Earlier this week, Paper Towns actress Cara Delevingne was convicted of the crimes of being “kind of tired” and “needing a Red Bull” in the court of Good Morning, Sacremento, long-recognized as the highest legal authority in the world of California-based morning entertainment natter. And while Delevingne has proven herself perfectly capable of defending herself from the slings and arrows of outraged TV morning show hosts, that didn’t stop her friend and colleague John Green, author of the book the movie is based on, from stepping in with some thoughts of his own.
Writing on Medium on Thursday, Green voiced his full-support for Delevingne, while also speaking a bit about his own soul-draining experiences on the junket circuit they’ve both been caught up in since the movie started making the rounds.
“The whole process of commodifying personhood to sell movie tickets is inherently dehumanizing,” Green wrote, because he’s both a professional author, and new enough at the Hollywood promotion machine to still have a little of his non-jaded nature left. “The TV people want some part of you, and in exchange for it, they will put the name of your movie on TV. But in that process, you do lose something of your self.”
Green acknowledged that junket-fatigue is “the first worldiest of first world problems,” but also pointed out that there’s a certain sexism in the way hosts tended to treat Delevingne, usually asking if she’s read the book the movie is based on, while her male co-star Nat Wolff was simply asked when he’d read it. (The Good Morning Sacremento hosts’ question to that effect elicited the first truly snarky response from Delevingne, although the fact that they called her “Carla” beforehand probably didn’t help.)
In the end, Green categorized Delevingne—who thanked the author for his words of support on Twitter—as much braver than himself, for refusing to give in to the natural urge to turn every junket interview into the same cookie-cutter set of responses: “Cara, however, refuses to stick to the script. She refuses to indulge lazy questions and refuses to turn herself into an automaton to get through long days of junketry. I don’t find that behavior entitled or haughty. I find it admirable. Cara Delevingne doesn’t exist to feed your narrative or your news feed—and that’s precisely why she’s so fucking interesting.” Green’s response, of course, has now been fed into the existing narrative and news feed, allowing the cosmic ballet to go on.