Everyone has dreamed at least once in their life that they were famous, whether for an incredible talent or for the luxurious lifestyle. But fame is far from just fortune. While some celebrities can successfully hide themselves from public view, and others might even enjoy it, there are plenty of stars who have spoken passionately about the twisted reality of everyone knowing your name, from the invasions of privacy to the complete inability to function as a normal human being.
Lisa Kudrow recently appeared on the Podcrushed podcast and spoke to host Penn Badgley about struggling with body image. The actress famously starred in the series ‘Friends’ for a decade and revealed that she developed insecurities about her body during that time that lasted into her forties. Kudrow compared herself to her co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox and couldn’t understand why she looked so different, thinking it must be about the tailoring of her clothes for the show. However, even after adjusting the fit, she realized that she simply couldn’t look like them. “I’m not trying to say I was overweight,” she explained. “I was not. I just had no idea of the actual shape of my body.” It was another decade before Kudrow learned to accept her body, reminding herself that she was a character actress and wasn’t even interested in playing the blonde bombshell or romantic lead. “That’s not a fun role for you anyway, so knock it off. It’s OK, you can look fine as you are,” she would tell herself. Badgley chipped in to say that feelings of “inadequacy” come up regardless of what type of actor you are.
In this gallery, check out what other celebrities have had to say about the dark side of fame. Click on!
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Chris Pratt
Chris Pratt received much backlash after he shared a tribute to his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt, on Instagram in November of 2021. He made cute remarks in the caption, but it was the line, “She’s given me an amazing life, a gorgeous healthy daughter,” that stirred backlash. Some felt it was insensitive toward his ex-wife Anna Faris, with whom he shares nine-year-old son Jack who was born two months premature and experienced numerous health issues afterwards. In a recent interview with Men’s Health, the actor responded to the backlash for the first time: “I’m like, that is f—d up. My son’s gonna read that one day. He’s nine. And it’s etched in digital stone. It really f—ing bothered me, dude. I cried about it.” He added, “I was like, I hate that these blessings in my life are—to the people close to me—a real burden.”
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Amanda Seyfried
In a May interview with Marie Claire, Amanda Seyfried described the downside to her breakout role in the 2004 movie ‘Mean Girls.’ Seyfried played Karen, a ditzy popular girl who believed she could predict the weather by squeezing one of her breasts. She recalled that male fans of the movie would always reference that particular scene from the movie which made her uncomfortable. “I always felt really grossed out by that,” she commented. “I was like 18 years old. It was just gross.” Seyfried always made an effort to fly under the radar and avoid the spotlight, but has observed the struggles of young stars who went a different route. “It must make you feel completely unsafe in the world.”
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Millie Bobby Brown
Millie Bobby Brown rose to fame when she was only 12 years old thanks to her breakout role in the hit Netflix series, ‘Stranger Things.’ The young actress has been a casualty of the over-sexualization of young girls throughout her career, but said she noticed a significant difference when she turned 18 in February. Brown saw that the way people online and in the press spoke about her suddenly changed as if all bets were off now that she was a fully-fledged adult. She was hit with a new wave of sexual objectification. Brown opened up about the topic during an appearance on ‘The Guilty Feminist’ podcast in April. “I think it’s just a very good representation of what’s going on in the world and how young girls are sexualized and so I have been dealing with that but have also been dealing with that for forever.” Public life is hard for anyone, but particularly for female child stars.
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Kendall Jenner
Kendall Jenner grew up in the spotlight thanks to her famous family, and struggled with the media attention for a long time. As the model herself acknowledges, “you can literally find old videos of me screaming at the paparazzi for no reason.” Jenner says she’s now at peace with things and has learned to manage the anger through therapeutic practices like reading, sound healing, exercise, and journaling once or twice a week. This has helped her to work through some mild depression she was experiencing. “It’s important to have a space that’s just for you where you can let out your happiness, your anger, frustrations, and stress, the things that are freaking you out, the things that are making you happy and even just ideas.” That’s easier said than done when you’re one of the most famous people in the world!
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Chet Hanks
Chet Hanks recently opened up in a YouTube video uploaded February 15 about what it was really like growing up as the son of actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. “There’s a lot of advantages but sometimes it can be pretty weird,” he said, noting that he is “blessed” to be able to travel the world, stay in nice hotels, and fly private, but people’s “jealousy” surrounding his situation made things difficult. “My experience was even more complicated because on top of fame already being toxic, I wasn’t even famous,” he explained. “I was just the son of somebody famous so I hadn’t even done anything to deserve any sort of recognition and that created a lot of contempt.” When he went to new schools for high school and college, he said that “People would make up their minds about me before they even got the chance to know me and it was extremely hard to break down their walls.” He said they would gossip behind his back which led him to develop a “hard exterior”—not only from anger but also from being “ashamed” and “insecure” about growing up “privileged.”
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The multi-hyphenate star revealed to Rolling Stone that having little knowledge of Hollywood in her upbringing and not coming from money has sometimes made her feel like an outsider. “I always feel like I was scrapping from the bottom. Always. I always felt like I wasn’t the one that was supposed to be in the room,” the singer and ‘Marry Me’ actress said. “That’s part of being Puerto Rican and from the Bronx and a woman.” But even with all her success, she still feels like she’s being left out. “It’s just 20, 25 years of people going, ‘Well, she’s not that great. She’s pretty and she makes cute music, but it’s not really this and that.’ You know, I think I’ve done some nice work over the years, some really nice work, but there is a club that I just wasn’t a part of. And I always acted like, ‘Yeah, I’m good. I’m fine. I’m OK.’ But it hurts to not be included. I don’t know if I will ever be,” the star admitted. “There is an inner circle, like, ‘We are the great artists.’ And then there’s the pop artists.”
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Taylor Lautner
Taylor Lautner struck fame as Jacob in the ‘Twilight’ film series at the age of 16. In an interview on NBC’s ‘Today’ show, Lautner revealed the fear and anxiety he felt after this huge life change. The teen actor couldn’t leave his house without having 12 cars following him, airports were packed with screaming fans waiting for him. “It built up something inside of me where, I didn’t know it, but I was scared to go out. I’d get super anxious to go out. So I just didn’t,” he explained. He avoided grocery stores, malls, and movie theaters for 10 years. Still, he felt confused when the interest in him finally waned. None of his later projects created quite the same excitement as ‘Twilight,’ and he said he started to question whether people cared about him anymore. “That’s the dangerous part, because that can really mess with your mind.”
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Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox went public with his Parkinson’s diagnosis two decades ago and has been raising awareness and funding for the disease ever since. His openness and activism have been admirable, but the circumstances under which he went public were less than ideal. Fox recalled shameless members of the paparazzi heckling him seven or eight years after he was diagnosed. They would stand in the street outside his apartment and shout “What’s a matter with you?” The constant pressure from the paparazzi forced his hand: “I said, ‘I can’t be making my neighbors deal with this,’ so I came out, and it was great. It was a great thing.” Luckily, Fox received a wonderful supportive response from friends, colleagues, and fans.
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Kieran Culkin
Kieran Culkin has recently reached new levels of success as the star of the hit HBO series ‘Succession,’ but he’s probably happy that he’s old enough to handle that fame. Growing up as part of the showbiz Culkin family certainly had its challenges, but Kieran remembers his brother Macaulay suffering the most. Macaulay Culkin starred in hit movies like ‘Home Alone’ (1990) and ‘Richie Rich’ (1990) which skyrocketed him to child stardom. Kieran remembers his brother regularly being harassed on the street. He told The Hollywood Reporter about a particularly nasty incident: “One time, a woman pulled off his hat and looked at him and said, ‘Yeah, it’s him! You’re not that cute.’ And then handed the hat back and walked away.”
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Cole Sprouse
Stars with younger fans often encounter problems when they start dating. Young fans romanticize their favorite celebrities to the point of obsession. When they start dating someone, it destroys the fantasy, and both the celebrity and their new partner can face serious backlash. Ex-Disney star Cole Sprouse has recently experienced this. The ‘Riverdale’ actor has an intense fandom and they didn’t respond well when he went public with his new girlfriend, Ari Fournier. He posted a cute picture with Fournier on Instagram and so many of his fans reported the photo for “violence and incitement” that it was removed. He shared the notification from Instagram with the caption “These kids are insane.” He later posted a photo series with Fournier captioned “Time to p*ss off the 14yos again.”
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Anya Taylor-Joy
Anya Taylor-Joy came into fame quite rapidly after starring in ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ but the 25-year-old recently opened up to Tatler magazine about how it’s not always fun, particularly in regards to paparazzi. “Well, there are other times when you’re just one person facing off against 20 and that’s just physically not safe,” she explained. “It can be very frightening when there are whole bunches of men with cameras attached to their faces running after you down the street.”
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Penn Badgley
‘You’ star Penn Badgley revealed on Rainn Wilson’s podcast that he was totally overwhelmed by his fame after starring in ‘Gossip Girl.’ He said that for years he got caught up in the pressure to make a positive impact on social media, given that he had such a big following, but later realized he had just been “wrapped up in ego and our materialist culture.” He also shared a story of a disturbing moment he experienced on a press tour two years ago at a mall in the Philippines. He was shocked by fans’ “over the top” reaction, described the location as being “packed with thousands of screaming adults,” and said the whole thing led him to have an anxiety attack.
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The actress told Vogue in 2013 that she was having a meltdown about how the world felt entitled to her private life, adding that fame was also dangerous as police officers would just allow strange men to sleep on her lawn and follow her to Starbucks. “It makes no sense… I am just not OK with it.”
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Zoe Saldana
Saldana described fame as a violation of her rights. She told the Daily News, “I’m an American, I’m a citizen, I vote, I pay taxes, therefore I have the right to my own privacy as much as anybody. What I do as an artist and as a professional has nothing to do with who I am personally.”
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Amy Schumer
The comedian was in South Carolina, when a man “scared the sh-t out of [her]” and demanded she let him take a picture, shoving a camera in her face despite her protests. “I asked him to stop and he said, ‘No it’s America and we paid for you,'” she wrote on Instagram.
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Jessica Alba
In an interview, Alba revealed that the press leaked a story about her engagement before she could even tell her parents. “Journalists feel entitled to do whatever it takes to get a sensational story, no matter how it affects the person involved,” she said.
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Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.
Hayden Panettiere
The star told Company magazine that fake headlines cause real drama in her life. “The public wants to read about your personal life, and the paparazzi give it to them by nosing into your personal life and saying things that are just not true and horrible.”
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