When Julia Cunningham was in high school, she had to fill out a form that asked what she wanted to do with her life. Her answer? Read magazines. “My parents got a call from the guidance counselor,” she recalls to Her Campus. Lo and behold, this answer — the one that “horrified” her teachers into thinking she had no ambition — actually pointed to her deep fascination with pop culture, which would ultimately lead her to a successful career as a radio host, celebrity interviewer, and entertainment expert.
It was in college when everything started to fall into place. While attending the University of Notre Dame, Cunningham got a gig at the campus radio station. (“It was classical music, and I didn’t know what I was talking about, [but] I thought it was so liberating,” she says.) From there, she applied to tons of internships — and landed an interview with SiriusXM. The only problem? She was studying abroad, and in the early 2000s, you had to jump rough quite a few hoops to make international calls. “Ambulances kept going by, and [the interviewer] was like, ‘Where are you?’ And I was like, ‘This is gonna sound insane, but I’m outside of a hospital in Athens, Greece,’” Cunningham recalls. “He was like, ‘What time is there?’ I’m like, ‘It’s 1:00 a.m.’ And he was like, ‘You know what? You’re hired.’”
The internship was the foot in the door that Cunningham needed. After graduation, she returned to SiriusXM as a part-time coordinator, eager to do any task thrown her way. This enthusiasm is what helped her work her way up in the company, eventually becoming an on-air host, which led to her getting her own eponymous program covering pop culture moments, recapping TV shows, and interviewing celebrity talent: The Julia Cunningham Show.
Cunningham’s job as a host comes with the best type of homework: watching TV and movies, listening to new music releases — and, yes, reading magazines. “Our audience cares so much about this content that I want to make sure that I’m delivering it with authority,” she says. “I take it as seriously as anything else that I do.”
With her radio show being live, there’s no editing safety net if things go awry, so Cunningham has learned to think quickly and go with the flow. “I think people are like, I have my set of questions and I don’t know what to do if they go off script. Whereas I love that because … I know I’m prepared,” she says. Some might be intimidated by the awkward silent moments that can come up in interviews, but Cunningham embraces it. “When I have guests on [the show] that have podcasts, they’re so terrified because they have the power of going back to edit [and are] afraid of the silence. And I’m like, no, silence is your power. A lot of times, there are people that maybe are not the best storytellers, and so they’re very nervous, or they know a tough question is coming because something has happened in the news. I have found that, actually, those silences freak most people out and want to quickly fill that silence. I often just sit there because I know they’re going to become uncomfortable and they’re actually going to speak.”
But while being prepared and experienced like Cunningham can help tremendously, no interviewer is perfect. Cunningham recalls an instance when she accidentally called Martin Short the wrong name durin an interview (she called him Martin Sheen). “The rest of the interview, he kept making Apocalypse Now jokes in a very funny way,” Cunningham says. “I literally wanted to crawl under the chair and die. I was so embarrassed. And afterwards … he was so sweet about it.”
With the amount of interviews Cunningham has done, it’s impossible to pick a favorite. However, there are some standouts, including a memorable moment from the very beginning of her career when she worked with Julia Roberts. “I got married within a month [of that], and she sent me a wedding gift,” Cunningham sys. “I couldn’t get over how lovely she was.”
One major misconception that Cunningham wants to debunk is the notion that the entertainment industry is always cutthroat. “It’s a smaller world than you might think. I think we think of Hollywood, journalism, or entertainment as this crazy vast world, but it really allows you to develop relationships,” she says. “I do feel like it’s actually a very uplifting community, especially amongst women.”
Given her own career journey, Cunningham makes it a point to help out the interns she comes into contact with, whether that’s by providing resume tips or making introductions. And for those who hope to follow in her footsteps, Cunningham’s advice is simple: Every moment is a learning opportunity. “Absorb everything and every job that you do. Whether it’s exactly on the journey that you want it to be, you are learning something.”