It’s Friday, and I’m watching my favorite romantic comedy again. It’s the one with the English bloke with floppy hair who can’t quite seem to say the right thing. He’s starring opposite the quirky journalist who is willing to do anything for the assignment, maybe even fall in love along the way. It’s just nice to watch charm and power shift back and forth between two people in conversation. The “will they, won’t they” of it all. The awkwardness? The tension. I can watch it over and over again because the film is short—just a minute or two long.
My favorite rom-com of the moment is not a Nora Ephron or Richard Curtis gem, nor can it be found in Turner Classic Movies’ deep vault. Not yet, at least. It’s a 90-second clip of rising celebrity interviewer Amelia Dimoldenberg flirting her way through a buttonholing of prestige actor and erstwhile Spider-Man Andrew Garfield on the Golden Globes red carpet last month. And it’s actually a sequel. She and Garfield spoke on camera at the GQ Men of the Year Awards two months prior. (Also very fun viewing!)
Over video from her London home, Dimoldenberg told me that she can’t say whether the clip is or is not an accurate representation of British flirting. (Writer Louis Staples taxonomized it as such on Twitter after it went viral.) It’s the only kind of flirting she knows. Then again, she’s British and Garfield is British, so maybe there’s something to it.
“At one point I say, ‘Well, I’m not even interested anyway,’ or something like that, which I think is very much like something that we do here. You are towing this line where you don’t really know: Are you interested? Are you not?” she said. “Like I’m not gonna reveal too much of myself to you, but I’m smiling the whole time, so what’s happening?”
Sounds complicated, but if anyone knows how to navigate this kind of situation, it’s Dimoldenberg. The comedian has made a career out of the type of flirting that runs headfirst toward the limn of cringe. The Golden Globes red carpet was a side gig; her day job is producing and hosting Chicken Shop Date, the first show in a surprisingly crowded genre that turns eating chicken with celebrities into deep-fried gold.
“The romance element and the dating element is something that’s intrinsic to my style, and works really well. I’m always just waiting for someone else to steal this thing that I’m doing,” she said. “It just hasn’t happened yet.”
The show, which now draws between a couple million to 15 million views per episode, started as a print column well over a decade ago; Dimoldenberg wrote for a Westminster youth club magazine made by local teens, and she rightly judged it would work better in a visual medium, migrating it over to YouTube eventually. The format hasn’t changed much since it launched on the platform in 2014, though the guests have gone from London-specific to more general interest. She began by taking out the city’s deep roster of grime artists, from Ghetts to AJ Tracey, and in the last few years, she’s “dated,” to use the show’s vocabulary, Ed Sheeran, Keke Palmer, the 1975’s Matt Healy, Rosalía, and Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya. Despite Dimoldenberg’s ability to pull ever more famous faces, she is still just a girl eating nuggets in front of celebrities, asking them to fall in love with her.
Chicken Shop Date turned Dimoldenberg into a rising comedic star, if not yet a household name, and she’s beginning to enjoy that—or at least process it. When we spoke, she’d just celebrated her 29th birthday by taking 20 good friends to the English countryside. “Sometimes people will ask, like, ‘How do you take in success?’” she said. “I think a really good way to do that is by giving to your people, like your friends and your family. In those moments is where I actually take in the good things that have been happening.”