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Justin Timberlake - Source: Reuters -
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My encounter with pop icon and actor Justin Timberlake took place in very controlled surroundings. It was just him, me, the chap who wrote The West Wing, the guy who'll play Spidey in the next Spiderman, and a few hundred people present at the screening of his latest movie.
JT, as he is sometimes called, was wearing Buddy Holly-style glasses, a knitted vest and a jacket. He did not - and this was clearly the effect - look like a man intent on bringing sexy back. He was bringing "thoughtful" back.
But from where?
Asked a somewhat idiotic question about working on The Mickey Mouse Club, aged 10, Timberlake commenced to haze the moderator of the panel. For someone so musically adept, his speaking manner sounds deliberately deliberate, like a singer playing an actor playing a man with so many far-reaching and painful feelings that the sole useful mode must be irony.
"I'm sorry to be so waffley," said the moderator.
"Define waffley?" asked JT.
"You know," replied the moderator, plunging into JT's cleverly-laid trap of spiked irony, "hemming and hawing".
"Define hemming and hawing?" said JT.
For this display, he was rewarded with a second question, and then a third. And he undertook to answer them in lugubrious detail. After the third paragraph, I forgot that I was listening to the man who had dated Britney Spears, Jennifer Biel, Cameron Diaz, Rhianna (apparently) and Janet Jackson. Perhaps he bored them into bed. I've seen this phenomenon occasionally, but never fail to find it perplexing.
Even his fellow actors, no strangers to the public glad-handling that comprises such events, didn't know where to look. Their faces though didn't register surprise. JT had been here before. He would go here again. It was just a fact of JT.
Later, I thought about how it must have been, having your first national telly show at the age of 10, and working ever since then, and having a management team, and hanging out with people who are employees, and hearing the phrase "No JT," very infrequently, if ever.
A grown man couldn't stand that kind of pressure, much less a kid or a teenager.
The movie which JT was promoting - he plays his role capably - describes the ascent of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from Harvard outsider to the world's youngest billionaire. In the movie, which is based on legal depositions, and hearsay, Zuckerberg does many questionable things. He stiffs social superiors, conks enemies, hurts ex-girlfriends and finally squashes his best friend, all without closing a fist. Later he pays some of these people off with multimillion dollar settlements.
He's a small man with a big idea.
Read more of Tim Wilson's articles.
