Watching a multimillionaire carry their own groceries into a camera frame seems a little strange. It takes place so often these days that it hardly seems newsworthy. An important star was seen at a gas station. Someone else was seen at Target, looking a little startled, like the paparazzi caught them there by accident. It’s always the same story: they’re just like us. The problem is that they’re not. That’s why an actor in Hollywood is selling their home right now to prove it.
The era of celebrities being relatable didn’t just happen. Over the course of ten years of social media, audience expectations changed, and people became less trusting of traditional star power. Around the middle of the 2010s, the math changed. Aspiration began to lose its tune. A certain group of people saw glamour as almost a liability. So the machinery was fixed. Stars started going to interviews in jeans that were worn out. They talked about how stressed they were. They put up selfies that weren’t edited. The message was clear: “I am also struggling, but in my own way.”
It seems like people were meant to find this comforting, and maybe some did for a while. But it’s harder to keep up the performance now that the difference in wealth between celebrities and everyone else is so big it’s funny. When a star makes eight figures for a single streaming deal and then describes feeling “burned out” in a Vogue cover story filmed at their home in Malibu, the exercise in relatability starts to fall apart.
Right now is really interesting because the A-listers’ return to “normalcy” is happening at the same time that real people are being pushed out of their homes. Kirk Acevedo, an actor who has worked on Marvel, Planet of the Apes, and Law & Order, recently talked about what it’s like to be in the middle class in Hollywood these days. He gave up his home. He saw his friends do the same thing. He made it very clear that the reason is that Oscar winners and big name actors who used to work in movies have moved on to TV. People with eight-figure profiles and award shelves are now getting the parts that used to go to actors at his level. He simply said: “The middle class, like in any economy, in any country, always gets squeezed out.”
That’s the part that no one posts about on Instagram. At its core, the relatable celebrity trend is a branding exercise meant to keep the public’s goodwill during a time of clear inequality. It’s not really wrong. In a certain way, it’s hollow. It’s even more obvious how hollow it is when you compare the fake modesty of a $40 million star to the real financial instability of an actor who books ten guest roles a year and makes maybe $45,000 after taxes and agent fees.
There’s a chance that some of this push for relatability is real. Fame can really make you feel alone, and there’s a psychological reason why rich people look for normal moments to ground themselves. But being honest doesn’t change the fact that the “normal celebrity” culture we live in now was built on the trust of the public that real working-class performers helped build. The character actor who slogged through regional auditions and the commercial talent who made a middle-class living from national campaigns—these are the people whose cultural closeness to everyday life gave the word “normalcy” to celebrities. And they’re being pushed out more and more.
The story is the same in the commercial market. Actors who used to make steady incomes from national broadcast campaigns are seeing that market shrink as A-listers move into advertising, streaming shifts budgets in new directions, and brands instead look for influencers who are real. The same force that is making it hard for working actors to find extra money is also making it hard for them to work on TV shows.
As I watch all of this, I can’t help but notice that the celebrities who best portray middle-class life are often the ones who don’t need it. The performance is credible because it has good lighting, a skilled publicist, and years of practice making a lot of people like you. The real middle class in Hollywood—the people for whom being broke is not just a plot device but a daily reality—doesn’t get the same chance to talk about what their lives are like.
The difference between the performance and the real life becomes the story at some point. We’re beginning to feel like we’re there.
