The 19 Press Tour Stops Ruthless Publicists Care About Now (and Don't)
‘Vanity Fair’ or Theo Von? ‘60 Minutes’ or 60 seconds? Reps unload on today's A-list outlets and who has the new power
Nicole LaPorte earlier looked at Eli Roth’s crowdfunded indie studio, the plight of docs in the MAGA era, the spec script market comeback, how WFH is killing Hollywood and how Hollywood DEI is now D-I-E.
This Ankler feature is a 15-minute read.
In April, when Ben Affleck was plugging The Accountant 2, the star’s longest sit-down interview wasn’t on 60 Minutes or NPR’s Fresh Air. It was on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, the popular podcast and YouTube show where Von, who occupies looser, less polarizing coordinates in the Manosphere than Joe Rogan, bros out with his guests with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure-style enthusiasm. Indeed, most of the nearly hour-and-a-half conversation was spent musing about things like middle school bullies who aren’t held back in school and the metaphor of Hollywood as a placid lake with ugly gunk underneath its surface. When Affleck’s film was finally brought up, it was clear Von, 45, hadn’t seen it.
“So, who is the accountant?” the comedian asked earnestly, sitting across from Affleck on his man cave-style set.
“You’ve seen the first movie, right?” Affleck responded gamely. “This is the second. You saw the first one with me and Jon (Bernthal) — it came out, like, eight years ago.”
Von, his outgrown mullet kept in place by a backward-turned baseball cap, lit up like a kid who’d just figured out where he put his lunch money. “Yeah! So this is the second? Sorry, man. I didn’t put it together.”
Far from the days when a publicist would have halted the interview and stormed off with her star in such a scenario (and leaked the bit to Page Six to embarrass the interlocutor to boot), this is the new 2025 attention economy, where a strange hierarchy of power appearances holds sway and is keeping reps scrambling for media real estate in a new world order (they dish on the 19 that matter most below).