Amelia Dimoldenberg

Barefoot, wearing knee-length denim shorts and a grey marl T-shirt appliquéd with stars, Amelia Dimoldenberg, one of the world’s most successful content creators, flicks on the kettle in her kitchen. It is a midsummer’s day, warm and breezy in her flat on the third floor of a mansion block in busy east London.

“I don’t know if you want the bag in?” Amelia says, looking into the mug she is proffering with the self-consciousness that can overcome a Brit making tea for a guest. “I had a mug that had a colour chart for tea on it once, and it kind of made it easier.”

The kitchen table is occupied by the face of Damson Idris, the British actor and star of the just-released F1: The Movie, which is frozen on the screen of Amelia’s laptop as she edits a recent interview with him, so we sit in the living room, taking a pink two-seater sofa each. Her sister, Zoë, 18 months her junior, has recently moved out and wants to reclaim some furniture, so Amelia has to decide which of the sofas to give up. The one she’s sitting on, she says, is a dupe of a fancier model. “It’s like 20 grand, the original, but I got mine for £800.” Maybe she’ll upgrade to the genuine article when Zoë takes hers, I suggest. She scoffs. “No way would I spend 20 grand on a sofa. That is insane behaviour.”

Some might assume that 20-grand sofas and the like would be familiar territory for this 31-year-old, the creator and host of Chicken Shop Date. In its 10 years, the YouTube hit has produced more than 100 episodes and gained over 3 million subscribers who tune in to watch, on average, eight minutes of a very funny, intentionally awkward blind date with a crushworthy celebrity who agrees to meet Amelia in the unlikely setting of a fried chicken joint in London. Her first ever date, in 2014, with the British grime MC Ghetts, gleaned just over 1,000 views in its first two weeks on YouTube; it has now been watched more than 1.3 million times. In 2022, her mutually flirtatious encounter with the American rapper Jack Harlow attracted mainstream attention (and, to date, 19.4 million views). She has since gone on to lure the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Little Simz, Sabrina Carpenter, Cynthia Erivo, Paul Mescal, Louis Theroux and Idris Elba to her feasts of nuggets and fizzy drinks.

“I’m not interested in just having the biggest stars on the show. If I wanted to do that, at this stage, I could,” she’ll tell me. “I’m interested in who’s going to create a really interesting conversation dynamic. Who’s going to play on the format? Who’s going to flirt with me? Who’s going to create a vibe and an energy? Like, will the performance be good?”

The standing joke of the show is that Amelia is rubbish at dating. Her character is on a quest to find the One but perpetually foiled by her own personality. She is at once flirtatious and confrontational; longing, needy, then mocking, unable to resist the opportunity to deflate a starry ego. She particularly enjoys doing this with men. Ben Stiller looked terrified during their encounter at the Covent Garden branch of Slim Chickens in April this year. “It’s interesting. A lot of men in the public eye are now nervous about being interviewed by me. But there’s never been an episode where someone’s come across bad. It’s never ended someone’s career. So what are you nervous about?” Perhaps the staccato banter and combative retorts remind them of cringey adolescent encounters over fries, spicy with the hope – or dread – that one or other could at any second lean over and snog their counterpart’s face off. (Matty Healy of the 1975 did attempt to do this in a 2023 episode – Chicken Inn, Cricklewood Broadway – that has now been watched 6.1 million times. Amelia, playing it exactly right, for the purposes of character and show at least, did not comply.)

Off screen, Amelia says, she’s not dating anyone. I wonder if it would have a negative impact on the show if she did have a partner. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell,” she says. “Honestly, I feel so connected to the person I am on Chicken Shop Date, it’s hard to extract myself. Like, the chemistry is real, and maybe that makes sense as to why I’ve been single for so long.” She laughs. “Often I feel like – and this is a dramatic reading of it – I feel like I’m sacrificing my actual love life for the sake of the show.”

Chicken Shop Date places Amelia in a line of renowned comic performer-presenters, such as Ali G and Alan Partridge but also Joan Rivers, Paula Yates, Mrs Merton and Philomena Cunk, who have taken the interview format and its expectations – namely that the interviewer will behave professionally towards their guest – and played it for laughs. Like the American comedians Zach Galifianakis and Ziwe Fumudoh with their respective series, Between Two Ferns and Baited, Amelia has brought the joke into the digital space. Raj Lahiri, YouTube’s head of creator partnerships for the UK and Ireland, describes Chicken Shop Date as “a masterclass in how authenticity and a unique format can create real cultural impact.” It has brought Amelia global fame and access to the world’s most glamorous occasions, both as a performer and as a guest. She has served as the 2024 and 2025 Oscars social media ambassador and red carpet correspondent and hosted the red carpet at the MTV EMAs and the Brit Awards.

Today, though, Amelia is just a girl, working from home, trying to hit her deadlines. “I love working from home. I get so much more done and feel more relaxed,” she says. Her production company, Dimz Inc, has an office a couple of miles away on Brick Lane, where she and her full-time staff of three (talent booker, social media lead and personal assistant) also work. “It’s in a shared workspace, though,” Amelia says, “because we’re a really small team and I didn’t want just two people in a room. That’s really intense.” She is sitting under an old Tate exhibition poster, her legs curled up. Near the door hangs a small Manchester United mirror – a tribute, she says, to her father, who is a Mancunian, like her mother, and a diehard Reds fan. The flat, she says, is pretty much a carbon copy of their family home in central London. “It’s one corridor with the rooms going off, like this one, and it’s also all painted white. When I moved in my friends came over and were like, ‘Mm, it’s really like your parents’ house in here.’”

Growing up in central London sounds snazzy. “Westminster is an interesting borough to live in,” Amelia says. “One of the wealthiest in London, but also home to some of the worst-off people. I didn’t grow up around that high level of wealth, and I’m glad about that.” Her father, Paul, is a Labour councillor and the new lord mayor of Westminster; her mother, Linda, a retired librarian. Amelia and her sister went to the single-sex state school St Marylebone, which specialised in performing arts and had zero outdoor space. “Eventually they built a gym underground,” Amelia says. I had read that she and her sister used to go horse riding, and I bring this up, mistakenly imagining them hacking around the elegant expanses of Hyde Park. She snorts. “No, we went under the Westway.” She is referring to the two-and-a-half-mile elevated dual carriageway section of the A40 that takes cars over west London. “They had this raggedy, crazy riding school literally under the Westway’s six lanes of traffic. We’d go there every weekend, and the horses were mad, obviously, because they were living by all this traffic. If we did go on a hack – which was like, honestly, twice – we would go to Wormwood Scrubs and just ride around the prison.”

Comedy was a family pursuit for the Dimoldenbergs. In conversation with Billie Eilish last year (Sam’s Chicken, Harlesden; 9.5 million views), Amelia remarked: “If you make a sibling laugh you’ve hit the jackpot.” Both her parents are funny, she says – “my dad intentionally, my mum unintentionally. I think I’ve taken something from both of them.” She has been delighted to discover that comedy writing is officially in the genes. On a recent weekend away, her mother told Amelia that her maternal grandfather used to collect jokes and had completed two comedy scripts in his time. “One was set in the factory he worked in, and the other was about when my mum’s grandad came to live with them, so a generational comedy,” she says. “We don’t have the scripts, but I just thought it was so cool and interesting. I’d never thought before that there might be a lineage.”

As a world-famous media personality in a still-young digital field, Amelia could choose to continue building her brand and name in any number of ways. This summer she collaborated with a London brand called Peachy Den on a collection of stretchy miniskirts and one-shouldered tops and the “flirt” T-shirt she wore on her date in June with Bella Hadid (Morley’s, Brick Lane; 3.2 million views). At some point, she says, she would like to do a live show format to showcase – and challenge – her performance skills. But her grandfather’s scriptwriting is pertinent because, in a bid to launch herself into a new realm of creativity, Amelia has three original scripts in the works. During the pandemic she did two creative writing courses and eventually landed in a BBC writer’s room. Now there’s a feature-length screenplay set in the Chicken Shop world, which would potentially star Amelia in the character of Amelia; a drama about teenagers, heavily influenced by Skins – her own rite-of-passage favourite – that’s being developed by the BBC; and a romcom series with an independent production company.

“It’s challenging to find the time,” Amelia says. Her PA now schedules scriptwriting hours into her working week. “And it’s hard because it’s a different kind of writing, using a different part of my brain. But I love learning more about storytelling. It makes me watch and read things differently. If I could do a master’s degree in anything, it would be in storytelling.”

In an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, said: “The hardest thing to get right in any work of art is tone.” Amelia, a big fan of Armstrong, agrees. But if she has shown anything with Chicken Shop Date, which also informs her style of interviewing on the red carpet, it is that she can nail a comic tone. “Deadpan, sarcastic, British, charming” is how she describes it. “When I’m performing on one of the dates it’s definitely a heightened side of my personality,” she says. “Then in the edit we heighten it again through the moments we choose to include.”

The shtick began at secondary school, she says, where she felt quite isolated until she started making the other girls laugh. Because she was at an all-girls school, she was often intimidated when socialising with boys. “I developed a strong sense of sarcasm to protect myself, and it worked,” she says. “It worked so well that I sort of repelled them – to this day, actually! But professionally it’s been brilliant.” The date concept began life as a print interview in a magazine called The Cut that was produced by her youth club, the Stowe Centre on Harrow Road. She was moving it into video format at Central Saint Martins where she was doing a BA in fashion journalism from which she graduated in 2017. James Anderson ran the then new course and remembers Chicken Shop Date being discussed in tutorials. “I thought it was a continuation or update – using a different medium and aimed at a different generation – of that irreverent and surreal approach to pop journalism pioneered by Smash Hits magazine back in the 1980s,” he says in an email. “They’d ask pop stars ridiculous or humdrum things, like ‘When did you last fall in a ditch?’ ‘What colour is Tuesday?’ Amelia makes it look easy, but there is a lot of thought, creativity, time and effort that goes into that. So I felt it had journalistic merit.”

Today, prospective students apply to that same course because Amelia Dimoldenberg did it. Last summer she was made an honorary fellow of the University of the Arts London, and addressing the graduates – after congratulating herself on “inventing content” – she stressed the importance of holding onto your “originality and creative independence”. She doesn’t want to use the word “legacy” but says her future interests involve mentoring the next generation. This summer, to mark 10 years of Chicken Shop Date, she launched the Dimz Inc Academy, a one-week summer school in Lambeth, south London, for creatives aged 18 to 24, where she was in attendance every day. In August, Amelia will take aspects of that concept to a bigger audience with a three-day immersive pop-up exhibition at Protein Studios, east London, showing the development of Chicken Shop Date and offering 10 pieces of advice for young people who want to turn their ideas into original content. It will be the first time Chicken Shop Date has been translated into a physical space beyond, well, the chicken shops. “It’ll be a mixed audience,” Amelia says. “Some will be people interested in the DIY nature of creating and want to inspire themselves to do something similar. The other side won’t know anything about that; they’ve just seen a few clips on TikTok or YouTube and think it’s funny. But everyone will walk in and feel like they’re experiencing the Chicken Shop Date world.”

For the past month, Amelia has been attempting to have two nights on her own every week. Prior to that she had been going out every night. “Not partying, just at an event or going to the theatre and cinema every evening, but it wasn’t sustainable,” she says. Last night, as part of her new regime, she stayed in and watched a documentary about the 1970s British funk band Cymande and listened to an episode of The New York Times’s Modern Love podcast. “My favourite thing, honestly,” she says, “is just to be consuming interesting things about arts and culture.”

One can understand why she needs the time to fill her cup. The content creator’s life is a busy one. In the fortnight after we meet, I follow Amelia’s progress via her Instagram stories. She attends Demna’s final Balenciaga couture show in Paris, where she is movie-star-glamorous in a selfie with Nicole Kidman, wearing a black feathered bustier top by the house and sharp tailored trousers. That same week she appears in Time magazine’s Time100 Creators 2025 list of the world’s most influential “digital voices” – taking her place in the Titans category, no less, alongside the podcaster giants Joe Rogan and Mel Robbins. “It has taken me 10 years to become a titan,” she tells me later by email. “I am very excited for what the next 10 years will bring. What’s bigger than a titan? My knowledge of Greek mythology doesn’t stretch that far.” The day after that, she releases on YouTube the date with Damson Idris (Slim Chickens, Cambridge Circus; 2.3 million views) that she had been editing at the kitchen table when I arrived at her flat. It will turn out to be one of those golden fried episodes, triggering not just lols but instances of genuine sizzle between the two. Idris steps up to the romantic order perfectly, with significant eye contact, heavily loaded pauses and a kiss upon the hand that makes Amelia squeal. The performance is good. “This just got me pregnant,” one commentator types 14 minutes after its upload.