I need not remind you that we were forced to stare directly into the concept of Josh Brolin’s allegedly red-raw anus last week, so I think it is fair to say that we live in a brave, unheralded, fantastic new era of celebrity overshare. This, as best I can tell, is the third age. In the studio-contract, golden-age-of-Hollywood days, stars said basically nothing, sharing only titbits of their life via fanzine-level magazine features and newspaper columnist gossip items, and most of those were distributed by savvy studio heads, chomping six inches deep into a cigar while they did it. We only learned about all their threesomes long after they all died.
Then a little loosening of the rules, some chum in the water: deep-dive magazine profiles, rock stars saying outrageous things live on television, high-profile relationships and the monetisation of divorce. Britain’s cottage industry for “posed paparazzi photos of someone in the despair of their life” is a particular guilty thrill of mine, which is why I love Arg from Towie so much. He provides a rolling feed of it, constantly either moving in or moving out of Gemma Collins’s house or being told by a doctor he is going to die if he doesn’t stop eating Toblerones in the bath, and there is forever a long-lens camera trained on him while he does it, thickly enacting what he thinks anguish looks like.
But now we have Twitter, don’t we, and celebrities have full control over which angles of their personality they show and when, and we don’t need the magazine-PR-studio-head cycle: they just do an Instagram Live and casually announce a pregnancy; they do a quote-retweet own on one of their stans who wobbles out of line. How far we have come, how much we have learned, how many times we have seen Arg’s joggers slip down as he puts a box of CDs with a plant pot on top into the back of someone else’s car.
Beyoncé, though, defies all that, and fair play to her. In an interview with Elle this week, the singer took a number of questions from fans – these included: “What are you giving us with your partnership with Adidas?” said in that natural way fans have of asking their icons questions when they have literally one shot of doing so in their entire lifetime – and in doing so pulled off an astonishing prestige. Beyoncé did not shy away from the light of a single question; she answered each one with politeness and life and rigour, yet also somehow said absolutely nothing at all and revealed nothing about herself. If you have any doubt that Beyoncé belongs in the same pantheon as the icons whose names ring out through history – Leonardo, Mozart, Michaelangelo, Picasso, Rodin – then hide that away now. She did this Elle interview with the gentle, precise, heaven-given touch of a master. She deserves a golden glow of light around her: Beyoncé, Creator of Worlds, Sayer of Nothing.
Here’s Beyoncé on her confidence as a creator: “The more I mature, the more I understand my value. I realised I had to take control of my work and my legacy because I wanted to be able to speak directly to my fans in an honest way. I wanted my words and my art to come directly from me. There were things in my career that I did because I didn’t understand that I could say no. We all have more power than we realise.” I … what? I have read that over and over. I had a really good reading age at primary school that I assume has rolled forward into adult life. I’ve gone through that paragraph six or seven times. What does it say? What does it say?
Or, Beyoncé, on her work process: “With new projects, I get my team together for a prayer. I make sure we are all clear on the intention and what the deeper meaning is. I do my best, and I try to push everyone around me to do the same. I eventually give everything I have. When it’s released to the world, I let it go because it is no longer mine.” There is a real “scene deleted” feel to the phrase “I do my best” there, isn’t there? Just to clarify: to make an album as world-changing as Lemonade you simply need to pray once, try hard, then let go of it for ever. That’s the creative process, yeah? That’s it? What have you said?
Beyoncé, on whether she ever puts on a lowkey sweatsuit and goes for a walk sans security: “I do!” Beyoncé, on the last time she went to a supermarket: “It was more like a bodega before a Madonna concert.” Beyoncé, neatly side-stepping a question asking: ‘What do you do with your clothes after you wear them? I am certain you won’t wear them again. May I have them?’ with: “I think it’s important to have great basics that you can wear again and again.” And, most crucially, Beyoncé, on whether negative comments on the internet ever affect her: “Yes, I’m human. In moments of vulnerability, I try to remind myself I’m strong and I’m built for this.”
I have never read a less compelling argument for being human than Beyoncé saying: “I’m human.” She must be something else. She is made of water and earth and air. She is made of a cosmic energy formed at the start of the universe itself. I refuse to believe that Beyoncé is just a person, made of blood and bones and skin, like the rest of you idiots. By this point, she is more a concept than anything else. She’s a concept, inside an Ivy Park x Adidas two-colourway boilersuit, delicately saying nothing at all with the precise and perfect touch of a maestro.
Adam Driver’s fowl eating history
Adam Driver eating a whole chicken. There, I said it. Adam Driver (you’re thinking about Adam Driver now, aren’t you? A leading man that they assembled out of sturdy wood and meat) eating a whole chicken (the rotisserie kind, the ones that go lurid orange as they rotate slowly on a spit, the ones with which you cannot help but get a thin, translucent layer of grease on your hands and around your mouth as you eat it). Adam Driver eating a whole chicken. That’s the story. That’s the news.
Why do we know this? Because it’s Adam Driver season (he’s starring as unconvincing wall demolisher Charlie in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, as well as unconvincing inner-turmoil-feeler Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), but the actor is secretive about his private life, so to get any sort of angle on him at all it is necessary to ask people who have known him or worked with him before he was a big lumpen pea-headed circus-boy megastar. Step forward Scott Aiello, Billions actor and Driver’s Juilliard classmate, who says Driver used to run across New York to attend classes then spend the entire day just really intensely eating a whole chicken to himself.
“He would walk around school with an entire chicken in one hand and a jug of water in the other,” Aiello told the podcast The Film Reroll. “He would carry his roaster chicken with him and go to all his classes and consume chicken.” I cannot shake this image from my head. Adam Driver, gorging on a chicken leg teeth-first like Henry VIII at an execution gala. Adam Driver, getting his entire hand inside the carcass like a veterinary student and eating it like a sort of savoury candy floss. Adam Driver making lip-smacking eating noises while everyone else lies there in leotards trying to do sole-focus breathing exercises. I simply forbid this man from starring in any more movies. There has to be other leading men out there, ones without such imposingly wonky carnivorous energy about them. Find them, Hollywood. Find them now.
