GQ’s Will Welch on Managing Men of the Year Franchise and That Viral Sydney Sweeney Interview

Men don’t stress about the weather. At least not Will Welch, GQ’s longstanding editor-in-chief and global editorial director, who was absolutely zen about the threat of an atmospheric river mucking up the mag’s Men of the Year celebration last night.

“I’ve been to some parties in LA that had crazy torrential storms, and it becomes like a junior high school party in that once you get to a party with weather like that outside, nobody leaves,” Welch explained to The Hollywood Reporter Thursday morning ahead of the big event while sitting on the terrace at Chateau Marmont, GQ’s Men of the Year headquarters. “We’re moving the red carpet into the garage, which I think will be better than what we originally had planned. It’s going to be fun no matter what happens with the weather.”

It was. And it was packed with stars and 2025 Men of the Year honorees including Stephen Colbert, Sydney Sweeney, Seth Rogen, SZA, Oscar Isaac, Clipse and Hailey Bieber along with guests like Justin Bieber, Noah Baumbach, Olivia Rodrigo, Alix Earle, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Anderson .Paak, Aziz Ansari, Emma Chamberlain, Kaley Cuoco, Finneas, Maggie Rogers, Alexander Skarsgård, Sombr, Tyriq Withers, Chase Sui Wonders and the I Love LA crew of Rachel Sennott, Odessa A’zion, Jordan Firstman and Josh Hutcherson.

Welch’s sunny outlook can be chalked up to the fact that for quite some time he’s been managing the Men of the Year franchise, which celebrated a 30-year milestone this year. Below, he shares just how important it is to the GQ brand, the viral moments that sprang from this year’s cover interviews.

Somebody better give Will Welch a Men of the Year award pretty soon, for as long as you’ve been steering the ship. How does it feel to be in charge of GQ at this moment in the media business?

It’s truly a privilege and an honor. The team and I really see it as an opportunity that we’re trying not to waste. We want to maximize it. We always say that if we’re not having fun making it, nobody’s going to have fun reading it, coming to the party, watching the stream or engaging with any of the content. A lot of people don’t love getting up in the morning to go to work, but I do. I can just tell from the attitude that they bring so many people on GQ team feel the same. I hope that shows in the quality of the work we do, and that we continue to push boundaries and do things differently. As far as the media business is concerned, all bets are off. It’s chaos, so why play it safe? There’s a lot that’s challenging out there but there has never been a time for more creative freedom. If you steer down the middle of the street, you’re not going to have success. To be in this environment now, creative risk-taking is the mandate. I don’t think that was always true. So, for me, it’s a blast. For me, this is the golden era. It just looks different from other people’s conception.

Men of the Year is a good model of what GQ can do in terms of live events, print, online rollout, social content, etc. Can you talk about what this franchise represents to you?

Yeah. First of all, it’s a wild thing that there is a magazine franchise that’s three decades old. Obviously, I’m biased, but part of the reason that it’s more vibrant than ever and that it has lasted that long is the creative risk taking. We have tried to evolve it as much as possible and have as much fun with it as possible. For print, that means seven covers. We long abandoned doing just men for Men of the Year…

If I remember correctly, Jennifer Aniston was the first female Men of the Year honoree…

That was an incredibly pre-social media viral cover. That’s the joy and the challenge of working at GQ. Leading GQwe inherited this incredible platform with a longstanding audience but then came the question of what are you going to do with it that feels fresh and new? With a big tentpole like this, we have a monthlong drumroll of content up to the night, and then for two weeks after, we roll out everything that gets captured from the event in all these different forms. It’s a party but it’s also this huge multi-platform event — sorry for all the buzzwords — that serves as a content creation opportunity for us editorially and with our branded content partnerships with some of our clients and sponsors. It’s about way more in this era than what happens in the room tonight here at the hotel.

No conversation with you about GQ Men of the Year would be complete without mentioning the 2019 New Masculinity issue. You wrote in your editor’s letter that “empathy” was a word that kept coming up for you. What was the word for 2025?

I don’t know that I have a word but six years later, this past October, we did the real follow-up to the New Masculinity issue, which was a full-themed issue called The State of the American Male in 2025 with a really fun, conceptual shoot with Glen Powell playing with these ideas of wellness and self-optimization that men are obsessed with right now. We did a survey of almost 2,000 men, and Emily Sundberg also interviewed 21 college students about their concerns, anxieties, hopes and dreams. We try to use GQ authority to not just examine how it’s evolving but to also be constructive and offer readers advice and guidance on how they can evolve. We try to make that a through line with everything that we do in this era. Men of the Year is a continuation of that conversation, and it’s reflected in our subjects and talking to them about everything from their childhood to the way they are styled and how we express masculinity through fashion.

Speaking of fashion, what will you wear tonight?

I’m really practicing what we’re preaching. Haider Ackermann, the new designer of Tom Ford, is our designer of the year. He’s honored in the issue and will be tonight. He made a bespoke suit for me that I’m wearing. Another example of practicing what we preach is that I’ll be wearing our watch of the year, [Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Tribute Monoface]. I will be basically dressed by our choices in the issue.

Let’s talk about the issue. You had a lot of viral moments come from it, including the Sydney Sweeney interview. There’s been a lot of discourse about it on TikTok, about what she said, what she didn’t say, the tone, etc. What did you make of it when you watched it?

I thought it was us doing what we do. Obviously, at GQwe do a lot of celebrity profiling, and in some respects, it’s one of the things journalistically that we’re best known for. We try to bring a journalistic sensibility to interviewing movie stars. I thought [Katherine Stoeffel] did a great job. She asked Sydney very real questions and Sydney answered. We were able to be additive to the conversation that has been swirling around Sydney for the past few months. That, to me, is our job. Show up, ask real questions and get real answers. The way we rolled out the covers, it started with Stephen Colbert in what was his first interview with a journalist and him reflecting outside the context of his own show about losing his show. That was our first cover and the next day, we rolled out of Sydney and on from there.

It was a dynamic one-two punch that reflects not only two people who have been in the news that our audience is very much interested in, but reflects a larger national conversation with that pairing. We shot a promo video with them together and it felt really timely.

On the subject of timeliness, Oscar Isaac got a lot of attention for his Star Wars and Disney comments, and I heard that the interview was done shortly after Charlie Kirk. Is that accurate?

It happened shortly after Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air. That comment was more directly pertaining to that. That’s my interpretation. But long before the issue came out, Kimmel was reinstated and back on the air, and so we worked really hard to contextualize the moment in which he was speaking from so it wouldn’t be misunderstood.

These interviews are all on video, which also speaks to the moment of having these cover subjects interviewed on camera rather than a print interview and a video interview separately.

That comes from basically just looking at this thing that GQ has a long, proud history of, which is deep, rich, insightful, culturally impactful celebrity profiles and matching that with the platform of the day, which is video for huge groups, especially younger audiences but not just younger audiences. We still have print, which is photos, words, and design. And we have digital, which is a textual rendering of that interview. But you can see these interviews happen on video with our journalists and the talent speaking to each other. I feel it’s an important part of my job to take what GQ does best and makes sure we’re matching the platforms in a really thoughtful, modern way to reach audiences. Print is still fundamental to what we do, but we have to be dynamic about meeting the majority of the audience, especially young, new audiences.

You oversee GQ’s global editions. Knowing that, my first thought is that your inbox is punished by all the time zones.

The inbox and the Zoom schedule.

What’s a typical day?

This was atypical, but it’s more extreme when I’m in Los Angeles: I had a Zoom with Asia yesterday at 5 am LA time. But I love it. I don’t think only about how I can make GQ as culturally impactful and successful as possible, but I also think about what represents growth for me as a person. I get the opportunity to learn more about the world through this very collaborative global process. I’ve learned so much. To me, the occasional early wake-up call or late-night call or messy inbox is worth it for the trade-off to make GQ as global as possible. We’re really proud of that, and I’m grateful for the personal growth.

What’s next in the growth path? Is the goal to stay at GQ or is there something else on the vision board?

I love my work so much. Over 18 years at GQI feel deeply connected to it. What it comes down to is that I just like getting up in the morning and going to work. I love the team I’ve built and there’s so many members of the GQ team that have gone on to do incredible things. We’ve found new and exciting talent to replace them. That process is extremely fulfilling.

You’ve got to get to your party soon, but what makes a great party in LA? What’s it like to wake up after a Men of the Year event?

Waking up tomorrow, my first thought will be, oh god, we have so much content that we created last night that we need to unfurl for our audience. Rather than having a big breakfast and taking a deep breath and staring off into the distance, I will be thinking about rolling out. In this era with a live stream, we’re trying to accomplish two things at once, which is to deliver a really amazing version of the party for our community who are watching from home and delivering a really memorable night for people in the room. Those two things aren’t one and the same.