Rory McCann — Who are you?
Life of a celebrity is a strange thing. Not like I know something about it personally — but honestly, I am glad I don't. There is a pressure — a lot of pressure because your privacy is a public affair. You often loses everything, even yourself, for the sake of popularity. That means you give your whole life to people you don't even know and who actually don't know you. All they have is your image — deceptive and vague — that they can adore for as long as they like (that is as long as you will be replaced by someone newer and fresher; it's like a mining thing — when one thinks the first mine is empty and there is nothing more he could plunder, he is just going to find a maiden piece of land he may gaily dig to). And you remain like that abandoned first mine — empty and sapless.
Nonetheless, there are still a lot of celebrities who think that they can fight against unavoidable. Through chilly scandals, attracting attention activities and their wannabe real messages and photos, they are constantly trying to be in the spotlight. While focusing at that whole “to be famous” thing, these celebrities are completely forgetting about their primary task — to be a positive example.
However there are a few stars who put an effort to this mission, having in mind responsibility they hold towards all these young lives of their fans. Unfortunately, almost all of them are creations of the American culture. Considering values of this society, all we now know thanks to these people is that we have to be rip-roaring and self-centered extroverts to achieve a real success. Without defining what success really is, all introverts are doomed to be only poor witnesses of achievements of “better” (exhibitionistic) people.
Now it all seems like a relic of the past. Because — despite of disfavor of cultural circumstances — out of nowhere, one of us — incorrigible introverts — appeared in the most popular TV project in the world. Portraying dangerous and always grumpy but at the same time enviably honest character called The Hound, Rory McCann became one of the most well-known actors nowadays. It is almost unbelievable that despite of this incredible success, we know almost nothing about him. And it is exactly what he wants and we totally understand. The question is — how does he do that?
In a nutshell, all information we have is that he was born on April 24th 1969 in Glasgow, his professional life began on the Forth Bridge in Scotland, where he had been working as a painter, and that he loves nature, his family and the feeling of being unavailable. In today's world, offline is new luxury and privacy is dead — and that is one extra reason why I can't understand, how he did it, that media leaves him alone.
So who is this A-class celebrity who does not drink, does not smoke, does not seek attention, does not watch his own series and even does not own television? This person for whom nature, peace and his family are in the first place? (And the person who claims it not because it is a thousand-times-said-by-celebrity cliché, but because it is true?)
I guess we will never know for sure — because, as I said on the beginning — all we have is an image. But in this case, it is enough…
Mr. McCann, I am a person like you. An introvert drawing strength from peace and solitude, inseparably connected with water element, who is, for the sake of his business, pushed to be in constant contact with a lot of people. Since I am not quite a part of that “highly civilized” world that considers us oddballs because we care about the trees and before the noise of television, we prefer murmur of a creek, I can understand you.
And I thank you. I thank you in the name of all people like us, that you are our positive model — and that you give us inspiration and example without really realizing it because you are only being yourself. And if someone asks me that regular question “who would you go to dinner with — dead or alive?”, my answer will be clear: Rory McCann. Because of three reasons: To meet exactly the same type of a personality as I am (but in a male body), to tell him all of these things I just wrote — and to thank him one and a thousand more times for all the stuff he does for us only by his existence.
