Wanting to be an actor from a young age and succeeding is all about passion and an incredible drive. Acting is a tough business, opportunities are few, varied and never guaranteed. It is a business that can be cruel, judgemental and can make or break a person. The few who make it then have to deal with the ‘Fame Game’, and it can be both a blessing and a curse, in most cases you can never be prepared for it.
Fame used to be exclusively reserved for those who graced the silver screen, or achieved something of great importance and it was far less intrusive to those who wished to remain out of the ‘limelight’. However, in more recent years fame has certainly changed, and now is even considered a career in it’s own right, rather than something you earn through work that gets you attention. With influencers on social media, people can effectively make a name for themselves and become famous by simply starting their own channels in their own houses.
Aaron Paul earned his fame, but also found himself becoming famous right at a time when social media started to become a ‘thing’. Right at a point where suddenly ‘stars’ became more accessible, easier to connect with, more engaged with fans.
His fame arrived via the more traditional route by becoming a household name through his amazing acting talent, earning respect and fans through a memorable role. Once he had the recognition and the fame, he then became one of the early adoptors of using social media to communicate with his fans – and he certainly used it, with cases of directly contacting fans, using his social media to make wishes come true, causing friendly mayhem with twitter treasure hunts around his home town and causing surprising chaos at airport boarding gates of people wishing to be called a bitch.
When Aaron Paul arrived in LA in 1997 with the dream of becoming an actor, he would have been aware that he was joining a highly competitive market in a city that lives and breathes ‘celebrity’. As well as being able to have the confidence to throw himself into acting, and have that gift of something different in a noisey city, he would also need to tackle the unspoken fame game to get himself noticed.
July 2001
October 2001
We can look back to the early 2000’s to see when Aaron Paul began to get noticed. Almost 8 years before Breaking Bad made him a worldwide star, he was starting to appear on red carpets, at parties and getting ‘papped’. Part of this was due to the company he kept, upon arriving in LA he clearly made friends with fellow aspiring actors, which helped him begin to ‘fit’ in.
It’s my understanding that you need to be seen in ‘Tinseltown’, and be seen by the right people. I believe the saying ‘it’s not what you know but who you know’ is very true in the entertainment business. It’s as important in those early days to be seen, and for the right people to notice you – so agents or managers will always encourage their young stars to get out there, be seen, be noticed, be talked about and I think it’s fair to say Aaron Paul took this very seriously to match his determination.
September 2002
January 2002
March 2002
Although he’s admitted in later years to being embrassed now by his fashion choices of the early 2000s, it’s easy to understand his motivation, and it clearly worked on some level simply by the number of photos that exist of him in various questionable get ups!
What is hard to determine is just how much it helped, it’s unknown if any of these red carpet appearances directly led to auditions or played a part in winning roles but its fair to say for a while in the early 2000’s Aaron Paul got regular guest spots, adverts and music videos – clearly he was getting noticed in the biz!
One very early activity that is now memorable and certainly got Paul into a huge number of living rooms, was his appearance on The Price is Right way back in 2000. His enthusiam, and certainly his energy went a long way to ensuring his name was called to ‘come on down’ and even in that madness you could see he had a natural quality on screen that was very watchable – dare I say he was able to win a few people over with his raw excitement, who were soon willing him on, only to watch him suffer heartbreak at the end (sound familiar??).
It’s fair to say during this time the need to be seen was essential to his ambitions to become an actor, and with it a star. At this time he still held onto his dream, not knowing what was just around the corner, but also at a time where he had almost run out of options. For many, many aspiring actors a handful of adverts, couple of music videos, some guest spots and a quiz show appearance is as far as they ultimately go.
Breaking Bad changed everything. Suddenly he was in the spotlight, although at first it wasn’t crazy. People were starting to recognise him, the invites were increasing and to much fancier parties. Things didn’t explode for Paul until season three of Breaking Bad, thanks to Netflix and the dawn of binge watching TV habits, and that’s when fame truly hit.
Thankfully it appears on the outside that AP had good people around him, added to having the right attitude towards fame as he navigated the crazy ride he was now on, and he took the new found attention with a good spirit and heart. There always seems to be a smile, and time made for people who stop him for an autograph or ‘quick’ selfies.
As his confidence grew, and his career blossomed, Aaron Paul appeared to have a good control over his fame. There are countless You Tube videos and photos of calm, patient, friendly interactions with both fans and the infamous papparazi who still to this day follow him around town.
What you won’t find is any flashpoints or moments of crazy, and this has to be commended. In fact whilst researching this the only negative I could find was actually recounted by Paul himself, remembering a fan who called him out for ignoring her when at that particular moment in time he’d been more focused on helping a friend in distress. The circumstances in that case were totally understandable.
There were some innocent mistakes made, small bumps – one being a story Bryan Cranston told about a social media post where Paul was reacting to his home in ABQ being burgled twice, quipping that it was safer in LA – clearly said in jest but the ABQ locals didn’t take kindly to this. It was quickly resolved, and apologies made, and in person appearance with Cranston at the baseball game went a long way to smoothing things over.
Quite often I see on social media people asking who the best actors to meet are, and Aaron’s name is almost always cited with various meets in bars, coffee shops, retail shops and every memory is one of friendly, happy and kind experience that is never forgotten.
Wisely, as social media became more of an animal, Aaron Paul stepped back a little from his earlier forays, with new focuses in his life and safety first its hard to deny that social media is no longer the fun exciting prospect it was in the early days. Whilst as fans we can naturally miss the spontaneous and sometimes genius uses of social media that Aaron used to play with, the cute little insights into his life like finding injured birds, trying to get his wife’s attention, risking life and limb in a quadrocycle in Paris it’s fair to say fame now has it’s place in his life, and he has it under control, he only needs to seek it on his own terms now.
Like when he wants to excitedly tell people all about his amazing Mescal ‘Dos Hombres‘ in bars and Costco’s up and down the United States! (And we sit here hoping the same excitement will come to England and Brazil one day!)
Where fame can change, destroy and eat people up, it’s always nice to see one big exception with Aaron Paul.
