Celebrity death threats: Fandoms abusing Paapa Essiedu, Barry Keoghan and more need to check themselves

Everyone really needs to calm down.

Seriously, whatever happened to a proportional response? To military action, to verbal slights perceived and actual, to political difference, to everything.

Why, in our divided and fragile age, everything must be the worst thing ever?

OK, there are some things worthy of an impassioned and maximalist response – war criminals, for example. We shouldn’t just ignore that or let it pass with an “ugh, that’s annoying, now what’s for dinner tonight?”.

But surely we can all agree that there are some things that really require cooler heads to prevail.

Fandoms have always been a little bit extra. Everyone often forgets that the word fan is literally short for fanatic, but that doesn’t mean you have to actually devote yourself to a cult-like level.

But more recently, thanks to the internet (that thing again), fandoms have become unhinged. If you’re engaging in harassment or, even worse, death threats, at people because of your “love” of pop culture, you’re not a fan.

This past weekend, Paapa Essiedu has become the latest actor to reveal he’s received death threats because of his involvement in a screen project, although he is hardly the only one.

Essiedu, who is best known for his role in acclaimed drama I May Destroy You, was cast as Professor Severus Snape in the upcoming Harry Potter series, and since it was announced almost a year ago, he has faced continuing backlash for being a black actor.

“I’ve been told, ‘Quit or I’ll murder you’, he told The Times UK.

“The reality is that if I look at Instagram I will see somebody saying, ‘I’m going to come to your house and kill you’. So, while I’m pretty sure I’, not going to be murdered … that could age badly.

“But, yes, while I hope I’ll be OK, nobody should have to encounter this for doing their job. Many people put their lives on the line in their work. I’m playing a wizard in Harry Potter, and I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect me emotionally.”

Essiedu said the abuse “fuels” him because it drives him to make the character, which was played by the late Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter films, his own.

On top of the overt racism directed at Essiedu – which also happened to non-white Star Wars actors John Boyeda, Kelly Marie Tran and Moses Ingram – there is also just that very ugly strain of this idea that fans “own” the thing they love and therefore can dictate how it will be made.

Filmmakers and artists love to say that once something is complete and out in the world, it “belongs” to the fans or the audience, but it’s not literally true. Not from a copyright perspective and not from a creative perspective.

No one fandom is monolithic, just as every Harry Potter fan shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush as those racists hurling abuse at Essiedu (notably, black actor Noma Dumezweni faced the same when in 2015 she was cast as Hermione for the stage production Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, she later won an Olivier for that performance), but some people really need to check themselves.

There are KPop and K-Drama fans who will hound Korean celebrities if they “step outside” of the bounds of expected behaviour, including any form of drug use.

The actor Anna Gunn copped death threats from Breaking Bad fans who disliked her fictional TV character, as did several Game of Thrones actors who played villains.

The Game of Thrones TV creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss received a ton of abuse after the divisive final season, and, reportedly, the toxic Star Wars fandom played a role in their decision to back out of a planned trilogy in a galaxy far, far away.

Irish actor Barry Keoghan too was this weekend talking about the abuse he’s copped. “There’s a lot of hate online. There’s a lot of abuse of how I look, and it’s kind of past the point of, ‘You know, everyone goes through that’.

“And everyone does but it’s made me shy away. It’s made me really go inside of myself, not want to attend places, not want to go outside. I say this being absolute pure and honest to you, it’s become a problem.”

Keoghan took himself offline in December 2024, after he released a statement that he can only take so much with being dragged across the internet, and said that he had been accused of being a “heroin baby” and worse, and that someone had physically knocked at his grandmother’s door and waited outside his son’s house.

His “crime”? He and pop star Sabrina Carpenter had recently broken up, and it was alleged that it was mostly her elements of her fandom that was responsible for the bile.

Hailey Bieber was also the victim of years of vicious abuse from a segment of Selena Gomez fans because they couldn’t accept that someone else had replaced Gomez in Bieber’s life. Bieber had to make a public intervention to call for it to stop.

Ewan McGregor also had to call out the abuse directed at Ingram, a black female actor who was his co-star on the Obi-Wan series. He said in an online video that it broke his heart to read the messages that had been sent directly to Ingram.

“It just sickened me to my stomach that this had been happening.

“If you’re sending her bullying messages, you’re no Star Wars fan in my mind. There’s no place for racism in this world.”

McGregor is correct. If you’re sending abusive messages or death threats, you have no right to call yourself a fan.

What you need to do is call a therapist, because that kind of extremity is symptomatic of much deeper issues than disagreeing with a casting decision or celebrities breaking up.

More than “owning” a piece of pop culture, you need to own your behaviour.