It’s Friday, and I’m watching my favorite romantic comedy again. It’s the one with the English bloke with floppy hair who can’t quite seem to say the right thing. He’s starring opposite the quirky journalist who is willing to do anything for the assignment, maybe even fall in love along the way. It’s just nice to watch charm and power shift back and forth between two people in conversation. The “will they, won’t they” of it all. The awkwardness? The tension. I can watch it over and over again because the film is short—just a minute or two long. 

My favorite rom-com of the moment is not a Nora Ephron or Richard Curtis gem, nor can it be found in Turner Classic Movies’ deep vault. Not yet, at least. It’s a 90-second clip of rising celebrity interviewer Amelia Dimoldenberg flirting her way through a buttonholing of prestige actor and erstwhile Spider-Man Andrew Garfield on the Golden Globes red carpet last month. And it’s actually a sequel. She and Garfield spoke on camera at the GQ Men of the Year Awards two months prior. (Also very fun viewing!)

Over video from her London home, Dimoldenberg told me that she can’t say whether the clip is or is not an accurate representation of British flirting. (Writer Louis Staples taxonomized it as such on Twitter after it went viral.) It’s the only kind of flirting she knows. Then again, she’s British and Garfield is British, so maybe there’s something to it. 

“At one point I say, ‘Well, I’m not even interested anyway,’ or something like that, which I think is very much like something that we do here. You are towing this line where you don’t really know: Are you interested? Are you not?” she said. “Like I’m not gonna reveal too much of myself to you, but I’m smiling the whole time, so what’s happening?” 

Sounds complicated, but if anyone knows how to navigate this kind of situation, it’s Dimoldenberg. The comedian has made a career out of the type of flirting that runs headfirst toward the limn of cringe. The Golden Globes red carpet was a side gig; her day job is producing and hosting Chicken Shop Date, the first show in a surprisingly crowded genre that turns eating chicken with celebrities into deep-fried gold. 

“The romance element and the dating element is something that’s intrinsic to my style, and works really well. I’m always just waiting for someone else to steal this thing that I’m doing,” she said. “It just hasn’t happened yet.”

The show, which now draws between a couple million to 15 million views per episode, started as a print column well over a decade ago; Dimoldenberg wrote for a Westminster youth club magazine made by local teens, and she rightly judged it would work better in a visual medium, migrating it over to YouTube eventually. The format hasn’t changed much since it launched on the platform in 2014, though the guests have gone from London-specific to more general interest. She began by taking out the city’s deep roster of grime artists, from Ghetts to AJ Tracey, and in the last few years, she’s “dated,” to use the show’s vocabulary, Ed Sheeran, Keke Palmer, the 1975’s Matt Healy, Rosalía, and Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya. Despite Dimoldenberg’s ability to pull ever more famous faces, she is still just a girl eating nuggets in front of celebrities, asking them to fall in love with her. 

Chicken Shop Date turned Dimoldenberg into a rising comedic star, if not yet a household name, and she’s beginning to enjoy that—or at least process it. When we spoke, she’d just celebrated her 29th birthday by taking 20 good friends to the English countryside. “Sometimes people will ask, like, ‘How do you take in success?’” she said. “I think a really good way to do that is by giving to your people, like your friends and your family. In those moments is where I actually take in the good things that have been happening.”

But as in all things work, the nearest rhyme to success is what’s next. Dimoldenberg has answers for that. She’s created other show concepts, like Amelia’s Cooking Show and Channel 4’s Celebrity Rebrand. She’s learning more about screenwriting and is developing her writing. Importantly for this awards season, in which we’re currently in the dead center, she’s keeping her work fresh by interviewing live on red carpets. Catch her on the Brit Awards red carpet for the second year in a row on Saturday. 

Though Dimoldenberg has long had Britain under her spell, the Globes put her in front of a slightly new audience of American television and film fans, a place she’s eager to be. She’s been able to consistently manufacture viral moments over the nearly 10 years of doing Chicken Shop. (Have you ever heard Louis Theroux say, “My money don’t jiggle-jiggle, it folds”? Keke Palmer say, “You know what, honey? I’d be a rock.”? Have you ever been able to feel like you were actually on a date with Daniel Kaluuya or Jack Harlow? That’s Dimoldenberg’s doing.) With the red carpet, the combination of the different format and the new audience is like a double-blind study of her ability to make videos millions and millions of people want to watch. There outside the Beverly Hilton, far away from the traditional London chicken shops, she proved that the bit can travel.

“You’re not meant to flirt with the talent,” Dimoldenberg said. “That’s why I think it’s funny. You are watching something where it’s bending the rules or subverting the interview.”

And why not? The red-carpet interview is in need of some subversion. The awards pre-show has gone through so many rebrands in recent years that it’s hard to say what its viewers even want or need from it anymore. The biggest touchstone, the one that casts the longest shadow, is still the “Who are you wearing?” era of the ’90s, which comedian Joan Rivers pioneered. Her red carpet was known for a kind of caustic bent. Some, like former Women’s Wear Daily executive editor Bridget Foley, have credited Rivers’s judgment of people’s red-carpet outfits with the professionalization of the form. That is, as Rivers kept issuing judgments on how these (mostly women) actors looked, the (mostly women) stars paid more attention to what they were wearing. It made stylists Hollywood power brokers by the mid-2000s, and also accidentally turned everything a bit boring. Gone was the glimpse into actors’ actual personalities through what they were wearing, and in its stead was something more buttoned-up, sleek, and protective. 

One of the big questions about the larger awards circuit became what to do about the red carpet. There was, especially at E!, a swing toward a nicer, schmoozy-er version of the pre-show. Networks put actual stars, like Geena Davis, on the red carpet to ask questions of their peers; they put more serious journalists out there, like Robin Roberts, to make the act of asking the parade of talent questions an atom or two more highbrow. The 2014 #AskHerMore campaign was a star-driven push that demanded interviewers ask actors questions beyond the sartorial.

So Rivers used the actors as joke fodder as was her wont, and then the actors actively rebelled against that dynamic, and it ended up somewhere in the middle, with a kind of self-seriousness that relied on mutual flattery. Nobody really thought to make themselves the joke. And therein lies Dimoldenberg’s particular genius. By leaning into her inherently awkward character and the artificial environment, she pulls out something natural, personable, and, well, delightful from her sparring partner. For a moment at the Globes, personality had returned to the red carpet. 

As most things that turn out well on live TV, it takes a lot of work on the front end. Dimoldenberg and two researchers had “prepped for every single person. We literally had over a hundred names.” 

“You have to be familiar with the talent because you are there on the carpet and you are making eyes with the talent,” she added. “And if they know you, they’ll come over to you and do an interview even if their publicist is like, ‘We don’t have time.’” Dimoldenberg recalled last year’s Brit Awards, when she got the only interview with Ed Sheeran because he had been on her show (she gave him fresh bedsheets and he wrote a little song for her on a ukulele).  

“Another thing that was a reality check was that it turns out, uh, loads of Hollywood A-listers don’t know who I am,” she said. “I know, I was shocked. [It was a] shocking discovery.”

But those who didn’t immediately recognize her gave her an opportunity to show off some of her versatility as a comedian, one who can adjust to whatever the moment needs. Though her thing works best when the personalities know who she is and meet her on her level, Dimoldenberg isn’t so rigid that she can’t meet celebrities on theirs. Take another standout moment from the night, when she and Henry Winkler did the dance from Wednesday together. 

“The first thing I remember is when he came over, he was just immediately so sweet,” she said. “So lovely and cute. And I just then was like, ‘Okay, he’s just so adorable.’ The whole shtick of being, I don’t know, a bit more sarcastic is not gonna go well with this person.”

The tone of Dimoldenberg’s comedy is reminiscent of Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns or Nathan Fielder’s Nathan for You, both of which she’s cited as inspiration. But you get the sense that if you put those guys on the red carpet, they would never break character and it would be a mild disaster for anyone who wasn’t already in on their bit. Dimoldenberg can do both. She can lightly neg Andrew Garfield in one moment, and get Winkler dancing in the next. 

As Garfield himself said to Dimoldenberg when she first interviewed him at the GQ Men of the Year Awards in November of last year, “It’s very specific, what you do.” Her sensibility is specific; her style—largely unsuccessful flirting—is specific. And her role in the wide world of entertainment is specific. A sample of the American comedians who would be equally charming in this niche—Nicole Byer, Cecily Strong, Jenny Slate, or The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri, whom Dimoldenberg interviewed—may be busy walking the Golden Globes red carpet themselves. Dimoldenberg seems content to work her way toward something bigger. She looks at the Golden Globes red carpet and sees a challenge, a way to locate room for improvement. She had, for example, envisioned being able to do far more interviews. 

“I feel like I’m quite good with my head, actually, because I didn’t get that upset about it,” she said. “I just thought, I’ve got something to build on. If I’d have had my first experience with the Golden Globes and I’d had interviews with every single person and it was like the best thing ever, where would you go from there? I feel like you have to build up towards something.”

The more Dimoldenberg adds to her plate besides the nuggets, the easier it is to make out what exactly she’s building toward. She’s a fan of The Graham Norton Show and grew up watching Popworld, featuring the likes of Alexa Chung and Simon Amstell (“They weren’t afraid to lightly bully the talent,” she pointed out). She could see herself following those footsteps. The red-carpet interview, then, is like celebrity-interview boot camp for an ambitious flirt. 

“One day I would love to have a talk show,”  she said. “I think all of these things—all of these events and opportunities that I’m getting—I just see them as a way of bettering myself and [becoming an even] better interviewer. I don’t know how exactly it would work, but that’s an ambition of mine.”