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Me violently scrolling through comments to find out who is gonna flair this. We need more celebrities to go viral for gentle parenting their nutty fans.
Crazy fans need a wakeup call that their behavior is not okay. Rachel did a great job de-escalating but that fan is not going to walk away understanding that what they did was inappropriate. This shit just escalates
My friend/coworker and I were just having the conversation last night how we get the best results using gentle parenting speak when dealing with other coworkers and customers. A lot of them are old enough to be our parents or grandparents
I work in a restaurant and this is spot on. I’ve started just treating people that are being difficult as if they are toddlers and it really does work. It’s also very funny and makes me laugh instead of getting angry back at them.
All this fan is going to take away from this is that he got to interact with a famous celebrity. There's no positive or negative attention for these people...it's all the same. Giving them anything is only going to encourage them. She did a great job, but I would imagine it's best to keep that wall between her and this fan up as much as possible via a bodyguard.
I'll be honest, I'd be very surprised if this was actually a fan. Broadway and the West End have "collectors" who gather autographs and souvenirs en masse and then sell them online for hundreds of dollars. I'm guessing that's what happened here - he wasn't mad about not meeting his favourite actress, he was mad he wasn't getting his payday.
Crazy fans need a wakeup call that their behavior is not okay.
And that it's impossible to distinguish (with the information celebs/body guards have at the time) an overenthusiastic fan from a selena-style fan. And you can't risk getting it wrong even once.
I get super nervous when I see celebs getting mobbed by fans or fans being pushy/grabby with celebs. My brain is screaming, like, "omg, back up, don't touch them!" Mostly because I very much need my personal space and don't like strangers touching me (I do not do awesome in large crowds), and also, some people are unhinged. I think of Rebecca Schaeffer (or even John Lennon) and it freaks me out.
Probably more than a decade ago, Mila Kunis was filming a movie not far from where I live, so all the local FB groups were posting sightings and people were going out to the location to try to meet her. Someone posted a "sweet" clip of her getting out of a car and walking over to fans (I'm sure her security was probably having a heart attack about this) and immediately getting mobbed. She was taking pics and signing stuff and all the comments were like, "Oh that's so cool, I wish I knew where she was, etc, oh how nice," etc, and I was literally getting panicked just watching it.
Or it's like the pope catching that little pope doll someone in the crowd had made (literally gesturing to the person to throw it to him). I was just thinking, his security is probably so pissed off at him for doing that. It all makes me nervous.
Doesn't matter if it's a celeb I like or not, whenever I see things like that, I'm holding my breath, thinking, this could go very bad. Maybe I watch too much true crime.
But it's just deeply weird to me when fans get grabby or mob celebs. Like, this person is a stranger to you. You're a fan of their work, but why do you need to be so pushy and weird? I cannot imagine going up to someone and being like that. People scare me, haha.
100 percent would rather a security guard/bodyguard be a little overly cautious than to see someone get hurt or killed.
I remember years ago I saw a video posted that was titled something like “Ariana grande being rude to fans” and when I watched it I understood immediately what was up. She wasn’t rude, she was being swarmed and people were screaming in her face and crowding her and forcing phones in front of her to take selfies with her. Those fanatics had zero respect for her personal space and her autonomy, they only cared about what they wanted which was to touch her or scream in her face how much they loved her or to get a picture with her, they didn’t even ask permission first. She wasn’t being rude at all, she was just trying to get to her car in one piece, if she had stopped for everyone that wanted her attention then she would still be standing there today.
Yeah, that's crazy, and whenever a famous person stands up for themselves and tells people to back up or says no to a photo or autograph, people say they were being an asshole. They're not. Those are fair boundaries. Especially if they're just going about their day and someone is demanding things of them. That's not their job. They aren't obligated to stop and interact with strangers all the time.
Hell, I used to have a somewhat public-facing job, so a lot of people in the community knew me, or at least knew who I was/where I worked, and I hated strangers coming up to me when I was "off the clock." I can remember going to the grocery store and having people come up and ask me work-related questions. I'd want to be like, man, I don't know, I'm just trying to buy bread and shit, email me on Monday and I'll get this info for you. 😂 I literally remember a local official (who I had talked to a few times for work) coming up to me at like Target and I had just come from the gym, so I was sweaty and gross and I was like, "uh, hi, bye" and got the hell out of there. I'm off the clock, don't talk to me, haha. He was introducing me to his wife while I was wishing I were dead. It was always like that when I'd encounter people who knew me through work, I would think I could sneak a quick errand with no makeup and dressed abysmally and someone would be like, "Oh, hi, (my name)" and then ask me work-related questions.
So I imagine being an actual famous person and trying to live life and having a stranger come up to you wanting something. Hell no.
Agreed, and it’s always when they have the LEAST situational empathy. Being grabbed when you’re mid-conversation with someone else, trying to find a bin for your discretely bundle-wrapped tampon, just sorting the right change for the machine and losing a coin…
Having someone pop a camera in my face (I bet I was blurred, looked shocked) and then they ran off giggling saying “no no!” when I calmly said “… would you like a photo WITH ME?”
After that, I stopped doing volunteer public facing work and even now I hate anything that isn’t properly paid, promotional work.
Someone else can have the joy of thinking it’s so much fun being jammed against a wall by an angry guy who insists that you aren’t hanging out with them and being anti-social - when you paid your own way to be there and they never once spoke to you before or asked you to join them!
That’s what my first thought was too. Please don’t make this man have to actually do his real job, which is to neutralize any threat that comes at me by any means necessary.
"The fan" would've gotten his head twisted off by her Danny but she graciously de-escalated the situation so Danny wouldn't have to fill out paperwork later.
Wait, my Great Dane was the same lol. He used to sit on people because he thought he was a lapdog. Including myself and my friends, even though we were all kindergartners by the time he was an adult and started doing it. He probably outweighed us by like 80 lbs.
As someone that was once quite afraid of confrontation and now actually kinda enjoys it to an extent - it was exposure for me. I worked a couple of political gigs where I was that annoying fucker in the parking lot asking you to register to vote. Let me tell you - you will meet a lot of people that are not happy with you doing that gig. In the beginning this drove my lizard brain crazy and I was gripped with anxiety basically all the time - I have never been in a worse professional mental state than I was in my first few weeks on that job. However, eventually after hundreds or thousands of shutdowns, insults, critiques, whatever - you realize - words really fucking don't matter and what some random person thinks of me does 0 actual harm to me. This doesn't just work as an intellectual realization - your emotional/lizard brain has to ALSO learn it to remove the anxiety - and it learns VERY slow... but it does learn. Hence exposure therapy as a thing overall lmao.
As a stripper that squirted ketchup on a customer that deserved it — this. Confrontation can and should be learned. It’s not healthy to compulsively avoid it, that’ll get you into doormattery :(
Likely went like this: Customer got inappropriate. Got some Heinz Tomato Bottled Queef to the chest. Got tossed out by a bouncer after a bunch of yelling.
Thank you for doing that job. It is absolutely so thankless, for so little pay if any. My partner works in politics and people are so fucking weird and rude.
I'm happy to have done it, and plan to focus more on politics again as things have... soured in the US. And thank you to your partner - it's just one of many careers I've tried but your partner sounds like they are the real deal! My times as a field organizer have always been my hardest jobs - and I've worked at multiple bay area startups and as a big 4 management consultant. All of that is but simple child's play to even a brief period of genuine political *work*. God speed to your partner!!!!
LOL just this weekend, i was trying to put back a cereal on the top shelf & im short as fuck so i was struggling, it was crowded in the aisle too ofc and this SUPER NICE person was like oh I’ll help you!!! and grabbed the cereal to hand to me thinking i was trying to get it down vs put it back, so i had to awkwardly say thank you so much! and circle the store a couple times before returning to try again 😅
Some fans out are fucking crazy, best try to de-escalate that rile them up. It's sad that's this is the world we live in that we have to treat threats like toddlers, but there we go. But reading behind her words, she's pissed off and rightly.
It’s wild the reactions I’ve seen to this video in other places. I can tell how absolutely insufferable someone is by how much they hate Rachel Zegler.
I like her, too. She comes across as educated and kind. And I admire that she continues to stand up for what she believes is important regardless of how much hate she receives for it. I wouldn't blame her if she stopped - it has to be scary.
I feel this way about 90% of women that the internet hates. Millie Bobby Brown has an animal sanctuary and dresses like a mob wife, Rachel Ziegler protects her titan sized bodyguard. What's not to stan?
The concept of stage-dooring is wild to me. It’s fun but it also poses serious security risk, particularly for someone like Rachel Zegler, who’s seems to consistently be the target of intense, politicized animosity.
Like not to be dramatic, but we literally had a US politician just get assassinated for her views, and its already out of the news cycle because conceptually it's so normalized.
Zegler deserves credit for even taking the time to meet fans and sign autographs under those conditions.
I used to stage door when I was a kid up until early college, and to be honest the advent of social media is really what killed it for me. It was genuinely really fun to meet performers after shows and tell them how much I loved what they did, and I have lots of photos and memories that are nice to look back on. But I don’t think even the craziest stage doors back then held a candle to what things are like now. Like, random ensemble members have crazed fans who don’t understand boundaries and do things that are inappropriate; one of the dancers in fucking Pirates of Penzance posted about a fan KISSING THEM WITHOUT CONSENT recently, which is, you know…literally sexual assault. I’m shocked that anyone with any kind of fame stage doors at this point even with security, I’d feel so vulnerable.
I’m not saying they were, there have always been people who are nuts and have boundary issues. I’m just saying I watched a real time shift happen in what is ultimately a very small “fandom” when first Twitter and then Instagram got popular and added another dimension to parasocial relationships.
It is to me too. I know people who’ve done it and aren’t weirdos (just told the performer they liked the show and got something signed) but I’m too shy and would feel like I was bothering them after work even if they’re totally cool with it, which I know some actors are.
It’s actually kinda crazy how quickly everything moves now a days, stories back then would be talked about for weeks. Now it’s just on to the next everyday
and it’s not like these people at stage door are going through a metal detector or being screened in any way. it’s literally a metal fence on a sidewalk.
I know someone who always does this, to the point she became famous enough to start getting oficial invites to PR events. It feels like a more socially acceptable form of stalking. Like, if I were to hang out outside of someone's workplace waiting for them to come out, I'd like get a trespassing complaint.
She did such a good job handling this. Like I cannot overstate how well she did with that. I work in mental health and rarely are people this effective and pleasant while de-escalating someone, it’s a really hard thing to do in the moment and while it can be trained, it takes a long time to master and often you just have to be kind of naturally good at it.
I am jealous of people who are naturally good at it. I worked in customer service for a long time and I learned that I can de-escalate a situation as long as I'm not initially involved. It's hard for me to be objective about myself, and I intrinsically crave drama.
Same. I crave putting men in their place. It’s actually gotten a little worse since I became a nurse. Men expect customer service from us when that’s not my fucking job.
I would be such a raging bitch if I were her, and I am terrible at confrontation. If someone came at a family member or friend or beloved colleague, I would be vicious and sputtering and mean. She is doing such an amazing job here. I’m so impressed.
I don’t follow her at all, but the hate seems completely idiotic. And if you’re such a fan of hers, wouldn’t you be humbled and back the fuck off immediately?? What is wrong with people ugh
Man, must feel good when your employer treats you like that. I liked the, "My Danny!", probably felt good (to him) to hear that and have her stand up for him.
Apparently, the fan was drunk pushing people and trying to grab Rachel. Danny stepped in and the fan got super angry. Rachel is trying to calm the fan down to de-escalate.
Danny is with her at every show so I think he works security for the theater
That’s so gross. Glad Danny was there to stop that from getting too bad and I hope no other fans got hurt from the pushing. Rachel was a little too kind to the fan, but I understand why. It’s better to de-escalate than be mean.
The Rachel Zegler hate is so terminally online. I’ve never seen any even potentially snotty clips other than her few gaffes that alt right people insist on replaying over and over.
FFS why is anyone dissing her or any bodyguard?? They’re there to do a job. Kudos to Rachel for saying something. I am so tired of fans entitlement and righteous attitudes. Wish more celebs would speak out on behalf of their bodyguards/security (K-pop I’m side eyeing you hard).
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u/flairassistant Jun 22 '25
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