting to an interviewer and you think i want to have an interesting chat this will go out and people will read it so i want to say something that represents me and you know the people at the uh the record company or the film company are happy but the second that that goes out and you know you've got even a day of just people going it's interesting that you said this because blah blah blah you just think oh okay i just it's the easiest thing next time will be not not not doing that as a result people have become incredibly boring yeah And they try very, very hard not to make news in headlines because you can just see the next you've had it happen to you enough times that you can see the next few days spooling out.

15:58And it's going to take you away from your core business and what you actually want to do with your time. And so I think the flip side of that is, which is what I ended up saying to him, which was, you know, I felt I thought it was absolutely not. Of course, Sydney Sweeney's jeans campaign was nothing to do with eugenics. But you didn't see anybody from Hollywood coming out and saying, this is bullshit. and I said to him I felt that she was left to slightly twist in the wind when everyone must have known it's bullshit and I think he found it quite hard to answer all that sort of stuff because he is friends with her and you know your friends can't come out and say it because then it's just they just get drawn into it it doesn't stop it and I think that was his point it doesn't stop it it just prolongs it oh the discourse gets more you're never you're not changing anybody's mind no you're just annoying more and more and more people and it goes on for something that you just I just think it would have been easier not to say anything it's what happened to politics a long long time ago and it's that search for the news thing so it's not it's not enough to say i'm going to talk to you about what's happening but it's what is the news thing that we get this over so if laura kinsberg does an interview on a sunday morning the the job is do you have something that leads the six o 'clock news or the ten o 'clock news so can you get something that leads that and not something that the government wants you to lead with but you found something else and that's And that's, by the way, perfectly good journalism.

17:14It's not good journalism if that's all you do all the time. Nor is it good politics to have to feel that rather than actually try and present complex and difficult arguments and try and work out how you can do the best thing, you have to think, let me parcel something out so that you have something for the Laura Koonsberg interview that will appear to be a news line. And so it becomes this incredible sort of diminishing returns thing. And actually, you know, that started right back when, you know, kind of New Labour's era of spin news management, when they're trying to literally parcel something out, something for the six o 'clock, something for the 10 o 'clock.

17:47Everybody's got to have their little thing and then everyone will be happy. And now it's become so lawless. But now entertainment has gone the same way. And that's why almost all interviews are incredibly boring. I think it's very difficult and I think everyone, I think it's the number one thing that anybody star now sitting down thinks, which is I don't want there to be any news coming out of this. And I think at the moment it's a particular issue with print publications. I think, for example, if you do go on Jimmy Kimmel or if you go on Graham Norton, you are very aware that their job is to be an entertainment show, not to get a news item.

18:21And occasionally they'll get them, but that's not the job. The job is to be as funny as possible with interesting, entertaining people. I've never felt going on a TV thing that you don't have to watch yourself quite so much because no one is deliberately trying to trip you up. every time and listen I for me it's nothing but because I just talk about books and stuff like that but even I can see if I talk to certain publications that they'll do all the stuff and then at the end you know they'll they'll ask you a political question or stuff they go oh god this is probably not important it's not really for the article but what do you think about this and you're like but I mean I'm not an expert so don't ask me but I mean secondly come on I know what you're doing every single week in this podcast somebody will say something you've said i believe that you've oh god i had the thing my my my when we were talking about what's coming the christmas number one book and i was going through the runners and riders i was talking about clocks and well there's diddly squat and i said so diddly squat's just coming out um in a couple of weeks uh and i said of course he's bringing it out really near christmas that's the coward's way of doing things uh and you know if he had any guts he'd have brought it out yeah nobody in britain hearing that knows that's anything other than a joke so you know it's like We used to just do jokes.

19:30And immediately, I just had an email saying, oh, we've just talked to Clarkson's representatives. We heard you called him a coward. You're like, yeah, I mean, and again. Has this story appeared? Oh, it's in loads of things. I mean, these people, we've talked about people toiling in the content minds of Reach and the Daily Express, which is probably why I imagine that they appeared. I will say this. I will say this to the London Evening Standard. Oh, my God. No, no, no, no. Good. It's good. are they the only people who said jokingly calls Jeremy Clarkson a coward I really there's so many times for a long time I wrote a showbiz column and it was supposed to be it was just making fun of the news and so I wasn't breaking stories in it but it was commentary every week and there'd be three items in it not unlike this podcast and I remember always thinking oh yeah but lots of people have deliberately misunderstood this and you can see this I hate it when people do it with politicians as well politicians do sometimes make jokes and they are quite good and every now it's so rare but when it happens it's such an easy thing to like pretend that you didn't hear the inference and just turn it into a horrible news story it has resulted in a much much much more boring public discourse in an area by the way in which isn't politics and which people you know we should we'd love to be entertained by our celebrities can I give one corrective to it because I feel like I've been moaning and it doesn't affect me it's sad I talk to journalists a lot whenever I've got a book out anything like that and 99 % of the time it's a really positive experience I love it you know and it is and you know you talk to the Daily Mail or people like that and you just think lovely interview no one's you know and it comes out and I'm happy if I've if you were able to speak freely you can hopefully say interesting things and useful things but so almost all the time but it's all it's easy but you are constantly thinking what's the Paul quote but it's also all the secondary tertiary all the other sites that just scrape all that content you have no control over that and they will just do whatever they like they will obviously deliberately take things that's supposed to be jokes as not jokes and it has made the world much more boring much more full of slop and also everything is kind of completely um gutted for anything it has so you never find it yeah the whole of our culture yeah it's like a scrapyard you might spy from a train yes yeah i do think that but anyway so i it would be nice to think that we could return to some kind of prelapsarian state where people could say things they thought and they could be fascinating and scintillating and it wouldn't be just taken over by bad faith actors all the time.

21:56Right, Richard, shall we now go to a break? Come on then.

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23:58Welcome back, everybody, to the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As we know, Saudi Arabia, under the aegis of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is trying to expand beyond oil. And one of the absolute key things they've been trying to do is just build a kind of entertainment empire. They've got the Live Golf. They've got an F1 race. We've talked a lot about the Riyadh Comedy Festival. They've bought stakes in Live Nation. They had stake in Activision Blizzard gaming company. But they've gone big with the biggest ever leveraged buyout, brokered by none other than Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump.

24:36He can do you a Gaza peace plan. In fact, he did them in, I think, the same day. Same day, in fact, these were announced. They've acquired Electronic Arts, who make all sorts of video games. They make EAFC, FIFA to anyone who plays it. Yes, EA Sports. It's in the game. It's in the game, yeah. Madden, NFL, The Sims. They've got all sorts of things. Yes, it's the biggest ever leveraged buyer, and the Saudis have acquired it. They also have their film festival. The Red Sea Film Festival is reactivating again in a few weeks, and they want to become a film production hub. and they've also brought in to Hollywood.

25:07They've put a billion into a studio within LA that they want to make content in. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about electronic art. So they paid or are paying, it hasn't quite been approved yet, but as you say, given it's Mohammed bin Salman and Jared Kushner, you wonder who would disapprove. Certainly, it'd be hard to. They now openly say it, with people connected with the Trump family, that I don't think there's going to be any regulatory issues. I think that'll be okay. Oh, I see. So you can have a foreign company can own an American company that has access to lots of sensitive American citizens data in some cases.

25:43Sorry, TikTok, but it's OK here because I guess Jared did the deal. So they're paying$55 billion for electronic arts,$55 billion. And this is sort of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gaming. As you say, so sports, they've understood entertainment. They've understood, you know, live golf. So, you know, it's like a hand grenade in world sport. this deal is essentially like 12 times bigger than the money they put into into that and is the tip of the iceberg in terms of gaming gaming seems to be the thing yeah that they're putting a lot of their money they have a huge population of under 30s in Saudi Arabia and gaming of course is an enormous thing for them so I read somewhere that they they felt that AI was going to so soon going to take so many jobs that many people would have much more leisure time and they really want to have gaming companies to be able to service that time.

26:30I mean, it makes a lot of sense. If there's one thing FIFA will do for you... It makes a cheery kind of sense, doesn't it, Richard? It'll eat up a lot of their time. So I think most people think of EA as EA Sports, but Apex Legends is EA, Sims is EA. But I mean... A lot of gamers really hate them and think that they ruin franchises and that they've... Because they've got this monopoly on all of these things and the biggest games, that they absolutely ruin them. They think they've ruined The Sims. They think they've ruined FIFA, which isn't called FIFA anymore. Yeah, but it might as well be. Yeah, it is for our pubs.

27:03I mean, have you heard that Twitter's not called Twitter anymore? Exactly. I mean, come on. Yeah, it'll always be FIFA. And yes, and they bring out live service versions of that, and people feel like they're slightly being bled dry for money. And occasionally they'll sort of… Hey, there are worse ways to go. Yes, exactly that. And the Saudis are in charge, but yes. So they spent all of that money, but they're also trying to become the e-sports capital of the world. And now for a long time, certainly in the West, people have tried to make esports happen and they haven't really. You know, you keep hearing, oh, in South Korea, there are these enormous arenas.

27:34But, you know, they're still not really filling out, you know, the O2 every Saturday night for people playing Counter-Strike 2. You know, there's something about it that hasn't quite kind of broken through. But Saudi are putting a big bet that esports is going to be the next huge thing. So every year now they held the esports World Cup in Riyadh. $60 million in prize money. Wow. Do they hold it in Boulevard, Richard? Yeah, they hold it in Square, I think. Maybe they just do it in Square. If you listen to our Riyadh comedy episode, you will understand this entertainment quarter that has these incredibly generic names.