Justice

John Green Calls Out Media Double Standards Toward Cara Delevingne

July 31st 2015

John Green is defending "Paper Towns" star Cara Delevingne following her awkward TV appearance that went viral earlier this week.

During her "Good Day Sacramento" appearance to promote “Paper Towns," Delevingne gave clipped answers to her interviewers, who called her "Carla," asked an obvious question about whether she'd read the book Paper Towns in preparation for her role in the film adaptation, asked if she was exhausted, and cut the interview short before telling her to take a nap and have some Red Bull.

"She was in a mood," said one host.

“You make $5 million for six weeks of work, you can pretend to talk to ‘Good Day Sacramento’ with some ‘oomph’!” another host quipped.

Green, who wrote the novel Paper Towns and got to know the actress during production of the film version, called out the television interviewers for what he thought was sexist and condescending treatment of Delevingne.

When asked whether she'd read "Paper Towns," Delevingne dismissively told the interviewers, "No, I never read the book or the script. I just winged it." In a blog post on Medium, Green said that her response was appropriate, as it's an "annoying," boring question she has been asked over and over again. He also noted the sexism in this inquiry, as many interviewers asked her male costar when he'd read the book rather than if he'd done so in the first place.

"I spent more than a month with her on tour in Europe and the U.S., and I watched as again and again, she was asked this question," Green wrote. "Cara has read the book (multiple times), but the question is annoying — not least because her male costar, Nat Wolff, was almost always asked when he’d read the book, while Cara was almost always asked if she’d read it. In the past two months, I’ve done something like 300 on-camera interviews. As you get asked the same questions again and again, you develop rote responses as a way of protecting yourself. The rote responses are true — the cast really was like a family; we really are all still friends — but in the repetition, the answers start to feel less and less honest."

Green notes this controversy represents the "first worldliest of first world problems," but says it's important to understand the context.

"There are bigger problems in the world — in fact, almost every problem in the world is bigger — but if people are going to pay attention to these junket interviews and criticize Cara for responding flippantly to a stupid question, I think context might be helpful," he wrote.

In response to the TV interview controversy, Delevingne tweeted that the TV station didn't seem to understand her British humor before retweeting tweets defending her:

Then Delevingne tweeted out Green's written defense of her, not seeming to realize right away that he was the one who wrote it:

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