Vogue has a series of short interview series called 73 Questions. The interviews are approximately five minutes of successive, quick questions directed to a celebrity who answers with one word or a short phrase while continuing to go about their business in wherever setting the interview takes place.
It’s interesting how much you can learn about a person in five minutes from 73 questions such as “what do you like on your pizza?”
It’s not so much what the interviewee answers, because these questions are quite shallow and hence limited in evoking a complex enough answer, but it’s more so how they answer.
The mannerism of tone, gesture, expression, and speech hints at different personalities of each celebrity and frames each question and response through a whole different perspective from which the celebrity may or may not meet up to the expectations of my own fandom for them.
Lupita Nyong’o, for example, is more hip than I thought. She’s playful but with a flair of authenticity and poise that’s both charming and avant-garde.
Viewers are undoubtedly inclined to preconceived notions of these world renown superstars who have already established a name and reputation for themselves, but because these questions pertain to every-day, “normal” inquiries we can all afford to question, it’s fresh.
I’m also just naturally curious and always asking questions, so I’m living my dream through this faceless interviewer who gets to ask all 73 seemingly inopportune and irrelevant questions the celebrity is willing to answer immediately upon request (although some wiggle their way out of answering some).
If I were to answer these 73 questions, I’d struggle to frame them to avoid revealing too much while giving them my honest opinion, but I realized they still wouldn’t know the whole truth anyway. Because if I answer, “I wish I hadn’t woken up before my alarm,” to the question “what’s the first thing you thought of this morning?” who’d be able to validate it as false? No one but myself, because it was a personal thought I had as soon as I opened my eyes this morning. And does it matter that it could potentially be a lie? Do people care enough? I guess if I was Lupita Nyong’o, they would. Good thing I’m not.
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