Celebrity Interviewing 102: Moderator Interview Styles (Part D - Jenelle Riley)

One cannot discuss celebrity interviewing without Jenelle Riley. She is (in my humble opinion) one of the best! She can talk to anyone, making them feel welcome, special, and like a real person who just happens to be famous.

According to her bio page on Variety’s website, she is the Deputy Awards and Features Editor, has won two Emmy Awards for “Actors on Actors” (a series I will discuss more in an upcoming post) as well as winning awards for her own short films. As an entertainment journalist she has covered EVERYTHING! Her published articles range from ranking an actor’s best performances to award season predictions to in-depth profiles, and of course, regular movie reviews. In a world with so many click-bait titles, Jenelle refuses to pander so low to readers. Instead, she gives them straightforward phrasing and yet still intriguing descriptions. You don’t have to read them twice just to figure out what she’s going to be writing about, and you don’t need to worry about that one item that is so completely wrong there are 100 outraged and disagreeing comments – which the writer was fully aware would cause that kind of controversy. (Looking at you Buzzfeed.)

Additionally, Jenelle has been one of the few preferred hosts of the SAG and then SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations series since 2012. And now that it is hundreds of interviews later, she has become even more of a tireless powerhouse whose passion for the industry has not waned. You can tell in every video interview her guests enjoy speaking with her. Perhaps only other than on James Lipton’s and Sean Evans’ in-depth researched interview shows, she is whom guests share unique memories from their professional lives that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere.

Choosing my favorite career retrospective interviews of hers to examine for this blog post would be impossible. Among the prolific diverse list of videos available on YouTube are all of Hollywood’s elite. So instead, I decided to study every 5^th(-ish) video on the search results list, which in (year release order) are:

1. Leonardo DiCaprio from 2014
2. Michael B. Jordan from 2018
3. Michelle Yeoh from 2019
4. Nicole Kidman from 2021
5. Jake Gyllenhaal from 2013 and then from 2016 to do a compare/contrast

…And, wow, this turned out to be a really great list!