Celebrities might be some of the most public people in the world but some stars are trying to claw back some privacy by staying off social media. Stars from Emily Blunt to Brad Pitt refuse to use social media and their reasons are abundant!
It can feel impossible to keep up with the modern age without spending hours a day on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and every other digital form of communication. Those who live their lives offline are a rare breed. How, in this day and age, can they not? After all, over 3 billion people globally are active members of social media.
However, there are those who abstain from it all and some of them are the most famous people on the planet! Somehow, they’ve managed to evade the vortex of modern social media and stick to more traditional means of communication. Like, you know, talking. Or writing letters. Or giving interviews in which they explain why they don’t have social media — like Emily Blunt who is all about keeping mystery alive. “I don’t need to know what they brush their teeth with. I don’t want to know. I love people being hard to figure out,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. Though, she does have a cheat day every now and then, and we have more on that later!
Whether it’s an issue of maintaining privacy, they get anxious from the overstimulating world of it, or straight up don’t feel like it, these celebrities have opened up about their disdain for social media.
A version of this article was originally published on July 2018.
Here are 30 celebrities who don’t have social media!
Keira Knightley
For Knightley, her extremely brief foray into social media proved too much too fast. “I did actually join Twitter for about 12 hours because I tried to be down with the kids, and it just creeped me out,” she explained on The Jonathan Ross Show.
“I didn’t post anything, and I was under a false name and I think because Chloë [Grace Moretz] followed me, suddenly all these people started following me and posting, ‘I’m having a cup of tea now,’ and I just got completely freaked out.”
Colin Firth
Colin Firth said to CinéSéries Originals that privacy is especially important to him, saying, “My impulse is not to broadcast myself when I’m off the clock. I think when I go home, I don’t want to send more images out there.”
Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt told GQ back in 2014 that he does “see a benefit” in having social media.
“You could, you know, combat the misconceptions or the misquotes immediately. And if I’d have had that in my younger days, I’d have used it,” he said before adding, “At this point, I don’t want to bother with it.”
Olivia Colman
In a February 2024 interview with Sky News, Olivia Colman stated that she has no interest in having social media due to her fear of reading negative comments about her work.
“I’m not brave enough. I know it would hurt. I’m not very thick skinned, and so I don’t want to know. I would rather pretend that no one ever sees a film that we make, actually,” the Wicked Little Letters star said.
Rachel Weisz
Rachel Weisz wants to keep her private life as private as possible. In a 2023 interview with PORTER, she said, “I’m not very technologically savvy; I would be really crap at it. [But] I suppose, for me, the words ‘private life’ mean just that: that you have a private life, which is the real-life stuff. And then there’s the fantasy stuff.”
Scarlett Johansson
In 2023, Scarlett Johansson told The Skinny Confidential Him & Her, “I can’t. My ego is too fragile. My brain is too fragile. I’m like a delicate flower.”
She added, “I had Instagram once for three days and when I started realizing that I’d spent 20 minutes looking at somebody’s Instagram page who worked for a friend of mine. I now know you have a pit bull and two daughters and you live in, like, Burbank. I felt so bad, like I was missing out on this random person’s life. I was like, I can’t do this.”
Saoirse Ronan
Oscar-nominated actress Saoirse Ronan has avoided social media for years, telling The Wrap in 2018: “self-promotion has always always made me feel really uncomfortable.”
“It’s too much work for me and too stressful,” she added. “I’ve developed a kind of distant relationship with my phone and technology over the last couple of years. I get why musicians do it, and journalists or people in the public eye.”
But acting is a different thing, ’cause you’re not yourself when you’re working. I’m not me in anything that anyone sees me in. So for me then to get on Twitter and go, ‘Oh, I’ve had a terrible day’ or ‘God, I’ve got such a headache,’ I just don’t think people need to see that.”
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
In a 2019 appearance on her close friend’s podcast, How to Fail With Elizabeth Day, Phoebe Waller-Bridge said that she avoids social media because she “would feel pressure to be funny all the time.”
Then, in 2023, she addressed the topic with Day once again at the host’s London book launch, calling social media “madness” and expressing her view that it “fetishises the idea of how many friends, how many likes, how many followers.”
Alicia Vikander
Alicia Vikander’s reason for having no social media is quite simple: she found no joy in it! In a 2019 interview with Harper’s BAZAAR U.S, she revealed she deleted social media after one month of creating it. “I realised early on that social media was not good for me; I personally didn’t find the joy in it,” she said.
Elizabeth Olsen
Elizabeth Olsen had social media for some time, but deleted it all and claims she hasn’t looked back. “I’m never going back to social media. And it’s not even like I was bullied,” the WandaVision star said to Glamour UK in 2021. “[I thought] Wait, why am I even trying to create a character version of myself and put it out in the world? And the whole thing just made me uncomfortable and it’s not even like I was really paying attention to comments or anything.”
Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen
Elizabeth isn’t the only Olsen child to shun social media! In fact, both of her older sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have avoided social media, telling Vogue back in 2011, “We’ve spent our whole lives trying to not let people have that accessibility, so it would go against everything we’ve done in our lives.”
They also noted that it gives them anxiety, and doubled down on this stance in the following years.
Kristen Stewart
Simply put, Kristen Stewart finds social media annoying. “It’s like you’re trampling on someone’s life without any regard,” she said to Flaunt per Instyle. “Everyone can do it now. Buy a camera and you’re paparazzi; get a Twitter account and you’re an informant. It’s so annoying.”
Mila Kunis
Mila Kunis at the 94th Academy Awards held at Dolby Theatre at the Hollywood & Highland Center on March 27th, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.
Eddie Murphy
Eddie Murphy said back in 2022 to Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t need to be on social media interacting with the fans, tweeting that I just ate strawberries. I’m not doing none of that.”
Kate Moss
Supermodel Kate Moss has no personal social media accounts, only an account for her modelling agency.
Back in 2017 for The Sydney Morning Herald, she explained why.
“The whole modelling scene is completely different to when I first started out. Everything now is so instant with digital photography and there’s no mystique,” she said. “I don’t have any personal accounts on social media, I’m just not into posting about personal stuff online.”
Chris Pine
Chris Pine like to keep things simple when it comes to technology. “I’ll tell you what, here we go,” he said to HelloGiggles. “I recently got a record player and a flip phone. I kind of like the simplifying down. I just like the simple, I just like the non-complicated. I don’t want to be connected so much.”
Emily Blunt
In 2021, Emily Blunt explained to The Hollywood Reporter why she has kept her life offline.
“I’ve always loved the mystique of an actor,” she said. “I don’t need to know what they brush their teeth with. I don’t want to know. I love people being hard to figure out.”
However, she did admit in a 2023 interview with The Guardian that, privately, she has fallen down the social media rabbit hole on occasion.
“I have been prone to getting occasionally pulled into lurking on Instagram, and it just makes you feel terrible,” she said. “I don’t feel good after doing it. I don’t feel like I’ve done anything beneficial to myself. I feel a little bit wobbly. Like I’ve wasted some time.”
Ruth Negga
Ruth Negga previously said in 2017 with Net-a-Porter’s The Edit per Marie Claire AUS that social media “terrify the s–t” out of her. Honestly, we totally get it.
Sandra Bullock
In 2022, Sandra Bullock joked that she “learned a lot” while making her 1995 movie The Net, in which a woman’s identity is erased by hackers, and opted not to take the risk.
But she had previously expanded on her reasons for staying off social media in a 2018 interview, saying: “Oh god, I would have one glass of rosé and be spouting off like [slurs voice], ‘This is not the truth!'”
“I’m not ignorant of what’s happening out there,” she added. “I look over people’s shoulders, going, ‘What is that little vignette of a cat on a fan?’ I’m just lazy. But I’m going to get on it and troll my friends. Once my kids are using it, I’ll know how to navigate it. I don’t want to be naïve.”
Rachel McAdams
Per a 2009 interview with People, it isn’t necessarily that Rachel McAdams dislikes social media so much that she’s technologically challenged. “I listen to the news on the radio. I don’t have a television and I am really bad at e-mail.”
Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett isn’t mincing words, y’all. She doesn’t understand the obsession with social media. “I cannot for the life of me work out why adults are participating in that sh-t,” she told Yahoo in 2015.
Daniel Radcliffe
In 2020, the Harry Potter star revealed that his reasons for staying off social media all boil down to damage prevention!
“I would love to say there’s some sort of intellectual, well-thought-out reason for this, because I considered getting a Twitter, and I 100 percent know that if I did, you all would be waking up to stories of like, ‘Dan Radcliffe gets into fight with random person on Twitter,'” he said while appearing on Hot Ones.
Jake Gyllenhaal
If he’s really being honest, social media essentially terrifies Jake Gyllenhaal. During a 2014 interview with USA Today, he explained, “No one is looking up. I take that seriously, I think it’s saying something really important and a little scary.”
George Clooney
George Clooney has given many explainations for his choice to stay offline over the years, like in 2022 when he said: “I don’t think you can be a star and be that available.”
But we’ll defer to his 2009 explaination when he admitted at the Toronto Film Festival: “I’d rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands than have a Facebook page.” Yowza.
Jennifer Lawrence
For the Red Sparrow star, it’s really just a classic case of technology incompatibility. “I will never get Twitter. I’m not very good on [a] phone or technology,” she told BBC Radio in 2014. “I cannot really keep up with emails, so the idea of Twitter is so unthinkable to me.”
In 2018, she doubled down when she told InStyle why she avoids social media.
“There is always so much backlash,” she said, via The List. So many people are listening and paying attention, and they have so many opinions about absolutely everything. I really don’t want to welcome that unless it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t want to put myself out there for no reason”
Tina Fey
Truth be told, Tina Fey doesn’t think most people have interesting enough things to say to be chronicling every detail of their lives on social media.
“Most people are so f–king boring that they should shut up, and you should have to get a license. And I’m volunteering to be in charge of the licenses,” she told BuzzFeed in 2013. “Go write it in a journal and mail it to your grandma.”
Emma Stone
Emma Stone’s reasons for not having any presence on social media are simple: she just doesn’t want to!
“I think it wouldn’t be a positive thing for me,” she told Elle in 2018. If people can handle that sort of output and input in the social media sphere, power to them.
Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet takes the toll social media has on girls and young women’s confidence very seriously.
“It has a huge impact on young women’s self-esteem, because all they ever do is design themselves for people to like them. And what comes along with that? Eating disorders. And that makes my blood boil. And is the reason we don’t have any social media in our house,” she told The Sunday Times.
Pete Davidson
Pete Davidson has dabbled in social media here and there, even returning from a 5-year hiatus in 2023 to promote his show Bupkis before signing off once again.
But, his reasons for staying predominately off social media are more than valid. After his split from Ariana Grande in 2018, the actor explained why he would be deleting his social media accounts.
“I’ve been getting online bullied and in public by people for 9 months. I’ve spoken about BPD and being suicidal publicly only in the hopes that it will help bring awareness and help kids like myself who don’t want to be on this earth,” he wrote via an Instagram post at the time. “I just want you guys to know. No matter how hard the internet or anyone tries to make me kill myself. I won’t.”
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