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Despite the awkward persona Amelia Dimoldenberg projects in her decade-old YouTube interview show “Chicken Shop Date,” the 32-year-old Londoner expresses wonderment that her little web series that could has taken her all the way to the Academy Awards red carpet, where she’ll be returning as a correspondent next month for the third year in a row.
“I do often take moments to be like, it’s mental,” Dimoldenberg exclaims via Zoom two months out from the March 15 ceremony, a period she’ll be using to cram the Oscar contenders in order to come up with hundreds of questions to have in the metaphorical back pocket of her designer gown.
“Oh, poor me, I have to watch all of these incredible movies and learn about amazing actors and the real-life people they were inspired by and the intricacies of the casting in ‘Marty Supreme’!” she tells The Envelope with her trademark dry wit. “I would watch them anyway because I love movies.”
Though digital creatives often get a bad rap, underestimate Dimoldenberg at your peril. In the more than 10 years since she first shepherded “Chicken Shop Date” from a column in a youth publication to a viral phenomenon fetching millions of views and securing the likes of Cher, Jennifer Lawrence and Billie Eilish as guests, Dimoldenberg has put a lot of work into her artfully inelegant celebrity courtships.
Her standing as one of the go-to promotional tour stops means Dimoldenberg has a contact list of celebs and, crucially, their publicists to call ahead of Oscars night.
“I’m able to prebook quite a few of them because of people knowing my work from ‘Chicken Shop Date’ and wanting to be a part of it,” she says. “It’s really hard as an independent creator to get people to come your way. Because of the success of ‘Chicken Shop Date,’ out of the people on the carpet, I will get nearly everyone. The only other people who are doing that are E! News or whoever.”
It also comes down to physical placement on the carpet. Three years in, Dimoldenberg likes to have a vantage point that allows her, as a producer for her company Dimz Inc., to scope out which celebrities are coming her way, catch their eye and “draw them to me while I’m talking to someone else.” All the while, she’s mentally organizing her questions — memorized more like a script, rather than written on her device or note cards — and juggling the “Chicken Shop Date” persona that brought her to the dance.
“The beauty of my interviews is that they look so off the cuff,” she says. “I think that’s what people like about me: I’m not going to be doing an in-depth look at their career or ask a very sincere question, but I will have done all my research so that I can ask them something that’s related to their movie or themes of their work or their interests that maybe catches them off guard. I don’t have to take the style of other reporters; I can do it in my own way.”
In fact, Dimoldenberg feels like more of her personality is able to shine through on the high-stakes Oscars red carpet than on her dates.
“Maybe if it’s an actual date,” she explains as to why the intimacy of her show spotlights the real Amelia less than the glare of the awards-season spotlight. “‘Chicken Shop Date’ is a performance,” she says. “I’m playing this character — a hopeless romantic who’s actually scared of romance. That’s where the comedy comes from.”
Dimoldenberg takes her work seriously and hopes to parlay her notoriety into more traditional performances, such as a role in Season 4 of “Industry,” currently airing on HBO, a part in Uber Eats’ make-your-own-Super-Bowl-ad campaign and a rumored part in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” later this summer. She’s also developing a TV series with BBC and recently announced a deal with Orion Pictures to develop, produce and star as a version of herself in a rom-com based on “Chicken Shop Date” alongside Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s production company, Gloria Sanchez Productions.
“I’m just interested in storytelling — that’s what ‘Chicken Shop Date’ is: telling the story of a date. Will it go well? Will it not?” she says.
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about Andrew Garfield who, after bantering with Dimoldenberg on the red carpet several times in 2024, finally went on a chicken shop date with Dimoldenberg in 2025 to much fanfare — and 12 million YouTube views.
“If it sparks people’s imaginations, not just with Andrew but with any guest, that’s great,” she says of the quasi-parasocial investment in her will-they, won’t-they with Garfield. “We had, like, episodes, where we [continued to] meet up, so it was the build up of something that captured people’s attention so much. You see it a lot with scripted shows, but it’s just a YouTube show, so for people to believe in the story that I’m telling, that’s my aim.”
