Celebrity culture always seems to be evolving in the weirdest directions. Sure, gossip and rumor mills and paparazzi photos have been around for as long as there has been an entertainment industry. But thanks to the Internet and social media, they have mutated into something weirder and a lot more invasive.
One prime example arrived this past weekend, in a viral tweet about pop star Dua Lipa and her fiance, actor (and potential James Bond hopeful) Callum Turner. The tweet from @kissmetryto garnered millions of impressions, arguing that they “have never seen someone lose the goodwill of a fanbase” as quickly as Callum and Lipa have. You would think that that kind of statement would be attached to a major altercation with paparazzi or fans, but the reality is a lot more inocuous. It was responding to… a seven-second-long video clip of the two of them leaving a restaurant in Mexico, quietly walking past a small handful of fans assembled at the front entrance.
The replies have tried, often futilely, to make heads or tails of the video. Is Turner acting like Lipa’s “bodyguard”, to the point of pushing her to keep moving past the fans? Is this emblematic of some larger problem with the couple, and with how their relationship could effect Lipa’s relationship with the fans? Or are those “fans” just reading way too much into a situation that is already uncomfortable to begin with: celebrities being overly scrutinized for simply entering or exiting a place.
Stop doing this!
As someone who grew up in the 2000s heyday of tabloids and paparazzi-focused celebrity culture, four words still occasionally ring in my head: “Stars! They’re Just Like Us!” At the time, celebrities were photographed occasionally doing incredibly “normal” public things, like grocery shopping or going to the park. It felt like a novelty, but also a reality of human existence. And outside of occasionally having your photo snapped or getting recognized by a stranger, it was something the celebrity was able to actually do.
These days, thanks to the quickness of social media and just the parasocial nature of modern fandom, it feels like the “Stars! They’re Just Like Us!” mentality has eroded in certain spaces. In some fans’ minds, they deserve the celebrity’s time, energy, and best behavior regardless of a situation’s context, and are quick to cry foul if they don’t think they’ve received it. It doesn’t matter if the celebrity in question has anticipated this kind of interaction, or if it has been sprung on them as soon as someone got word of their location. (That, for what it’s worth, raises a whole separate conversation about that parasocial fandom, and how it can toe the line into stalking.)
It also doesn’t even matter if this interaction turns into a full-fledged meet and greet… and most of the time, it doesn’t. It just turns into a crowd of people, usually armed with cell phones, watching them enter or exit the building. While every celebrity is different, it’s understandable for them to not want to be in that kind of situation all the time, especially while doing something as simple as walking a few feet to a nearby car.
Look at Taylor Swift, as an example. Swift has been under this kind of proverbial microscope for years, revealing in 2015 that she even smiles in her sleep because she’s having “anxiety dreams” about being photographed in public, and complaining about the dark side of those crowds in her 2020 documentary Miss Americana. But things really started to escalate once she kicked off the Eras Tour in 2023. The popularity of the tour, combined with new developments in her romantic life at the time, meant that every time she was spotted anywhere other than the stage, fans were quick to surround her. Crowds grew to wild (and borderline unsafe) numbers outside of Electric Lady Studios in New York, just on the off chance that everyone would catch her arriving or leaving the building. It got to the point of fans swarming Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley’s wedding just because Swift was one of the guests.
Again, Swift never really interacted with those fans during these moments… and she didn’t have to. Not just because doing so could snowball into a safety or security issue, but because that scrum of people were not actually tapped into how she was feeling in the moment. Going back to the summer of 2023 at Electric Lady, we now know Swift was recording her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, during that time. In between people swarming her entrances and exits and overanalyzing the outfits she was wearing, she was recording an incredibly personal and emotionally-raw body of work. People have since realized, thanks to behind-the-scenes photos later shared by Antonoff, that Swift’s outside demeanor and big sunglasses might not have matched the mood she was feeling inside the studio on certain days.
The point is: celebrities deserve to exist, in public like the rest of the world, without having their every movement or facial expression overanalyzed. If they can’t even walk to a car without it leading to a mountain of scrutiny online, then the slope is only going to get slipperier.
(featured image: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Columbia Records)
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