From Anthony Hopkins to Jane Fonda: 2020 proved that older stars are so much better at social media

On an average day in 2020, you could find Sir Anthony Hopkins dancing to Drake on TikTok, Dame Judi Dench dressed as a dog on Instagram, and Dionne Warwick using Twitter to mock young rappers. By the time James Caan went viral this winter for tweeting vintage photographs of his movie career, and signing off every message with a characteristically cool declaration of “end of tweet”, there was little left to debate: the elderly and famous had discovered social media, and they weren’t letting go. That they’ve used it so well was one of the year’s few pleasant surprises.

Celebrities tend not to understand the internet, or its specific rhythms. Gal Gadot’s infamous and star-studded rendition of “Imagine”, which induced widespread cringe at the start of the pandemic, was celebrity social media usage at its worst. It thought the mere presence of celebrities doing something was particularly meaningful. It wrapped itself in tooth-aching sincerity at odds with an internet landscape dominated by the wry or the strange. It was hilarious, but (very) unintentionally so. A flurry of think pieces arrived in its wake, all of which pondered whether celebrity as we knew it was over.

Thank goodness, then, for the olds. In March, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 73, hugged and kissed his miniature ponies on his Instagram. In April, Jane Fonda demonstrated her staggering, 83-year-old flexibility in a workout video on TikTok. In his own TikTok video in May, Hopkins, 82, attempted to emulate a viral dance routine called the Toosie Slide, which originated in a Drake song. He gamely shuffled from side to side, lifted his legs, and then challenged Sylvester Stallone to a fist fight.

All trafficked in the knowingly absurd and wholesome, and rejected the kind of grindingly curated artifice that dominates the social media feeds of younger stars. There is a clear separation between the “lifestyle influencer” posing and quirky Instagram captioning of a Mindy Kaling, Ryan Reynolds or Reese Witherspoon, and the “why the hell not?” indifference of a Candice Bergen, 74, whose Instagram bio reads “Tired-ass ho”.

They also served as much-needed reflections of shared boredom. These were older stars cooped up in their houses, and finding joy or silliness in the mundane. While stars in their thirties and forties have tended to pontificate about the revelatory wonders of quarantine – Jennifer Lopez mused that it made her “reassess” her parenting; Kim Kardashian said it served as a “humble reminder of how privileged my life is” while sunning herself Covid-free on a private island – their elders have remained earthbound. In a video posted to Twitter in July, Mandy Patinkin, 68, finally got around to deleting thousands of his wife’s unread emails.

Even if some elderly pivots to the internet are more calculated than others (“Doing TikTok is fun and it attracts a younger demographic,” Fonda said in September), they’ve all revealed something about how the internet democratises celebrity. “Relevancy” has become a looser term in the age of Dionne Warwick’s outrageous Twitter output, with its mix of in-jokes and gentle roasting. That Warwick, 80, hasn’t had a commercial hit in decades is superfluous – merely being part of the modern cultural conversation is victory enough. Age, too, is suddenly no barrier. It wasn’t Hollywood that decided the obscure Will & Grace actor Leslie Jordan would become a breakout star of the pandemic era, but rather his delightfully homespun Instagram page, which transformed him into an internet staple thanks to a few twirls and folksy non-sequiturs.

“For someone 65 years old to all of a sudden be, like, an internet star? … I’ve never gotten this kind of attention,” Jordan told The New York Times in July. “Even on Will & Grace, winning an Emmy, it wasn’t anything like when you have social media. When you’ve become a success there, it’s unbelievable.”

If there are drawbacks to all of this, it’s that, for some at least, it feels slightly beneath them. There’s an inescapable melancholy to the elder statesmen of pop culture being filmed under poor lighting on an iPhone, and participating in viral challenges that vanish from memory within weeks. Or hearing Warwick’s heavenly drawl emerge not from crackling vinyl, but a stern video in which she protests that she does, in fact, write her own tweets. Here are towering stars of yesteryear, mucking in with gauche Gen-Y silliness. It’s a bit like finding your parents on Facebook, squabbling with someone in the comments section who is also getting on in years and ought to know better.

It’s undeniably human, though. The internet may urge us to reveal too much of ourselves, or write or say things we probably shouldn’t, but it’s arguably preferable to perpetuating the idea of cultural superiority based solely on money or fame or even creative talent. Through his social media presence, a towering star like Hopkins has transformed from an elusive and occasionally frightening silver screen legend to a beloved human being who can be just as sombre, reflective and cringeworthy as the rest of us. And if it took a viral dance challenge to show that, so be it.