Leslie Mann responds to anger about her flirting with male reporter
The actress said she and Dakota Johnson went ‘a bit crazy’ after four hours of back-to-back interviews
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Your support makes all the difference.Leslie Mann has explained why she and her colleague Dakota Johnson chose to flirt with a male journalist during an interview for her new film “How To Be Single”.
In an interview with ABC News, Ms Mann said the reporter Chris Van Vliet unbuttoned his shirt at their request and was “a breath of fresh air” after a long day of press interviews.
“What happened is, that was at the very end of a very long junket day where you do four minute interviews back to back for like three or four hours and we just got a little crazy, and we hit on this guy,” she said. “It’s like we forgot we were being interviewed. He was such a breath of fresh air.”
The video of the three-minute flirting session went viral on social media. 50 Shades of Grey star Ms Johnson asked Mr Van Vliet to take off his shirt, adding: “You look like you pump iron. You get swolled up. Swole patrol.”
It shows the male reporter laughing along with the two actresses, and later in the interview he tests out pick-up lines on them.
“We were like the creepy girls. But you’ve got to do what you’ve gotta do, to get through the day,” said Ms Mann.
The film "How To Be Single" features 43-year-old actress Leslie Mann, flirting with a 27-year-old, played by Girls actor Jake Lacy.
Some critics questioned why it was funny to see women flirting with men but not the other way round.
Cricket player Chris Gayle was recently exposed in the media for asking out a female sports reporter live on air. She looked uncomfortable by his advances, and he said: “Don’t blush, baby”.
Former lads mag editor Martin Daubney wrote in The Telegraph that Ms Mann, by flirting with Mr Van Vliet, acted like the “drunken wedding auntie from hell”.
“For in the bizarre world of modern privilege politics, it is impossible for women to be sexist, in the same way it is verboten for people of colour to be racist,” he said.
Mr Daubney added that people who support women’s rights - like campaigners who were against Page 3 in The Sun newspaper - were being “selectively offended”.
Mr Daubney previously insisted at the annual Woman of The World festival in London that "No More Page 3" campaigners were the very reason why Page 3 lasted so long.
“If liberal or feminist commentators only get wound up about the things that fit their agendas, then conveniently ignore inconvenient truths that don’t, why should the rest of us care about what bothers them?” he wrote in The Telegraph.
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