Laura is an award-winning features reporter and editor specializing in entertainment and culture. You can find her bylines in places like the Washington Post, Vulture, Vanity Fair, Slate, and The Daily Beast. In 2022, she received the L.A. Press Club’s Arts & Entertainment Journalism award for best celebrity investigative reporting for her exposé, “Nicki Minaj and Husband Kenneth Petty’s Campaign to Silence His Sexual Assault Victim.” Laura has interviewed the likes of Mike Schur, Andy Garcia, Samantha Bee, Terry Crews, and Daniel Radcliffe, among others.

The following has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to/watch the full interview on the Interviewist YouTube channel.

Sarah: How are you involved with interviewing these days?

Laura Bradley: I interview folks pretty much every week, both as a reporter and as someone who works in content marketing. In any given week, I might be talking to an actor, a director, or a source for an investigative story. Or, it might be a subject matter expert for a content marketing piece. Each of these conversations is a bit of a gear switch, because they demand different things, but it's really fun to flex that interviewing muscle in so many different ways.

How you would describe your interviewing style or approach?

More than anything, I try to make my interviews feel conversational. Depending on the context, that means different things. 

If I'm speaking to an actor or a director, that means I'm talking to someone who has probably answered all of the basic questions so many times that the minute they hear it, their brain just shuts down—as anybody’s would. CEOs do that, politicians—anybody who speaks for a living has a sort of script.

Whenever I hear that happening, I try to focus on asking an unexpected question. Not in an impertinent way—maybe a follow-up or anything that'll get us into a place where I feel like: Okay, they haven't talked about this a million times. It's going to get us re-engaged or introduce a new idea, just anything to get us away from the subject they've covered 100 times.

The way you make it conversational with investigative sources, it's sort of the opposite. Often, these are folks who haven't ever given an interview or not very many. It’s more about empowering folks to really feel safe and earning trust. Perhaps you give more leeway in determining the parameters of the interview than you would with someone else… I would rather you know that you can trust me to not turn around and print whatever you say two days later without your consent.

How much preparation goes into your interviews?

I try to do as much research as I can. I'll try to read any interview you've given before...I look for follow-ups that didn't get asked in those interviews, because I think that can be a way to reference what's come before in a way that's not redundant. 

I try to get a mix of professional and personal, if that's appropriate. If we're doing more of a personality guided piece, I'm trying to see not just how have you talked about your work, but how much do you talk about your life? What seemed to be the places that you feel comfortable talking versus not comfortable? Are they places that you should be prodded to talk more about, or are they things that it would just be more sensitive to leave alone? 

As an interviewer, the best thing you can do for yourself is to do as much research as possible, because even if it doesn't turn into a question you ask, it can inform how you handle curveballs in the interview. It can also tell you a lot about how the subject you are interviewing interacts with being interviewed. 

There are some folks who are very open books. They love to talk. They love to give an interview. There are some folks who really love to play with the interviewer and like, you know, mix it up a little bit…there are some folks who just are spicier, and if you know that going in, you're not going to take it personally. But if you're somebody who hasn't done that research, and now you've got somebody mixing it up with you a little bit, you can be like, “Did I say something?” It'll get you in your head.

What’s your most memorable interview?

It was for my investigative story looking into the allegations against Nicki Minaj and Kenneth Petty. The primary source was a woman named Jennifer Hough, who had accused the couple of trying to pressure her through intermediaries into essentially recanting her allegations of sexual assault from the 1990s. He had been convicted of attempted rape when they were both teenagers. We spoke for hours multiple times. 

On the completely other end of the spectrum, the first time I interviewed Daniel Radcliffe was very, very fun because I was terrified, and he was very nice, which I had already heard from multiple people.

You said you were interviewing [Jennifer Hough] for hours, multiple sessions. How do you know when you've gotten what you need?

There are so many variables with investigations, and I think doing them right is really difficult. 

I have gotten more practice over time figuring out how to structure my reporting process when it comes to investigations. I've learned what are the things we need to talk about up front? What are the things that I can look into on my end to find out what kind of corroboration are we going to need? Is it worth diving into that? Are we going to be able to include it? If not, is it a road that we still want to go down anyway, just in case? 

Do you have any other best practices, techniques, secret tips and tricks that you deploy when you're doing celebrity interviews?

Really the number one thing is staying present and asking your own follow-up questions. You'll get to the end of an answer, and you can either just move to the next question you scripted for yourself, or you can really stay with it for a second and dig one layer deeper. And that's where the interesting answer is. 

Also go in with a sense of purpose. Are we here to get a headline? Are we here to get the full story? Are we here to show your personality? Whatever you're there to do, you should be able to sum it up in a couple words.

Is there anything you would like to see more of with celebrity interviewing? Or, conversely, less of?

I see fewer interviews being done in a longform format…I get from a practical sense, how many of these can somebody do? Is it worth it? I understand all that, but, selfishly, I want as many long interviews as I can read. 

The other thing is, I would like to see a little bit more, maybe rigor. I find podcast interviews really fun, but the problem is the degree of fact checking that happens on those podcasts can really vary. Some of them are wonderful, and some of them, it's more just a free-flowing conversation where folks can say whatever they want. In general, it's worth recognizing the value of each format and the limitation of each format. 

There's also this growing emphasis on celebrity-on-celebrity interviews, which can be really fun. Like, I love Variety’s Actors On Actors feature that comes out each award season. At the same time, I think there's been a bit of pushback from journalists in this space of—there's a time and a place for those. Including Actors on Actors! Please keep it alive forever! But when we've got actors interviewing each other for interview features, you'll see a certain kind of question gets asked more than others. They're not necessarily going to be as rigorous. And you lose something. 

Who are your interviewing muses, inspirations, role models?

The person who stands out most in this moment, his name is Tim Teeman. He's a journalist who I worked with at Daily Beast for a few years. He gave a talk about interviewing when I was a few weeks or maybe months into the job, and he talked a lot about remembering how to hold on to your power as a journalist. 

His advice was, essentially, if you don't ask everything you've come there to ask, you're only doing a percentage of your job. And that's not what anybody wants. If you're there as a journalist, you're there to get the story, so you shouldn't let anybody get in the way of that. You should feel comfortable pushing back on anyone who isn't your editor, who is trying to limit your story. 

🎤 

Want more? Check out our full, uncut interview below.