Over the past six years, more than 33 million people have watched Dakota Johnson wax lyrical about lemons.
“I love lemons, I love them, they’re so good, I love them so much and I love presenting them like this in my home,” the actor said, pointing to two ceramic platters of citrus rounds.
The short proclamation came in the middle of a 10-minute video of Johnson showing Architectural Digest around her midcentury-modern Los Angeles home, and it was posted to the publication’s YouTube in March 2020.
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Johnson is known as the Queen of Anarchy, and wherever she goes on press tours and talk-show couches she breaks entropy, so be it insights into her home life, where her dead were buried or her absurd revelation about a table made from Winston Churchill’s yacht is on brand.
Well, the lemons and his love for them were a lie. She confessed to Jimmy Fallon a year later that she was completely dressed up and didn’t even know they were there. Johnson thinks he might actually be allergic to them. Or maybe not, with our chaos queen, it’s hard to know.
But the video went viral. As in many of Architectural Digest’s other celebrity house tour videos, the one that always starts with “Hey, Edie, welcome home!” The front door of the bright star opens with a change of .
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard open the door of their Brooklyn townhouse, and call Eddie into the parlor, where a warm fire is burning. Amanda Seyfried took Edie through her NYC apartment (she actually lives on the farm most of the time), where she took everyone through her storage solutions under the TV.
Tommy Hilfiger, FYI, hides his TV behind a mirror.
It is often mundane and sometimes bizarre.
Like David Harbor and Lily Allen’s townhouse video, which resurfaced after their public split, and was used by the internet as Exhibit A of his weird situation — he wants the bedroom to be so dark that it has virtually no windows.
There are plenty of beautifully decorated New York townhouses, LA Hills mansions and even a castle – Dominic West and his aristocratic wife open the door to their ancestral home, described as a literal castle with “neoclassical plaster ceilings”.
Last week, Julianne Moore went viral with a tour of her luxurious New York City rooftop apartment. A sculptural red chair that had to be protected from the sun because it could melt and a Pierre Chapo table she likes to work on, an Ikea shelf that sells for $90 in Australia.
These AD video house tours are a peek into a celebrity’s life, a glimpse behind the artifice — at least in theory, because maybe they’re all “I love limes!” Be lying about your version of.
Vanessa Hudgens doesn’t actually play the piano (she can’t read music) and Ashley Tisdale asked her husband to go out a day early and buy the 400 books she had on the shelves. Not real readers, Tisdales.
This practice is not a new thing. As long as there have been celebrities, forms of it have existed. It’s really not that different from visiting Buckingham Palace or Hearst Castle.
While Architectural Digest has been doing this for a century, featuring celebrities’ homes on its glossy magazine pages, its modern version really started with MTV’s Cribs, which toured the homes of people like Mariah Carey, Gene Simmons, Fatboy Slim, and 50 Cent.
Eddie’s Open Doors videos are an evolution of that – more class and design, less yellow Ferraris and custom motorcycle workshops.
As for the celebrities themselves, those who claim to staunchly protect their privacy, what ability will they have to open their doors to the Internet.
One is that “authenticity” continues to be a buzzword, the idea that to be truly loved by your fans, you have to be open to them, and Eddie allows him to do that in a very controlled manner and with better production values that just some random TikTok video.
You invite people to see the “real,” and immerse themselves in the cache of Architectural Digest. Wiz Khalifa’s video, which featured his own marijuana bar, has been viewed 54 million times since 2018.
This is another option in the new age of promotional tours where you’re more likely to be playing with puppies, playing a game of celebrity guessing who’s who, making pizza, eating chicken and wondering whether you strongly agree or disagree that Spider-Man can kick Batman’s butt.
Almost anything except actually talking about the movie/series/album/book you want to sell. This creates the illusion of the celebrity being a real person and yet keeps them inaccessible.
Moore has a new film called The Debut, for which she is already a strong contender to win her second Oscar. But you wouldn’t know it from the AD video – it’s more about evoking the halo effect so that you remember how much you appreciate Moore, and maybe you’ll go see his movie when it’s released in a few weeks or months.
In that situation, probably everyone wins. We get to the sticky beaks, pretending they’re just like us because they even have a “dump everything” drawer! In their ancestral palaces and houses in the sky.