If you don't want a bad interview, don't ask daft questions - how Ashley Graham has learned the hard way

It is already being tipped as a contender for Most Shocking Oscars Moment Ever! and the now infamous Ashley Graham/Hugh Grant red carpet interview is essential car crash viewing, writes Simon Burch.

For those who haven’t seen it, this was the cringeworthy moment supermodel-turned-interviewer Ashley has a toe-curling two-minute chat with Hugh as he is heading into the Oscars and unenthusiastically answers her questions with lots of sighing, periods of silence, short unhelpful answers and plenty of eye-rolling.

The incident went viral and opinion is beautifully divided between those who think Hugh Grant was surly and rude, and those who praised his lack of artifice in the face of her frivolous interviewing style.

As someone who has interviewed thousands of people over my career in journalism and PR I would simply say to Ashley, welcome to journalism club, where the odd interview going wrong is par for the course.

And that, if you don’t want bad answers, then don’t ask bad questions.

I’m sure that conducting a live interview when your brief is to keep it light is a tough gig. Plus I am sure that most celebrities routinely make up something suitably banal and jolly to cover their innermost feelings no matter what the question.

But in my view this is asking more of the interviewee than it does of you. Acting is an ego industry and since Hugh Grant potentially has far more to lose from a lukewarm reaction to a series of questions than Ashley Graham does, the onus is on him to mask his annoyance.

Of course, he is an actor and, just as he played a Prime Minister in Love, Actually, he should be able to play the part of the Happy Actor Excited to Attend the Oscars.

But, in my opinion, this forces him to pretend to be someone else in the interview rather than himself, making the interview a work of fiction, just another act.

Does this matter? When you’re trying to fill air-time with celebrity froth, no. But what does it say to Hugh Grant that you want him to play a role, not be who he is, and that he has to be made to feel that he has to answer whatever question comes his way with enthusiasm in order to save face.

Truth be told, her questions were themselves questionable. “What are you wearing?” “What was it like to be in Glass Onion? How fun is it to shoot something like that?” “What’s your favourite thing about coming to the Oscars?”

The first and third were just filling time, the second is ignorant because, as he was forced to explain, his screen-time in the film is a painfully short three seconds.

Ask any established A-lister about their experience of appearing in a film for a humiliatingly short time – perhaps when so much of their work has ended up on the cutting room floor – then you run the risk of affronting their ego (their stock in trade) and stirring up feelings of hurt and rejection.

Might he not be annoyed at being reminded of something that was a slight to his professional pride? Live and unexpectedly in front of millions of people on TV? And if so, should he have to laugh it off?

Either Hugh Grant is not such a good actor as we thought, or he is refreshingly human and that someone who hasn’t tailored her questions to match her interviewee or done her research has got the result she deserves.

Woe betide any journalists who fails in either of these counts. The secret of interviewing – something you learn across many hundreds of interviews – is being prepared, of being able to read your interviewer’s reactions and being change your questioning technique if needed.

Good interviewing isn’t just asking a series of questions one after the other. It is very much a two-way thing.

Sometimes, nothing you can do to prepare can save you. Once I bounded enthusiastically into a pub as a local reporter in the depths of Chaddesden (the now long-gone Penguin pub in Taddington Road) and was told to fuck off even before my first cheery opening question had escaped my lips.

Or there was the occasion when I lost control of an interview with a local pensioner and was trapped for hours while he went off at tangents and I was unable to keep him on message.

I have also worked with many journalists who have interviewed famous people and discovered that behind the lovely, happy and friendly public persona is someone who is bored of answering the same inane questions time after time and makes no effort to hide it.

Even in PR, we sometimes work with business people who are unenthusiastic or can’t see the point of the questions we are asking, unaware that the story we are trying to create is different to the one that they would like to tell.

As an interviewer, it’s our job to have the skills to save the interview, not the interviewee’s. And this is why Ashley Graham – in my opinion – should have done better with Hugh Grant, a man who has been interviewed countless times and who, presumably, refused to play along.

Unprofessional? Maybe, especially when the interview is being broadcast live. But hopefully she will learn the lesson that all journalists learn – that people don’t enjoy being asked daft questions they don’t want to answer, they’re not always co-operative and that having a bad interview now and then just comes with the job.