Kanye West sings “Spaceship” to a bemused Elon Musk. Bernie Sanders and Slavoj Žižek debate America’s slide into oligarchy. David Lynch warns Cher that she has a “dark cloud” hanging over her: “So maybe something will happen.” It’s a testament to the weirdness of our current moment that you might stumble across a clip from Jonas Hollerup Helle’s video series The Talk and think it really happened. It happens often enough. “Some people get angry – they think I’m trying to fool them,” the Copenhagen-based artist tells Dazed. “But I’m not interested in fooling people. I’m not interested in making fake news.”

It’s easy to see how a viewer might make that mistake, though. The videos in The Talk all follow a similar format. A pair of celebrity figures conduct a one-on-one conversation against a stark black backdrop, in the style of legendary interviewer Charlie Rose (although it could just as easily be a liminal hell space lifted from a Lynch film). Spanning music, art, politics, and film, their conversations are stilted – white noise creeps in to fill the awkward pauses – and frequently deviate down bizarre rabbit holes. 

The truth is, many of these people have never met, and that’s kind of the point. Hollerup Helle cut the first of his uncanny interviews together at art school, where he was inspired to work with decontextualised video materials by artists like Christian Marclay, creator of The Clock (2010). At the time, he was watching a lot of Charlie Rose interviews, and realised that he could cut the interviewer out of two separate videos, flip one of them, and reframe it as a conversation between the two interviewees. “Immediately, when I did the first video, the fact that they’re facing each other, you have shots where they’re listening, shots where they’re asking questions... these simple things already made it feel very real,” he says. “And then I thought it would be fun to contrast it with having the conversations themselves be super absurd, dark, and humorous.”

Since then, he’s orchestrated dozens of fictional conversations. Viewers can watch Philippe Petit (the tightrope artist who walked between the Twin Towers) conduct a guided water-drinking ritual with Marina Abramoviç, or Nas giving Macklemore goosebumps. In one video, Tilda Swinton argues with herself about whether or not she’s an actual vampire. The key, the artist says, is to find an interesting overlap between two guests, even if they might have been interviewed decades apart. Beyond that? “It’s intuition. Maybe there’s something there personality-wise, maybe something about the way they speak, or the pacing.”

Partly because they feature big celebrities, clips from the videos often appear on social media after they’re posted on the official YouTube channel for The Talk, sometimes attracting tens of millions of views. Here, they exist completely out of context, and take on an even more uncanny form. Understandably, in the post-image age of AI, viewers often mistake them for computer-generated deepfakes. But could an AI Kanye West really come up with the line: “The human being is the iPhone... and the Earth is our office”? I don’t think so. Sometimes, truth is weirder than fiction.

Below, Jonas Hollerup Helle tells us more about The Talk, from where he got his otherworldly editing style (hint: when we talked, he was very upset by the recent death of David Lynch), to the challenge of keeping up with the bizarreness of real life.

Firstly, how did the uncanny aesthetic of The Talk take shape? There’s the stripped-back studio from Charlie Rose, but the pacing and rhythm feel much more distinctive…

Jonas Hollerup Helle: As soon as I saw them in this black void, it already had a strange ambience, so I think I was playing into that. And I just really like working with rhythm and pauses. David Lynch’s work is a huge influence, his way of working with pacing. I enjoy making it weird and absurd, and having the videos be in a place where it feels authentic and then kind of constructed at the same time.

That uncanny vibe, absurdity grounded in reality, does provoke a lot of deepfake comparisons though – even though the project predates that tech hitting the mainstream.

Jonas Hollerup Helle: Yeah. When I started, of course, AI tools were coming along, but the widely available consumer AI software wasn’t a thing back then. So much has happened since. AI is being used so much online, and there’s a lot of misinformation.

I think it has impacted people’s media literacy as well. I would say, like, half the time people think [The Talk] is AI. And in a way, it represents the opposite. As a project, it speaks to editing, classic film editing. This is specific, and very deliberate in every moment. It’s not this randomly generated thing. 

Half the time people think [The Talk] is AI. And in a way, it represents the opposite. As a project, it speaks to editing, classic film editing. This is specific, and very deliberate in every moment – Jonas Hollerup Helle

What do you think the project says about our faith in images today, and how we can be misled?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: Given that it’s celebrities and well-known people… people are seeking out any new interviews with Kanye West, for example, then they’re finding my videos on my YouTube channel. I do provide a little bit of context in the description, and you don’t have to do much research before you can figure out how it’s made. But when it really took off, a lot of people were taking the Kanye West/Elon Musk video [and] putting it up on their channels. They cut it down, not having the original context at all. 

Everyone would take his video and repost it, and sometimes I would jump into the comments, both to get some credit and provide some context. At this point, when I find my videos randomly and other people have uploaded them, I often see people in the comments explaining what it is because they found my channel, which is something I really appreciate.

So maybe the reaction says as much about how people use social media, as it does about AI?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: I do it myself when I’m on Twitter, X – I often realise that I only read the headline, or someone posted something[and] left out a lot of context, to make people outraged. And often you go to the comments instead of going to the article, which is other people who haven’t gone to the article. So it becomes its own little bubble, where people are not aware of what they’re actually talking about.

That’s also become very interesting for the work: that it’s a lot about viewer perception. That’s why it makes sense for it to exist in an internet context. I have had a few of the videos exhibited as well, but they are so much about the internet and celebrity culture, I kind of see the YouTube channel as a work in itself. I want to create as many videos as possible, because I love the idea of people coming across a talk show that they’ve never heard of, like, ‘What is this?’

As an art project, it almost feels like The Talk falls within the lineage of artists like Andy Warhol or Richard Prince, who took on celebrity as a subject. What drew you to celebrity interviews specifically?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: It came naturally from the original idea, because Charlie Rose featured celebrities. But then as I put it up on YouTube, I thought a lot about the idea of parasocial relationships between fans and celebrities, and how we feel like we know them, but we only know a very specific image of them that they’re putting out. It was very much: how much do I play into that? Or how much do I play with people’s expectations of these celebrities that they admire or follow. 

Did you feel a responsibility for how you represented certain artists, through the act of editing and reconstructing their image?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: Yeah, it’s something I’m very conscious of. I also discarded some videos for that reason. So far I haven’t made a video where I feel like I’ve gone too far, because it’s still so grounded in humour and absurdity. To me, it’s pretty clear that we’re not in real life, we’re in some weird, other, Lynchian dimension. Again, how much is it my responsibility to make people aware of that? I’m not sure.

There’s an interview featuring Donald Trump and P Diddy – the context there has changed a lot, since you uploaded it. Has that video attracted any controversy in the last few months?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: It was the first time my videos were featured on political websites, and fact-checked. It wasn’t a huge network, but they had a whole article debunking my video. They contacted me and I wrote them a whole thing, they didn’t post it. But it was taken very seriously, just [because of] the fact that Donald Trump was in it. Because of that, the video went into fake news territory in a way. Of course, I’m not interested in making fake news at all. It’s all made with artistic intent, and meant to entertain.

You recently brought Kanye and Elon Musk back for part two. Why do they work so well together, and why was now the right time to bring them back?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: Their roles in pop culture are similar, in a way. They’re both controversial figures. They both had a fall from grace. In the original video, the idea was to have the younger versions of them, where they’re still more pure. It’s before they became corrupted. Being that famous, and maybe having some mental issues, it’s a dangerous combination.

So there’s something similar between them, but their way of presenting themselves is the opposite. Kanye is so outspoken, and he’s coming out with these huge statements, which he also sometimes laughs at. And Elon is much more reserved. The dynamic itself is interesting. Then, bringing them back was meant to [present them] post fall from grace. And of course, there’s a lot of controversy with Elon Musk right now, but it wasn’t meant to speak to that. It was more like a continuation of the original video. 

Do you ever worry that you’re not going to be able to compete with the increasingly insane, weird, or uncanny interactions that people are having in real life?

Jonas Hollerup Helle: That’s a really good point. It’s true that reality has overtaken fiction in a way. But then I think The Talk is tapping into something else – I’m not sure exactly what. I really want to make a super horror video at some point, and maybe go more absurd and leave real life even more. Like, why make a parody of these people when they’re already parodies of themselves?