Public vs. Private: Celebrities Show Their Different Personas

Andrew H. Walker, a staff photographer at Shutterstock, decided to shake things up a bit when celebrities of films playing at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival stopped by the ‘Variety and Shutterstock Portrait Studio.’ Tired with the customary film festival photo booths, Walker asked 51 A-listers in attendance to pose for a series that exposes two different sides of themselves. One side shows how they act in front of the public, while the other reveals a private side we don’t usually see.

The settings for the photographer’s project were sparse, with the celebrities only granted a bare table with a tape mark, which served as the dividing line between their two personalities. When they crossed the mark, they could switch characters. While some hardly changed, there was a marked difference in the way a lot of the stars posed. A lot of smiles disappeared, some turned away and Rami Malek even went as far as leaving his chair and turning his back.

The project, which saw some Golden Globe nominees striking poses, sheds a light on how celebrities often have public and private personas that are poles apart. "I was really curious with actors because they have, not only this personal inside voice, but they have a public persona that they put out there, and they also have their private self," Walker told Mashable.  "There's this whole other layer of themselves as people. I found that really, really intriguing." However, we’ll never really know which poses represent their public or private personas, as Walker didn’t specify which side of the table was which to the celebrities.

Click ‘Begin Slideshow’ to see how some stars differ when they’re on call and when they’re away from the limelight.