What with this situation with Blake Lively, it may have piqued your interest as to what it is to work with celebrities frequently. As editor of The Rake, I have booked no less than 60 covers with original shoots. Whilst the news we’ve heard recently is a little bit disappointing, I promise you that these engagements can be creative, thrilling, exciting and collaborative. I’ve had plenty of those and these are my top five. These are in no particular order. No. 1, Kevin Hart. The bulk of the Kevin Hart shoot was shot at the Corinthia Hotel. However, his publicist asked me in advance. She said, is there anything we could do with Kevin? That is, I don’t know, something he just wouldn’t have done before? So I put my thinking cap on and thought, well, I know that nearby is Wellington Barracks, where the Household Division are based. So I called my good friend, who was the commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards at the time, and said, do you mind if we pop over with Kevin, entourage and camera crew, from Dylan, Don, the great photographer, to our star director, Grace Guilfoyle and me and tail? He was extremely receptive and when we got there, we had a wonderful shoot with Kevin being shot with Guardsman. I don’t think, uh, he had his team realise at the time that these were bonafide soldiers. Uh, but, uh, after a good cup of tea, uh, and a bit of hanging Out. Uh, it was a really, really great occasion and I think for our troops, uh, who, uh, serve our country, it was a really, really nice light day uh, for them to, uh, have a little bit of enjoyment and do something different themselves. No.2 is Josh Brolin. If you haven’t seen Josh Brolin on chat show, you may not know that he is both extraordinarily articulate but quite gregarious, uh, outspoken, uh, doesn’t really give, uh, two hoots. He, he’s, he’s, he’s not somebody who protects his image too much. And I think that, that that is to his advantage. Cause Josh Brolin is a guy who has all sorts of amazing interests, from motorbikes to reading to cigars. He’s a man with a broad spectrum of interest. And it was really, really fun to interview him. Our interview went on for three and a half hours. And you are only given hour slots for these kinds of interviews. And usually it’s kind of kept to quite strangely. And as a professional you are meant to just wrap up and in good time and get it over and done with. But he and I just went on for three and a half hours and then the shoot itself was done at his house with his wife, uh, Catherine Berlin, who’s a terrific photographer, doing the shoots. She asked me whether, you know, because it’s the Rake, was there a need to be sort of stiff and or Steer and I said, no, you can kind of go nuts. We want a specific look for the cover. Uh, but after that, you can kind of do what you like. And then, uh, we got these amazing pictures of Josh in the pool wearing, like, a towel on his head and reading the newspaper and a toothbrush in his mouth. It kind of made cool, irreverent. And I think that that is part of what the Rake loves to do, is slightly flip, uh, expectations on their heads. And Josh was the perfect candidate to do that. No.3 is Matt Damon. So Matt Damon was, to his credit, incredibly jet lagged when we saw him in can to do the shoot with the great Greg Williams. I’d interviewed him a couple of days before when he was in Australia. So between that time, he’d gone from Australia to Los Angeles and then to Cannes for the film festival. And what we’d done is we’d organised with the guys at Riva to go out on this extraordinary boat out into the water and do the shoot on there. And because of his jet lag, he was tired. And so Greg had this idea that he should dive into the water and get, you know, get wet. And he was totally up for it because we would both wake him up and do something a little bit different. Matt Damon is quite special in that way. A lot like Josh. He really doesn’t have His ego and profile at the top of mind all the time. So it’s very much to his credit that he did something that, from a photography point of view, was not considered sort of safe territory. And so jumping into the water, doing dives, and having fun with Greg underwater, who was able to get his photography. It was absolutely amazing. What a day. And then, uh, on the way back, there was this amazing catamaran out to sea, which had big sails with one sail saying beer and the other sail saying pizza. And Matt says, I could do with some beer and pizza. So we stopped off and had some beer and pizza, and that was the end of a terrific shoot. No.4 is Ethan Hawke. This one is in because it is particularly unusual in terms of the request. I got a message from his publicist, who said, Tom, I have an idea, or at least Ethan has an idea, and he wanted just to run it by you, just to see what you thought about it. Do you mind? I was like, well, of course. I’m receptive to all ideas. And she said, well, Ethan Hawke has always wanted to be shot with a hawk. I’m not very familiar with people who have access to birds of prey, but I managed to find a bird sanctuary in the tristate area, and they were more than happy to bring a hawk to the shoot. So We had this incredibly powerful image shot by Charlie Grey, uh, that had Ethan Hawke shot with a hawk. And No. 5 is in there because it’s particularly special to me, and it’s my first ever cover shoot. It’s Samuel L. Jackson. This shoot could be best described as being a baptism by fire, or at least a baptism by fire and ice, because it was shot not in the usual places you would do a cover shoot, which is London, Los Angeles, New York. It was shot in Telluride, Colorado. Because he was up there shooting the hateful eight for Quentin Tarantino, there wasn’t a huge amount of time for him to be able to break away and do a shoot. So Tom O’Brien, who is a terrific photographer, flew out there with the team and he was interviewed and shot there. The images that have come out of it are absolutely tremendous and I think put the Rake on the map in terms of creating powerful imagery of celebrities.