As a writer myself there’s nothing I love more than other writers getting all het up about a celeb encounter and tweeting furiously about it. I’ve interviewed a few famous people in my time and can confirm: some of them are dicks. But no one has got me so fired up that I’ve felt the need to scream about it on Twitter (mainly because I have like 35 followers so what would that even achieve). But US journo Steven Weintraub, from pop culture site Collider, has 53k followers, so when he goes on a rant people take notice.
Yesterday, during the mammoth LA junket for Avengers: Infinity War, which is released tomorrow, Weintraub had a celeb run-in that left an extremely bad taste in his mouth. First things first – interview junkets are exhausting, for both the journalists and the talent. For the journos, you’re trying to get fresh/unique angles out of the actors and have to pray to the Hollywood gods that the talent is “on” for your measly 4 mins of time. Meanwhile the stars are getting asked the SAME BLOODY QUESTIONS all day about a movie they made like a year ago. But usually, there’s a level of mutual understanding about the whole process and both parties tend to play ball.
But not in this case. In a now-deleted series of tweets, Weintraub vented about one of the stars who he says was deliberately antagonistic during his alloted junket slot.
Cop the rant below:
WOW. This is huge if true (and it’s absolutely true).
Some genius over at Perez Hilton has done some FBI-level investigating into the incident, first up crossing off all the female stars since Weintraub refers to the person as “he”.
Then, they pointed out that Collider is running several videos from the junket, so this means Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Holland, Mark Ruffalo and Chadwick Boseman are out of contention. (Which is good, because they’re all divine and frankly I don’t want their image tarnished for me).
editing and writing. Expect some of this on @collider tomorrow….#avengersinfintywar #Marvel pic.twitter.com/b8LbjA2WRr
— Steven Weintraub (@colliderfrosty) April 23, 2018
Robert Downey Jr, who definitely has a dickhead reputation, didn’t do interviews so it’s not him. Chris Evans is in New York on Broadway and Chris Hemsworth didn’t do the junket.
Which leaves…
Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Winston Duke, Paul Bettany, Dave Bautista, and Josh Brolin. Chris Pratt is my one true love and he was also paired for interviews with Zoe Saldana, who I doubt would have let him go off his rocker at an interviewer for 4 min.
Some fans reckon it was Mackie, who had a semi-prickly convo with Weintraub a few years back. Meanwhile out of that list, Brolin was the only one who did solo interviews, so some folks reckon it was him. But without knowing anything else about the nature of the incident and what exactly was, it’s hard to actually figure out who it was.
After his rant, Weintraub saw the shitstorm he created by throwing suspicion on a whole bunch of innocent actors, so deleted the tweets.
Yesterday I experienced something that’s never happened to me while working in Hollywood. I subsequently tweeted a few things while very upset that I should’ve kept to myself. While I’m still upset about the experience, I regret airing dirty laundry and have removed the tweets.
— Steven Weintraub (@colliderfrosty) April 22, 2018
I guess we will never know who the guilty party was…. unless we get our hands on the FORBIDDEN TAPES.
Brb, going to rummage through a Disney dumpster somewhere in Hollywood.
