Please Let Celebrities Have Letterboxd Accounts in Peace
Something weird happens when people find an actor’s Letterboxd account, especially an incognito one. Sure, it’s exciting for a fan to find and share a celebrity’s seemingly private account, full of honest reviews and rankings about their fellow actors, but there’s also something sad about it. “Boxxeding” celebs for their posts on Letterboxd is the most obnoxious kind of online person to be, and Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams is the latest to get the brunt of it.
A flurry of social-media users posting screenshots are outing Williams’s alleged account, effectively Letterboxd doxxing him and causing him to seemingly delete the account altogether. It’s one thing to share Williams’s posts because they’re funny, but fans seem to be using his Letterboxd to attack his acting abilities and call his taste into question. Does Williams need to like Nope? Or Pedro Pascal? What does it mean that he likes the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Lolita? Of course an actor has incomprehensible taste in movies — few actors’ tastes actually line up with the work they do, and even more of them have weird takes altogether. The rampant unpacking of his account descending into ad hominem attacks feels counterintuitive to what people want from celebrities now, a patina of authenticity. What if, instead, we all just behaved normally about this for once?
As the Tina Fey clip from Las Culturistas gets passed around for the ten millionth time, maybe we ought to rethink an ecosystem that encourages everyone to refuse to say how they actually feel for the sake of politehood at best and not pissing off stan communities at worst. It’d be one thing if Williams was going on podcasts or doing interviews where he talked openly about his dislike for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but his alleged Letterboxd — which has been otherwise absent from his promoting Heated Rivalry — is his business. He’s not the only person on his show who has been forced to grapple with his digital footprint. His co-star Connor Storrie’s embracing of his past YouTube videos is very sweet but feels unnecessary. An account titled “Actorboy222” is not asking to be discovered, let alone doxxed.
It was a little over a year ago when Charli XCX’s Letterboxd account “leaked” to the public, which led the singer to fess up to the account being hers. The appeal of Charli’s account was that her reviews were funny, yes, and a glimpse into her culture diet in relation to her own work. Charli decided to own it, both changing her bio on the site to be “my account got leaked i guess.” Though the singer and actor posts semi-regular breakdowns of her activity on TikTok, her unchanged bio on the site reminds users that she’s not a public figure on that site by choice (even if her username made her easy to identify). Margot Robbie’s alleged Letterboxd watches made the rounds before that account mysteriously disappeared. Even more public-identifying figures on Letterboxd — like Sean Baker — have curbed their activity on the platform, and other stars like Ayo Edebiri (and now Williams) deleted their accounts entirely. Should celebrities feel obligated to be public ambassadors of movies on Letterboxd, we run the risk of having everything on there feel like #spon. Celebs will already give five stars to movies with their friends in them; do we also want them doing that with whatever studio spends the most on marketing?
The frantic dissection of Williams’s account has allowed fans to feel they are close to, or even understand, someone they don’t know based on their media consumption. Or they’re using it as a vehicle to be weird haters. It’s a little interesting, sure, to see what celebrities get up to on Letterboxd, just as it is their Instagrams or anything else noted with a blue check mark, but they should be granted their privacy to have taste — good or bad or somewhere in between. If there’s anything Heated Rivalry fans should know, it’s that a little mystery is always more fun.
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