We are all quite familiar with the celebrity sit-down interview setup. The celebrity—usually with a project to promote, usually dressed up in trendy garments—will charm their interlocutor (and us, their audience) with anecdotes and jokes and amusing tales. There will usually be some overly friendly, maybe forced-seeming banter—often a clip from the project in question—and the whole back-and-forth will end with some familiar whispering between the host and guest, as the credits roll on-screen.
Grace Coddington’s interviews are a little different. The former Vogue creative director is hosting a new original series, Face to Grace, for the video network Made to Measure, IMG’s fashion OTT network. In the six episodes—all filmed at the Midtown eatery Mr. Chow, on 57th Street, which is owned by Michael Chow, Coddington’s ex-husband—Coddington dines with various creatives, including Chow himself, actor Ansel Elgort, fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière, director Sofia Coppola, and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. The interviews have a certain looseness and charm about them: in the first episode, featuring Elgort (whom Coddington has known since he was born, due to her friendship and close professional relationship with his father, the photographer Arthur Elgort), a phone rings in the middle of the interview (Coddington jokes it’s probably Elgort’s girlfriend checking in), and there’s a pause when Elgort eats a dumpling.
There’s also a notable authenticity and honesty to the episode, which lasts about 20 minutes and is currently streaming online. For example, Coddington explains she had trouble watching Elgort’s Baby Driver the first time she saw it—she was a “bit self-conscious,” because she knew Elgort so well, and “wanted so badly for it to be great [that] it was kind of difficult for [her] to watch it not already judging it.” (The second time she watched it, she “liked it a lot more” and was “cracking up.”) When discussing a run-in the two had at a movie theater recently, Elgort offers that he is not a fan of any of the new Star Wars films. (Elgort: “I hated it. I don’t like the new Star Wars movies.” Coddington: “I don’t like any Star Wars movies.”) It is clear that the real-life comfort level between the two pays dividends on-screen; imagine sitting down for an interview with your favorite aunt.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Coddington said that filming the series at a restaurant was important to her in creating that sense of intimacy. “There’s something about talking over a meal that makes people relax,” she said. “And you can sort of get to talk about silly things, or not—or serious things, or whatever. And you can take it anywhere, as opposed to, you know, on a proper talk show.” She said her role model for the series was none other than David Letterman: “I think he’s so incredible . . . and that’s my dream: when I grow up, I’d like to be David Letterman. I’m nowhere near him, but, you know, that’s my dream.”
Coddington said, despite decades at the top of the New York social pyramid, she’s not especially comfortable in a conversational setting, which is partly why she selected guests she already knew. “I’m very chicken, and I’m actually not someone who talks terribly easily. I can chat, but to initiate a conversation is . . . I find quite hard. I find it quite intimidating.” She continued, “So I said I’ll only interview—for the moment, anyway, until I’ve kind of practiced—people that I know really well, and I sort of know their home life as well as their . . . the way they present themselves to the world. I felt it gave me an edge on other people that might interview [those] people.”
Elgort was one of her favorite interviews of the series. “He was the first person I interviewed, and I must say: he was fabulous, because he is very funny, and I think he likes me a bit. He’s really adorable, because although he’s kind of famous now, he’s not . . . to me he’s not changed. He’s still that sort of cheeky kid that is so endearing.”
Elgort—who spoke to Vanity Fair from the Los Angeles house of his Baby Driver co-star Jamie Foxx, where he is finishing up recording his debut album—said he was on board for the sit-down immediately after Coddington asked him to join her. He said he recently caught up with Coddington at the Met Gala, where he walked around with her for 15 minutes (“which at the Met Gala is a long time to spend with one person, because everyone is bouncing around a lot”), and at the Prada show in New York, where he spoke to her and Pat McGrath for about half an hour. “It was sort of like me and Grace clearly were becoming friends, and enjoyed seeing each other at events and speaking as adults for the first time, because she always knew me as Arthur’s son. And we had always had interesting conversations about fashion and about my father and about all the things that she’s such a great wealth of knowledge for. Then she asked me if I would do her new show, and I just [said], of course.“
To Elgort, this sort of interview, in its more unscripted nature, is the future of talk shows. “That’s how it should be, and that’s honestly . . . I think the future of these kinds of shows will probably not be such professionally done versions. It’ll probably be, like, a third person at the table with a phone, and they’re also even maybe part of the conversation, or they’re just really good at filming stuff. Because that’s what people like right now. That’s why social media pops off, because people feel like that fourth wall is broken, rather than feeling like it’s all uptight. What I wanted to do going into that interview—what I thought it was gonna be, and what it ended up being by the end, which was nice—was it just sort of felt like Grace and I were just sitting there talking.”
Elgort—who regularly posts on his Instagram feed for his 10.5 million followers—said he also enjoys the direct channel he has to his fans. “I think that social media is now . . . it is media. It is media that we have control over, as the artist. That’s my direct connection to my fans, and I don’t need somebody to twist my words, or make the headline a certain way, so that they can sell their magazine or get clicks.” He said he tries not to think too hard about what he’s posting, though it can sometimes be a challenge. “I try not to think about it too hard, because I try to think about it [as] if I was just posting for my thousand friends or whatever [I had] when I first started Instagram. But that’s hard—it’s hard, because you gotta think about that maybe studio executives are gonna see this: Are they gonna be cool with that? Yeah, probably. O.K., cool. So there’s a little bit of that.”
He said, though he has definitely been subject to squealing fans and invasive cameras in public before, he isn’t hounded by the paparazzi and TMZ cameras all that much right now: “I think most of the people who have TMZ cameras on them all the time want that. And they sort of get that to happen. Then there are a select few who are in a controversy or something, so they have the TMZ cameras on them without wanting it. But if you really want TMZ to go away, I think you can just maybe not go to the restaurant in L.A. where they’re outside. And you can maybe not live in L.A.”
He continued, “I’ve talked to celebrities about this kind of thing, who complain to me about how they can’t live their lives anymore. I’m like, ‘Well, you also dress to the nines every day, and you’—like I said—‘go to the restaurant with the TMZ cameras outside—you clearly like it.’ I think there's a way as a public figure to be more hidden. I don’t know. I don’t see Christian Bale all the time getting paparazzi-ed . . . I don’t think it’s that hard—the world’s a big place.”
While a second season of Face to Grace has not officially been green-lighted, Coddington says she is hoping for the chance to get to do more episodes: “I’m really hoping they’ll ask me, yes. ’Cause I’ve got all sorts of people lined up that are fun . . . We’ll see how people react to Ansel."
