What Celebrities have wholly artificial public personas?

[oliversarmy]

Teller talks and seems like a good guy – at least when I met him. Penn was OK, too.

[Antinor01]

@don_t_ask

I would have thought the whole roster of WWF would have qualified. I never was a fan but used to watch a lot of it with my kids, who were, and came to appreciate the “totality” of its commitment to entertainment. Everyone from Vince down was playing a part in a soap - pretending to be some wrestler with a bogus name who was fueding with another guy with a fake name who had stolen his “girlfriend” or pretending to be the estranged son of the owner of the whole thing to set up another wrestler with an assumed name etc etc. They were all pretending to be private people, pretending to be public people.

Mostly but not entirely true. For example, HHH and Stephanie McMahon really are married. That’s why he was made a superstar. Matt and jeff hardy really are brothers and matt was really dating Lita who really did cheat on him. They brought real life into the story line. Granted, most of it is fake but the line can get blurry.

[Moirai]

I love the walking dead!

The WWF references brought back one for me- Goldberg, aka Bill Goldberg, former football layer and professional wrestler. I saw him on *Denis Miller Live[/i[ years ago, and he’s a very smart guy from a pretty smart family-

Goldberg’s mother, Ethel, is a classical violinist, while his father, Jed, a graduate of Harvard University, was an obstetrician and gynecologist (they divorced). Jed died in late 2006. In addition to playing the violin, Ethel breeds flowers, and once succeeded in creating an award-winning hybrid orchid which she named after Goldberg

From Wiki…

I remember him say how horrified they were that he wanted to play football. Then, when he got injured, he broached the subject of pro wrestling… :eek:

[Ephemera]

@Antinor01

Mostly but not entirely true. For example, HHH and Stephanie McMahon really are married. That’s why he was made a superstar. Matt and jeff hardy really are brothers and matt was really dating Lita who really did cheat on him. They brought real life into the story line. Granted, most of it is fake but the line can get blurry.

HHH was already well established by the time he started seeing Stephanie. Him marrying her cemented his status, and assured his legacy, but it didn’t play any part in him becoming a main event player.

[Lamia]

Sasha Baron Cohen rarely gives interviews or makes television appearances as himself. He is usually in character as one of his three best known characters, Ali G, Borat, or Bruno. However, he did appear in other roles in the films Madagascar (well, just his voice in that one), Talledega Nights, and Sweeney Todd.

[Beware_of_Doug]

@Lemur866

News and talk shows are to a greater or lesser extent a performance, so even though someone seems like a nice guy on David Letterman, we really know almost nothing about them.

Dave himself, off-air, is said to be pathologically self-critical, his humor submerged beneath a deep cynicism.

[Marley23]

Continued over here in a much newer thread.