Remember Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video? Apologies for dredging up this piece of regrettable pop culture, but back in March 2020, the Wonder Woman star recruited a gaggle of her famous friends to film themselves singing—no, butchering—John Lennon’s “Imagine” to boost morale as people began to quarantine amid the rise of COVID. The resulting clip, as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber put it at the time, “somehow made a global pandemic feel even more hopeless than it already does.”
Public figures often attempt to move their fan bases, only to inspire a collective cringe instead. In 2022, the actor AnnaLynne McCord, then best known for starring in a reboot of Beverly Hills, 90210, taped herself reciting a poem she’d written to Vladimir Putin after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; it begins with the line “I’m so sorry that I was not your mother.” After posting it to social media, she was roundly mocked by online commenters. In January, Selena Gomez cried in an Instagram video as she discussed the mass arrests of migrants within the first week of President Donald Trump’s new term. The issue is personal to Gomez—the multihyphenate celebrity is the granddaughter of undocumented immigrants and executive-produced a Netflix docuseries on the subject—but her plea, too, drew the internet’s ire. Conservative pundits, perhaps unsurprisingly, criticized her message (and its emotional delivery); other commenters chided her for the seeming theatricality of filming her distress.
The actor Hunter Schafer, however, seems to have avoided a similar fate. In a nearly nine-minute-long TikTok she posted late last month, the Euphoria star, who is trans, recounted receiving her new passport and seeing that she is described as “male” on it. The change came in accordance with the Trump administration’s recently issued executive order stating that the federal government recognizes only biological sex, not gender identity. (Schafer, who is 26 years old and has used the female gender marker since her teens, explained that she had her passport stolen while working abroad last year; she then needed to, upon her return to the United States in February, replace the temporary emergency document she’d received.)
Schafer described her shock; although the switched gender marker doesn’t affect her self-perception, she said, she was dismayed by “the difficulty that this brings into real-life shit,” including going through customs and “having to out myself to border-patrol agents.” Yet unlike Gomez, McCord, and the “Imagine” crew, Schafer has not received much mockery online. Instead, her video has been extensively shared across social media as a frank example of how the new policy has begun to affect Americans.
That relative lack of blowback is telling. Celebrities have come to seem more accessible than ever on the internet, with multiple platforms available for them to communicate intimately and directly with the public. But the motives behind their words face greater public scrutiny too. If celebrities can use social media to show off parts of their personal life—the average person can see inside their home or monitor their romantic relationships—to endear themselves to the public, their activism can come off calculated rather than authentic.
This changing relationship explains why Gadot’s and McCord’s efforts were seen as tone-deaf, too staged to be taken seriously. Gomez, meanwhile, was clearly sincere, admitting as she sobbed that she didn’t know how she could help those being detained and deported, but her demonstrative message led viewers to focus on her delivery rather than her intent. Fans and passive followers alike seem to be swayed by neither raw emotion nor rehearsed performances. So what do people actually want from celebrities today, when they try to respond to wider issues?
Schafer’s video offers a clue. Crucially, she clarified that she had no expectations for how people might receive her recording. “I’m not making this post to fearmonger or to create drama or receive consolation,” she said. “I don’t need it. But I do think it’s worth posting to note the reality of the situation, and that it is actually happening … I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.”
It’s a remarkably blunt statement from a celebrity, especially at a time when few industry figures are making such appeals. (Hollywood seemed much more vocal at the start of Trump’s first term.) Schafer was also not encouraging her millions of followers to act. She presented her anecdote straightforwardly, walking her viewers through her experience. She was unrehearsed but not unprepared; at one point, she referred to the notes she took about the executive order that resulted in the change to her passport. And over and over, Schafer declared that this was, most of all, a “harsh reality check” for her. “I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented,” she said. “We start to normalize the circumstances we’re under.” She expressed anger at the administration but ultimately focused on conveying a simple message: that the label for her identity was changed without her consent.
Perhaps as a result, Schafer’s video has generated headlines for exactly the reasons she intended. Viewers who might not be keeping tabs on the political news of the day are learning that the Trump administration has enacted policies with material impacts on transgender people. Relatively few people appear to have made condescending comments or hyperbolic criticism about her video, and I suspect that’s because Schafer made her articulation unassailable: She was so direct, so transparent, and so measured that if any commentators did try to condemn her tone, they’d seem histrionic in comparison.
After Gomez took down her video, she shared a note saying that “apparently it’s not ok to show empathy for people”—which she later also deleted. But if the overall response to Schafer’s experience is any indication, empathy isn’t what made most viewers bristle at Gomez’s tearful musings; her overwhelming emotion, and the implicit assumption that it would be compelling to viewers, was. Schafer actually considered deleting her video too; in the caption for her TikTok post, she wrote that she’d thought about replacing it with “a more concise/well spoken thing” but decided against doing so. By talking plainly and taking time to explain her intentions, Schafer showed that she understood the shifting dynamic between celebrities and their followers online—that she couldn’t assume their interest or support, let alone demand anything from them. She could, however, capture their attention by telling a concrete story. Separating a performer from their performance has become difficult—and appealing to logic, not pathos, may be the only way to cut through the noise.
