‘Panic, panic, hope’: Dissecting Vogue’s ‘73 Questions’ with Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Unpacking the 'Fleabag' star’s implicit critique of hustle culture, ‘guilty’ feminism, and celebrity authenticity

Recently, a student of mine asked for help with an unusual English class assignment: an analysis of Vogue’s ‘73 Questions’ series, a popular group of interviews conducted with high-profile celebrities. The assignment was to interpret one or more of these interviews in relation to a number of ‘global issues’, such as patriarchal power, the cult of celebrity, and authenticity in the age of social-media. Intrigued by this challenge, I assigned as homework Vogue’s interview with Phoebe Waller-Bridge (of Fleabag and Killing Eve fame) and dutifully set out to prepare some notes for our discussion, not knowing for sure if this particular interview would yield any interesting results.

To my pleasant surprise, Waller-Bridge’s pithy answers, mannerisms, and body language offered a rich well-spring of discussion on a number of topics that I think will have a broad interest, and so I have decided to expand our classroom discussion into an essay form below. If you haven’t already seen the nine-minute interview, you can do so here, but in any case I’ll be describing most of the video’s main points below.

Vogue’s ‘73 Questions’ interview Phoebe Waller-Bridge presents a satirical take on hustle culture and the contemporary cult of personality among celebrities. The overall format of the show, in which an audience is given a glimpse into the intimate day-to-day life of a working celebrity is designed to present an image of success to the wider public, usually in the form of a grandiose domestic setting where celebrities can showcase the fruits of the labour in the form of lavish architectural features, wardrobes, and material markers of wealth and status.

Perhaps most infamously, Vogue’s interview with Kim Kardashian was like something out of a slow-burn A24 horror-film, featuring the then-wife of Hitler-apologist Kanye West walking backwards through a sparsely-furnished beige mansion replete with an unfinished-wood grand piano and a bizarre, $30,000 custom-made basin-less kitchen sink. Kim and Kanye’s answers to the interview questions are almost as vapid and hollow as the mansion itself; when asked what the best thing about being a father is, Kanye robotically replies, ‘The kids.’ For Kim and Kanye’s beigepocalypse bungalow, its stripped-down aesthetic and emphasis on space rather than ornamentation is itself a signifier of wealth and status; the mansion oozes cultural capital to mask any lingering stench of their ‘new money’ background.

Waller-Bridge’s interview, however, breaks with this trend somewhat, as the audience is invited to follow the writer-comedienne down the garden path; literally, as the interview ends in a Soho park where Waller-Bridge continues her journey to her next ‘appointment’ at the final ‘Fleabag edit’. Structurally, the interview follows Waller-Bridge perambulating from one place of work to another, as the interview begins with her conducting a ‘pretend rehearsal’ of Fleabag at the theatre in which the one-woman show was first performed. The audience are therefore under the impression that the successful writer and actress cannot spare a minute in her day for a sit-down interview, or an extended chat in a domestic space. Rather, an image of success is predicated upon a template of ‘hustle culture’, in which the celebrity is seen continually moving from one project, destination, or opportunity to the next. How else are we to interpret Waller-Bridge’s frenetic definition of the creative process?: ‘Panic, panic, hope.’

This vision of success is validated at multiple points in the interview, most notably when Waller-Bridge is stopped in the street by a passing fan who expresses admiration for her work. When asked if this is a common occurrence, Waller-Bridge somewhat sheepishly replies in the affirmative. On the other hand, the conscious artifice created by the format of the Vogue interview does not go unridiculed, and it is this commitment to ridicule which, we learn, is the foundational ethos of Fleabag: ‘she lives to make you laugh’. The final scene of the interview sees Joe, the interviewer, proffering his own draft of a TV pilot for Waller-Bridge’s comments and review, again reinforcing the urgency of milking every relationship, every opportunity, and every second of the day for a shot at the big-time. Waller-Bridge’s reaction, however, is telling. After making an ardent promise to read Joe’s script, she is seen swiftly disposing of it in the trash. Perhaps this is a suggestion that the audience should do the same, not only to unsolicited drafts from anonymous TV personalities, but in rejecting the idea of ‘hustle culture’ itself. 

Another fascinating aspect of this interview, and of Waller-Bridge’s work in general, is the exploration of how certain strands of ‘feminism’ can make women feel guilty or regressive for valuing their beauty and sexual attractiveness. A recognition of this problem, however, doesn’t stop Waller-Bridge from gleefully subverting the gendered stereotype of the polite and submissive woman. While sporting her sugary grin, she defines ‘female rage’ as ‘uncontrollable, violent, female anger’, condenses the plot of Killing Eve into ‘murder, murder, hair’, and sends the Vogue censor into a stir by yelling ‘CUNT’ in the middle of a busy Soho street. But female identity is, for Waller-Bridge, more complicated than just being outspoken; it straddles multiple contradictions. Waller-Bridge’s least favourite question to be asked is ‘What’s it like being a woman?,’ while at the same time the question she’d like to be ‘asked more often’ only draws attention to her physical (and surely feminine?) appearance: ‘Are you a model?’

Unsurprisingly, Waller-Bridge’s favourite podcast is ‘guilty feminists’ or ‘anything with the word guilt in it’; I’m reminded of the scene where Fleabag and her sister are asked to raise their hands in a crowded lecture hall if they would trade five years of their lives ‘for the so-called perfect body’. Fleabag and Claire instantly assent to this hypothetical proposal, singling them out among the crowd. ‘We are bad feminists’, Fleabag mutters sheepishly. The upshot? No attempt to pin woman down into a neat category is unworthy of ridicule.