By Gill Pringle
“I don’t even look,” Melissa McCarthy replies when FilmInk asks how she deals with online criticism. “That’s how I deal with it. I’ve never been on Facebook in my entire life. I probably shouldn’t say that. I do some stuff on Twitter, but it’s mostly just stuff that I put out, but very rarely do I look for stuff. Sometimes I respond to people, but I think that you’re supposed to be sending massive stuff out. But I’m always responding to like someone in Tacoma, Washington, and I’m like, ‘I love that you said that! That’s so nice!’ But everybody tells me that you’re supposed to be sending it out to the world, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do that, but she said something nice and I’d love to say, ‘Oh, that’s great. You seem like a good mum’, or whatever it is. I do it poorly. I don’t feel like I can improve as an actress or as a human or as a mum by reading a bunch of stuff that, kind of, breaks my heart.”
Considering the pre-release response received by Ghostbusters – which was met with instant derision at the announcement, and had its trailer voted the most hated clip in YouTube history (that vote must have been rigged…have you seen some of the crap on YouTube? – it’s probably proven to be a smart strategy. “It’s not worth it,” McCarthy’s co-star, Kristen Wiig, says of tracking the online criticism, and maintaining an online presence. “I have no desire to be more public than I already am,” she says. “I don’t even know how to look on Instagram. I’m not on Facebook, Twitter…nothing. I just don’t have the desire. I’m not against it… everyone does it. It’s not a judgment call that I’m not doing it. It’s just not for me. That’s all.”
Adds McCarthy: “I go to work and literally feel like I got hit by the lucky stick. I feel so much joy. For so long, I just wanted to do it, and now I get to do it, and it is heaven to me. So I don’t want to let someone make me feel bad about it, because it could go away in a minute. I at least want to try my best and put positivity in the world. It’s a very long answer, I’m sorry.” Are her kids online yet? “No,” McCarthy replies. “They don’t know about any of it. We let them play like a half-hour of little building educational games. Georgie’s always like, ‘I’m online!’ Our heart stops, and then we realise that she’s just typing, or she’s on a drawing game. But she’s like, ‘I’m online!’ But I will monitor that…to my children’s nightmare! I just want to keep their world as small as possible for as long as I can.”
Ghostbusters is released in cinemas on July 14.
