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meIt must be tough as a celebrity in the Covid era. With all the traditional avenues of release and promotion closed, celebrities have spent the past nine months desperately trying to channel their desire for attention into all kinds of extracurricular adventures.
But finally a new path begins to form. Celebrities can’t promote movies because they haven’t been making any. They can’t get all their friends to join them in an excruciating singing video because, as Gal Gadot has been discovering this week, they will be asked about it much more than their actual work. But what they can do is get vaccinated. And they can pose for a photo while doing it.
The biggest name, of course, is Sir Ian McKellen. He was vaccinated against the coronavirus on Wednesday, giving a thumbs up to the cameras while wrapped in a colorful scarf. But he was not alone. Prue Leith got her jab on Tuesday, Lionel Blair on Wednesday. Marty Wilde was vaccinated last week, as was Jack Whitehall’s father.
And I don’t think I’m the only one to be thankful that vaccines are being given to older celebrities first. They’ve all been around long enough to know this isn’t about them. They have enough wisdom to know that by making their shots known, they are sending a message to skeptics about how safe it is. Not missing a photo in which Sir Ian McKellen suddenly collapses, or transforms into an Illuminati lizard, or sends a tracking beam directly to Bill Gates’ private surveillance satellite. He gave himself the injection, said, “That didn’t hurt,” and then went home.
You can’t help but wince at what would happen if younger celebrities were vaccinated first. Remember when Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank house and wrote: “Anne was a great girl. I wish I had been a believer ”in the guest book? That’s the level of self-deception that we would have had to deal with. If Rita Ora, for example, had been vaccinated first, I’d know there would be pictures of her partying without a mask on the weekend. .
When I see photos of McKellen or Leith receiving an injection, the primary response is relief. This has been a difficult year for everyone, so difficult that every time a celebrity starts trending on Twitter, you prepare for the worst. But knowing that Magneto, or the wife from Bake Off, or Lionel Blair, has managed to guard against the virus’s most angry edges, is to feel a brief glow of reassurance. This hasn’t been fun, but at least the nice old celebrities will be with us for a while longer.
The best news of all, though, is that celebrity shot fatigue will start in no time. We are delighted to see McKellen, 81, get his chance, and we’ll be delighted when Sir Ben Kingsley, 76, gets his. But by the time a photo of 72-year-old Jeremy Irons begins to circulate, the excitement will start to fade. No one will ever figure out when Ralph Fiennes, 57, will get his, and when the time comes for Tom Hiddleston, 39, people will be furious that it even counts as news.
This is exactly how it should be. As it is, the images of vaccinated celebrities are still novel. But by spring, when we are inundated with photographs of all of us, even with the slightest public profile, posing animatedly with a needle in the arm in a false attempt to reassure the public, it will be much harder to swallow. Okay now, but enough.
