So it turns out that Australian comic actor Rebel Wilson is 35, rather than 29 as previously claimed. This revelation has dominated headlines across the world for the past 48 hours, with agencies as diverse as Australia’s Mamamia, Britain’s Daily Mirror and E! Online in the US all leading with the story.
Former workmates – though not particularly close ones – have spilled to the papers, high school yearbooks have been dredged from dusty bookshelves and even an Asic business registry has been consulted to expose Wilson’s real age. Other claims were made about her real name, although she has previously told media she went by her middle names at school.
For those following this story with stoked outrage, it aggrieves me to add to these revelations that Wilson’s lauded character of “Fat Amy” in the Pitch Perfect movies is not a real person. Furthermore, her television show Bogan Pride was not a documentary series. I have it on good authority that much of the standup material that brought her into public life was likely to have been fictional.
Rebel Wilson is, of course, something of a fiction, whatever age or name she chooses to call herself. As an entertainer in an industry built on delightful illusion, the persona delivered to the public here is deliberately not a private person: it’s a manufactured brand. As a product marketed as youthful, challenging and unique, Rebel the 29-year-old is a part more appropriate for the provision of Fat Amy and Bogan Pride than the 35-year-old graduate of Tara Anglican Girl’s School, who runs her own companies and once went by the name of “Melanie”.
This adjustment in packaging is, of course, central to the whole entertainment gig. Sharon Needles, anybody? As any drag aficionado will tell you, the name that comes with the costume is half the fun of turning up.
The famous spider dancer of the Australian goldfields, Lola Montes, perhaps would have not enjoyed such exotic renown had she appeared as Irish immigrant, Elizabeth Gilbert. For equal and opposite reasons, Natalia Zacharenko’s appeal as the quintessential 1950s all-American girl may have been compromised had she not renamed herself Natalie Wood.
Archibald Leach was no Cary Grant, until he became him via deed poll, and in the outrage around Wilson’s claims about her age, please consider that Grant’s co-star in 1933’s She Done Him Wrong was Mae West. Every day of 40 when that film was made, West kept her age ambiguous for most of her career.
Name changes are the least of considerations in a culture that subsumes a performer’s private life into their public brand. Historical examples of politicised, institutionalised rebranding deserve criticism, certainly: obscuring the nature of her migrant heritage informed the rebranding of dancer Margarita Cansino into actor Rita Hayworth – it also demanded a recolouring of her tresses.
Merle Oberon’s Indian background was suppressed in order to prevent her onscreen romantic partnerships falling foul of social antagonism to mixed race relationships. Dirk Bogarde and Rock Hudson were but two of countless performers whose particular brands as male romantic leads demanded their intimate relationships with other men to be hidden from public view.
In an industry where actors are actually employed to pretend to be other people, it is bizarre to consider the strange tone of betrayal that accompanies much of the reporting about Wilson – especially in an entertainment culture where the ultimate rebranding is so commonly achieved by the injection of botox and silicone fillers, as well as unnecessary surgery.
In the wake of the exposure of frauds like Belle Gibson, who faked having cancer to sell wellness products, suspicion of public personalities is deserved. In a world of Icac inquiries, political scandals and large-scale corporate tax avoidance, political disappointment is democratically valid.
But Wilson is not offering health solutions to the sick, aspiring to manage a government or demanding to oversee a judiciary. She’s a performer performing – and if Wilson can convince casting directors and the public that she’s 29, not 35, then she’s clearly very good at the performing she does.
The suspension of disbelief and the smoke and mirrors of illusion is the entire delight of watching performance. To demand otherwise is to strip the wig from the drag queen, the punchline from the joke, the decorations from the party – and, not to mention, the experience that civic life does not otherwise allow us: to revel in a falsity that means us no harm.
