There are no photos of Milly Alcock in this post
Last week I was standing in front of the toaster, thumbing through Instagram, when I saw an interesting headline:
Yeah, I know — not the first time someone’s ever said it. It’s a good interview, though. Here’s the relevant bit:
Me seeing my face constantly is straining. No one should have to do that. It fuckin’ sucks, man. I don’t know how the socialites of the world can do that. It’s kind of driving me off the wall. It’s an incredibly difficult space to navigate… It feels like someone’s opened Pandora’s box and you’re kind of just looking through the looking glass. It’s a bit Alice in Wonderland-y. It’s fucking weird.
Since there’s only one episode of House of the Dragon a week and only so much content to be squeezed out from them, this soundbite eventually fell into the laps of our favorite people: Instagram content aggregators. Guess what went with all their posts about it? Photos of Milly Alcock.¹
Anyways, we’re easing our way into an era where we take mental health seriously and it’s nice to see people being wholesome, so 10pm me thought “hey, I should check the comments!”
This is always a mistake. Never open the comment section.
What bugged me, even more so than the callousness, was the willingness to make assumptions about a person’s intelligence and character based on what amounted to a few lines and the most basic context imaginable. I couldn’t wrap my head around the logic — people taking the time to bash someone they can barely conceive — because it’s so hard to conceptualize others the farther they are from us. When we think of friends or family, we can pick them apart so easily in our minds. We know them so well that their fears and their wants, their habits and their character, feel like they’re laid out right in front of us. When we think of strangers, we have nothing. Despite all that, as the distance increases, the desire to analyze remains even as the understanding falls apart.
Celebrities are stuck in the middle of the scale. They’re farther from us than anyone, but fame bridges the gap in a way that is as artificial as it is parasocial — the constant exposure creates the illusion of an intimacy that doesn’t really exist. The very nature of existing near a journalist or a photographer compels it. When someone is presented to an audience, the audience wants to speculate, and with social media being as ubiquitous as it is now it’s easier than ever for the armchair psychoanalysts to come out of the woodwork.² It’s the inevitable outcome of a culture that has existed as long as celebrities have: when people want to know you and want to speculate about you, they will.
You don’t even need to be famous to attract that brand of attention. Think about those kids from school — the ones with the weird walk, or the big personality, or the inability to filter what passed between their brain and their mouths. They were never on a magazine cover, or interviewed on TV; they attracted gossip anyways. It wasn’t that they were asking for it. They just existed near people with nothing better to do.
It’s easy to forget that celebrities exist as more than concepts, but it feels hard to say that they’re real people either. We can feel like we know more about them than our friends or our coworkers, but in reality we don’t know them at all. We see them everywhere, and yet they exist totally out of bounds from our lives. The nature of the celebrity complex makes it hard to imagine them as full-bodied people, with lives and relationships and everything else “normal” people have.
Maybe they’re not as far away as you’d think.
There’s very few people who’ve had an experience like how I’ve had, and finding them is really difficult. I don’t really know anyone whose kind of gone through what I’m going through. All of my friends are very normal and go to uni and just do very basic things, and my family’s not in the arts whatsoever, so it’s strange. — Milly Alcock, to Nylon
I was washing dishes in a restaurant, living in my mum’s attic. This doesn’t happen to people like me, so it was incredibly quick…I froze, and took a deep breath and said to my friend, “Do you have wine?” Then I called my mum. — Milly Alcock, to Stellar Magazine³
The difference between the person who can’t get away from her own face and the person who lived in her mom’s attic is about 15 months and five episodes of a TV show, but the difference in how seriously her problems are taken is enormous. It’s not that she became any less of a real person in that time frame. It’s that people prefer an image they manufacture in seconds to a reality that they might never fully grasp.
I haven’t watched House of the Dragon, nor do I have any plans to. I don’t know anything about Milly Alcock as an actor, although I’ve only heard good things. What interests me is the story of the person who washed dishes and lived in an attic; who chased their big break for years, then realized they didn’t know what to do with it. But I didn’t know anything about her. A thousand words later, I still don’t.
I don’t mind. Sometimes, it’s nice to leave the mystery unsolved.
This article exists thanks to my sister.
¹ I get it — it’s a visual platform, and it probably wouldn’t make sense to post a quote with no photo anyways. But it was funny to watch them run so willingly into the contradiction.
² I think anyone that voluntarily writes multiple Tweets a day should be on a watch list, but we don’t have time to get into that.
³ I need you to know how annoying it was to cite this source. To get the quote I had to find an article, that linked to another article, that linked to the original article, which was behind a goddamn paywall! I’m so glad I don’t have to do this shit for a grade anymore.
