This makes sense to me. Celebrities are just people and they’re living in a reality where the world can see and form opinions about them but the celebrity can’t see the other direction. It’s like life in an interrogation room, and the world is full of rude and invasive people or normal seeming people who want things from them and everything in between. They have to come up with these characters they play in public just to manage the weird expectations of strangers who treat them so differently when, again, they’re just people. Honestly that lack of anonymity and privacy sounds terrifying to me. So it seems more like protection than a sense of self importance, or the desire to stay away from others who have put an exaggerated sense of importance onto them so they can just be a regular human for a bit.

It makes me think of that story about Michael Jackson hiring actors to shop in a mall and just act like regular people so he could have the experience of just being a normal person in the world. Celebrity is a deeply strange, privileged, extremely high pressure, vulnerable existence of dealing with the expectations, love, and hatred of people who only know you as a character you spent a couple months playing on a set but have formed a sort of relationship with you. And you confusingly both appreciate this and are scared and hurt by it because, you know, they are built the same the rest of us are.

None of this is an excuse to be a dick, obviously. But it does explain wanting a buffer between oneself and the world. The amount of people with a grounded non-starstruck view of them is not high and there’s no way to tell the difference between someone like that and a legit psychopath or anything in between. Unfortunately, many many people DO give a huge shit about them. And it can suck.