14 DAY TRIAL // Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence has gone into hiding and is said to live in fear that her career might receive a serious hit as a result of the leak of her private, nude photos, which a hacker obtained from her iCloud account and posted online. Dame Helen Mirren, on the other hand, says the best approach to this conundrum is the humorous one.
She does have a point: since neither Jennifer nor any other celebrity involved in the biggest photo hack of our times can do anything about it, she might as well laugh it off. As the saying goes, what has been seen cannot be unseen.
The 69-year-old actress says in a new interview that she’s actually “insulted” she didn’t find any of her own revealing photos among the hundreds that emerged online last week, when the accounts of 101 female celebrities were hacked.
A humorous approach is always best
“You weren't anybody if your phone hadn't been hacked,” Mirren says in the interview, as cited by the New Zealand Herald. “I was rather insulted my phone wasn't hacked, actually. I kept desperately looking at the list of people whose phones were hacked, hoping to see my name.”
Obviously, she didn’t. The names she did see included the who’s who in film, television, and fashion, from Lawrence to “it” model Kate Upton, Victoria Justice, Kirsten Dunst, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. A couple of names from sports were also included in the targeted attack, like Hope Solo and McKayla Maroney.
Seeing the funny side doesn’t mean hacking is ok
Like Ricky Gervais last week, Helen Mirren is trying to see the upside of a very bad situation, but at the same time, she wants her fans to know that joking about the hacking incident doesn’t meant that she’s diminishing the severity of the crime or, for that matter, that she’s blaming the victims.
Sure, she doesn’t understand why anyone would snap naked pictures of themselves and then keep them on their phone, but that doesn’t mean any hacker is “right” to steal them and make them public.
“It's insulting and stupid to hack phones. The best thing is to be superior and not take it too seriously,” the actress says on a more serious note.
The lesson learned is to keep private stuff under lock and key
As much as she’d like the women involved not to take the scandal “too seriously,” Dame Mirren hints that they should also learn a lesson from what has happened to them. Being celebrities means that they must take extra caution when it comes to their behavior online or even at home, behind closed doors.
Once things are out online, you can never really take them back, no matter how much you’d want that to happen or the kind of money and attorney power you have at your disposal. Just like you can’t unsee what has been seen.
So the best thing you can do, according to Helen, is to think ahead and be cautious. “I think we're all in a learning curve about what is appropriate to put on your phone and what isn't and I think people will be far more careful in the future. And also I think the protections will get stronger, I presume,” she says.
She might not be an expert at this, but the things she says on the topic are common sense.