I’m no one special, but I have worked multiple conventions promoting stuff I was involved in and I have to say I sympathize with Elijah Wood here because there are a lot of real entitled assholes at those cons. Maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to do it in the first place, but it’s actually pretty amazing how many times I saw people come up to someone well-known at a table next to me and were just incredible dicks to them because they think they deserved to be talked down over some show they were in.
I sat next to the late Richard Hatch at a convention once (awesome guy, by the way) and it was amazing the shit people gave him for having the nerve to be in the original Battlestar Galactica. They would say shit to him like, “I love you in the new BSG, but wow that original show sucked in every way and I hated your character.” And then there were all the “you didn’t write a long paragraph on my 8x10 and I’m mad about it! Don’t you know how big a fan I am?!” people.
I’ve been pretty lucky in my life to have been around multiple well-known people and in my experience, they really appreciate it if you just talk to them on a person-to-person level. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go up to Elijah Wood at a convention and say, “I loved you as Frodo!” but if you come up with something more human-to-human to say to them, you’ll get a better reaction. Especially if they’re having a bad day. If you had said to Elijah Wood, “these conventions must be really tiring with all the signing you have to do,” he probably would have appreciated it (assuming he isn’t just an asshole himself).
I’m no one special, but I have worked multiple conventions promoting stuff I was involved in and I have to say I sympathize with Elijah Wood here because there are a lot of real entitled assholes at those cons. Maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to do it in the first place, but it’s actually pretty amazing how many times I saw people come up to someone well-known at a table next to me and were just incredible dicks to them because they think they deserved to be talked down over some show they were in.
I sat next to the late Richard Hatch at a convention once (awesome guy, by the way) and it was amazing the shit people gave him for having the nerve to be in the original Battlestar Galactica. They would say shit to him like, “I love you in the new BSG, but wow that original show sucked in every way and I hated your character.” And then there were all the “you didn’t write a long paragraph on my 8x10 and I’m mad about it! Don’t you know how big a fan I am?!” people.
I’ve been pretty lucky in my life to have been around multiple well-known people and in my experience, they really appreciate it if you just talk to them on a person-to-person level. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go up to Elijah Wood at a convention and say, “I loved you as Frodo!” but if you come up with something more human-to-human to say to them, you’ll get a better reaction. Especially if they’re having a bad day. If you had said to Elijah Wood, “these conventions must be really tiring with all the signing you have to do,” he probably would have appreciated it (assuming he isn’t just an asshole himself).