The press junket is one of the film industry’s necessary evils; a way of shoehorning the maximum amount of media attention into the minimum possible time. But the famous faces who are a press junket’s most powerful attractions don’t always enjoy the experience of dealing with the conveyor belt of interviews and public appearances. The latest to suggest the press junket is a less than ideal experience is Lupita Nyong’o, star of Us, Black Panther and 12 Years a Slave, who called them a “torture technique”.
In an interview with Glamour magazine to promote her latest film A Quiet Place: Day One, Nyong’o said she finds press junkets “irritating” and that the process of doing one interview after another where “different people are being ferried in” to be a “torture technique”. She added: “You have to give each one of them attention, focus, and an articulate answer that you just gave to the person before. That’s irritating.
” Nyong’o is by no means the first to resent the press junket, which has been a staple of industry marketing practice for decades. While promoting Christopher Nolan’s A-bomb movie Oppenheimer, for which he won a best actor Oscar, Cillian Murphy called the intense cycle of interviews and red carpet appearances “a broken model” and suggested that the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer – released during the Sag-Aftra actors’ strike which curtailed much promotional activity – showed that junket activity was unnecessary. Oth.