The question
What is your greatest fear?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Crashing in an aeroplane into an ocean at night.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 April 2026 source ↗
Not working. I want to be one of those old actors on the set of Casualty at 95, who quietly passes away in the actual scene rather than at home.
No, I’m afraid of nothing, actually. Maybe there are some genres that I would not feel uncomfortable with. I’m not sure I’d be able to do a western or a science-fiction film, but you never know.
Overcooking pasta for my Italian family in Napoli – they would kill me.
Democracy proves to be a Potemkin village and gross inequality becomes our permanent way of life.
All of the anxious thoughts that you are able to escape during the day that somehow know when you are lying down to relax.
My tendency to be avoidant.
Someone to clean my apartment.
I’ve never really had a horrible job – I liked working at restaurants and being a nanny when I wasn’t acting.
An inability to be authentic.
When I realised that I could get myself through anything that came my way.
Christian Louboutin, Mike Wallace, Yo-Yo Ma, Audra McDonald, Nick Frost, Shakin' Stevens
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