Cate Blanchett press kerfuffle: The media blew it, not the interviewer

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Celebrity journalism has reached a new low (or is that high?) thanks to the Cate Blanchett interview that went viral on Thursday.

The interview, conducted by Australian TV reporter Jonathan Hyla, was great, showing Blanchett to be the cool, charming, slightly subversive person you probably suspected her to be. Rarely are journalists able to create these kinds of moments. But to read the coverage of the interview, you'd think it was an affront to not only Blanchett but journalistic standards themselves, which already set the bar pretty low when it comes to celebrities.

"Cate Blanchett shuts down awkward interview," one gossipy headline screamed.

"Cate Blanchett calls out an interviewer for ridiculous question" was how USA Today framed it.

CNN went with: "Cate Blanchett upset at interview question, leaves."

It doesn't sound pretty, does it?

If only they had bothered to watch the full interview. Celebrity journalists, you had one job.

Press junkets for movies are a special forum of professional and existential despair. This is true for both actors and their interviewers. Both are stuck in a transactional dynamic with each side working at cross purposes: The actor is there to promote the movie, and the interviewer is out to get the one answer we all want from celebrity profiles: Who are you, really?

To answer that question, reporters will often try too hard to establish a genuine moment of human connection that reveals some piece of who a star is behind the persona, behind their publicist's talking points, behind that star's understandable desire to maintain their privacy.

Imagine being the actor who has to suffer these many attempts. Promoting a big studio film means having to sit down with dozens of reporters for 10 minutes or so at a time each, and most of them are trying to get this rare moment of connection with you. For John-Paul Sartre, hell might have been other people. For stars, it's press junket interviews.

One of the implicit ground rules for these interviews is that the questions will be banal: What was it like to work with the director? What inspired you to take this role? No one is going to ask Selena Gomez what she thinks of Middle Eastern conflict. No one is going to ask Vin Diesel how the automobile has contributed to global warming.

Hyla's interview with Blanchett was better than anything else you'll see from the Cinderella press tour, not because he tried to break the banal and vapid terms implicit in the celebrity interview but because he pushed them almost as far as they could go.

It helps, of course, that Blanchett seems like a wonderful, easy-going person. Watch the entire interview and you'll see that she and Hyla establish a chummy rapport from the start.

She throws a few barbs his way, but she's smiling as she does. They talk about drinking beer on pub crawls, she tells him he should go get her some vodka if he "wants the sex to be good."

You can hear people off camera laughing. That never happens.

Far from the confrontation that so many gossip-minded celebrity news outlets portrayed this as, it's a lively, joking few minutes that manage to give you a glimpse of what Blanchett is like. (Just as you may have suspected, she's amazing.)

To his credit, Hyla doesn't bother with the usual formula. Any questions he might have prepared are out the window. When he does ask, "What inspired you to do this role?" he does so in a self-mocking tone.

Blanchett laughs her way through her answer.

Then Hyla asks the question that's been generating headlines: "How were you able to get that cat to do what you wanted to on a leash? Because I tried and put my girlfriend's cat on a leash and it just never works for me?"

Blanchett looks off camera for a moment before answering. "That's your question? That's your fucking question?" At that point, everyone is laughing. And with that, the interview is over.

More often than not, exchanges like these are painfully awkward, particularly because actors refuse to play ball. Who could blame them? And reporters who try to establish this kind of rapport usually only embarrass themselves without getting anything other than a stone-faced reaction.

It can be painful to watch. But this one was a joy, not in spite of its ridiculousness but because of it. Instead of one more canned moment, we got to see Blanchett the person, not just another actor offering up a string of anodyne answers to sell a movie.

These moments are rare, and they usually do go viral.

On his Instagram, Hyla called it "what might have been the best worst interview I've ever done.

He's exactly right.