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Jan Wong, Lunch With John Hurt (1999):
Hurt is unhappy talking about his life. At lunch in Toronto at Sassafraz, the temperature drops one degree with every question…. “Is this going to be about smoking?” he asks, slightly irritated.
He’s told the point is to figure out what makes him tick. “I don’t think you’ll manage to do that over lunch,” he says dismissively….
“Nobody told me I was doing an in-depth interview.” Glowering, he cites his right to privacy and denounces “glib” articles published “for the sake of selling newspapers. Not that I’m being churlish.”
The maître d’ interrupts. “How is everything?”
“It was delicious, thank you,” says Hurt pleasantly, demonstrating his fine acting ability. Once the maître d’ disappears, he continues. “I’m slightly annoyed now,” he says icily. “As far as I knew, I came here to help Fox get their wretched film off the ground. Don’t put that down, for chrissake.” […]
Hurt would have stomped out, except he didn’t know the way back to his hotel. After his publicist fled, I walked him back the two blocks to the Four Seasons. (We both pretended everything was fine.)
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But does he feel guilty that, somewhere along the chain, he’s feeding others’ sense of entitlement?
“No,” he says briskly. “Our friends on the plane were beastly South Africans.” In the following week’s column, he’d corrected the “many” readers who’d assumed the couple were American. He says he’s had “big fights” with the FT when he’s mentioned nationalities and they’ve pulled the reference: “I’ve rung up and said, ‘That’s the whole point, that they’re Chinese or Russian, and now it’s neutered.’ It’s entertainment.”
It’s considered gauche to write down exactly what happens. Like when a fat social-justice-warrior girl lied about me in a “right-wing” newspaper. Or how a fat teleplay writer spent half of the last decade of his life on a harassment crusade, now carefully covered up by “friends” and colleagues who pretend it never happened (or that I deserved it).
Or when I attended Jian Ghomeshi’s final hearing, not quite sitting in Crusty Blatchford’s de rigueur second-row-aisle seat, and observed Ghomeshi blinking in sequence, then a pause, then a sequence, and with visibly dry mouth; that the Crown prosecutor, Michael Callaghan, is a fair-skinned bald eldergay who no longer quite fits his suit; what Marie Henein’s shoes were like, and how she needs her thick eyeglasses on while sitting but takes them off before standing, if only because that’s the performance segment of her job; and how almost every word uttered in the courtroom, even by the judge, was read from a script.
You didn’t read any of that anywhere.
Nobody likes a journalist who writes down exactly what happens, and calls people (for) what they are. But reporting that a man in a dress isn’t a woman, or that antifa throws the first punch at demonstrations, or that Mohammedans are waging war on the West all merely require the ability to see – and the willingness to report what was seen. I manage it.