By Jose Perez
While researching Benedict Cumberbatch and scrolling through the various articles on Google, I stumbled upon one particular article from Zap2it that was solely devoted to celebrating Benedict Cumberbatch’s and Tom Hiddleston’s friendship and their apparent BFF status. The article presents various pictues of the actors together, as well as several hilarious edited gifs of the two, made by fans, which are evidently fascinated by such friendship.
Benedict and Hiddleston in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse–the movie that “brought the actors together.”
Nevertheless, this article made me wonder: what is the fascination with their friendship? Why are these articles, focused on two people’s friendship—something so ordinary and banal—, made in the first place? The first thing that popped into my head was that we are so enthralled by Cumberbatch’s and Hiddleston’s friendship because it humanizes them. It makes us think: “Hey, famous people can have friends just like us!” It lowers them from their celebrity status and turns them into ordinary people, with whom we can relate to more easily. However, there’s more to it.
By creating such articles, aren’t we contradicting ourselves? The fact is, we are giving so much attention to these two fellow English actors and their close friendship. We place them on this pedestal because their friendship is so much more fascinating, as if their friendship is superior to our friendships (you don’t see gifs of you and your friends on the internet, do you?) Therefore, aren’t we further increasing the distance between them—the stars—and us—the “commoners?” It seems to be this paradox where the more attention we give to the fact that stars are just like us, the more we push them towards celebrity, and the more articles about their life–including their friendships–are written.
This fascination with the Hiddleston/Cumberbatch friendship is reminiscent of the Selena Gomez/Demi Lovato friendship.
Here’s a link for more info on that: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2551431/Demi-Lovato-talks-friendship-Selena-Gomez-candid-post-rehab-interview.html
I do agree to some level that this celeb friendship humanizes and makes them appear ordinary to the general public. However, if we use the Gomez/Lovato friendship model, it all seems fabricated. These Disney Channel starlets were basically made into friends to increase these two young girls’ popularity coaxing Lovato’s fans to be Gomez’s fans and vice versa. Lovato and Gomez conveniently revealed that they had a shared history of being on the Barney show together and because of this have been friends since they were toddlers. However, I believe this to be just another scheme and plot to promote the Disney Channel shows that the two girls were headlining. All of a sudden, there was an onslaught of pictures of these two girls hanging out and doing best friend activities in basically every teen magazine. With that exposure, Gomez’s new show at the time “Wizards of Waverly Place” gets Lovato loving fans. In return, Lovato’s new show “Sonny with a Chance” receives Gomez’s adoring fans.
Now, I wonder if publicists and/or agents are devising our two beloved Brit actors to be “besties” just so they can create an arranged marriage between the celebs and their fans. It makes me wonder if this is a friendship of convenience or if it is truly sincere.