Reclusive Artist / Actors

• For a long time, Rowan Atkinson would only agree to be interviewed in character though he relented beginning in the 2000s.
• Sacha Baron Cohen, while happy to hog the limelight disguised as one of his characters (Ali G, Borat, Brüno, etc.), is a lot more reserved about appearing or being interviewed as himself. Considering Baron Cohen is almost unrecognizable as any one of his characters, as well as his liking for messing with people who aren't actual actors, this may be a necessity for him.
• Johnny Carson, after he retired from The Tonight Show. He indicated that he would come back with another project, but only made less than a half dozen TV appearances (and the last one was 11 years before his death) and only granted two major interviews. Even before his retirement, he would often fax joke answers in lieu of giving a real interview and, according to his friends, was incredibly shy and introverted in his private life.
• Dave Chappelle...for a while. Chappelle quit Chappelle's Show abruptly in 2005 while Season 3 was in mid-production, and spent the next eight years largely out of the public eye, although he did give a couple of interviews and made a couple of low-profile standup appearances. This seclusion more or less ended with a full-scale standup tour in 2013, and he has been active since, with more live performances, a series of standup comedy specials for Netflix, and other work, such as a couple of hosting gigs on Saturday Night Live and a couple of film roles.
• Richard Dawson, the Hogan's Heroes star-turned-game show panelist/host, became this after the original incarnation of Family Feud ended in 1985. His prima-donna behavior on both Feud (and before that, as a panelist on Match Game) had caused him to burn bridges with both shows' creator Mark Goodson, and his only subsequent non-Feud work was as the self-parodying game show host Damon Killian in The Running Man. (He did host a pilot for a revival of You Bet Your Life, but it was not picked up.) While he did return to Feud in 1994, this was a short-lived desperation move by Goodson's son Jonathan, by then running his father's company and attempting to quell the show's declining ratings after six years under the hosting of Ray Combs. When the third version of Feud hit airwaves in 1999, then-current host Louie Anderson wanted Dawson to appear on the first episode and "pass the torch" to Anderson, but Dawson declined. Overall, he only made a handful of public appearances, TV spots, and interviews in the 17 years between his final Feud episode and his death on June 2, 2012.
• Daniel Day-Lewis is widely regarded as being one of the best actors of all time and has three Oscar wins to his name, yet rarely grants interviews or public appearances. Additionally, he is also highly selective of his acting roles, with only six acting roles from 2002 to 2017, making him even more scarce from the public eye. After his performance in the Phantom Thread, he retired from acting and now lives with his wife in New York and Ireland, although he is eager to talk to fans that approach him.
• Robert De Niro does a lot of movies and makes numerous public appearances (he presided over the jury of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival). But whenever anyone tries to interview him... (unless you're Graham Norton, that is.)
  • Extras did a joke based on this... Andy's utterly incompetent manager somehow gets an interview scheduled with De Niro. Andy doesn't show up.
• Shelley Duvall, known for her role in The Shining and Olive Oyl in Popeye stopped acting in movies for 20 years. She is said to be highly reclusive and odd, even going so far as to in 2007 go to a hardware store complaining she needed materials to keep the "aliens" away. However, she did give an interview in 2010 saying that she wasn't reclusive, she just wanted time off after working for so long, and noting that she still gets script offers and a return to acting wasn't out of the question. Eventually, in 2022 she was announced to star in The Forest Hills, her first movie role since 2003, playing the protagonist's mother. Previously, she resurfaced in 2016 on the Dr. Phil show, battling mental illness, and also granted a lengthy interview to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 (although for the latter she declined to allow the interviewer inside her home — she was interviewed from her car window, though there was a fairly good logistical reason for that). The interviewer took great pains to dispel how she was represented on Dr. Phil, acknowledging her apparent mental instability but describing her as a lucid and engaging interview. In a charming postscript to the Dr. Phil appearance, it notes that a fan of Faerie Tale Theatre, dismayed by what he had seen, managed to track her down and strike up an unlikely friendship with Duvall, helping her to get in touch with old Hollywood friends (many were interviewed for the article and claimed to have not spoken to her in decades) and even hosted a 70th birthday party at her favorite restaurant with some other fans.
• Eric "Garbage Day!" Freeman of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 fame seemingly disappeared in the early 1990s. Numerous people have tried to find him (including the film's director for a DVD commentary track) but his whereabouts remained unknown until he resurfaced in 2013 for a Christmas screening of SNDN Part 2.
• After she retired from acting, Greta Garbo—although in her case she rarely made public appearances or granted interviews even when she was acting. "I want to be alone" indeed.
  • Garbo said the media had confused her personal inclinations with the character she played in Grand Hotel. In an interview around that time, she'd said "I want to be left alone", not quite the same thing. It was her character in the play who said "I want to be alone."
• Dan Godwin, best known for his roles of Franklin Delano Donut in Red vs. Blue and The Strangerhood's Dr. Cornelius Chalmers Esquire the 3rd, finds the adoration for his roles rather awkward so he avoids con appearances and the like.
• Setsuko Hara, star of Japanese cinema for some 25 years, best known for her roles in Yasujiro Ozu's films Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story. She quit acting the year of Ozu's death, and lived the entirety of her life in seclusion thereafter, refusing all interviews and photographs. Even her death—and she lived until 2015, or 53 years after her 1962 retirement—was only publicly reported two months later. Her total seclusion in retirement was an inspiration for the anime film Millennium Actress.
• The Tomorrow People (1973):
  • Dean Lawrence, who played Tyso, has only given two interviews and attended one convention since he left the show. He's never seen at informal gatherings and his life post-TP remains a mystery (although it has been rumored that he now designs and manufactures fetish clothing). There's barely any talk of him within the fandom and any times where he is mentioned are when the stories featuring the character of Tyso crop up. What makes this even stranger is that judging from a few sources he doesn't seem like the reclusive type.
  • Stephen Salmon, who played Kenny, has given no interviews (not even on the Beyond Tomorrow documentary) and made no appearances since he left the show, to the point where the fandom often questions whether he's even still alive (for whatever it's worth, the bio on his IMDB entry claims that he finished college and became an electrical engineer).
• Al Matthews, who was likely best known professionally for his work as Sergeant Apone in Aliens, seemed to drop off the map in the mid-'90s, and very little was heard from him since. To whit, for almost a decade, many fans believed that he had died in 2002 - in actuality, it was a false story spread by one of his friends. He finally resurfaced in 2011 to provide voice work for Operation Flashpoint: Red River and Aliens: Colonial Marines. It took Gearbox Software a long time to find Matthews' whereabouts, and they finally discovered that he was living in a small town in Spain. While Matthews did maintain a website, it was seldom updated. He died in September 2018.
• Brent Spiner deliberately made himself extremely scarce for the first few years of Star Trek: The Next Generation to build a mystique around his character Data.
• Matthew Waterhouse rarely gives interviews, and when he does it's done with great reluctance. Not helping things is the image of his Doctor Who companion character Adric as The Scrappy of that era. He was also missing from the convention circuit for many years, but in The New '10s it's gotten somewhat better. Plus he (in)famously utilized the third person when writing his own autobiography.
• Out of the four major characters in the 1974 cult classic Dark Star: Brian Narelle (Doolittle) went on to do work in animation, Dan O'Bannon (Pinback) went on to do special effects for Star Wars and write the screenplay for Alien as well as several other projects before he died in 2009, Cal Kuniholm (Boiler) never really went on to do anything before he died in 2008, but nobody seems to know anything about Dre Pahich (Talby). It is known that Pahich had a thick accent that required his lines to be dubbed, but nobody seems to know just where he was from or what happened to him after the movie was released. Even co-star Brian Narelle has no idea what's become of Pahich. In an interview, he later explained that they never actually met during production despite their characters interacting in several scenes (Narelle's lines were filmed separately, with a body double being used in shots where they both appeared).
• Michael O'Hare disappeared from public view after leaving Babylon 5 early in its run, which together with the show's crew being notoriously vague about why it happened fueled all kinds of rumors. After his death in 2012, it was finally revealed that he had suffered from schizophrenia. Although he sought treatment, the delusions and paranoia caused by the disease made it too difficult for him to work and he eventually spent his final several years hardly ever leaving his house and died after a heart attack in a halfway house for the chronically mentally ill. His condition was made public as per his request after his death, to raise awareness and provide an explanation for fans.
• Emilio Estevez is very private compared to the rest of Brat Pack, rarely makes public appearances, and is usually the only one absent from cast reunions for The Breakfast Club. When asked about this, he said "I've never been a guy that went out there to get publicity on myself. I never saw the value in it."
• Gene Wilder granted very few interviews in his lifetime due to suffering from shyness and the fear that he would have to be "on" all the time. In fact, in one interview, he asked that there be no live audience for the show because he was suffering from stage fright. Prior to his death in 2016, he stuck to a few appearances every once in a while and his writing. Later in his life, it was also done to hide his Alzheimer's diagnosis.
• Linda Fiorentino, who is most remembered for her role of Dr. Laurel Weaver in Men in Black has largely stayed away from acting in most recent days and is currently focusing more on her career as a photographer, as seen on her official site here. This stems in part from the fact that the commentary for Dogma mentioned how hard it was for directors to work with her, which has caused Fiorentino to largely vanish from the big screen industry.
• Lucille Ball tragically became this after the failure of her 1986 sitcom Life With Lucy. Ball was reportedly extremely devastated by the show's quick cancellation. She never again attempted a television or film production and her subsequent television appearances and interviews were infrequent. She died three years after Life With Lucy premiered and one month after appearing at the Academy Awards.
• Daryl Hannah, who is best known for her roles in films like Blade Runner, Splash, Roxanne, Wall Street, and Kill Bill, suffered from such paralyzing shyness and social anxiety (due in a large share to her being autistic) that it made it challenging for her to venture out on talk shows, premieres, or award shows like the Oscars as a means of promoting her work. In a 2010 interview, Hannah proclaimed that her difficulties with social interactions ultimately had a seriously detrimental effect on her career. Her relationship with Neil Young began soon after that. They engage in environmental activism together and make films like Netflix's Paradox, which she directed. Young is a private but not shy or reclusive artist, so perhaps his example has helped to ease her anxiety.
• Jean Arthur was considered a recluse and rarely did interviews. She was naturally shy and never found the appeal of Hollywood fame. Asked if she would like to have an interview, Arthur replied, "Quite frankly, I'd rather have my throat slit." She also suffered from immense stage fright, making her seem aloof or cold; however, her screen presence said the opposite: warm, outgoing, and inviting. After filming George Steven’s Shane, she retired from the silver screen and went on Broadway; however, her insecurity would often get the best of her. Her last days were spent in her home in Carmel, California. She died in 1991 at the ripe age of 90.
• Chris Pratt was once active on social media; frequently posting hilarious clips, promo tours, or visits to children's hospitals (particularly on Instagram). After announcing his split with Anna Faris, Pratt has changed his profile picture on every social media account and was inactive for months on Instagram until finally posting to promote upcoming films: the highly anticipated Avengers: Infinity War and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and in addition sharing a little of his day-to-day hobbies from his farm life.
• Although bold enough to do interviews and PR for his movies, Harrison Ford is fairly private on his family and works to keep his kids' business out of the spotlight. His son Benjamin did agree to be a stand-in for his father to get some improved shots for the Blade Runner 2007 re-release.
• Tom Hiddleston used to have a very good relationship with his fans, often taking pictures with them in-person and posting his Twitter account. However, he stopped interacting with his fans and left social media to protect his privacy after many transgressions including: cyberstalking; tricking him into meeting with them by posing as someone he worked with; and harassing any woman that has been photographed with him. His Twitter account has not been updated since the spring of 2020. It’s known he and his fiancée Zawe Ashton welcome their first child into the world sometime around the late summer or early fall of 2022 but the child’s sex and name are unknown.
• Jodie Comer used to be quite active on social media and would interact with her fans. Come 2020, she became the target of much harassment because her boyfriend was allegedly a Donald Trump supporter. She deactivated her Twitter account afterwards and only uses her Instagram to promote her projects. She also also said that she promised her family that she would never date another actor and lives at home in Liverpool when not working.
• Downplayed with Chris Pine. He's one of the few young actors who doesn't use social media despite being fairly outgoing and congenial.
• Character actor Christopher Lloyd, while known for playing various over-the-top characters, most famously Doc Brown from Back to the Future and Reverend Jim Ignatowski in Taxi, is noted by fellow actors for being very shy and private in real life, rarely doing interviews. Around the 2010s, however, he made appearances at comic book conventions.
• Rick Moranis went into semi-retirement in the '90s, following the diminishing qualities of roles he was being offered, and having to deal with the death of his wife and raising his kids alone. He still rarely gives interviews, and his biggest role of note in the past 2 decades was a voice role in Brother Bear.
• Vera Miles, best known as Lila Crane Loomis in Psycho and Psycho II, retired from acting in 1995, and has been living as a recluse since. She hasn't granted a single interview since that time or made any kind of public appearance. However, she has been known to occasionally answer fan mail and send autographs to fans that write to her, and Jessica Biel met with her grandson before portraying her in Hitchcock. Even before her retirement, she seldom gave interviews, and even there, she mentioned her shyness and desire for privacy.
• Charles Hawtrey is a sad case. After being sacked from the Carry On series, he retired to Deal, Kent where he became a complete recluse, getting drunk, soliciting sex from sailors, and sporadically acting. When he died in 1988, only nine people attended his funeral, none of whom were friends or family.
• Peter Dinklage is extremely protective of his personal life, keeping no official social media accounts and not revealing the names of his children.
• Cillian Murphy prefers not to speak about his personal life in interviews, travels with no entourage, and overall keeps a very low profile, having expressed no interest in the high-flying "celebrity" lifestyle.
• Since the 1990s, Faye Dunaway has made few public appearances, rarely gives interviews, and overall gives little insight into her personal life.
• Little is known about Luke Evans' personal life, which he says is to shield his family from the press.
• Timothy Dalton is known for being an extremely private person who shies away from interviews and was reportedly relieved upon learning that Pierce Brosnan was replacing him as James Bond (his time as Bond is clearly not an Old Shame, but the spotlight and attention he received were atypical for him). That said, he's still known for being very professional and well-liked among cast members and crew and has maintained a close friendship with the Broccoli family.
• Canadian child actor Gil Filar, best known for playing Boobull on The Noddy Shop, retired from acting in the early 2000s to become an author and has rarely been heard from since.
• Holly Larocque, known for playing Holly on Under the Umbrella Tree and Leota in The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, never did any other acting roles and has rarely been heard from since the former show ended, though she did write for a Strawberry Shortcake video in the mid-2000s.
• Sean Connery became this following the commercial failure of his final film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003. While he would reprise the role of James Bond for the 2005 video game 007: From Russia with Love, his most notable public appearance afterwards was in 2006, when he received the AFI Life Achievement Award, before passing away on October 31, 2020.
• John C. Reilly is another downplayed example; he's a relatively outgoing guy who grants interviews and makes public appearances (usually related to an upcoming project), but doesn't use social media (he did give a Reddit AMA in 2014). Furthermore, after no less than four movies featuring him premiered in the last few months of 2018 (The Sisters Brothers, Stan & Ollie, Holmes & Watson and Ralph Breaks the Internet), he appeared to have scaled back in the next few years, with his only major projects between then and the early part of 2022 being a handful of TV shows, a short film by Luca Guadagnino called O Night Divine, the Bob Odenkirk-created audio drama Summer in Argyle, and a brief cameo in Licorice Pizza. Subverted in September 2023 when an Instagram account was set up for his Mr. Romantic shows, but he most likely isn't the one operating it.
• Rachel McAdams doesn't use social media or give many interviews and has stated in the past that she likes to keep her privacy.
• After some bad experiences and information about her family got out, Daisy Ridley deleted all of her official social media accounts and stopped talking about her personal life in interviews.
• Tobey Maguire became more reclusive after the Spider-Man Trilogy ended, with him rarely granting public interviews and not using any social media (he has a Twitter account, but his last tweet is from 2013, promoting The Great Gatsby (2013)). He's been known to ignore fans who approach him and has spent most of his time producing movies and playing professional poker (rumor has it that he was the basis for Player X in Molly's Game), although he did have a small voice role in 2017's The Boss Baby. When it was rumored that he would be reprising his role as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: No Way Home, fans were doubtful that he'd come back, as he hadn't acted since 2014, although he did return to much joy. Furthermore, he made his return to onscreen acting in a small part for the film Babylon. Fans have also posted videos and photos on social media, showing that he often does interact and pose with them for pictures, when he does encounter them. He even did a Reddit AMA in December 2022 and attended some screenings for Babylon.
• Emma Stone is one of the few prominent millennial celebrities who doesn't have any verified social media. She doesn't talk about her personal life much and usually brings her parents or brother to events with her. Her husband, television writer Dave McCrary, has a verified Instagram account and used it to announce they'd gotten engaged but he rarely posts himself. They allegedly got married in 2019 or 2020 but no official announcement has ever been made. She was clearly very pregnant later on in the year (and dropped out of a project at the last minute) and had a baby girl in March 2021 but she's never confirmed it.
• Although he made public appearances and (rarely) granted interviews, Sherman Hemsley was a very private person. For most of his life, the only thing known about him was that he was single with no children or known living relatives. Most information known about him today, even about his life before becoming an actor, was not published until after his death in 2012. He left his entire estate to one of two friends he had been living with for many years, which was contested by someone claiming to be his long-lost brother (whose lawsuit was eventually dismissed).
• Allen Payne, who was quite popular from nineties to aughts, and is best known for his roles in New Jack City, Jason's Lyric, Vampire in Brooklyn and House of Payne, rarely makes public appearances, has no official social media accounts, and is widely known to be very private about his personal life. Even after coming back from hiatus following his mother's death and reprising his role in House of Payne, his current actual marital status and where he lives remain unknown.
• Little is known about what became of Erik Per Sullivan, the actor who played Dewey on Malcolm in the Middle. He does not attend Malcolm reunions, where he is often represented with years-old headshots of himself.
• English television presenter Paul "Des" Ballard, of GMTV's Disney Club and Diggit fame, disappeared off the face of the earth when the latter show ended in 2001. His anonymity was so great that a (now defunct) Facebook group was set up to find him. Even his former friend and co-presenter Fearne Cotton revealed that they'd lost touch and that she'd be interested in finding him. Then in 2021, he resurfaced for all the wrong reasons. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for causing a car pile-up that led to two deaths (he was driving under the influence of drugs while his twelve-year-old son was in the backseat) and another year added for attempting to rape and assault a woman in a hotel room. It was also revealed that in 2014, he operated an illegal self-storage business on green-belt land in Bulphan, England and had been ordered to repay the profits from it.
• Comedian and actor Tony Slattery is best known for being the Breakout Character of the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? Unfortunately by the mid-'90s, his professional and personal life took a toll due to having undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which he admitted to self-medicating with substance abuse and this culminated in him becoming this trope. Thankfully within the past several years, he has been getting help, has a lot of support from fans and his close friends (including his fellow Whose Line costar and frequent collaborator Mike McShane), and is working on his autobiography.
• Matt O'Leary is the rare Millennial actor without any public social media presence whatsoever. He has never granted a substantial interview, and nothing is known about his personal life.
• Brandon DiCamillo was a permanent mainstay in the original CKY videos and as a part of the original cast of Jack Ass and Viva La Bam. However, after the release of “Minghags: The Movie”, he has never returned to any CKY/Jackass projects, even to the point where most of the CKY crew no longer keeps in contact with him. It has been said that the reason why was because of his disillusionment with how more and more corporate he felt the projects became, as well as deciding to settle down and raise his family. Even before that, he was usually the hardest cast member to participate in a lot of trips, as he mentioned he never cared much to leave Westchester, Pennsylvania most of the time, and would rather spend time at home playing video games.
• Rami Malek is known for being very reserved and private in interviews and avoids social media, although he's very approachable to fans.
• Michael Cera is another similar example. He owns no social media and never talks about his personal life. He is married to a woman named Nadine with whom he has a son who was born in 2021 but that is all is known about either of them.
• Stephen Collins of 7th Heaven and Star Trek: The Motion Picture fame has understandably disappeared from public and professional life after his career was effectively ended in 2014 upon the revelation of his serial sexual misconduct with minors dating back as early as 1973.
• Bill Murray not only stays out of social media but also has no agent or publicist. Instead, any and all scripts or role offers have to come through an unlisted 1-800 number passed around through word of mouth that leads to a voicemail box that Murray admits he checks very infrequently.
• Scarlett Johansson doesn’t have any official social media accounts, rarely gives interviews, and lives in New York where she can blend in more easily. She also has never publicly shown either of her children’s faces and even managed to completely hide her second pregnancy in 2021.
• Joe Alwyn is notably private about his private life, frequently declining to comment on interview questions about his relationship with Taylor Swift. This was something Taylor noted that helped her lifestyle and mental health during her 2017 "Snakegate" time. His desire for privacy is stated to have been a reason why they broke up in 2023, as he struggled to adapt with Taylor's then-recent explosion in publicity between 2022 to 2023.
• Jet Li isn't extraordinarily keen on maintaining his high profile as one of the greatest martial artist/actors in the world, putting a lot of his attention towards philanthropic efforts or simply living a quiet life (by Li's own admission, a lot of this was motivated by a Near-Death Experience where he and his daughters were caught up in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, which led him to reevaluate his relationship with fame). He briefly went viral in 2018 when new photos showing his age having drastically caught up to him became public (prior to that point, he was known for being able to pass as being in his early 30's rather than his mid-50's), something he had to address by pointing out 1) he'd been dealing with a battle with hyperthyroidism in the early 2010's, and 2) it was not the reason he'd taken less movie roles since then; he was simply pickier with his time as he'd put more of his focus on charity work.
• Gene Hackman had a huge acting career for more than six decades which earned him several awards including two Oscars. In 2004, he retired from acting and became a novelist instead, staying away from the Hollywood limelight that he once had been. Afterward, he has rarely given interviews and is rarely seen in public. The only thing people heard about him is that he enjoys cycling. It was only in March 2024 that he and his second wife, Betsy Arakawa, were seen in a public outing for the first time in 21 years.
• Ever since the tragic deaths of her pregnant sister, brother-in-law, and toddler nephew in a plane crash in mid-2022, Megan Hilty has become this, rarely posting updates on social media.

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