Charli XCX watched 'Opening Night' (1977) on New Year's Day

On Dec. 27 Charli XCX’s Letterboxd account leaked, ushering in over 155,000 new followers. The brat singer promptly changed her bio to “my account got leaked i guess” and removed all non-five star ratings of films. 

Charli isn’t the first celebrity to publicly use art-tracking apps, but the publicization of her Letterboxd spotlights a new dimension of digital celebrity surveillance popularized by pop culture aggregate accounts like Pop Crave and Film Updates. 

This isn’t to say that Letterboxd is a niche, privacy-forward platform: It’s now a staple of any film’s press tour, with representatives asking cast and crew their four favorite films. Hollywood icons like Martin Scorsese and new internet fav Kyle MacLachlan have used the platform itself to promote projects. But when celebrities, like Charli, use Letterboxd earnestly things get dicey. 

Actress Ayo Edebiri faced blowback after her probing review of Saltburn (2023) was reposted to Twitter by pop culture aggregate accounts Pop Crave and Film Updates. She left the film unrated and wrote, “my man is doing all of this but can’t eat runny eggs? 🤨.” She also liked a half star review and a two and a half star review of the film. Two days later, Edebiri deleted her review and changed her bio to “be nice and don’t harsh the vibe please!” She only wrote a handful of reviews after the incident, and pretty much stopped logging movies last March.

Edebiri’s slow fade away from Letterboxd coincided with her rise in celebrity, specifically, not just her growing online popularity. The actress started logging movies on Letterboxd in 2018, well before her breakout role in The Bear. Most of her reviews span a time when she was best known for being funny on Twitter. And her reviews were funny and full of a palpable love for movies. It’s a shame that the news era of digital celebrity surveillance drove her off the platform. 

Edebiri’s Bottoms co-star Rachel Sennott also has a public Letterboxd account @girlactress, but she only started logging movies after her acting career began. 

Musician and boygenius member, Lucy Dacus has a public Goodreads account she’s posted on since 2018.¹ She’s the seventh most followed person on the platform behind authors like Kristin Hannah and Colleen Hoover. 

While I find Goodreads and Letterboxd are generally uninteresting ways to engage with art — they deter patrons of the arts from sitting with what they’ve just seen and reading professional criticism — but if you were to read the same 480 books as Lucy Dacus or watch the same 1,082 movies as Charli, you’d undoubtedly get an education; You’d read Shakespeare, Angela Davis, and Annie Ernaux, and watch the films of Agnès Varda and Ingmar Bergman. 

In a time of algorithmically-generated taste, celebrity worship of this kind could offer an alternative portal of discovery. In Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, he explores how algorithms flatten taste and urges readers to develop their own aesthetic sensabilities by intentionally falling down rabbit holes. If celebrities like Charli, Edebiri, and Dacus are made inescapable by algorithms, perhaps moving beyond their internet personas and treating them as the artists they are through their Letterboxd and Goodreads accounts is a subversive and tastemaking act.

Charli even published a list of films titled, “if she was to succeed she has to do more than fail; she has to embrace her failure” and the description quotes her song “Sympathy is a Knife.” Her list offers fans a way to further immerse themselves in the themes of brat and what inspired her. 

But I imagine what most of Charli’s “angels” (the name for her fanbase) gain from the “leak” of her Letterboxd is the glimpse it gives into her life, not an education in the art that inspires her. On Christmas day she watched Macbeth “whilst george built lego.” She was so “amped” after watching Challengers that she went out “til 5am with Harrison and then was super hungover for the met.”² In her review of Ratatouille she revealed that she only ate McDonalds at Paris fashion week. She watched To Die For on a comedown from partying in Las Vegas. 

The platform itself isn’t designed to be a haven of intellectual discovery, it incentivizes this sort of flippant engagement with film, and the tendency towards surveillance —normalized in the posting habits of Pop Crave and its contemporaries — encourages engaging in Charli’s celebrity, rather than her artistry.

Let me know what you want to see from Altar Boys!

Celebrity worship touches all aspects of our lives, so please tell me what topics you’d like me to cover. This newsletter is partially an experiment in writing for my brilliant friends instead of the Google Search lowest common denominator. Speaking of, thank you to Chase for edits on this!

Catch up on some of my relevant writing.

• The Tyranny of the Top Four: How Letterboxd is changing movie-watching

• What do we lose when influencers replace journalists on the red carpet

1  It’s not lost on me that all the artists with these kinds of accounts are women, another example of female artists having to show their work.

2  George is George Daniels, Charli’s fiancé and the drummer of The 1975, and Harrison is Harrison Smith, Charli’s collaborator that performs under The Dare.