For a man with access to some of the hottest stars in celebritydom, James Dearlove is frustratingly discreet. Well, frustrating for a journalist, that is. Yet this is surely a key part of his job of persuading Hollywood heroes on to chatshow sofas and award-night stages.
His early career was less glamorous. He left university with an MA in theatre design and got work on a couple of films. He had a great time and enjoyed the industry, but discovered that he didn’t like the job itself.
“I had all these grand delusions that I would be designing science fiction fantasies or Peter Greenaway movies, and actually I was designing fairly boring flats or bathrooms,” he says. “I saw an interminable ten years of going slowly up the ladder before I was going to get anywhere near being a proper production designer on something amazing.”
But Dearlove, a co-founder of Dearlove Malone Talent, which arranged for celebrities to appear at last weekend’s Live Earth concert in London and is working on the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, hasn’t always been backstage on the fame circuit.
He’d just left set design when, in an unexpected turn, his spare-time band, Posh, got a record deal. They weren’t a huge success, but their guitar pop, combined with Dearlove’s sideline in writing theme tunes (“I did one for a show with Davina McCall called God’s Gift”), made him a living for the next three or four years.
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When the record label’s receptionist refused to order them a cab after a meeting, he realised that the band had been dropped and so it was on to his next job, working at a casting studio in Soho. This segued nicely into a position at MTV, casting presenters. Once that was complete, his immediate usefulness for the music channel ended, but a desire to stay – and, more importantly, the careful development of a business case outlining why MTV should create a new role for him – earned him the title of head of celebrity and on-air talent and the task of making sure that he had three celebrity guests lined up every day, five days a week. It was a position he held until deciding earlier this year to start up a business of his own doing the same thing.
While Dearlove has had brushes with fame, celebrity booking is not about direct personal contact with famous friends. Deals are done through agents or publicists.
“It’s about havingthe relationships and being in the right place at the right time. For example, Angelina Jolie is difficult [to book] but we got her because she was promoting the launch of Tomb Raider.”
So, back to celebrity tales. There’s no prising the name of the worst celeb guest out of him, but he will name his favourites: the actors Jack Black and Will Ferrell. “Sometimes we book a celebrity guest who walks on, says their lines and that’s that. But [Black and Ferrell] bring an energy that adds to the show.”