How Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg Turned Teen “Delusion” Into Hollywood Domination
There’s a video of Kylie Jenner at Paris Fashion Week that went viral last September. In it, Jenner can be seen steamrolling through crowds outside the Acne Studios show—eyes hidden behind Terminator-esque sunglasses, security flitting around her like feeder fish—when, all of a sudden, she spots someone she recognizes. Up pops her left hand to her ear, as if it’s a flip phone. “I love you. Call me,” she mouths across the courtyard. Naturally, the camera pans to find out who on Earth the multimillionaire beauty mogul and reality superstar could be fawning over. The answer? An unapologetically awkward British YouTuber and Hollywood’s unlikely new infatuation, a woman otherwise known as Amelia Dimoldenberg.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” Dimoldenberg says, laughing, when I bring up Jenner on a wet weekday afternoon in London. “I sat next to her at Jean Paul Gaultier at couture week…” She leans forwards, hands on knees. “She is like a swan. She has the best posture I’ve ever seen in my life. I thought to myself, I’m going to have to sit up straight, and then the sleeves of my suit were too tight, so when I had to clap I was literally like…” She sits up, rigid, her arms moving in front of her like a swing bridge slowly creaking to a close.
The 30-year-old Londoner has lots of stories like this—glimpses into a glamorous new life told as if they were calamitous nights out at a bar. It’s this culture clash with the celebrity world she now inhabits—her unfiltered, down-to-earth air and refusal to ever play it cool seen up against the glossy, untouchable lives of the rich and famous—that’s helped Dimoldenberg develop an uncanny talent for creating genuinely intimate moments with usually guarded A-listers. It’s also won her more than seven million besotted fans across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
A profusion of the world’s biggest stars now line up to be guests on Dimoldenberg’s self-produced YouTube show, Chicken Shop Date, an interview series that favors personality-revealing ribbings over interrogative questioning, where she plays an exaggerated version of herself flirting, unsuccessfully, with musicians, actors, and cultural figures in fast-food restaurants. In the past few months alone, she’s asked Cher about heartbreak (“she loves a long story”), Jennifer Lawrence about her kinks (“complete movie star”), and Paul Mescal about his famous thighs (“he was so nervous”). Her chat with Louis Theroux sparked a global TikTok dance craze, while Lena Dunham emails to tell me she feels “lucky Amelia’s in my orbit. From the moment I saw her on-screen, I recognized my favorite kind of storyteller: a woman who doesn’t mind disrupting popular thought and playing with perception.”
Now, she’s the red carpet interviewer du jour. By the time you read this, she’ll have served as the official social media ambassador of the Oscars. “And the red carpet correspondent,” she chimes in, “which I added [to the title]. I’m quite particular.” Today she’s in prep mode, squeezing in a quick club sandwich at The Landmark before she’ll take a call with the Academy. She’s living out of hotels currently, her pinstripe trousers, round-neck cardigan, and Glossier perfume grabbed from a suitcase this morning, rather than the east London flat she shared with her sister, Zoë, until a few days ago. (“She’s moving in with friends. When she told me I was really sad,” Dimoldenberg laments.) Tomorrow she’ll fly to LA for six weeks. While there, with her cowriters, Albie Swingler and Rory Marshall, she’ll mainline YouTube videos of every Oscars guest, preparing bespoke and only slightly unsettling questions for each she may encounter.
“Oh, my God—oh, my God—I need to do a good job,” is how she’s feeling right now. “I need to make sure I’m as researched as possible, but then also forget it all and just have fun with it.”
If she manages to maintain an aloof veneer on-screen, there’s more of a giddy energy to Dimoldenberg in person. In her videos, she reads as dry, fearless, and a little offbeat. Today, she’s warmer—self-assured, yes, but also self-deprecating and very silly. She speaks at a fast-forwarded pace, veering off into energetic asides, each told with wiggling eyebrows, ironic flicks of her honey-colored waves, and spurts of laughter. For example: “Do you know who smells really good? Drake.” She makes her eyes wide. “He was drowning in fragrance. An oud.”
She’s always been a talker. Growing up in Marylebone, with her Labour councillor and PR dad and librarian mum, “I never, ever had an issue with being confident.” She and her sister tore up the city as teens. “It was here,” she recalls of when Zoë raced over to this very hotel to get a picture with Lana Del Rey. “I actually had a really nice chat [about it] with Jack Antonoff at the GQ Men of the Year Awards,” she says. “And Jack was like, ‘Send me the picture,’ and sends it to Lana.” Later, as a fashion journalism student at Central Saint Martins, Dimoldenberg was equally unshrinking. “I used to go into the design studios and try and give my two cents, and then everyone would be like, ‘Amelia, you’re not meant to be here.’” Did she have any insecurities back then? “Maybe not being very desirable,” she says. “I was the last person [at school] to have my first kiss; I didn’t have a boyfriend until later. But, then again, there’s been a benefit: it’s created who I am, my personality.”
It’s this unease she has channelled into Chicken Shop Date and its Leslie Knope-meets-Simon Amstell heroine. It’s wild to think that the juggernaut of a show was invented when Dimoldenberg was only 17, as a column for her youth club magazine. The first video—a shakily filmed chat with British rapper Ghetts (about cats, largely)—got fewer than 1,000 views when it was uploaded in 2014. Did she ever think about giving up in those early days? “Maybe I’ve always been delusional, but I’ve always thought I could achieve a lot with it. I thought, from the very beginning, we could definitely get Drake, one hundred percent.” She takes a messy bite out of a sandwich for dramatic effect.
It’s midway through our chat when a teenager approaches to ask Dimoldenberg for a picture. She gamely agrees, switching her natural smile for the Wallace & Gromit rictus that has become a trademark of her content. Dimoldenberg is adored by her fans. Her comments sections are always flooded with people excited to see her flirt with their crushes. “I’m lucky,” she says, but she also works hard not to be overexposed, scared she’ll “annoy” people.
“Maybe that’s actually some internalized misogyny going on,” she says, “of being a woman and thinking, I’m too much.” Does she ever get negative comments? “On meme pages, where it’s all teenage boys who are like, ‘She’s ugly,’” she says, with a snort. “To be honest, sometimes that actually does upset me.” She cringes. “And people like to say that I’m average-looking and that gets me too. I’d rather be called ugly than average-looking. If someone calls me ugly then I’m like, That’s obviously not true, but if someone calls me average-looking then I’m a bit like, Maybe I am…”
One of Dimoldenberg’s biggest fears is being average. “Some people think, Oh, my God, it’s going to be a total disaster, and I don’t think that. I worry about no one caring.” It’s a perfectionism that reveals itself increasingly the more time you spend with the presenter. Her daft sense of humor disguises an astute, ferociously driven business brain—the kind of person who starts the day listening to The Guardian’s Today in Focus and slides into the DMs of stars she admires, asking them for networking coffees.
“Amelia’s brilliance is her combination of qualities: warmth, wit, intelligence, beauty, weirdness and—what may sound like the least glamorous, but is just as important, if not more so—her work ethic,” says Louis Theroux. “She takes enormous pains to make the encounters as brilliant as they are. A lot of viral interviews with celebrities used to be based on a sense of disconnection and cheekiness, and even meanness at times. But Amelia’s interviews are based on mutuality and consent. It’s safe awkwardness.”
In 2018, sick of people asking YouTubers, “Do you even actually have a job?” Dimoldenberg launched her own digital production company, Dimz Inc, to formalize the work she was doing behind the scenes on Chicken Shop Date. Now she’s developed spin-off shows, her own TV series, and brand work with her team—the beginnings of a self-made media empire she’s laser-focused on growing.
“There’s been a lot of times in my life when I’ve been really quite career-orientated and the be-all and end-all is what’s happening with my job. You can get quite lonely,” Dimoldenberg admits. I wonder if, as a Hollywood-approved chemistry machine, dating is something she’s prioritizing too? “I’ve been single for four years,” she says, mainly because “feeling comfortable with someone… I find difficult.” Has her YouTube series made it harder to meet people? “Well, maybe it has and I’ve not known it. Maybe there are loads of stunning men who would love to go on a date with me, but just think, Oh, I can never get Amelia, or, She’s got a dating show, so that’s weird.”
She’s ready for something serious, she continues, “but I try and never be so negative about being single. Obviously, I have been known to come home from a party and cry because I haven’t met the love of my life, but maybe I was just drunk.” She laughs. “I’ve been able to do so many amazing things and travel and feel free.”
It’s five weeks later when I next chat with Dimoldenberg. She video calls me from bed in her LA hotel, bare-faced and exhausted, after a whirlwind 36 hours. Rewind a couple of days and she was arriving at the Academy Awards in a custom baby pink Gucci gown ready to do four hours of interviews. (“I wanted something simple and classic,” she says of the look. “Although one learning from the Oscars is no trains. When I got into the actual ceremony, someone spilled an entire liter bottle of water all over mine, to the point where I was having to ring it out.”)
The guest list kept getting extended, so interview prep was down to the wire. The day before, “I had to ring my sister and go for a walk. Everything just sort of got to me,” she says, adjusting a pair of round glasses. “I think I had a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe properly.” The result, though, was undoubtedly a success: a run of joyful chats with the likes of Billie Eilish and Cord Jefferson. She was caught on camera fangirling over Ariana Grande with Florence Pugh. She got the only red carpet interview with Jennifer Lawrence and cheekily asked her for tips on not falling up the stairs (“I thought it was funny”).
The next few hours were a blur. She watched Emma Stone have her Oscar engraved at the Governors Ball. (“It’s like Disneyland for canapés.”) At the Vanity Fair after-party she was befriended by Austin Butler and at an after-after-party discovered Cillian Murphy’s sons are obsessed with the show too. “Even though I didn’t interview Cillian Murphy, I did hold his Oscar,” she says. She headed home at 5 a.m., wrote edit notes as the sun came up, passed out for three hours, and then worked until 5 p.m. finishing her content. “I’m always a bit apprehensive when everything’s going out,” she says. “It’s nice to see that people like it.”
What’s next? For the first time in Dimoldenberg’s career, she’s not sure, though she alludes to a meeting with comedy hero Amy Poehler. Stepping behind the camera is appealing, she says. “Sometimes, with my job, it feels like my birthday a lot of the time. I find it a bit overwhelming at times: the attention and everyone staring at you, being the person everyone’s fussing over. And sometimes I think, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I was the one saying, ‘You look great, don’t worry about it.’” In the meantime, though, she’s looking forward to being back at home for a while. “I thought I might want to move to LA,” she says, “but I’m excited to hear British accents. I’m excited to see the grey sky. I love London.” When all is said and done I guess that’s why Brits so adore Dimoldenberg: the presenter might be conquering hearts across the globe, but she’ll always feel like she belongs to us.
