Your Entitlement is Showing Again, John Barrowman

Ahhh, Twitter. What would we do without it? The shouty, ranty echo-chamber that makes our blood boil in fury, then placates us with poetic platitudes and pictures of playful puppies. I love it!

What’s also great is that Twitter can really weed out the highly unpleasant members of our society and highlight the kinds of behavior that used to stay hidden behind a veneer of (albeit fake) decency. Anonymity, and the irresistible lure of 15 minutes of internet fame, is a remarkably effective tool when it comes to chipping away at false propriety.

When it comes to the world of entertainment and celebrity, such behavior would usually be whispered about on-set but whitewashed by publicists and fixers. But with plenty of old footage openly circulating on the internet and millions of people gossiping on social media, that already thin veneer can be chipped away very quickly nowadays, exposing the ugliness behind the façade faster than you can say “Trending on Twitter”.

Best of all is when it’s the celebrities themselves wielding the chipping hammer and, erm, exposing themselves for all the world to see.

Actor, author, singer, and television celebrity, John Barrowman, is no stranger to exposing himself. You may already have been following the sordid saga of his frequent acts of sexual misconduct; exposing himself during a performance of Sunset Boulevard, flashing his appendage on a live BBC1 radio show, and offending his fellow Doctor Who cast members by taking his member out on the set.

This latter incident, which took place around 2008, resurfaced recently when the Guardian revealed numerous allegations of groping, bullying, and sexual harassment against Barrowman’s fellow Doctor Who actor and film director/screenwriter, Noel Clarke. A video from a 2015 Doctor Who panel discussion at science fiction convention, which features both Clarke and Barrowman joking about the latter taking his todger out on set, went viral in the wake of the allegations. In the video, female cast members Camille Coduri and Annette Badland sit awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable, while Clarke uses his microphone to imitate Barrowman repeatedly tapping his exposed penis on them.

Earlier this month (July 2021), trashy UK tabloid The Daily Mail published an interview in which Barrowman gave “his side of the story”. In it, he dismissed his frequent flashing as “hijinks”, “tomfoolery”, and “fun”. Possibly not as much fun for those on the receiving end, John, but as long as you’re having a good time, right?

Understandably, Twitter-users were quick to point out that Barrowman’s side of the story was remarkably devoid of any remorse or genuine apology;

Now here we are, not even two weeks later, and John Barrowman is trending on Twitter again, this time in response to a poorly-judged and ill-conceived tweet in which declared award-winning director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film Old “an utter shite movie”, and boasted of having demanded a refund from the cinema, despite he and husband Scott having sat through the entire 1hr 49 minutes of it. What’s more, he copied Shyamalan and Universal Pictures into his petty diatribe, which included a video rant. Like Camille Coduri and Annette Badland before him, Barrowman’s husband Scott Gill, sits there looking awkward and slightly embarrassed.

Barrowman has now deleted the offending tweet, no doubt chagrinned by the level of outrage it has evoked.

One wonders what precisely Barrowman had hoped to achieve with this tweet. Sure, we don’t all like the same films and sometimes movies fail to deliver on their promises (I haven’t seen Old yet, so I can’t offer an opinion on that front), but what exactly is the benefit in copying the film’s director/ screenwriter into a tweet in which you declare his work “utter shite”?

Did Barrowman get rejected for a role in said film, and is taking his petty grievances out in public? (Let’s face it, they certainly wouldn’t be the first thing he’s taken out in public.) Or is Barrowman so conceited as to believe that his opinion should somehow be of particular interest to Shyamalan?

Moreover, demanding a refund for a film that you were actually happy enough to sit an watch for nearly two hours is a massive display of celebrity entitlement and a huge slap in the face to an industry that has taken a battering during the COVID pandemic.

As Forbes reported in April 2021, theatrical revenue “dropped from $42.3 billion in 2019 to $12 billion in 2020, [with] theatrical entertainment account[ing] for only 15% of the total global entertainment revenue, compared to 43% in 2019”. Cinemas all around the world have been closed throughout the pandemic, and hundreds of thousands of cinema employees have been unable to work. Here in the UK, cinemas only began to reopen in May 2021. That Barrowman thinks it in any way funny, clever, or charming to harass cinema staff into issuing him a refund just because he, the almighty Barrowman, didn’t enjoy it, speaks volumes to his arrogance and sense of entitlement.

Whilst I am not a big fan of “cancel culture” per se, when an entitled individual’s imperious attitude sees them hoisted on their own petard, I can’t help but enjoy it. Between being “cut” from upcoming Doctor Who theatrical event Time Fracture, audio production company Big Finish cancelling the release of Torchwood: Absent Friends (which would have seen Barrowman’s Doctor Who/ Torchwood character Captain Jack Harkness reunited with David Tennant) in light of the allegations, and a graphic novel based on Jack Harkness shelved, it’s been looking like John Barrowman’s career was pretty much dead in the water.

Now, with his petty and spiteful actions against an award-winning director and an already wounded cinema industry, it seems that the troubled actor has exposed himself all over again.

©️ Jupiter Grant, 2021

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Jupiter Grant is a self-published author, blogger, narrator, and audiobook producer. Buy me a coffee here: https://ko-fi.com/jupitergrant

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