The nepo babies can't win, so they might as well lose instead

• Ben Platt's poor handling of a nepo baby question went viral and reignited nepo baby discourse.
• Meanwhile, "The Idol" was so bad, everyone basically forgot Lily-Rose Depp is Johnny Depp's kid.

Just when we thought we'd escaped nepo baby discourse, Ben Platt went and dredged it all up again.

On Friday, Rolling Stone published its interview with Platt, which was conducted prior to the SAG strike and as part of the press tour for Platt's new movie "Theater Camp." The story quickly went viral, and it's not because people are just really excited to see "Theater Camp."

At one point in the interview, reporter Ej Dickson asks Platt about his inclusion in New York Magazine's viral Nepo Baby Issue, an exhaustive look at celebrities who have become famous largely thanks to having already-famous (or at least influential) parents, and what he makes of the discourse surrounding it.

"We're going to skip right over that if we can," Platt says in response. When Dickson follows up to clarify that Platt has "no comment" on the topic, Platt's publicist jumps in to cut it off, telling Dickson, "If we could just focus on 'Theater Camp,' that would be great. Thank you."

The exchange ended up being baked into the very framing of an otherwise non-contentious interview (its headline: "Don't Ask Ben Platt This One Question"), and near instantly became fodder for online mockery. Virtually all of the internet derided Platt's sidestepping of the nepotism question.

But Platt — the son of megaproducer Marc Platt, who has been nominated for three Oscars and produced the 2021 movie adaptation of his son's star-making Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen" — is just the latest nepo baby being blasted for their response (or lack thereof) to being called out on their nepotism. Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Hailey Bieber (née Baldwin), Lily Allen, and Jamie Lee Curtis have all been called out for being critical of the discourse or defensive of their privileged start in the industry.

Some nepo babies, however, have been applauded for their response to being called a nepo baby — most notably Allison Williams, whose dad is former TV anchor Brian Williams. "All that people are looking for is an acknowledgement that it's not a level playing field. It's just unfair. Period, end of the story, and no one's really working that hard to make it fair," Williams told Vulture. "To not acknowledge that me getting started as an actress versus someone with zero connections isn't the same — it's ludicrous."

Even Meghan McCain had a better response than Platt's refusal to answer, urging her "fellow 'Nepo babies'" to "just acknowledge your privilege, the opportunities your last name has gotten you and move on" in a December Instagram story.

Interestingly, there's one nepo baby who has managed to skirt the discourse in more recent months — Lily-Rose Depp. She was initially roasted to the high heavens for telling Elle magazine, in an interview for their November cover, that it "doesn't make any sense" for people to "reduce somebody to the idea that they're only there because it's a generational thing." In the same interview, she explained why she's refused to weigh in on her father Johnny Depp's controversies, saying she'd rather be "defined for the things that I put out there" than defined by "the men in my life."

Weirdly, that kind of worked. People are now not really talking about the fact that Lily-Rose Depp is Johnny Depp's daughter. Unfortunately, they're talking about how awful her HBO show "The Idol" is instead. That might be the key, then: Don't want to talk about being a nepo baby? Do something even worse than having famous parents, and everybody will want to talk about that instead.