21 hours ago
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It’s a tough time to be famous in Hollywood, what with dwindling respect levels for movie stars and the inability of anyone under 35 to recognise that George Clooney’s lips weren’t always that thin or that Brad Pitt, at one time, was a thing. Add to this a painful new pitfall for celebrities; not defending their unremarkable offspring from accusations of nepotism or explaining how big a role Ozempic has played in their new look, but rather the small, horrifying possibility that in the event of a bad year, some enterprising fan or assistant will whip up a GoFundMe for them.
Most of us know instinctively that there’s nothing worse for business than admitting that business is bad. Unless you’re a parent soliciting donations to fund your Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, or have just committed an act of heroism and are rightfully in line for a reward, being the beneficiary of a whip-round by strangers is not a good thing at all. With this in mind, one can only sympathise with Mickey Rourke, the latest dwindling star to fall victim to an act of public charity, who this week was forced to issue an extremely Rourkian statement denying all knowledge of a fundraising appeal set up in his name by one of his manager’s enterprising young assistants.
With a baffled air and cradling his dog, Rourke popped up on social media to put the record straight. He had, he conceded, done “a really terrible job in managing my career,” and, per reports, had indeed been fighting with his former landlords. But, he said, “if I needed money, I wouldn’t ask for no fucking charity. I’d rather stick a gun up my ass and pull the trigger”. Well, quite. “Don’t give any money, and if you gave money, get it back … it’s humiliating.”
As humiliations go, Kevin Spacey has known worse. But in November last year, the 66-year-old felt compelled to issue a correction to the notion he was homeless, a misapprehension that arose from an interview published in the Telegraph in which he’d said, “I literally have no home”. Parsing Spacey’s meaning required one to understand that the word “literally” in this sentence was, per common usage, intended to mean “not literally”.
After the piece came out, the former actor got quite shirty, blaming the headline writer for quoting him out of context and saying, “I feel it would be disingenuous of me to allow you to believe that I am homeless in the colloquial sense”. Yes, that old causer of confusion, the “colloquial sense”. Spacey may be unemployable as an actor, but his feel for public relations is still keen enough to know that, even by the standards of someone accused of sexual misconduct, this latest development was not a good look. “As we know,” he said, “there are many people … who are indeed actually living on the streets or in their cars or are in terrible financial situations – and my heart goes out to them.” Meanwhile, he claimed he had received thousands of offers from fans to move into their spare rooms, and for those of us who can’t stand Kevin Spacey, it’s hard to think of a more exquisite comeuppance – worse than prison; worse than appearing in season two of Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair – than an offer of charity from the little people.
Which brings me to this: you could weaponise this phenomenon, you really could. We must be mere moments away from someone prominent suing the originator of their GoFundMe or Kickstarter campaign for putting it about that they’re finished. Wouldn’t it be a brilliant and almost unprovable piece of defamation disguised as a charitable act? The reputational damage is total. There was nothing funny about the fires in LA last year, except this: an extremely powerful agent who represents some of the biggest names in Hollywood and whose beautiful, multimillion-dollar house was burned down, discovered that their assistant had whipped up a GoFundMe to help them and couldn’t move fast enough to shut that shit down.
For Rourke, meanwhile, at least there’s an upside. Clad in a pink shirt, eyes skimming this way and that, he struck an appealing figure in his pushback video. My first thought on watching it was: I wonder how big a role Ozempic has played in his new look? And my second was that he seems like a good egg, smiling wryly at his own ridiculousness, rambling off topic in the style of the baffled old rocker, confused and amused and authentic. If I was a casting director, I’d call him.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
