The latest of Variety’s wacky Actors on Actors pairings reads a little bit like one of those old-school clickbait headlines (which I’m told still exist on Facebook, but that’s one cesspool I won’t wade into): “The Ultimate Cool Girl Sits Down with America’s Most Divisive and Derided Celebrity. What Happens Next Will Warm Your Heart.” One might not expect actress, model, Charli XCX video star, and all-around cultural darling Chloë Sevigny to be willing to sit across from Kim Kardashian for a 45-minute chat, but the fates have conspired to give me a little Wednesday afternoon treat. And who am I to question the forces of nature?
At first glance, Sevigny and Kardashian may seem like a strange duo. X users went so far as to call their pairing “appalling” when Variety announced it last week, noting that it feels “like a slap in the face” to Sevigny, as she’s been “acting since 1995 and Kardashian started acting in American Horror Story once everyone stopped watching it.” (To ignore Kardashian’s guest stint on Drop Dead Diva and her cameo in Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor? Unforgivable!) While there’s a degree of merit to those arguments, they’re also positively silly. Kardashian and Sevigny’s conversation makes perfect sense, not just because they were both on Ryan Murphy productions this year, but because these two women are equally unserious.
Sure, Kardashian helms an image-conscious empire, but it’s that death grip on popular culture that ironically enables her to stop giving a fuck. That’s been more........