When David Marchese took over The New York Times Magazine’s Talk column in 2019, he had already been interviewing celebrities for several years, first at Spin magazine and then at New York magazine. When I hired him, I called him “one of the most prolific and profound interviewers in the country.” But I never could have imagined what he would do with Talk. In his hands, what was already a well-established and respected Q. and A. transformed into something beautiful, hilarious and, yes, profound. Now he has published his final Talk — a conversation with the actor Jeremy Strong. But don’t worry: That doesn’t mean David is stepping away from interviews. In fact, he’s introducing a new interview franchise, called The Interview, in late April. David will be joined in this endeavor by another hugely talented journalist, Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Every week, one of them will have a conversation with a fascinating person, which will appear in the magazine and online and also as a podcast. (This means instead of reading David doing his best John Malkovich impression to John Malkovich, you can read it and hear it!) To celebrate David’s great run, I recently sat down to interview him — a somewhat intimidating task, and also a total pleasure.
You once said that the first question you ask in an interview is almost more for revealing personality than it is about getting a great answer. So I want to ask you something that might reveal something about your personality. As the interviewer, you’re usually in control, you’re well prepared, you’ve made a plan for the conversation, you’re driving it. You’re running the show. So I was interested to see how you would respond to a situation in which you’re not in control. So, how are you responding? I would say my overriding concern is not coming off like a yutz. I definitely feel more nervous having to give the answers rather than ask the questions.
What did the waiter do? The waiter said something like, Yes sir, is it not sufficient? I think Reed sort of shrugged and let him put it down, but I don’t know what he thought shaved Parmesan was. Maybe it had to be smaller pieces? I don’t know.
Let me ask you about some different categories of people. You have had a lot of great encounters with actors over the years. I wonder if there’s a way for you to generalize about what actors are like, or if there are patterns to interviewing an actor that are different from the patterns that you experience interviewing musicians or novelists. I’m lucky enough that the actors I speak to are actors in whom I have a sincere interest. And the thing that I’m interested in is their personality, and how their personality comes through in their work. So, when I’m interviewing an actor, I think typically what I’m trying to do that is more pronounced than with other kinds of subjects, is just show their personality. I think that really comes through in the Nicolas Cage interview, or an interview I did with Nicole Kidman — or one I really enjoyed was Shirley MacLaine, who is such a sassy broad. Also, usually famous actors are charismatic people who are fun to talk to. And that’s part of the enjoyment, too.
Is there an interview with a musician that unlocked for you something about their music that you just did not understand before? You know, I think in a weird way something closer to the opposite is more likely to happen, where after I speak to a musician, a little bit of the magic dust goes away.
Even for your new best friend? Even for my new rock-star best friend. He sent me a text like, You should come to the show. And I made an excuse why I couldn’t go, but it was a blatantly transparent excuse. And I knew immediately: He’s going to know. And then there was the thing that happens where the three dots went away in his text response, and then it was just some cursory response, like, oh, too bad you can’t make it. And I’ve never been in touch with that guy again.
That’s such a sad story. You hurt this rock star’s feelings. That’s probably good for them every once in a while.
It feels as if you’re trying to figure out something about the world and how to live in it. That comes up overtly in some interviews, like the one with the so-called world’s happiest man or the hospice nurse. But there’s often an undercurrent to your questions that suggests to me that you’re using these interviews to try and answer questions you have about how to be a good person, how to take care of the people around you, how to grieve, how to deal with the stress of a catastrophic era. These themes come up again and again and again. That trend you’re identifying is partly related to the answer I just gave where, you know, it’s about my own curiosity. But the underlying question of why that has increasingly become my curiosity — the answer, honestly, has to do a lot with getting older and experiencing more life. Once you have kids, your questions about the world change. And obviously there are larger events happening in the world that raise questions about goodness and what it means to be a person in the world. That’s happening in parallel with the questions I’m asking in my own life. I’m often trying to interview people who I think can speak to fundamental questions that I have, not just about me, but that I think are also relevant to a lot of other people. Because if it was just about me, I’d be asking more questions about amplifier repair or something.
What do you think it would do to your thinking? At other jobs I paid very close attention to the traffic, and it always pushed my thinking in more mercenary, less creative ways. And the pleasure you get out of a traffic success is in my experience dwarfed by the anxiety you get from traffic failures. But that’s a digression. The climate stuff, it all confirms for me that our world is behaving in a completely insane manner about the climate crisis.
Are you susceptible to climate doom? It’s not even doom. I think it’s climate realism. It’s a very stark negative future that we’re looking at directly. And there’s not nearly enough action being taken to try and mitigate the worst of it. I think it’s better to be alive than to not be alive. So in that sense, I wouldn’t necessarily call it doom. But it’s going to be bad. It is bad. And all these people I talked to confirm that.
All right, let me ask you a couple of personal questions. I think readers and your colleagues and your subjects think of you as somebody who has a real gift for talking to people. And that’s 100 percent true. But I know that this was not always the case — that the ability that you have to find a way to not only get other people to open up, but to get yourself to open up, is something that you developed over time. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I can talk about that. There definitely was a pretty low period in my life when I found even the idea of talking to people I didn’t already know to be depressingly daunting. I used to skip out on classes in college rather than have to lead a discussion or give a presentation. I’d never raise my hand to say anything.
And this is a fear of public speaking? Oh, it’s bigger than that. It sounds like a stupid term, but I just had pretty low self-esteem at the time. I didn’t want to have my presence registered with anyone else. I’m aware of the hardships that people face in the world. In the scheme of things it was not that bad. But to know that used to be me, and that now I have a job where I talk to strangers at length, basically in front of the public — I still find it a little hard to wrap my head around. It feels as if my life took a pleasantly unpredictable path.
Do you think having been a person who once struggled to have the kinds of conversations that you now have freely has helped you do that as well as you do? I don’t know that I’ve thought about it in those terms specifically. I just take the idea of conversation seriously, even when it’s lighthearted. And that includes both for me and the person I’m talking to.
Let me ask you one more personal question that’s perhaps a little more lighthearted. This is sort of a deep cut, but in your Emma Chamberlain interview, you referred to being unable to go to prom because you were suspended. Yeah.
I believe that when this came up in your interview with Emma Chamberlain, she said that it was iconic. Now that I know the whole story, I concur. So, a couple of last questions. You’ve been doing this long enough that some of the people who you’ve interviewed have died. When that happens, do you go and read the interview you did with them? I think the main thing is, I feel some more direct sadness that I wouldn’t have otherwise felt if I hadn’t interviewed the person. The instance of somebody dying after I interviewed them that resonated the most with me was this economist named Herman Daly, who talks about how the idea of endless growth is ecologically unsustainable and irrational. He was well known in his field, but certainly not a celebrity. I wouldn’t even say he’s necessarily famous for an economist. After the piece ran, he sent me a really nice note and said how gratifying it was for him at the end of his career to get to talk about his ideas in The New York Times. He died three or four months after the interview. And I felt happy to have given him that opportunity, to talk about the ideas that meant so much to him.
What about the flip side of that? I’m sure it must happen all the time, that an interesting person in the world dies and you think, Man, I really wanted to interview them. Who’s on that list? It’s a bit of a morbid exercise. There are some people who I know I’ll just never get to interview.
You’re right. This is a morbid exercise. So can you say a bit about the next thing that you’re going to do? Talk is retiring, but it’s being replaced by something that’s very similar to Talk on the one hand, but very different on another. There will be a podcast of each interview, and you’ll be co-hosting this whole enterprise with Lulu. I’m curious about the audio part. You have these very intimate encounters with people. In a funny way, the intimacy of the moment that you have with any of your subjects is kept private, because the thing that we read is a transcript, but it’s not like being in the room exactly. But “The Interview” is going to be almost like bringing people fully into the room. What’s an example of an interview that you’ve done over the past five years that you think, wow, that would have been a great one to have audio for? I did an interview with the comedian Jerrod Carmichael a couple of years ago in which he had just publicly come out, and it was almost as if he was on fire with wanting to express who he was. And I think that really came across in the timbre of his voice. It would have been really cool for people to hear that. Or Nicole Kidman. I found her to have a provocative tone, like she was playful, that came through in her voice. Oh, you know what was a great one? When I did the interview with Bono, and at one point he started singing a new U2 song. Of course that would have been great to have the audio for.
Earlier we talked about your theory about the first question in an interview. Do you have a theory about the last question? You’re trying to end on some sort of answer that nods to the larger themes of the interview. But maybe I could just hijack this and say that, as my last answer to this interview, when I look back at the people I’ve been able to talk to, it’s been such a gift for me, just as a person. That’s been an incredible thing. And then to be able to share them with people who seem to be interested, that’s really been both an adventure and a gift.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
