Young people can smell disingenuousness. And much like a baby recoils from an eager adult trying too hard to make nice with it, Gen Zers and Millennials have decided they’ve had enough of James Corden’s ill-advised queer pantomiming, niceness as a transaction, overwrought theater kid thing. Earnestness as a brand turns sour like milk left in the sun, and it seems to mostly plague theater-turned-film stars, but also translates to people with a kind of megalomaniacal energy like Taylor Swift. Something about the passion and panache required of the stage eventually feels mocking and trite when it’s not finessed into a more nuanced persona on screen or in real life. And for that reason, at the time of this writing, nearly 80,000 people and counting have signed a Change.org petition to keep Corden off of the cast for the upcoming film adaptation of beloved musical Wicked.
It’s a fascinating case study in pop culture, and it’s not the first time this particular flavor of resistance to a star has happened. Many remember the great Anne Hathaway banishment circa 2013, after an insufferable Oscar-courting press cycle promoting the film adaptation of Les Miserables left us all never again wanting to see rich people sing aloud with the fake muck of industrial revolution smeared on their faces. After some time off, Hathaway had the correct response, admitting when she reemerged, “My impression is that people needed a break from me.” She read the room, something that Corden — who has now appeared as a singing rodent, a singing cat, a singing non-gay gay person and a singing baker — is not doing.
