When Katy Perry and five other women were launched into space in Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket, no doubt they expected to be celebrated as trailblazers. Cast your mind back to April, and the event was getting wall-to-wall news coverage. The crew, also including Bezos’s then-fiancee Lauren Sánchez and CBS presenter Gayle King, were in space for about 11 minutes, during which Perry sang a rendition of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World and revealed the setlist for her Lifetimes tour. On their return, the pop star kissed the ground and showed a daisy to the camera – a tribute to her daughter, Daisy.
Well, talk about crashing back down to earth. Instead of being hailed as a giant leap for 21st-century feminism, the voyage turned into a colossal PR failure. It was ridiculed for being tone-deaf, an out-of-touch luxury ride for the super-rich during a time of economic hardship. There were so many mocking memes and hot takes that Perry later admitted feeling “battered and bruised” at being turned into a “human piñata”. “I take it with grace and send them love,” she said, “cause I know so many people are hurting in so many ways and the internet is very much so a dumping ground for the unhinged and unhealed.”
But the Blue Origin backlash reflected a broader cultural shift. As the now-viral refrain from Kourtney Kardashian goes, “Kim, there’s people that are dying.” The public’s tolerance for the promotion of celebrity as an end in itself is disappearing fast. In a world beset by economic uncertainty, political upheaval, wars and environmental breakdown, is it any surprise we increasingly want to see those with big platforms use them for something more than self-promotion?
Of course, Jeff Bezos’s Venice wedding this summer, estimated to have cost £37m, was uber-glamorous, and any A-lister worth their buck was invited. We saw the photos of Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, Ivanka Trump and the Kardashians boarding water taxis to tour the Venetian lagoon. Once these images would have inspired envy or aspiration; now they arouse anger and feed “eat the rich” narratives.
Our celebrities were once distant figures whose lives functioned as escapism. Social media has eroded that distance, drawing stars into the same feeds, crises and conversations as everyone else. Now, when they appear indifferent, it reads as disdainful.
Take Sydney Sweeney, whose advert for American Eagle jeans caused one of the biggest controversies in pop culture this year. In it, the blond-haired, blue-eyed star of Euphoria is framed as having “great jeans” – playing on the pun with “genes” – which critics claimed evoked eugenics and white supremacy. Even Donald Trump got involved, calling it “the hottest ad out there” after it was reported that Sweeney had registered as a Republican voter in Florida months before his election. Many saw Sweeney’s silence as complicity. “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear,” the actor said in November.
Fast forward a few weeks, and Sweeney finally conceded she should have addressed the controversy around the ad. She also spoke out against “hate and divisiveness”. The generous interpretation is that it took time to work out the right response, but cynics may point out that the contrition coincided with Sweeney’s latest film, Christy, underperforming at the box office.
Film execs could be forgiven for believing that merely having an A-list name in a title could get people into theatres – after all, it’s been the established way since the dawn of Hollywood. But Sweeney’s experience also speaks to a broader recalibration in the film industry itself. This season, films starring the likes of Margot Robbie, Dwayne Johnson, Julia Roberts, Keanu Reeves and Daniel Day-Lewis have all struggled at the box office. One popular post on Reddit said it was “simply because the star system no longer exists and a single name is not enough to convince a person to go to the cinema”. Instead, what resonated were films that challenged existing power structures as well as having a solid cast, such as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a vampire film rooted in Black history, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, about a retired revolutionary and his mixed-race daughter taking on the state.
It’s no longer enough, it seems, to celebrate celebrity. Even Taylor Swift, who built a career on emotional vulnerability, faced a muted response when her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, prioritised songs about showbiz and her fiance’s manhood over grander concerns. Accusations that Swift was detached from the anxieties of the wider world were compounded when she failed to challenge the Trump administration using snippets from the album on social media (in stark contrast to other musicians, such as Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo, who have publicly objected to similar political appropriation).
Last year, Swift was on a list of celebrities that social-media users were encouraged to block because they had not publicly commented on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Perhaps such strength of feeling was behind the increasing number of artists who have felt empowered to speak out about the scale of death and suffering in Gaza over the past 12 months. But there are also potential repercussions for those who do make political statements – and not just about the Middle East. The suspension of the US TV host Jimmy Kimmel (over comments made about the killing of Charlie Kirk) demonstrated that powerful institutions are willing to act against public figures who challenge them.
There is also the risk of celebrities sliding into performative activism. On her new Substack, Charli xcx recently reflected on the artist’s responsibility to the public. “Some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood,” she said. Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence has said the onus shouldn’t be on artists to fix the world’s problems. But in an age when many have lost trust in institutions that once shaped public morality, from political leaders to the media, it’s hardly surprising that celebrities are being looked to to fill the vacuum. In 2025, people don’t want their celebrities in space, they want to know what they stand for on the ground.
Nadia Khomami is the arts and culture correspondent at the Guardian
