Stars find fame saps fun out of life
Think it would be cool to be a famous movie star? Think again. Sure, they get paid millions of dollars, live in fancy mansions and are fawned over by adoring fans, but there are actually a lot of downsides. Here’s what some of the world’s most recognisabl
George Clooney
Imagine being recognised by people wherever you go, being hounded by fans and followed by paps.
Welcome to the life of George Clooney (pictured with wife Amal).
“There are restrictions to this kind of fame,” he told Esquire in 2014.
“I haven’t walked in Central Park for 15 years. I’d like to, you know?”
The actor relocated to Lake Como in Italy in 2001 to try and escape the Hollywood bubble, but even there is hounded relentlessly.
“If I could I’d be out on the boat every day,” he said. “But every time you go out, it’s a scene. Other boats follow you, photographers follow you.
“There’s a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it’s everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there and it’s shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.”
Megan Fox
The Transformers star told Esquire in 2013 that being famous was comparable to being bullied at school, only much worse. “I don’t think people understand,” she said. “What people don’t realise is that fame, whatever your worst experience in high school, when you were being bullied by those 10 kids in high school, fame is that, but on a global scale, where you’re being bullied by millions of people constantly.”
Jennifer Lawrence
Jennifer Lawrence told Vogue in 2013 that being famous was more of a curse than a blessing. “I am just not OK with it,” she said. “I am just a normal girl and a human being, and I haven’t been in this long enough to feel like this is my new normal. I’m not going to find peace with it.”
Her attitude towards fame had changed slightly by 2016 when she told Glamour magazine she was slowly getting used to it.
“I didn’t really realise how angry and distorted I felt,” she said.
“For, like, probably a solid three years. It had nothing to do with Hunger Games. It had to do with the thing that came with Hunger Games. I still felt entitled to a certain life that I just wasn’t allowed to have [any more]. I felt like I had the right to say, ‘I don’t want to be photographed right now, I don’t want people outside my house right now, I don’t want my nephews in People’. I felt so much anger . . . And then you just get used to it — and it just is.”
Zach Galifianakis
The Hangover films turned the comedian into a star who now gets recognised wherever he goes.
“Being a celebrity is shit,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012.
“I like to be an actor, and that’s it. The blurred lines are, I think, manmade.
“I think celebrity is a man-made thing; it’s not innate in us, we have people telling us, ‘We should pay attention to these people,’ for all the wrong reasons, their personal lives and whatnot.”
Shia Labeouf
In 2014 the troubled star said he was retiring from public life. Unfortunately, brushes with the law have kept his name in the press for all the wrong reasons.
Labeouf has vented about the downside of fame on many occasions, including in 2015 when he told Variety that to be a celebrity is to be “enslaved”.
“The craft of acting for film is terribly exclusive and comes with the baggage of celebrity, which robs you of your individuality and separates you,” he said.
“As a celebrity/star I am not an individual — I am a spectacular representation of a living human being, the opposite of an individual.
“The requirements to being a star/ celebrity are namely, you must become an enslaved body. Just flesh — a commodity, and renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things.” — news.com.au