If you couldn’t tell, social media is actually a way of life now. When we leave the house without our phones, we tend to feel naked and vulnerable to the entire world. It’s like we lost a limb or something. Sure, this has to do with us being away from the item that helps us communicate with those we love, but it’s also a tool that helps us communicate with the entire world. And we usually do that with the help of social media.
We use Twitter to express our everyday thoughts that we just can’t keep to ourselves. Thanks to these platforms, we’ve seen the rise of some celebrities that wouldn’t even be possible without the help of social media. Take the Kardashians, for instance: that entire family seems to live their entire lives in front of a camera of sorts, whether it’s on television or on social media. It’s how they make their money and build their brands. It’s how other companies profit off of them and make money themselves.
So what about the celebs who don’t feel like they need social media in their lives? Are they onto something, or simply behind the times?
Here are 20 celebrities who refuse to use social media because it’s either burned them in the past or who have not desire to get burned through it in the future.
20 Don’t Feel Like Doing The Unthinkable - Jennifer Lawrence
Actress Jennifer Lawrence is undoubtedly one of the most popular young actresses out there these days. Thanks to her turn as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games trilogy, she’s getting movie offers left and right. She even won an Academy Award for her turn as a bipolar dancer looking for love in the comedy-drama Silver Linings Playbook with Bradley Cooper (an actor who plays her co-star so very often). But when it comes to signing up for Twitter or Instagram, she steers clear.
“The idea of Twitter is so unthinkable to me,” she said, according to The Bert Show.
“I’ll never get Twitter. If you ever see a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter that says it’s me, it’s not me. It’s because the internet has scorned me so much that I feel like it’s that girl in high school that I’m like, ‘Oh, you want to talk about her? Yeah, I’ll do that!’ Take my hoops off, I’m ready to go.”
She did, however, break her social media rule to take a picture of her asking late night talk show host David Letterman not to go. Oh, and of course, she starred in that infamous selfie that Ellen DeGeneres took at the Oscars that “broke the Internet”.
19 Too Old For Social Media? - Emily Blunt
Right now, Emily Blunt appears to be on top of the world. Her latest film A Quiet Place (directed by husband John Krasinski) is killing it at the box office and she’s prepping for the whole Mary Poppins Returns storm that’s going to pass through once that movie is released in theaters later this year. While she’s pretty open-minded about a lot of things, the one thing she isn’t so open-minded about is social media. “I’m like a dinosaur with [social media], number one,” she told Vulture. “I can barely remember to text people back! I also feel that my job is to persuade people that I’m somebody else. So if I reveal too much, then I’m doing my job a disservice, in a way.” Basically, even though she’s only in her mid 30’s, she’s saying leave all that Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat stuff to the kids where it belongs.
Then again, that was a couple years ago – so who’s saying that she might not want to give it a go this time around. Hubby John Krasinski is on Instagram and Emily is commonly featured in a majority of his posts (she happens to be his muse, you know). So who’s to say that she won’t get the social media bug a little later on and start up an Instagram feed of her own so she can feature John? One can wish, we suppose.
18 “It’s A Taste Thing” - Bradley Cooper
Looks like actor Bradley Cooper thinks a great deal like his always co-star, Jennifer Lawrence when it comes to social media. Cooper, who managed to fly under the radar for years until he struck gold with The Hangover franchise, can be seen virtually everywhere these days – mainly on the big screen. Back in the early 2000’s, Cooper starred with Jennifer Garner in the spy drama series Alias, which a lot of people don’t seem to recall. While Bradley apparently doesn’t care for all things Twitter-related, he seems to respect those who do.
“It’s a taste thing, I see the benefit of it [social networking] for sure,” he said on OK! TV.
"It’s a great way to promote ideas and projects."
"For me, maybe I’m old fashioned, if I know so much about you and you’re playing a character in a movie then that’s a lot of work I’m gonna have to do to forget who you are so that I can believe the character and therefore enjoy the movie."
So, basically, he thinks along the same lines as Emily Blunt does when it comes to being on social media and having it crossing over into their work field and affecting their work as actors.
17 Just Live In The Moment - Julia Roberts
America’s Sweetheart is considered a veteran actress by now. Julia Roberts shot to fame quickly with Pretty Woman back in the early 1990’s and hasn’t slowed down since. But when it comes to social media, Roberts isn’t looking to catch up to the “now” crowd.
“Listen, I don’t have my head in the sand,” the actress told InStyle magazine back in 2016 when discussing social media and popular television shows. “I’m aware of different outlets, however, you label them. It’s like people talking about a TV show – I can be perfectly aware of the TV show and the story, but it doesn’t mean I watch it. I have other friends who watch it, and they tell me about it. I mean, we were talking about Instagram. Everyone has Instagram on their phone. And I just, yeah, [if I had it] I would be looking at it all the time.” Julia basically prefers to live “in the now” in order to set an example for her children.
“It’s about allowing time to just exist. Conversations require a complete disregard for the clock – so that you can just listen and really be present. It becomes a paradox of efficiency and presence. That’s why I love summer. I just don’t care what time it is.”
16 “It’s That Need To Be Liked” - Emma Stone
Emma Stone doesn’t seem to have a single problem getting work these days. The La La Land actress is keeping herself busy, even though she’s really hasn’t appeared on the big screen much this year (rumor has it she’s dating Jennifer Aniston’s ex Justin Theroux, whom she was spotted having a sushi date with a couple days ago). But the one thing that Emma tends to stay away from? Social media.
“It’s that need to be liked,” she told The Los Angeles Times.
"That need to be seen, that need to be validated, in a way, though no one that you know. And so people ask the question about fame, or what it feels like, and it seems like everybody knows what that feels like."
"It seems like everyone’s cultivating their lives on Instagram or on different forms of social media, and what pictures look best of their day. It’s this very modern ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ It’s almost impossible to find someone that’s not, in some way, on the internet."
Have to say that she’s not wrong in what she says. Heck, we even found a selfie she took that was posted on Twitter (she’s not on Twitter). Everyone really is on the internet one way or another.
15 Skills He Won’t Admit To Having - Benedict Cumberbatch
Trust us, you probably wouldn’t want this guy on Twitter – mainly because it’s super hard to spell his name as is. Benedict Cumberbatch is an amazing actor, but apparently, that’s where he draws the line. There’s a reason why Cumberbatch refuses to use Twitter, and it’s actually pretty amusing. “No matter who pretends to be me at the moment, I do not tweet, I don’t do Twitter, I don’t,” the actor told an audience of Sherlock fans who came to hear him speak at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. “Do you want me to tweet, you lot?” he asked the bemused audience, who of course, yelled yes!
“Why?” he asked, completely baffled. “I think the reason why is because I don’t tweet. I think if I did you’d very soon be disappointed because it’s really a skill – it’s a skill I genuinely don’t have. Just listen to how much I talk. I’ve already talked over our time [here] and tweeting is about being pithy. I think tweeting would take so many hours of editing I’d be lost for doing my job.”
It’s actually amusing that Cumberbatch thinks he wouldn’t be able to live up to himself in his own tweets and that his audience would have to suffer through them. Still, we think we’d all be interested in what he would have to gripe about.
14 It Plays A Large Role On Women’s Self-Esteem - Kate Winslet
Most parents these days have a firm grasp on the dangers of social media, so they tend to put restrictions on it with their kids until they’re old enough to make their own decisions. Titanic actress Kate Winslet happens to be one of those parents. Only, Winslet has a very specific reason why she doesn’t allow her kids (or herself) on the popular applications. When speaking to The Sunday Times, Winslet expressed how social media actually makes her “blood boil”. And it has to do with self-esteem.
“When an 11-year-old posts a picture of her hair for others to ‘like’ she’s thinking about what some other person thinks who she doesn’t even know,” the actress says.
"[It ends up having a] huge impact on young women’s self-esteem because all they will ever do is design themselves for people to like them..."
Even when her children are working on homework and need to look something up, they’re given time limits. “If they want to look something up, like my son will often want to look at the transfer lists for Arsenal, he’ll have to go on my iPhone to do it and he’ll know he only has 10 minutes and can only do that specific one thing and he can’t go off on a bunch of tangents and Google pictures of cute fluffy hamsters.”
13 He Believes Twitter Is Just... Dumb? - George Clooney
Actor George Clooney is a known goofball who is notorious for pranking his co-stars on the sets of different movies. His victims include best friend Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Julia Roberts. So for him to say he won’t use something because the idea is rather silly in question, you have to wonder. And when it comes to social media, it’s clear that Clooney isn’t the biggest fan.
“If you’re famous, I don’t – for the life of me – I don’t understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter,” Clooney told Esquire magazine. “Why on God’s green earth would you be on Twitter? Because first of all, the worst thing you can do is make yourself more available, right? Because you’re going to be available to everybody. But also Twitter. So one drunken night, you come home and you’ve had two too many drinks and you’re watching TV and someone [upsets] you and you go ‘ehhhh’ and fight back. And you go to sleep, and you wake up in the morning and your career is over.” So Clooney tends to admire those famous actors who are “unavailable” to the general public, which is why he admires his friends like Pitt and Damon. We have to say, the man has a point.
12 Her Jokes Aren’t For Free - Tina Fey
Comedian and writer Tina Fey built her entire empire on her comedy – it’s practically her beating heart. And she happened to do it the old fashion way before Twitter came about – she was hired as a nobody on Saturday Night Live and built her career up from there. These days, young comedians are taking to Twitter in order to test out their own comedy, something apparently Fey is baffled by.
Actor Titus Burgess, who plays the sensational Titus Andromedon on Tina Fey’s Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, knows that’s one of the reasons why Tina doesn’t use any social media platforms. He had once asked his partner why she wasn’t on Twitter and her reply was short and to the point:
“Why would I give my jokes away for free?”
Young comedians on Twitter constantly have to deal with troll accounts stealing their jokes and passing them off as their own, which ends up hurting their careers in the long run, so Tina makes an absolutely good point with why she stays away from the site. It’s always wise for a TV and film writer as funny as Tina to save all her material for her work instead of “testing” it out on Twitter, only to have them stolen by some hack.
11 Won’t Be Consumed By Technology - Jake Gyllenhaal
There are many, many reasons to stay away from social media – ones that have already been specified by numerous actors on this list. But there’s an important one that we’ve missed, one that actor Jake Gyllenhall sites as his reason why he stays away from Twitter, Instagram, and everything else. It’s the fact that no one seems to be connecting on a personal level anymore.
“I wonder what that would be like, actually,” the actor told USA Today. “To me, this is a product of us all having smartphones and being consumed by that – we’re looking down. No one is looking up. I take that seriously, even in the midst of being funny. I think it’s saying something really important and a little scary.”
The man does make a solid point: we’re living in a generation where everyone is constantly looking down at their phones, some for even the sole purpose of avoiding human interaction with other people. This certain technology has even created a generation of introverts who have absolutely no desire to go out and mingle with the real world – they prefer to live in the world of technology. While we seem to be progressing with new technology every day, we’re forgetting that we need to interact with actual human beings every now and then.
10 Over Sharing Is Just Too Much - Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson is a phenomenal actress who seemingly can do it all. But the one thing she won’t do? That’s right: Twitter. Or Facebook. Basically, anything connected with social media altogether. “I don’t have a Facebook or a Twitter account,” she told The Huffington Post. “And I don’t know how I feel about this idea of, ‘Now, I’m eating dinner, and I want everyone to know that I’m having dinner at this time,’ or ‘I just mailed a letter and dropped off my kids,’ That, to me, is a very strange phenomenon."
"I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than have to continuously share details of my everyday life."
The younger generation seems to believe that other people desire to hear the tiny details of their everyday life, so they constantly feel they need to inform all their followers that they “just bought a Starbucks iced coffee” or just was “sooooo tired cause I didn’t sleep last night.” We really are over-sharing so very much and Scarlett makes a valid point. Go look at your feeds right now and you’ll see that most are just posting shockingly similar posts to each other: what they’re eating, posting a selfie in a good light or posting a pic of a cherished pet – it’s all really the same.
9 No Need To Have Everything Documented - Brad Pitt
There’s a reason why George Clooney is so close with Brad Pitt: it’s because he tends to make himself “unavailable” in most cases, especially when it comes to social media (good to know what Clooney sees in the makings of a good friend). When Pitt was with wife Angelina Jolie, both of them were avid on not allowing themselves and their children be subjected to social media. The pair even had a cyber-security team monitoring their children’s use of the internet. Also, both of them were extremely old school. “First of all, I don’t really know how to operate a computer,” Pitt confessed to Vanity Fair. Well, we have to say that’s one good reason not to have any sort of social media account.
Now, of course, we don’t know about his phone usage, but we do know as a fact that he is not on Twitter or Instagram in any shape or form. Usually, for stars of his and Jolie’s caliber, there really is no need to document every little thing that they do, mainly since the paparazzi already does that for them. So what’s the point? If he wants to know what he did one day, he could just Google himself and we’re sure some random picture of him on that specific day will pop up.
8 Feels Too Much Like School - Keira Knightley
Keira Knightley seems to have a very logical explanation why the actress only had a Twitter account for a mere 12 hours before it baffled her so much that she deactivated her account and hasn’t looked back since. Once upon a time, the actress who referred to the internet once as ‘dehumanising,’ decided to open up a Twitter account under a false name just to test out the waters a little bit. Needless to say, she wasn’t impressed at all.
“It made me feel a little bit like being in a school playground and not being popular and standing on the sidelines kind of going, ‘Argh,” the actress told Harper’s Bazaar UK. Some of her fans have described Knightley as “haughty” for refusing to get on social media and engage. “No, I think that’s fine… I like being private,” she said when she was told that’s what some people think.
“I haven’t asked a lot of the actresses who I really admire, ‘How do you do it?’ because I don’t want to know."
"Maybe I’m childish in that way; I just don’t want to know about your life."
We have to say, we admire the way she draws the line in the sand. Hey, at least she gave it a shot for 12 hours.
7 “It’s Just Not For Me” - Daniel Radcliffe
So, how do his fans feel about Harry Potter himself not having any social media accounts? Well, we have to say, after they hear his reasoning, they really shouldn’t take any sort of issue with it. While Daniel Radcliffe thinks that the Twitter platform is great, it really just isn’t for him.
“I think Twitter is great for certain things and certain people,” the actor told People magazine. “There are people I really enjoy reading on Twitter. But I don’t know why anyone in my position would be on it.”
A while ago, a fan asked him about his feelings about technology and he responded “I got email three years ago. I managed to not because I loved not having it, and then I had to get it because I joined a fantasy football league.” What’s amusing is that Radcliffe admits to being a huge fantasy football fan and joining multiple leagues every season. If that’s the case, he should really start exploring Twitter just to see some players’ tweets (and if they happened to party a little too hard the night before a game so you know if you should play that particular player or not). To each their own, I suppose.
6 No Selfies For This Beauty - Sandra Bullock
It can be rather interesting when a person who makes their living pretending to be someone else refuses to get on social media because the Internet is full of, well, liars. But that’s what actress Sandra Bullock feels and truth be told – she isn’t wrong. The actress can’t even stand taking selfies, so she refuses to do it. “I hate taking selfies,” she told U.K.’s The Times. “I will not take a selfie that I can’t erase. I don’t post or do any of that stuff.”
Bullock actually believes that the images that are floating around the net (the selfie craze) are unrealistic.
"We’re not representing our lives truthfully."
"Like when you’re yelling at your child, you’re not taking a selfie of you being a horrible parent. No, you’re waiting for the perfect selfie. ‘Do I look thinner now?’ ‘Do I look great?’ It’s this false projection of one’s life. Hollywood has now gone global. Everyone’s Hollywood now.”
“People have these worlds they post and it’s about projecting an image and getting likes,” she continued. “I read a great article about how there’s a higher rate of depression because people are looking at everyone else’s Facebook [pages] and seeing this picture-perfect life. I think it’s frightening for kids and young people developing who they are to have that false sense of acceptance based on an image. How do you unravel that when it’s being pushed hard?”
5 Privacy Is More Important - Mila Kunis
It’s a little odd that while Ashton Kutcher was once the king of social media at one point in his life, his wife Mila Kunis really wants nothing to do with it. “What I do and who I am are two different things,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “And to me, it was always really important to keep those things separate. I don’t want people thinking they know me to the point where they feel comfortable coming in my house without being invited. For security reasons, it just wasn’t worth it. I’d rather have my privacy over anything.”
Of course, just because she doesn’t get on social media doesn’t mean she feels the need to put that upon her husband as well. He was always hilarious on Twitter, but apparently, that’s nothing compared who how he is in real life. “Clearly, I’m the funny one, let’s be honest,” Mila joked when asked about who was funnier in their marriage – her or Ashton. “I will say he makes me laugh every day. Sixty years from now, when we’re in our rocking chairs and I’m wearing a muumuu, I hope he’s still around and I’m still giggling, because the greatest gift you can give is making each other laugh.”
4 What Happened To Old Fashion Calling? - Daniel Craig
We don’t think that anyone should really be surprised that James Bond himself stays off the grid when it comes to social media. Mainly because he’s used to playing a character who wouldn’t, for the life of him, ever be caught using social media unless it was used to track down a bad guy. Daniel Craig, well, he basically thinks like James Bond and finds it all just so pointless.
“I am not on Facebook. And I’m not on Twitter either… ‘Woke up this morning, had an egg’?” he joked to The Daily Star when it comes to people’s average posts on the site.
"What relevance is that to anyone? Social networking?"
"Just call each other up and go to the pub and have a drink. There’s some talk of a new class-system paradigm – that, in the future, the world will be divided between those who ‘get’ social networking and those who don’t. I’m really not bothered. But I hope the generations to come learn to be a little bit cynical and learn how to mess it up a bit," he states.
Sometimes, the actor does look up things about his own work, but if the criticism gets too harsh, he just shuts down the computer. “The truth is that I mistakenly go online occasionally and Google my name… and oh man, the hating on the internet… it’s like there’s a bunch of sociopaths out there who want to go out and rip you to pieces.”
3 Too Much Pressure - Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston is used to having her life on permanent display. Back in the late 1990’s, early 2000’s, she was happily married to Brad Pitt and just living out her best self with her hit show Friends on NBC. And then, all of a sudden, her marriage was over and she was attempting to put the pieces of her life back to together as the press stalked her the entire time, focusing on her every move and if she was “happy” or not. So why on earth would someone think she would enjoy social media?
Recently, Jennifer took over the Instagram account for her company Living Proof and, well, it wasn’t really a pleasant experience for the actress. “I was so stressed out, sweating bullets,” she told People magazine. “It was too much pressure. For these Kardashians, it’s a career!”
Not only that, but Aniston is worried about how social media affects the younger generation. “Kids aren’t speaking to each other anymore. I was with friends of ours from Vermont and their two kids don’t have an iPhone or an iPad. They were 9 and 12 and were the most interesting young adults. Seeing other kids on their [phones] all the time, it makes me sad.”
2 That’s A Firm “No” From Voldemort - Ralph Fiennes
One big reason we haven’t heard from most celebrities when it comes to staying off social media is that because it’s messing with modern language. This is how actor Ralph Fiennes feels about it, and he’s clearly not wrong.
He actually blames Twitter for the “erosion” of modern language.
“Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us,”' he said when speaking at the BFI London Film Festival. Fiennes also believes that students in drama schools are suffering thanks to social media sites.
“I hear it too, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, (students) a few generations ago maybe would have. I think we’re living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English language, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant? But I love this language we have and what it can do, and aside from that I think the themes in his plays are always relevant.”
1 The Need To Be Free - James Franco
There’s really one thing that will keep most celebrities from being on social media – and that’s if they were on it before and messed up big time. This happens to be the case for James Franco who found himself involved in scandal after scandal. But not only that, but because he felt that he was no longer in control of his Twitter account or Instagram. “Social media is over. Still up there. Going down. You heard it here first,” the actor said when speaking at the creative writing non-profit 826DC’s benefit. “My thought was ‘this is my Twitter. I can do whatever I want. But certain companies I work with contacted me about what I was saying.”
“If you want to write, make the time,” he told the guests attending the benefit. “We all have an hour or two a day that can be used for surfing Facebook or writing. No one is going to beg any new writer to write. I feel like I didn’t get a ton of support in school in creative subjects and I went to a great public school. As a kid, I would have grown from that.”
You live and you learn, and James took the lesson he learned to heart, so I doubt we’ll be seeing him back on Twitter or Instagram for a long time.
References: americasspotlight.com, vulture.com, etonline.com, usmagazine.com, thesun.co.uk., radiotimes.com, thetimes.co.uk., esquire.com, time.com, adweek.com, vanityfair.com, dailymail.co.uk., people.com, thedailytelegraph.com.au, gadgetsnow.com, telegraph.co.uk.,
