Dua Lipa corrects interviewer who mistook Houdini for a biblical character
Dua Lipa found herself in a pretty unusual scenario during a recent interview.
The singer had been giving an interview to the Italian radio station RDS with interviewer Anna Petinelli about her song 'Houdini' when the awkward moment happened.
It got to a question about the inspiration behind the song, which was released on 10 November.
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The song has had a strong reception, and the singer was giving a promotional interview following its release.
Things had been going very well until the interviewer asked about the inspiration.
She posed the question: “Are you fascinated by Houdini?"
This might seem like a fair enough question until it was followed up by: “Have you read the story of this biblical character or not?"
Now, anyone who is familiar with Harry Houdini will know that he was not a biblical character, but was actually a Hungarian American escapologist.
Dua Lipa responded to this and corrected her interviewer, saying: “Well, I mean, Houdini was a real person."
She then quickly moved on, adding: "I think for me, I’m always very fascinated by magic, fantasy, and how that can be brought into reality.”
Houdini is known to have spent one portion of his career debunking spiritualists and mediums, showing that they they're taking advantage of the recently bereaved.
People piled into the comments to share their opinions on the hilarious moment in the interview.
One person replied: "Loveeee how she insinuates that biblical characters weren’t real people."
A second wrote: "I'm sorry Dua fighting for her life to try and over-explain Houdini as if there’s subtext to it like its not obvious in the lyrical content as to what the song is about is so f*cking funny to me like it really is not that deep."
One person took a slightly more sympathetic tone, suggesting that perhaps the interviewer had intended 'biblical' to mean something more like 'mysterious', 'iconic', or 'historic' rather than literally in the Bible, which would make more sense.
They wrote (translated): "Not to defend Petinelli, but for me she wanted to say something like 'mythical/mysterious figure' or 'of mythological elements', and she came to 'biblical' in place of 'mythical'."
An interesting fact about Houdini is that he died after being repeatedly punched in the stomach. Unfortunately he did not have time to prepare himself properly to receive the blows, which are believed to have brought on an attack of appendicitis.
Kit Roberts