Brick Lane, in London’s East End, is famous for its bustling commerce, from sari shops to graffiti-splashed vintage-clothing stores. At 9 a.m. on a recent morning, however, nearly all the storefronts were shuttered. One exception was Morley’s, a takeout fried-chicken restaurant, where bright lights were shining behind closed glass doors that had been covered with translucent paper, and a hubbub of voices could be heard coming from inside.
Seated at a white plastic table in the center of the small shop was Amelia Dimoldenberg, the creator and star of “Chicken Shop Date,” a popular YouTube interview show. Despite the early hour and the raw winter weather, she was dressed as if for a night at the club, in an asymmetrical one-sleeved top made from clingy metallic jersey, and a matching skirt so short that, when she sat down on a cold metal chair, she squealed. Swirling around her was a team of half a dozen people, who were preparing to record a new episode. In the background, slushie machines started to whirr, and a pungent vat of oil sizzled. Dimoldenberg thumbed through a sheaf of pages listing questions that she’d prepared for the guest who would soon arrive—the actress Cynthia Erivo, who’d recently been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Elphaba, the green-skinned witch in “Wicked.”
Dimoldenberg’s show is shot in fried-chicken restaurants around the city. In the episodes, which are typically less than ten minutes long, she unleashes a fusillade of left-field questions and sometimes interrupts her guest midsentence—techniques designed to elicit an unpredictable exchange. Dimoldenberg began running through possible approaches to Erivo with her producer, Liv West. Noting that Erivo had attended drama school, Dimoldenberg imagined proposing some absurd theatre exercises: “ ‘Be an inanimate object’ might be fun. I could get her to try to be a water droplet, or something. A lettuce.” West laughed. Dimoldenberg scanned her list and read aloud, “ ‘Have you ever used your acting abilities on a date to pretend like you are having a good time?’ ” She then read a question that would flirtatiously address Erivo’s queer identity: “ ‘What’s the best thing about dating a woman?’ ”
Dimoldenberg continued, “ ‘What’s the best musical to take someone to right before a breakup?’ ‘I’m thinking of turning “Chicken Shop Date” into a musical—can you help me write the songs?’ ”
“Perfect,” West said.
Dimoldenberg, who turned thirty-one in January, celebrated ten years of hosting “Chicken Shop Date” last year, proving herself to be one of YouTube’s more durable entertainers. Nearly three million people subscribe to the show. Each episode has the format of a first date, conducted in the unlikely setting of an unflatteringly lit fast-food outlet, and is freighted hopelessly with the longing for enduring love. Dimoldenberg’s first guest was the British rapper Ghetts, one of the foremost figures in the London grime scene, who is a decade her senior. The episode, which aired in March, 2014, established her disarmingly direct technique. “What would you say your type is in a girl?” Dimoldenberg asked. “I like girls with a sense of humor,” Ghetts replied. “O.K., so, me,” Dimoldenberg swiftly retorted, with a straight face, nodding.
On “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg plays an exaggerated version of herself: more awkward, more brusque, more grandiose. Celebrities on the publicity circuit who are accustomed to the usual techniques and tricks of interviewers—softball questions, fawning compliments—find themselves in a different and disconcerting dynamic. The brittle self-confidence of Dimoldenberg’s character can seem like a mask for a painful neediness, and her strategies of redirection can subvert even the most self-assured of interlocutors. Whenever a “date” seems to be going well, she undermines it. After Jack Harlow, the American rapper, said that he liked the phenomenon of community library boxes, from which passersby can borrow books at will, Dimoldenberg’s follow-up question was “Can you read?” On “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg courts compliments, then receives them with deadpan discomfort. After Mahalia, the British R. & B. singer, said that Dimoldenberg’s skin looked “amazing,” Dimoldenberg replied, “Thanks. It’s my own. It’s my own skin.”
Dimoldenberg prepares for each exchange with extensive research, but she also deftly improvises, and her onscreen style of flirting is sometimes indistinguishable from cutting critique. When the pop star Ed Sheeran started to play the ukulele, she told him, “Don’t give up the day job.” At moments, though, her guests show unexpected vulnerability. On an episode two years ago, Dimoldenberg asked Central Cee, the British rapper, “How long does it take you to fall in love?,” and he responded with a meandering and strangely touching discourse on the unreliability of romantic feeling. “I just think it’s a delusion, innit?” he said. “Maybe I’m a bit pessimistic, I don’t know, but if you’re going against the grain, trying to secure something rare, I feel like you just have to be a bit deluded.” The episode was “Chicken Shop Date” at its best, offering a surprising disclosure in which the border between performance and authenticity was impossible to pinpoint.
Dimoldenberg’s interviews have a surreal strangeness reminiscent of the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, another high-wire, always-in-character comedian. She once asked Beth Mead, the record-holding forward of the Lionesses, the English women’s soccer team, “Would you say you are a competitive person?” But the distance between the highly capable Dimoldenberg and her “Chicken Shop Date” persona hasn’t stopped her followers from becoming invested in the most promising-seeming encounters. (She hasn’t seriously dated anyone from the show.)
In the past three years, Dimoldenberg has leveraged her “Chicken Shop Date” fame into a new line of work, as a red-carpet interviewer—including, last year, at the Oscars, a role she will reprise at this year’s ceremony, on March 2nd. Her flirty but jarring red-carpet exchanges with the actor Andrew Garfield blew up on social media. “It’s weird what you do,” Garfield told her at a 2022 event. “Weird as in good.” The two ran across each other again the following year, at the Golden Globes. After Garfield teased Dimoldenberg that she’d been eying him “like a capybara in the wild” and observed that they had compatible astrological signs, he insisted that he wasn’t interested in her: “I don’t think we should explore this!” She replied, “Well, I’m not even asking to.” When Garfield eventually joined Dimoldenberg at Sam’s Chicken, in northwest London, fan anticipation was high, and the pair did not disappoint.
“Come on, we can own that it’s been vibey,” Garfield said.
“It’s been vibey to the point where you’ve been avoiding me for two years, because the vibes were too much for you to handle,” Dimoldenberg shot back, in undermining-girl-boss mode.
The ensuing ten-minute battle of wits had a screwball energy that Preston Sturges would have appreciated.
“I’m not going to be who you want me to be in this moment,” Dimoldenberg offered.
“I’m not asking you to be anything but what you are,” Garfield said, shifting around in his chair. “I’m just holding a mirror up.”
“Yeah, and I look good,” Dimoldenberg retorted.
Later, Garfield asked, “Do you think this”—he gestured toward the cameras and the mikes—“has fucked up the fact that we could actually have gone on a date at some point, maybe?”
“Yeah, because you’re afraid of it,” Dimoldenberg said, popping a French fry between perfectly glossed lips. The episode, which aired late last year, has been viewed more than ten million times.
In the decade since launching “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg has attempted to diversify her comic output. Among other things, she launched a YouTube show in which she cooked alongside guests—the gag being that she cannot cook. Most of her income now comes from sources other than “Chicken Shop Date,” including her red-carpet work and one-off appearances or videos. But none of these projects has had the resonance or the authenticity of her first show. Dimoldenberg, being in the happy position of owning the show outright, is writing and producing a romantic comedy set in what she describes as “the ‘Chicken Shop Date’ world.”
Each episode costs only about six thousand dollars to make, though Dimoldenberg now has three employees—a creative producer, a social-media manager, and a personal assistant—on her payroll. Because “Chicken Shop Date” appears just once a month or so, she is selective about her guests. “It has to be an organic fit,” Dimoldenberg told me. “I need to be a fan of them and their work. If I fancy them, it helps, too. It is a dating show, after all.”
“I recently found out that I like a Pinot Noir,” Dimoldenberg said the first time I met her, as she settled into a low armchair at the Dean Street Townhouse, a restaurant in London’s Soho neighborhood. It was a week into the New Year, and Dimoldenberg was not observing Dry January, but she had plans for a first date the following evening with someone who was. She explained, “I was Googling ‘Things to do when you’re sober,’ and I found it so funny. It was, like, ‘An escape room.’ ‘A horse-drawn carriage around the park.’ ‘Indoor rock climbing.’ ”
So what plan had they settled on? “We’re going to go to the pub, obviously, and have Diet Cokes.”
For “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg likes to dress up, usually in an outfit that has some interest around the neckline or the arms, given that she and her guest are seen only from the rib cage up. This evening, she was dressed less flamboyantly, in chic black pants and a black top. She ordered roast chicken—it’s actually her favorite meal, she said, not just an on-brand choice. “But I have to ask what part of the chicken it is, because I only like breast,” she told me. (On “Chicken Shop Date,” she eats only nuggets and cringes at wings.) When the waitress came, Dimoldenberg politely asked to have the chicken leg left off the plate, though not before asking me if I would like it. “I’m not going to eat the leg, so I’d rather give it to someone else,” she said.
Dimoldenberg’s onscreen character is in many ways formed in the editing process, which she supervises. Moments of standoffishness or awkwardness are emphasized with jump cuts to her face, the camera lingering on her expressive, quizzical features. In person, though, Dimoldenberg is warm, open, and relaxed. “My character is equal parts desperate and uninterested,” she told me. In the earliest iteration of the show, the comedy lay in part in the rap-world interviewees’ amusement at being asked deadpan, rapid-fire questions by a scrupulously prepared but apparently clueless girl eating fries across the table. (“You have another name, Murkle Man,” she said to Jammer, a grime artist who was the fourth guest on her show. “Does that have anything to do with Angela Merkel?”) Dimoldenberg told me, “I talk more now—I’m leading the conversation now. Before, it had more staccato energy, and now it’s quite fluid.” These days, Dimoldenberg is well known enough not just to perform celebrity interviews but to be the object of them. Last year, she ate chicken with Drew Barrymore on Barrymore’s talk show, and appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” where she explained the British art of banter: “British people, they flirt like they don’t like you. Make someone think that maybe they actually hate you, and I feel like that’s how you fall in love.” Having become a public figure in her own right, she plays with the equilibrium of mutual celebrity for comic ends. On a recent episode, the actor Paul Mescal asked what kinds of movies she liked. “I think I’ve seen all yours,” she told him, then added, condescendingly, “You’ve not done loads.”
David Letterman, who began subverting the celebrity interview more than forty years ago, is among Dimoldenberg’s obvious precursors. But her closest contemporary peers are not the hosts of network television shows but, rather, YouTube and TikTok interviewers such as Nardwuar—a character created by the Canadian journalist John Ruskin—who stuns rappers and other musicians with his prodigious research into their early lives, and the New York-based comedian Kareem Rahma, who, on his online show “Subway Takes,” invites comedians, influencers, or actors to offer miscellaneous critiques of social mores while riding mass transit. (Jeremy O. Harris: “We should have gatekept being woke a little bit longer.” Cat Cohen: “You can’t text someone just ‘hey’ and say nothing else.”) Like these interviewers, Dimoldenberg permits the interviewee to be in on the joke.
But if part of the joke of “Chicken Shop Date” is Dimoldenberg’s insistence that every episode really is a date, and not just another stop on a publicity tour, part of the show’s success is the degree to which the encounters generate genuine chemistry. “I don’t know why I wouldn’t be able to meet someone on the show—like, that’s how we meet, right?” she told me. “But I also know that it’s not real, and that the person I’m meeting is not going to think that it is.” Although Dimoldenberg has had one long-term relationship in the decade of making “Chicken Shop Date,” she is currently single. (Of her sparks with Andrew Garfield, she said, briskly, “I don’t think it’s going to happen, otherwise I would be going out with him already, wouldn’t I?”) She told me, “Part of me thinks that the reason I’ve been single for so long is because I have this dating show, and it’s easier for me that I’m single, because I’m living the character.” In her private life, Dimoldenberg goes on the apps and has friends set her up, with varying degrees of success. “I go through waves of finding it really hard to meet people, and then my first thought is ‘I’m so unattractive,’ ” she told me. “When I’m super single, I just go into this place where I convince myself not that I’m unattractive—like, I know that I’m not—but more, like, ‘Every single person thinks I’m ugly, but they’re wrong.’ ” Sounding like a more self-knowing version of her “Chicken Shop Date” identity, she added, “I do have good self-confidence, but it just manifests in a different way, where I just think people are out to get me.”
Most of Dimoldenberg’s guests are familiar in advance with the show’s format, though there are exceptions, such as Cher, who made an appearance in early 2024. “She was told to do it by her godson, and she nailed it,” Dimoldenberg said. (In the episode, Dimoldenberg confided that she once had a terrible kiss with a man who didn’t open his mouth. “English?” Cher asked, with a knowing shrug.) When Shania Twain came on, Dimoldenberg arrived at the restaurant swathed in leopard-print pants and a matching top with a draped hood—an outfit impressively similar to the one that Twain wore in the video for her 1997 hit “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Twain wrote to me in an e-mail that she was “not at all prepared for it, in a chicken shop of all places.” They got along beautifully, and by the episode’s end the singer was tossing chicken nuggets across the table and Dimoldenberg was attempting to catch them in her mouth. Twain told me, “I’m not sure how the nugget-tossing began. With Amelia, these things just happen.”
Initially, Dimoldenberg’s guests were all male; she was reluctant to invite women on the show, for fear that the dating conceit would founder. “I was always, like, ‘It’s not going to work with a woman—I’m straight,’ ” she said. But she decided that her thinking was too literal, and in 2017 she began having women on. Some of her most popular episodes have been with female stars, and Dimoldenberg is as likely to seek dating advice from them as she is to engage in flirting. With Billie Eilish, it was both. “You’re pretty mesmerizing,” Eilish told her. Dimoldenberg punctured the moment with “Your glasses—are they real?”
In moving from the chicken shop to the red carpet, Dimoldenberg retained her flirtatiousness and shed her clumsiness. “Chicken Shop Date” alums treated her like an old friend: Eilish sidled up to her at the Oscars and gave her a long squeeze, saying, “I’ve been thinking about you.” At first, Dimoldenberg tended to avoid including anything in the final edit of “Chicken Shop Date” that carried a whiff of sincerity, on either her part or that of her guest. “I was always, like, ‘If it’s not funny, it’s not going in,’ ” she said. Recent experience, though, has made her reconsider. “With Andrew Garfield, I loved that you could feel there was some sincerity there, and I kept that in,” she said. “I was being real. He’s an actor, so I didn’t know what was going through his head. But I was being somewhat true. And afterward it was, like, ‘People are really liking this, actually.’ ” She was thinking of trying something similar with Erivo, whose earlier interviews indicated that she was inclined toward earnestness. “She seems very sincere—she’s not really my type,” Dimoldenberg said. “I’m excited to have a conversation that shows her to be funnier than ever—but also, maybe, we could have some serious chat.”
It is estimated that there are more than four thousand chicken shops across the U.K.—one in every postcode except three, according to a 2020 assessment by the Financial Times. (The chicken-free zones were on far-flung Scottish islands.) Although there are a few big chains, such as Morley’s, which originated in South London and now has nearly a hundred outlets all across the capital, many are independent businesses, though they hew to a similar model: laminate countertops, fluorescent lighting, and food that can be made quickly, at low cost, in deep fryers. Culinarily, KFC is the U.S.’s closest parallel to the U.K. chicken shop. But culturally—in New York, at least—a better comparison might be to the corner pizzeria swiftly doling out slices on paper plates to schoolkids, budget-minded parents, and late-night revellers.
A chicken shop is not what most people would consider an ideal venue for a date, hence the comedy of Dimoldenberg’s premise, but it is a space accessible to a broad swath of London residents, and it holds a particularly cherished place in rap and youth culture. Not long after Dimoldenberg launched “Chicken Shop Date,” another London YouTuber, Elijah Quashie, started his own chicken-shop-based humor series, “The Pengest Munch”—“peng” is slang for “good”—in which, in the role of Chicken Connoisseur, he reviews different establishments. (On Valentine’s Day, 2017, Dimoldenberg and Quashie collaborated on an episode of “Chicken Shop Date” in which they ate together after Dimoldenberg was supposedly stood up by a date.) The pairing of poultry and celebrity is also central to “Hot Ones,” the American online series in which Sean Evans interviews famous people while feeding them increasingly spicy chicken wings. Not long ago, Evans appeared on “Chicken Shop Date.” The gag was the similarity of their shticks—“I basically want to date myself, in a male form,” Dimoldenberg told Evans—but, in fact, the shows are quite different. “Chicken Shop Date” depends on an audience’s suspension of disbelief about the date scenario, whereas Evans offers a more conventional interview exchange, albeit with the added possibility of acute digestive distress.
From the start, “Chicken Shop Date” has been shot in real chicken shops. “Yes, it’s a pain, because there are so many noises, and you’re on the main road, and the fryer’s on, and the phone rings—but it’s great,” Dimoldenberg said. When a guest is from London, a shop appropriate to his or her neighborhood is chosen; though Dimoldenberg makes accommodations for certain of her guests’ dietary requirements—for Eilish, the nuggets were vegan—she is unwilling to compromise the show’s geographic and cultural integrity. (An exception was made for Cher, because she’s Cher; her episode was shot in Paris, at Chicken Hub, a fast-food joint in the Tenth Arrondissement.) Dimoldenberg’s efforts to land Drake for “Chicken Shop Date” have been a running theme; for years, she has said that he will be her very last guest. “We were meant to film together numerous times, and for numerous reasons it didn’t happen,” she told me. “The last message he sent me was about me coming to Sweden to film. And I was, like, ‘Well, there’s no chicken shops in Sweden.’ ”
Dimoldenberg grew up in northwest London, not far from Paddington Station. Her mother is a retired librarian; her father, a director at a public-relations firm, is a member of the local government, representing the Labour Party. Their home was middle class, but the social environment that Dimoldenberg grew up in was economically diverse, and she attended local, state-funded schools that had students from a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Dimoldenberg was one of the few Jewish students in her elementary school. “When it was show-and-tell, I did Jewish prayers—that was my talent,” she told me. At home, she was known for her creativity—she was always roping her younger sister into putting on plays—and, as a teen-ager, for her stinging sarcasm. Her mother, Linda Hardman, told me, “She’s lovely now, but she could be quite alarming at times—but in a way that was probably funny if you were watching it.” Dimoldenberg attributes a prudish tendency to her mom’s influence. “Like, when we were watching television and people were kissing, my mum would be, like, ‘Oh, look away, everyone!’ ” Dimoldenberg told me. When Matty Healy, of the band the 1975, appeared on “Chicken Shop Date,” three years ago, and leaned across the table for a kiss—the only time a guest has ever attempted to take things to first base, at least on camera—Dimoldenberg initially refused, and then gave him a dismissive peck on the forehead.
The very specific territorial allegiance of Londoners to their postcodes was important to the show’s original identity. When, in an early episode, Dimoldenberg asked A. J. Tracey, a rapper from Ladbroke Grove, in West London, which part of the city the best girls come from, his reply—“West, definitely. Where in London are you from?”—prompted an extended comic prevarication on her part: “West. Northwest . . . I’m from West.” The porosity of London’s social and economic strata among young people was crucial in establishing the “Chicken Shop Date” premise: Tracey knew of Dimoldenberg before going on the show because she’d attended the same elementary school as a cousin of his, also a rapper, who goes by Big Zuu. Tracey’s episode, the sixth in the series, was unusually combative. At one point, he said that Dimoldenberg’s face was only “O.K.”; he later instructed her to get into a garbage can in the corner of the shop. “My intention was to make her feel as awkward as possible, honestly,” Tracey told me recently. “I just wanted to see her get a taste of her own medicine.” (He added, “She didn’t get in the bin.”) Dimoldenberg’s sister, Zoë, who trailed her by a year at school and is now a video producer who collaborates behind the scenes on Dimoldenberg’s red-carpet interviews, told me, “The funniness of the show at the beginning was kind of Amelia as an outsider—that’s how it hinged. But, actually, she was an insider, because it was just people we had connections to and people we would meet. That’s how the show is really kind of representative of London.”
“Chicken Shop Date” originated not on YouTube but as a Q. & A. column in the pages of a print magazine, The Cut, produced by members of a youth club that Dimoldenberg attended in her high-school years. (She joined the club on the advice of a teacher who knew of her ambitions to become a fashion-magazine editor; she had already received a rejection letter from Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and of this magazine, with which she had sought a work placement at the precocious age of thirteen.) Even in print form, the scenario of a date in a chicken shop was already in place, as was Dimoldenberg’s unnerving technique. “Do you get fan mail?” she asked the rapper It’s Nate, one of her first interview subjects for The Cut. Her follow-up was “Do you get fans that are male?” While studying at Central St. Martin’s, where she majored in fashion journalism, Dimoldenberg transferred the chicken-shop concept to YouTube, roping in friends with video-production skills to help her make it. After graduating, Dimoldenberg worked as a journalist. She contributed to various publications that would later cover her, such as Vice and the Guardian, where she wrote about Internet phenomena (“How a Dog Named Tuna Became Beloved, Rich, and Famous on Instagram”) and gave cheeky advice to young people on how to get a start in a desired career (“Don’t eat lunch alone in the local cemetery. I did this on one internship. . . . I could have been mingling instead.”)
The youth club where Dimoldenberg got her own start has since been shut down, as have many comparable programs, because of cuts to local government funding made by the Conservative government in the twenty-tens. Dimoldenberg feels strongly about the value of such institutions, especially for young people without her cultural capital. “I didn’t even need those services—I was probably the poshest person in the youth club,” she said. “But I don’t think I would be anywhere without The Cut.” When, in 2018, her former classmate Big Zuu appeared on “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg asked him what law he would like to implement. “It would be that youth clubs have to be built in every area, and run in an amazing way,” he said.
“Love that,” she replied.
“It would change the country,” he said, with feeling. This moment of sincerity, unusually, made it to the final edit. “Vote for Zuu,” Dimoldenberg said.
A few days after the Cynthia Erivo episode was shot, I joined Dimoldenberg at her airy apartment, in Hackney, in East London, where she was reviewing the footage and making notes for her editor. Typically, Dimoldenberg records for thirty to forty minutes. In the early days, the final episodes lasted for three or four minutes; now they can run as long as twelve.
We watched as, onscreen, Dimoldenberg’s producer, Liv, smeared a patch of green color onto Dimoldenberg’s cheek. “Why is this green on your face?” Erivo inevitably asked. Dimoldenberg paused the playback on her laptop and typed an instruction to the video editor: “Before this, have a shot of me doing nothing. Maybe looking awkward.” She pressed Play to review her response: “Oh, sorry, I’ve just, like, been using a new foundation. I feel like it’s not rubbed in. Has it not rubbed in properly?”
That bit having landed, the tape continued to roll. Dimoldenberg had read that Erivo received a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. “So, when are you going to start your Ph.D.?” Dimoldenberg asked. Erivo responded at length: “I’m hoping in the next couple of years—well, it just depends on when I can get the time to actually be in the place, or if I can convince someone to let me do it as I’m moving around.” She went on, “I guess it would be the study of voice and psychology, and how it all works.”
“Wow, it’s fascinating,” Dimoldenberg replied.
Now, in reviewing the footage, Dimoldenberg seemed a bit impatient. Erivo’s response had been full and informative, but not at all funny. Watching Dimoldenberg’s face onscreen, it was possible to see her calculating in the moment how to divert the conversation into richer comedic territory. Eventually, she cut Erivo off: “I can sing live on set. I don’t, because it gives the crew migraines.” (When the finished episode dropped, at the end of the week, Dimoldenberg’s migraine was in it but Erivo’s doctoral plans went unmentioned.)
As playback continued, Dimoldenberg typed notes to her editor about what she liked, including a moment when Erivo gamely pretended to be a head of lettuce, shrugging her shoulders from side to side. Among the material left on the cutting-room floor was an account that Erivo gave of meeting Aretha Franklin after a performance of the musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” which Erivo starred in on Broadway. The story—Franklin had appreciatively sung back to her a line from the performance—might have been the lead anecdote in a profile of Erivo that sought to place her in a lineage of distinguished vocalists. But for Dimoldenberg’s purposes it was useless: “I just feel like, yeah, it’s interesting, but it doesn’t really have a place in ‘Chicken Shop Date.’ ”
More promising was an exchange in which Erivo, who is a marathoner, talked about the addictive qualities of running.
“I’m addicted to dates,” Dimoldenberg replied.
“What’s the end goal?” Erivo asked, sounding genuinely inquiring. “Do you want to fall in love?”
“That’s the thing I’m thinking about—do I even want to fall in love?” Dimoldenberg replied. “Because, if I actually wanted to fall in love, maybe it would have happened by now.” Dimoldenberg pressed Pause again: this was useful material. “I like that, because I’m talking about the story arc of the show,” she said. She pressed Play and watched as she turned the conversation back to Erivo.
“I feel like you are very good at being sincere—you have a sincerity about you that I run away from in my own life, and I just hide it with flirting,” Dimoldenberg said. “Have you always been able to be naturally sincere?”
“I think so,” Erivo said, utterly earnest. “I think I am actually interested in a person, and I think that makes it easy to be sincere, because I’m actually, like, listening, and I’m paying attention.”
“See, I do that, I listen,” Dimoldenberg replied, abruptly. “I then think, O.K., let’s just move on.”
“That doesn’t to me sound like you’re insincere. It sounds like there’s, like, nervousness,” Erivo said, gently. The exchange was no longer exactly Dimoldenberg’s “Chicken Shop Date” character seeking to elicit a usable bit from her guest; it was the real Dimoldenberg seeking advice from someone she admired.
Dimoldenberg pressed Pause again and sighed. “I’m not really good at listening,” she told me, with a tight laugh. “In the show, I don’t really listen. When I’m watching the rushes back, I can see that someone said something, and then I asked them a completely different question, rather than asking a follow-up.” She paused and considered this. “But it’s kind of created the energy of the show, and my character.” “Chicken Shop Date” had been built on Dimoldenberg’s character being so insecure and self-involved that any deeper engagement with a guest was impossible—or at least impossible to include in the final edit. In reviewing the Erivo footage, though, Dimoldenberg could see the possibility of a different kind of exchange, one in which self-sabotage was replaced by a half-real, half-comedic pursuit of greater mutual understanding, and even self-knowledge.
The Erivo episode wasn’t Dimoldenberg’s funniest, but it was winning nonetheless, with Dimoldenberg striving to match Erivo’s empathetic energy, rather than Erivo being obliged to match spiky wits with Dimoldenberg. Dimoldenberg’s plans for her comedy career will eventually require her to retire the “Chicken Shop Date” format, perhaps sooner than her fans expect. Drake needs to get a move on. (He certainly could use a viral boost.) Increasingly, Dimoldenberg told me, she feels able to inhabit a larger emotional space. “Maybe before I was scared of being the real me,” she said. “It’s easier to hide behind a persona. Or this idea of ‘It’s funnier if you’re a character—you’re not funny enough on your own.’ ” Still, Dimoldenberg’s wistfulness about her former guests—her “exes,” as she calls them—is entirely genuine, and it’s also familiar to anyone who has ever tried to bond with a stranger under charged circumstances, and to anyone who has ever hoped for that bond to last. “I always feel really connected to everyone on the show,” she told me. “I think about them all the time. But they probably don’t think about me.” ♦
Comments
Leave a Comment