From a fun idea at 16, now Amelia Dimoldenberg has millions of fans worldwide

The Age

a day ago

This story is part of the July 6 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories.
Amelia Dimoldenberg has just got back from a hard-earned break in Brazil. 'Most places I go now on holiday I'll get recognised by different people, which is kind of amazing,' says the born-and-bred Londoner. 'My parents always think it's so crazy that people come up to me and ask me for photos.'
The trajectory of Dimoldenberg's career is, indeed, crazy. It's now more than 10 years since she launched Chicken Shop Date, the wildly popular YouTube series in which she interviews A-list actors and pop icons in fast-food chicken shops. In fact, nowadays she is often more famous than the people she's grilling over nuggets, thanks in part to her other gig – being flown around the world to deploy her blunt interviewing style on the red carpet. Think of her as a sort of quirky, more socially awkward Joan Rivers.
When we meet, she has recently hosted red-carpet interviews at the Oscars, the Brits and Saturday Night Live 's 50th anniversary event in New York, where she rubbed shoulders with everyone from Kristen Wiig to Bad Bunny. 'It was just an amazing experience for so many of my comedy heroes to come up to me and be like, 'I'm such a fan of your show,' ' she says of the Saturday Night Live gig.
The 31-year-old is squeezing our interview into a tight work schedule. 'I set myself up in … I don't want to say in prison because it's not prison, but I'm in some kind of cage of my own making,' she says, sipping tea and dressed down in jeans and a Wallace & Gromit T-shirt ('I love Wallace & Gromit 's awkward charm,' she explains). 'I'm just always working a million miles an hour, but there are so many things I want to do.'
It all started with Chicken Shop Date. Her idea to interview UK rappers in a date scenario initially began as a column in a youth club magazine called The Cut when she was 16. From there it morphed into short videos shot in harshly lit fried-chicken shops while she was also studying fashion journalism.
In 2014 her first on-screen interview was with the rapper Ghetts in a branch of Chicken Cottage. Since then, her dates have become more starry: Cher, Jennifer Lawrence, Harris Dickinson, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish. Her 2022 date with Louis Theroux has more than 12 million views; American rapper Jack Harlow has pulled in over 19 million.
To have an original idea as a teenager (and not even a media nepo-baby teenager) and then pull it off so spectacularly is astonishing. 'I've always believed in the idea, I've always thought it's going to be great. It was just a matter of getting people to watch it,' says the woman now living the Gen Z dream of turning a YouTube channel into both fame and a full-time, highly lucrative career. MrBeast, the world's most popular YouTuber, for instance, reportedly earned about $US1.1 billion ($1.7 billion) last year. Dimoldenberg may not be in that league but her annual social media income is estimated at £4 million ($8.36 million), thanks in part to the lucrative advertising lured in by the 3.1 million followers she has on YouTube, four million on TikTok and 2.6 million on Instagram.
The show's recipe, tweaked and honed over the years, is carefully balanced: awkward tone, unexpected questions ('If you were an ice-cream cone, would you rather be licked or bitten?' she asked a pink-cheeked Eilish) and a ruthless edit down to about eight minutes. Her sister, Zoe, who is 18 months younger, is sent the edited version to give feedback. 'She doesn't like to indulge me,' Dimoldenberg says. 'There'll be bits where I'll be like, 'Oh, I love it,' because the guest is complimenting me loads. She's like, 'It's unnecessary, you can take that out.' '
Zoe was on the Brazil holiday too, and the pair are close. 'We're kind of twin vibe because we have the same friends, we hang out socially, we work together, we used to live together – but now we don't because we were too co-dependent,' adds Dimoldenberg, who currently lives alone in east London. 'I'm very lucky to have someone who is so similar to me.'
Dimoldenberg grew up in central London with her mum, Linda, a retired librarian, and dad, Paul, who is a Labour councillor at Westminster City Council. Initially, being funny was just a way to make friends – at her girls-only state school she cottoned on that making people laugh would get her on the invite list. Years later, she partly credits her single-sex education for her self-confidence: 'When you're at a girls' school, you are not competing with male voices. I hung out with guys as a young person and they dictate the dynamic of the friendship group.'
In Andrew Garfield's chicken shop date he asks: 'Do you think this has f---ed up the fact that we could have actually gone on a date at some point maybe?'
We get on to her hottest dates. In 2023, she met Cher in a chicken shop in Paris (2.3 million YouTube views). What was the legend like off camera? 'Amazing, so nice, talking to all the crew. Literally, we couldn't get her out of the shop. She was chatting to everyone.' Jennifer Lawrence (9.2 million views) was one of her favourites. 'It's amazing when they're going toe-to-toe for you, and they're funny and charming,' Dimoldenberg says. 'She literally did one piece of press [promoting a rom-com] in the UK and it was my show.'
As an interview subject, Dimoldenberg is polite and engaged but has a slight frostiness that I fail to melt. She seems unimpressed when I ask about Andrew Garfield, for instance, the Spider-Man actor with whom she's had famously fizzing chemistry on the red carpet, first at British GQ 's Men of the Year party in 2022 and at the 2023 Golden Globes. Cue fans clamouring for real-life romance to blossom. In Garfield's chicken shop date last year (11 minutes of nonstop flirting that's had 11 million views), he asks: 'Do you think this has f---ed up the fact that we could have actually gone on a date at some point maybe?'
What's the latest on their flirtationship, then? 'We're friends. I saw him at the Oscars and he's a great guy, a great person,' she says, professional hat firmly on, although she admits: 'We've got such a great dynamic.'
She relishes it when her chicken shop encounters blur the boundaries between what's real and what's not. Matty Healy, the lead singer of UK band the 1975 and Taylor Swift's one-time bad-boy squeeze, tried to kiss Dimoldenberg at the end of their YouTube date in 2022 (5.9 million views). She ended up pecking the musician's forehead instead. 'He was definitely down to kiss me,' she says, grinning.
Despite her numerous chicken shop dates, Dimoldenberg is happily single. 'I've got my whole life to be settling down with someone. My life is very fast-paced. I'm going travelling, I'm working away, I'm doing all these different things. I feel like I'm really glad to be single at this moment.'
Whenever he comes along, her ideal man is 'kind, thoughtful, intelligent', has self-confidence and, obviously, a solid sense of humour. Does Chicken Shop Date get in the way of real-life romance? 'I feel like it depends. Obviously, the guys who I'm dating need to be confident in themselves for many different reasons. I also just feel like maybe my work gets in the way of dating more broadly. I definitely want to create space in my life to meet someone but, at the same time, I don't want it to be the focus of everything.'
Right now, her focus is clearly her career. She is developing a romantic comedy film in which she'll take on the lead role ('It's me playing myself'), and another project, a drama series that Dimoldenberg wrote, is in the early development stage at the BBC. She has other acting ambitions too: 'Playing versions of myself, or in comedic roles. I don't necessarily, at this point, have an ambition to do a dramatic reading of Shakespeare.'
Going into auditions has forced her inner monologue to shift from telling herself that she definitely won't get the role to telling herself that she will get it. 'Saying I'm not going to get something is a negative mindset and I feel like often the voice in my head is so negative and critical,' she says. 'It's a good exercise to start talking to yourself positively.'
Dimoldenberg acknowledges that it's not easy being on the red carpet alongside mostly pin-thin women. 'The self-confidence thing, in terms of body image, is hard when you're having to have your photo taken, and you're literally in a line-up next to professional models, for example,' she says. Yet she vows never to have cosmetic surgery, which she believes has become normalised: 'That'd be very revolutionary of me, a celebrity, to have no surgery.'
Due to her series' near-blanket exposure over social media, endless celebrities are lining up to be her guests, but Dimoldenberg is discerning: 'Just because you're famous, you're not going to get an interview.' She knows who she wants to lure, though: Harry Styles, Beyoncé, Timothée Chalamet, Kendrick Lamar, the UK rapper Giggs and Philomena Cunk (aka the comedian Diane Morgan).
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Politicians of any stripe or level of global fame need not apply, however. At one point, Joe Biden's team reportedly reached out, as the Americans would say, but it came to nothing. 'The politics of my show is that we have a diverse range of people who are from different backgrounds and their views I appreciate,' the presenter says. 'I'm being political in the sense of the people I choose to not have on the show.'
Acting, writing, developing and chicken shop dating aside, Dimoldenberg also wants to one day launch her own youth academy to help people from varied backgrounds forge careers in creative industries. 'I hope my legacy is that I'm able to open doors or create confidence in young people and level the playing field in some way.' Her advice to up-and-comers? Crack on with your bright idea sharpish. 'I always tell them, go and do the thing.'