And the winner is...
Are celebrity lookalike contests a step back or a step forward?
Photo: Special
Sonya Pandya, Editor-In-Chief
If you had typed 'celebrity lookalike contests' into a search bar before October of 2024, you probably wouldn't have seen a dedicated Wikipedia page or countless articles and links to posts on social media. (In fact, using the Wayback Machine doesn't yield a single result.) Nowadays, it's hard to imagine a world without a new celebrity lookalike contest popping up on my feed.
While they've existed since the early 1900s for big names such as Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple, I can't help but wonder how the sudden resurgence of these contests happened. The trend initially started after YouTuber Anthony Po plastered hundreds of flyers across New York City for a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest and received an unprecedented 2,000 RSVPs to his event as well as virality all over social media. Afterward, several other celebrity lookalike contests popped up all over the country and the globe, some of which included contests for Gordon Ramsay, Zendaya, and Jungkook of BTS.
Honestly, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised at how these contests gained such a following. For years, we as a society have strayed away from large gatherings in person due to the rippling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the lack of effort towards such gatherings. I mean, if it's easier to hold an event online, why go through the effort of planning a large-scale event in person? Seeing hundreds of strangers across the globe come together for a small, hour-long contest where all they did was judge how similar others looked to a celebrity was certainly not on my list of how these gatherings would come back to life. The success of these contests brought opportunities for not only Po but several contest winners as well. The original video boasts nearly 2 million views, with the winners from Chalamet and Glen Powell lookalike contests even showing up to the Golden Globes proudly holding signs saying 'I won a lookalike contest and now I'm at the Golden Globes'. Chalamet also brought four of his lookalikes to make an exclusive appearance on Saturday Night Live alongside him. These inclusions aren't necessarily harmful unless you include how the words ‘celebrity lookalike contest’ suddenly get incredibly annoying to think about after so much repeated exposure.
With so many people gathered in such a small space, there's bound to be some who ruin the fun for everyone else. At New York City's Mark Lee lookalike contest, Lee himself arrived at the event to see his lookalikes but was quickly mobbed by a large crowd of fans, causing him to leave the event as soon as he arrived. Many online felt that this was unjust, leading to heavy backlash, and the incident begged the question of how safe these contests truly are. But should this really surprise us? It's such a predictable outcome, and we can never fully prevent mobs from happening. Yes, this is probably why we can't have nice things, but that doesn't have to mean jumping on the bandwagon of fully getting rid of these contests. It's about awareness, in a way; as always, we as a society need to change and treat celebrities as normal people. Whether it takes strong barricades to hold fans back or several bodyguards, we need to promote a society that controls itself and keeps everyone safe in these situations. After five years, the world is still returning to normal from the pandemic, and many people are still reeling from its effects.
