Just sometimes, someone will dare to ask a question that no one has ever asked before. Questions like: “What does Liam Payne have to say about all of this?” Coincidentally, that very question was asked yesterday, not long after Will Smith had slapped Chris Rock in front of everyone at the Oscars for making a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. We were waiting for a statement from the Academy. We wondered how Smith would justify it, if Rock would issue a response, or if Jada Pinkett Smith would make any comment. What we simply did not reckon with was that Payne, in fact, did have something to say about all of this.
What unfolded on Good Morning Britain as Payne was asked this question can only be described as an extraordinary sequence of events. Not only did Payne happen to be there, not only did he have things to say, but he said them in a whole new accent. Liam Payne used to sound like he was from Wolverhampton, which he is. At the Oscars, he sounded like Richard Burton doing a play on Radio Four, before merging into Peter Schmeichel at a press conference, then back to the valleys again. It was a trip.
To ask a human being to even attempt to process this first thing on a Monday morning was too much. Where were we supposed to begin? With his words – “ask yourself… what would you do in the same situation?” – or the strange noise coming out of his mouth? The way that he turned, looked straight down the camera and declared, “I’m a big movie fan”? Or the way that the red carpet presenter’s nods slowed down and sped up as he tried to understand what was happening?
Like he was cornering us at the bar at the tail end of a wedding, Payne shared that Will Smith used to live behind his house, and that when Smith cries, Payne cries, and when Smith laughs, Payne laughs. For the sake of my own closure, I’ve decided to assume he’s prepping to play Tom Jones in a biopic of the Welsh legend’s life, and is doing a Lady Gaga/House of Gucci-esque ‘stay in the accent for the whole shoot’ thing. The rest of it? Lost on me. But, as Payne himself said, “I would rather take the beauty out of the situation than take the pain.”
