Ian McKellen had his jab – phew. Prepare Now for a Deadly Epidemic of Celebrity Suffering | Movie

IYou don’t have to be tough as a celebrity in the age of Covid. With all traditional avenues of exit and promotion closed, the famous have spent the past nine months desperately trying to channel their desire for attention into all manner of extracurricular ventures.

But a new path is finally starting to take shape. Celebrities can’t promote movies because they haven’t. They can’t get all of their friends to join them on one excruciating video, because – as Gal Gadot found out this week – they’ll be asked about it far more than their actual work. But what they can do is get vaccinated. And they can pose for a photo while they’re doing it.

The biggest name, of course, is Sir Ian McKellen. He was vaccinated against the coronavirus on Wednesday, giving the cameras a boost as he was wrapped in a colorful scarf. But he was not alone. Prue Leith received her shot 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 who is thankful that vaccinations are given to older celebrities first. They’ve all been around long enough to know it’s not about them. They have enough wisdom to know that by posting their photos, they are sending a message to skeptics about their safety. There is no missing photo in which Sir Ian McKellen suddenly tilts, or transforms into an Illuminati lizard, or sends a tracking beam directly to Bill Gates’ private surveillance satellite. He had his injection, said, “It didn’t hurt,” 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. Hopefully she would have been a “believer” in the guestbook? This is the level of self-infatuation that we should have faced. If Rita Ora, for example, had been vaccinated first, you know there would be photos of her partying without a mask on the weekends. .

When I see pictures of McKellen or Leith being injected, the primary response is relief. It’s been a tough year for everyone – so tough that every time a celebrity starts trending on Twitter, you’re preparing for the worst. But to know that Magneto – or Bake Off’s wife, or Lionel Blair – has managed to protect himself against the virus’s more angry edges, is to feel a brief glimmer of comfort. It hasn’t been fun, but at least the nice old famous people will be with us for a while.

The best news of all, however, is that celebrity vaccination photo fatigue will start before too long. We are delighted to see McKellen, 81, get vaccinated, and we will be happy when Sir Ben Kingsley, 76, receives his. But the moment a photo of 72-year-old Jeremy Irons begins to shoot, the excitement will start to wear off. No one will even notice when Ralph Fiennes, 57, receives 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 stands, photos of vaccinated celebrities are still new. But in the spring, when we’re inundated with photos of everyone with even the slightest public profile posing with a needle in their arm in a fake attempt to reassure the public, it will be much harder to swallow. It’s fine right now, but it’s enough.