starstruck

Kate Winslet with her Best Actress Oscar at the Vanity Fair Oscars party, 2009. Photographed by Larry Fink

The first time I was starstruck I was fifteen years old, in the dining hall at school. Earlier in the day we had had an assembly, and whilst these were usually powerpoint-aided monologues delivered by our teachers, that particular morning we were informed that they had called in a speaker who was not staff, and who would be performing mime in between bits of spoken-word poetry. It was an act of pure cruelty, I thought, inviting someone like that to perform at a state secondary school in the North East, surely one of the most socially unforgiving environments in the whole of England. Yet there he had stood before us, a man who was not only a mime (by profession? it’s unclear to me now what his career-title was), and not only had a penchant for spoken-word poetry, but who was also bald.

Only two moments from the performance remain in my memory now: the finale, in which he turned slowly in a circle whilst playing an imaginary violin, and a single sentence: ‘these young women told me that they knew the beauty standards set by magazines and social media trends were not real — it was their boyfriends that did not.’ Looking back, I have no idea what the theme of the assembly could have possibly been. My friends and I saw him later in the dining hall at lunchtime, grabbing one of those greasy red trays we were all made to eat from. He ate alone in a calm, dignified manner. That I had just seen this man pirouetting in front of a gaggle of sniggering 15 year old boys, and that we were now sitting across the table from him as he solemnly chewed through plain pasta topped with watery tomatoes, and that when his eyes met ours there a complete lack of recognition in them, was a matter of great curiosity.

Maybe starstruck sounds like too strong of an adjective to use to refer to my bareheaded assembly speaker. But it is one of the earliest recollections I have of recognising someone who could not have identified me at all. Technically, ‘starstruck’ refers to the awe or fascination that accompanies meeting a person, usually famous, who one admires to the point of intensity. People assume that you get starstruck because you’re overcome by your respect for them, or perhaps it’s your desire for them, or for their wealth, fame, glamour. This is not true. What you are being struck by, when encountering someone who knows nothing of you whilst you know something or the other about them, is your own mysteriousness, the infinite possibility you represent in that moment by being so totally unknown, and the contrast of their cluelessness with your knowingness. I believe it’s possible to be starstruck by anyone, so long as you know more about them than they do about you: a cool friend-of-a-friend, an ex’s new partner that you have stalked on Instagram, a professor who you have only ever before seen delivering a lecture from the front of a packed hall.

Adrien Brody and Nicole Kidman, 2003. Photographed by Larry Fink

The celebrity industry entire is engineered to cater to this appetite for our own obscurity. That is why we are constantly being inundated with the smallest and most useless details of the lives of our actors and musicians, so that we can feel we really know them inside out, and thus think about ourselves a little less. PR strategies have changed over the decades, but for the moment the line we are being fed is that celebrities are our babies. It is impossible to scroll on any social media platform for longer than two minutes without being confronted with some short-form video content of one of these fresh-skinned, long-toothed individuals. They are being seated in front of the camera (into, one presumes, a high-chair), and we are being asked to mind them while their manager goes to the bathroom: Charli xcx is playing with a sparkly toy and slowly sounding out the word ‘bibi’; Dev Patel is excitedly gesturing to his toy car; Andrew Garfield is crying. Perhaps once upon a time, celebrities were advised to be enigmatic, empty vessels onto which only desire could be projected, but no longer. Now we watch patiently as they excitedly babble about their favourite toys — their film camera is one of the ten items without which, they tell us in an earnest lisp, they would not be able to go on living — and then we ruffle their hair and suspend them in the air over our heads while they, darling things, actually believe they are flying.

How long do you think this person has spent assessing the sibling dynamics of their own family/children? Probably not as much as she has of Kendall and Kylie’s. But that’s understandable. No one wants to think too much about their own family

That being said, I’ve never encountered Celebrity in the flesh. Perhaps this is for the best, as who knows how I would react if I did — it’s possible I would take them in my arms and try to burp them. I’ve come close, once or twice. Timothée Chalamet and I were once in the same small city for a while; I was studying in Oxford, and he was there to film scenes from Wonka. Strange things happened all week. Students upped and left tutorials and classes to get a glimpse of the superstar, and others camped out in the upper floors of libraries, from where they believed they would have the best view from which to hunt him down. When walking down the high street, a route I took almost every day, every group I eavesdropped on was talking about him. Two crew-members loaded materials into a van, and one turned to the other and said: you know, yesterday, I held the door open for him. Another time, I was walking to get a sandwich and the gates of a building on my route were opened, and out flooded a swathe of extras, all clothed in period dress. I walked with them to Pret, all the while feeling like a badly-dressed time traveller. A road beside the Bodleian library was closed off, and when I walked past it the next day, it was covered in snow. In my heart of hearts I knew that many of these incidents had more to do with the magic of movie-making than any action of Chalamet’s, but they seemed inherently related to his presence in Oxford for that bizarre week. In my mind, he became an impish little figure, wreaking chaos and inspiring adoration across the city, buying snow machines and using them on only one road as a prank and a trick, hiring eclectic dressers then letting them loose on the streets all at once.

I never did bump into Chalamet (something of a relief as, by now, I half-expected that if I did he would ask me to answer his riddles three in order to pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs). I’ve had other near-brushes with fame, though. I recently walked past a group of Qatari men in an airport, who cut such stark figures in their crisp white robes, emanating more perfume than a rose garden, that for a moment I wondered if they were celebrities of some kind, and if it was fame they were oozing as they glided past. I now think, though, that it was really fame’s cousin: glamour.

David Bowie, photographed by Larry Fink

I have also spotted several internet starlets out in the wild— as a teenager, I sat near a vlogger on a train and watched in queasy fascination as she stared boredly at her own faux fingernails. There was the time I saw Madeline Argy on a train station platform, grinning at something on her phone. I even saw an actor in Regent’s Park that I recognised from the periphery of a Sherlock episode I had watched years earlier.

Then last summer, I walked past a man who I had seen on Instagram, conducting those interviews where they badger the people walking past them on the street, trying to get them to answer their inane questions about society, a vocation I neither admire nor respect. Nevertheless, I felt the strange rush that accompanies recognising a face that would have no knowledge of mine. We glanced at each other with increasing nervousness, three or four times, in the few seconds it took for us to pass each other. I had identified him, of course, from the numerous times he had slid through my feed. But it was he who kept looking back at me, startled. I still find this incident troubling. How did he recognise me?

Paparazzi, photographed by Larry Fink