It’s easy to idolize someone you haven’t met. You can build them up in your mind as the perfect person, immune to greed, arrogance, and other flaws so many of us carry around within ourselves.
The ultimate test is bumping into them in real life.
A recent r/AskReddit thread has its users sharing their best and worst celebrity encounters, and the responses ranged from heartwarming to disillusioning.
While some stars appeared to be humble and kind even to random strangers, others didn’t live up to their reputation and showed a side of themselves that shattered the admiration fans once had.
I met Weird Al and got starstruck and didn’t know what to say to him. I finally blurted out, “I know you probably hear this a lot, but I’m a huge fan.” He smiled and responded “I do hear that a lot, but I’ve never heard it from you.” Made my day.
We reached out to Reddit user Ksndkendkfjeknx, the person who started this discussion, and they explained that the idea came from personal experience.
“I was watching a video of one of my favorite YouTubers, and he was reacting to memes that his fans had sent in his Discord channel,” the Redditor told Bored Panda.
“I eventually got to the part where he reacted to a meme that I had sent. I was shocked that he sort of brushed it off and barely acknowledged it. I thought, ‘Huh, well, you know what they say, don’t meet your heroes.’ And I started to think … how many other people had [done so] and they turned out to be absolute [jerks]. That’s when I went to Reddit!”
When I was in Junior High, I wrote a paper on Thor Heyerdahl and Easter Island.
In High School I wrote another about his reed boat Atlantic crossing attempt.
I went to college to study anthropology, both because of him and Indiana Jones (I was 15, give me a break).
Through a series of familial misadventures, my money for grad school vanished, and I joined the military to get the cash to finish.
While stationed in Charleston, SC. I was with a buddy walking along the pier when I see this gorgeous three master sitting up ahead. I want to go look at it, and see it’s flying a Norwegian flag. I get closer and start taking with one of the girls on the ship. She says they’re college students and this is sort of an foreign study credit, sailing the ship. From Bergen all the way around to South America. That sounds amazing.
As I’m looking around, I notice that the ship is called the Heyerdahl. I comment that I wrote papers on Thor and got my degrees based on my admiration. She asked if I ever met him, and I just laughed…I was a poor kid from Western South Dakota… What were the chances I’d ever get to meet him?
She said he was right over at a cafe less than a block away.
I remember with unbelievable clarity. He was sitting on a little white bench outside the place with a disposable cup of something, with a book in his hand. There was a small table and chair not far away, and I could only just sit and look.
He looks up about a minute or two later, sees me and says, “I’m sorry, but are you alright?” I didn’t even realize I was crying.
Over the next hour and a half I talked and listened to him, watched him smile and talk about how adventure still existed, you just had to find them, and live them whenever you could.
He invited me to visit him if I was ever in Norway, and we both laughed at that.
When he died in ’02, I bawled my eyes out.
I live in Atlanta now, and a little over a year ago my wife and I went to Charleston for a few days. After dinner one evening we were walking along the pier and I saw where the ship had been tied up. Nothing there at that moment. Then I turned to where the cafe was, and saw the bench.
I sat where he sat for a while.
I met Wil Wheaton at a big SciFi con a few years ago. It was like halfway through the third day and he’d been signing stuff for hours.
I got to the front of the line and he jumped out of his chair in excitement and yelled “Are those BAT’LETH EARRINGS?! So cool!”
He then proceeded to sign my dorky old TNG comic (with Wesley Crusher on the cover of course) and we put an earring on the cover so he could take a photo of Wes with it. We talked about Open Source software and EFF.
Whole interaction took 3-4 minutes but he was just totally there for it, despite having a hundred other people he’d have to interact with.
He later included the photo in his blog.
There’s good reason for maintaining a distance between ourselves and the ones we adore.
A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology showed that excessive celebrity worship can negatively impact mental health, with effects like lowered self-esteem (which is more pronounced in women) and increased daytime sleepiness (a factor that is more common in younger people).
Another study published in the same year in BMC Psychology suggests that celebrity obsession can also subtly impair cognitive performance—the mental energy and attention invested in intense celebrity fascination could take away from the cognitive resources needed for daily problem-solving and decision-making tasks.
Not sure this is a “Never Meet Your Heroes” story, but it’s a great example of why you shouldn’t always listen to that advice.
I met Terry Farrell, the actress who played Jadzia Dax on Star: Trek Deep Space Nine, at a convention QnA session when I was 15. She and another DS9 actress (Nana Vistor for the Trekkies out there) were up on stage answering questions, and there were two lines leading to a microphone on either side of the stage. Well suddenly on Terry’s side, the mic went out, and without skipping a beat, Terry got off the stage and started holding out her own microphone to people so they could keep asking questions. Terry even gave a hug to a 4-5 year old girl ahead of me in line. I got to the front, and there I am, an extremely shy 15 year old, arm’s length away from my childhood hero, in front of several hundred people. I manage to tremblingly squeak out that she is my favorite character in all of Star Trek, and before I can say another word, she gives me a big hug. I ended up asking her about her favorite episode (her answer was Blood Oath, for those curious), and went back to my seat.
My dad had also bought me a photo op with her later that day, and when I got there, she exclaimed something to the effect of “Oh, I remember you!” and immediately pulled me into another big hug for the photo. I still have that photo, as well as an autographed photo of her character. Words cannot describe how much that encounter impacted me, I never expected someone who probably met thousands of fans that day to show so much care to one awkward teenager who just wanted to meet her hero like everyone else. Jadzia Dax is everything I wanted to be growing up. She is kind, confident, smart, funny, and adventurous. I still want to be all those things, but more than anything, I hope I can learn to exude even half the kindness that Terry Farrel does.
So yeah, sometimes your heroes really are heroes. :).
I met Tim Curry a few years ago and it was a different kind of bad. He was so frail it broke my heart.