Lena Dunham

This is the interview question list and voter outreach script I prepared for Lena Dunham's segment in the digital content I directed for the Hillary Clinton campaign in the final weeks before the 2016 election. Nine questions, two scripted PSAs, all aimed at the Commonwealth of Virginia.

What this captures is how a campaign actually builds a celebrity surrogate piece. The questions aren't generic. They're tailored to the specific person sitting across from me. Lena went to a liberal arts college, so we open there. She won the DGA award as the first woman to direct a comedy series, so we ask her about debt to the women who came before her. She had already interviewed Hillary for Lenny Letter, so we ask what Hillary was like off camera. Every question is engineered to get an answer only Lena Dunham could give, which is the entire point of using a surrogate in the first place.

Pay attention to the rhythm of the questions. They move from the personal to the political to the millennial call-to-action. That arc is the edit, written before we ever rolled tape. I knew where the piece was going to end before we started shooting.

The voter outreach scripts at the bottom are the workhorse copy. Short, direct, location-specific. Read in twenty seconds. Cut into rotation across digital platforms in the final 72 hours.

For anyone reading this who works in political content, this is what a tight surrogate interview prep looks like.