It happens every time. At a reading, or a movie screening, or any live talk where an interview is being conducted by a professional, the moment in the night arrives when audience members get to ask questions. Sometimes (sometimes!) respectful questions are asked, but I always find myself holding my breath for that one person, the person who inevitably bumbles up to the microphone to ask a wordy, non-question (“I just want to say I’m such a faaaan!”) or, in the case of a question recently posed to Zendaya, something worse.
At a recent Q&A for her new HBO show Euphoria, a man first asked Zendaya if she really smokes weed on the show. “Did you literally inhale the good stuff? The weed?” he asked, Page Six reports. To which she replied, no, she did not. But then he had another request: to take her on a date to a local ice cream shop.
Zendaya was polite about it, because every woman knows being rude to a guy asking you out on a date can easily result in whiney chaos, at best. “If I had time I would, because I love ice cream and I appreciate that,” she said. “Is that a no or a maybe?” he then asked. “We’ll see,” she said. He also told her she could bring someone since he was a stranger (how considerate) and Zendaya told the audience they all were going. Ha, ha, terrifying!
I’ll risk sounding like an asshole when I suggest, kindly, that we should just ban the audience question portion of most of these events. Sorry, men like this ruin the whole thing. Not asking the stars on the panel for a date is a low, low bar.