It’s easy sometimes to forget that celebrities are human beings, but this is a product of how celebrity works. When studios or record labels or agencies or whatever find someone that people love (read: will make them a bunch of money), that person becomes a commodity. Shaping their image and controlling what parts of them are shown to the public is an integral part of maximising the revenue you can get from them.
The details of their personal lives are distorted or censored; sometimes even whole relationships are completely fabricated to maximise cross-promotion between compatible celebrities. The celebrity becomes an object, an abstraction – a version of themselves that is based on who they really are, but shaped to become more broadly appealing, more intriguing, more newsworthy.
Make no mistake: this person we’re presented with isn’t real – they are an amalgam of the celebrity’s actual personality and a bunch of decisions made by PR people. But behind that idea there very much is a real person, with real wants and desires and needs.
And beneath whatever curated image there is of Sir Patrick Stewart, beats the heart of a man who just really, really wants to be a beekeeper.
Today, he is living that dream:
Since I was a child, I’ve fantasized about keeping bees, and I finally am. BeeStew! 🐝 pic.twitter.com/b4VuYMSi3O
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) July 16, 2018
Bless you, Sir Patrick Stewart.
