27.

“I worked for the first time with a major A-List talent many years ago when I was first starting out. They (trying to remain gender neutral so as not to give too much away) have quite the reputation for being phenomenally talented but also rude, abrasive, and arrogant.”

“Going in, I knew that I had to tread carefully around them because of their reputation, but I was a little surprised by how not rude they were. … Because they were rather friendly with me from the get-go, I didn’t have to walk around on eggshells while interacting with them and could be myself. Also, I’m generally not the kind of person who ever asks for pictures, autographs, etc., so that helped.

A couple weeks in, we had a quiet moment together, and they broke down in front of me. At first, I thought to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m fucked,’ but those were tears of joy. I was the first person in a long time to have treated them like a normal person and not as some diva or someone who should be placed on a pedestal.

They opened up about the fact that they enjoyed acting as an art form but hated much of the pageantry and attention they got as a celebrity and much of their abrasive personality came from years of being exploited by people who they assumed to be friends and feeling like a ‘zoo animal’ whenever they were out and about with people treating them like they were the latest attraction to see and forgetting that there was an actual person underneath.

Are there some genuinely horrible people in Hollywood entertainment, etc? Absolutely. But it also taught me not to always judge a book by its cover, and a lot of times when famous people come across as abrasive, it’s a bit of a defense mechanism.”

—u/Lanky_Replacement375