Interviews released around a film's opening tend to contain the same anecdotes told in the same order. The uniformity is manufactured by the format the interviews are conducted in.
The format is a production line
A junket gathers dozens of outlets into one hotel over a day or two, and each is given a slot measured in a small number of minutes. A handler stands off camera and ends the conversation on time regardless of where it has reached.
Some sessions are roundtables, where several journalists share one performer and each gets perhaps two questions. Others are one-to-one, which sounds better and is usually shorter.
Four minutes allows for roughly three questions if the answers are brief, which means nothing can be followed up and no exchange can develop.
The questions are constrained before anyone sits down
Topics are frequently agreed in advance, and areas relating to a performer's private life or to unrelated controversies are ruled out as a condition of the interview.
A publicist is generally present and will intervene if a question strays. The intervention is rarely dramatic, since most interviewers understand the boundaries and do not test them.
What remains is a narrow set of subjects, and every outlet is working from the same narrow set, so the questions converge before the answers do.
Access is the currency being exchanged
Outlets attend because the resulting interview draws an audience, and they are invited because the studio expects favourable coverage.
An outlet that pushes hard may find itself absent from the next film's list, which is a real commercial consequence for a publication that covers releases.
That asymmetry shapes behaviour without anyone stating it, and it is why the sharpest interviews with performers usually appear outside a promotional cycle.
The performer has answered it forty times already
By the fourth hour of a junket day, an actor has described the same scene repeatedly to different people asking the same thing.
Answers become polished and then become fixed, since a version that worked will be repeated rather than reconstructed each time.
This is not evasion. It is what happens to any account told continuously for two days, and the resulting anecdotes are what the audience hears.
Why the exceptions travel so far
Occasionally a question lands differently, or a performer is tired enough to answer honestly, and the moment escapes the format.
Those clips spread widely precisely because they contrast with everything surrounding them, which confirms how rigid the standard product is.
Outlets now design formats around this, building interviews around games or unusual settings, on the reasoning that a performer given an unfamiliar task cannot fall back on the prepared version.