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Very few celebrities are actually fans of the paparazzi who follow them everywhere they go. But some are more successful than others when it comes to keeping their private lives out of the public eye. Some choose to move out of Los Angeles as an easy start, like George and Amal Clooney’s super-private Lake Como hideaway or Sandra Bullock’s home in New Orleans. Others like John Travolta have attached whole airports to their homes to avoid setting foot on public property while traveling (okay, maybe that one’s just Travolta). But each of these celebrities who we so rarely see captured by the paparazzi has also spoken out about why they feel so strongly about the issue, and their comments are well worth hearing. Whether they’re trying to protect a child, a partner, or just themselves from the onslaught of clicking cameras and being watched, they all report feeling the same way — first helpless, then seriously angry.
Here’s the dilemma. As actors, these stars do acknowledge that part of their profession entails being a public figure, and that they rely on the public’s attention to succeed. So, how can you show one side to the public and keep another side covered? Just ask Kerry Washington or Taylor Swift, whom I’m sure you would say you see in the press often. Now tell me how much you know about Kerry Washington’s husband Nnamdi Asomugha and their two kids. Little to nothing? We thought so.
When all else fails, some celebrities have found relief from paparazzi by legal means, issuing injunctions or filing lawsuits over illegally publicized images. If avoiding paparazzi sounds like a full-time job at this point, that’s because it probably is — and that’s why these stars’ under-the-radar home lives never cease to amaze us.
Read on for all the celebrities whose lives are rarely captured by the paparazzi.
A version of this article was previously published in October 2020.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have spent their entire relationship being hounded by the media and were involved in a nearly catastrophic car chase with paparazzi in May 2023. So it’s no wonder they want to keep their children’s lives as private as possible. They infrequently share photos of Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet and that is very intentional.
“We’ve been really conscious of protecting our kids as best as we can and also understanding the role that they play in this really historic family,” Markle said in the couple’s Netflix docuseries.
Harry, who grew up on the global stage, said, “As a dad and as parents, I think consent is a really key piece to this. That if you have children, it should be your consent to what you share.”
Back in 2013, Garner fought for the California state government to protect the children of celebrities from the paparazzi. After the bill passed, the actress felt a major difference.
“The paparazzi have calmed down so much for me that I’m back to being in the world,” Garner told Allure. “I’m not getting chased into the grocery store to have whatever is in my cart photographed. Maybe my life is happily boring enough that there’s nothing to see here. I think social media helped calm it down, actually. You have your own relationship with people.”
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher like to keep their private life on the down-low, and while Kunis doesn’t really have social media, Kutcher does — but he never posts their kids’ faces. He previously told The Thrive Global Podcast in 2017, “We don’t share any photos of our kids publicly because we actually feel like being public is a personal choice…. My wife and I have chosen a career where we’re in the public light, but my kids have not.”
He added, “So, I think they should have the right to choose that, and I actually don’t think that they should have images of them as children that are out there, that somebody could potentially blackmail them with or do whatever — you know. It’s their private life; it’s not mine to give away.”
Along with being amazing co-parents to their son Flynn, they never post about him on social media (and if they do, they cover his face with an emoji!)
Orlando Bloom values privacy in every relationship, and so does Katy Perry. And that’s why they don’t share pics of their daughter Daisy on social media!
Mindy Kaling is another celebrity that is adamant about not posting her children’s faces on social media. She previously told Glamour back in 2019 (before she had her son in 2020), that she wouldn’t be showing her daughter’s face.
“I’m on social media and like sharing with people what my interests are and how my day’s going and all of that, but I do feel entitled to have privacy about my daughter and my relationships,” she said. “It’s really essential to my life that there be something not everybody knows about. That’s a boundary, but it’s a very small boundary. Everything else I really don’t have any issue sharing.”
Along with being private people in general, Benji Madden and Cameron Diaz announced soon after giving birth to their daughter Raddix that they wouldn’t be sharing photos of her. They said in the Instagram post, “While we are overjoyed to share this news, we also feel a strong instinct to protect our little one’s privacy. So we won’t be posting pictures or sharing any more details, other than the fact that she is really really cute!! Some would even say RAD.”
Vanessa Bryant used to post so many updates of her daughters, however, at the beginning of 2023, she private her social media accounts, keeping many eyes of for her family.
Adele previously told Vogue back in 2016 that she and her son Angelo Adkins “need to have some privacy.” She said, “I think it’s really hard being a famous person’s child. What if he wants to smoke weed or drink underage, or what if he’s gay and doesn’t want to tell me, and then he’s photographed and that’s how I find out?”
Diane Kruger and Norman Reedus are another couple that never posts their daughter’s face on social media. In fact, it took then until 2022 to even clue fans in on their daughter’s gorgeous name: Nova Tennessee.
Ever since Drew Scott and Linda Phan welcomed their son Parker in 2022, they’ve made it a point to hide his face on social media, even if they’re posting about him. They’re all about protecting his privacy, especially from those who keep pestering them about it on social media.
As her three daughters with husband Ryan Reynolds get older, Blake Lively is becoming more vocal about how she feels regarding the paparazzi. In October 2021, the actress called out paparazzi who were following her and her daughters around and taking photographs of them. She also requested a social media account that then circulated the images to take them down.
“I’ve personally shared with you that these men stalk and harass my children. And you are still posting,” Lively called out the social media account, which was posting paparazzi photos of her and her children. “You said you would stop. You personally promised me. This is not casual appreciation. This is YOU also exploiting very young children. Please. Delete. Please. Some parents are ok with this. We. Are. NOT.”
Since becoming a mother, Sophie Turner has been incredibly reticent about publicly disclosing details regarding her personal life with husband Joe Jonas. The couple welcomed their first child together, daughter Willa, in July 2020, and the former Game of Thrones star made it known that she is incredibly uncomfortable with paparazzi taking photos of her baby girl.
“I guess yesterday some paparazzi managed to get a picture of my daughter, and I just want to say that the reason that I am not posting pictures of my daughter and making sure that we can avoid paparazzi at all costs is because I explicitly do not want those photos out there,” Turner said in a May 2021 social media post.
“She is my daughter. She did not ask for this life — to be photographed,” the actress continued. “It’s fucking creepy that grown old men [sic] taking pictures of a baby without their permission. I’m sickened, I’m disgusted, and I’m respectfully asking everyone to stop following us around and stop trying to take pictures of our daughter and especially printing them.”
In 2014, Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell took their fight to maintain their daughters’ anonymity to news networks. The couple led a successful campaign that sought to have responsible news outlets from publishing photos of their daughters, Lincoln and Delta. In the past, Bell has even confronted paparazzi who have photographed her daughters at their school, per Today.
Since taking a step back as senior members of the royal family, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have gone in a total different direction when it comes to the public’s access to their young children — Archie and Lilibet. It’s unlikely, moving forward, that the couple will share photos of their children and keep them as far away from paparazzi as possible.
And paparazzi may have gotten the message. “A lot of people have decided that it is kind of not worth the hassle,” Giles Harrison, CEO of photo agency London Entertainment recently said of pursuing photos of the Sussex famiily.
As Drew Barrymore‘s daughters Olive and Frankie have gotten older, their mom has shielded them from the public eye more and more. Though Barrymore is very open about discussing parenting and raising her daughters, she’s less interested in having photos of her girls out in the world, which is why she rarely shares pictures of them on Instagram or puts them in a position to be photographed out in public.
Like many of the parents on this list, if Charlize Theron is going to have photos of her kids out in the world, it’s going to be on her terms. The actress rarely shares photos of her two adopted children, and has yet to bring them to a red carpet or industry event.
Since becoming parents to daughters Hazel and Violet, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski have made a concerted effort to keep their daughters’ lives as private as possible. Upon their eldest daughter, Hazel’s, birth, Krasinski tweeted a photo of the little girl with the caption, “Pics of kids should only come direct from parents.”
Since then, the parents have talked about their children in interviews, but rarely share photos of the girls. They also make it very clear they don’t want paparazzi near their kids at all.
Sandra Bullock admits that keeping her kids out of the public eye over the years hasn’t been easy, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“From the ruse I had to construct so that Louis didn’t have to lie to his friends at school, to the stories I constructed for friends and coworkers as to why I was absent all the time, the subterfuge was pretty elaborate,” she told People. “But there is always the chance that the bonding process wouldn’t happen or that the CPS [Child Protective Services] workers would feel I wasn’t a suitable match. So I had no problem lying and fabricating stories to keep things on lockdown.”
Not only do George and Amal Clooney live on secluded Lake Como, promising a safe distance from most paparazzi haunting grounds, they did have to make their stance clear when a French magazine snapped a pic of their newborn twins without permission.
The new dad immediately released a statement announcing a pending lawsuit; “Over the last week photographers from Voici magazine scaled our fence, climbed our tree and illegally took pictures of our infants inside our home. Make no mistake the photographers, the agency and the magazine will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The safety of our children demands it.”
Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling are so private, they won’t even really acknowledge how private they are. This is just how the Mendes-Goslings do things. Mendes kept both her pregnancies a secret and has focused her energy on making sure her children can have as private and “normal” a childhood as possible.
Emma Watson explained to Vanity Fair why she had to have a no-photo policy when fans approached her on the street, and it’s a big clue to how she’s managed to avoid the flash of cameras everywhere she goes.
“If someone takes a photograph of me and posts it, within two seconds, they’ve created a marker of exactly where I am within 10 meters. They can see what I’m wearing and who I’m with. I just can’t give that tracking data.”
Halle Berry is so passionate about this issue that she’s worked with Jennifer Garner to get a law in place prohibiting the photography of children without the permission of their parents.
“We’re moms here who are just trying to protect our children,” Berry told California legislators in 2013. “These are little innocent children who didn’t ask to be celebrities. They didn’t ask to be thrown into this game, and they don’t have the wherewithal to process what’s happening. We don’t have a law in place to protect them from this.”
John Travolta certainly goes the extra mile to secure his privacy. A licensed pilot, Travolta has an airport attached to his Florida home and can fly directly in and out with one of his five planes and however many family members he wants in tow.
Isla Fisher got candid about why she’s kept her kids with Sacha Baron Baron Cohen out of the public eye on Today in 2017.
“If you speak about your children or if you take them to a red carpet event, you can’t be litigious later on when there is a picture of them in something and say, ‘hey, they deserve anonymity,’ but they do,” the mom of three explained. “They have rights, too. It’s a very conscious decision and truly I would feel really disgusting about myself if I used my family to sell something. It wouldn’t sit right with me. It doesn’t line up with my values.”
Katie Holmes has never been able to avoid the paparazzi as much as she’d like for herself or for daughter Suri after her high-profile divorce from Tom Cruise. But Holmes did score one massive privacy win: by filing for divorce in New York instead of California, she ensured that their court documents would be kept private.
Sienna Miller is another celeb who took her right to privacy to court after a 2011 phone tap. She’s since revealed she has an injunction against paparazzi in England so they can’t take her photo, which may explain why she spends so much time there.
Kerry Washington has accepted that certain elements of her life and her former footballer husband’s life will be in the public, but she doesn’t want to make that decision for her kids.
“I want her to be able to make those decisions in her time,” she told Entertainment Tonight of her and husband Nnamdi Asomugha’s daughter. “She already has a lot to navigate in life as the daughter of an actor and a former football player. She should be able to enter this world when it feels right for her, and not [have me] make that decision for her.”
Jennifer Lawrence was impossible to avoid when she was at her Hunger Games heyday — but ever since, the actress has made more and more concerted efforts to live a low-profile, paparazzi-free life. After she was targeted in a 2013 hacking incident that shared her private nude photographs with the public, she addressed the bigger intrusions of privacy she’s fought so hard to keep at bay.
“I knew the paparazzi were going to be a reality in my life,” she told the Associated Press. “But I didn’t know that I would feel anxiety every time I open my front door, or that being chased by 10 men you don’t know, or being surrounded, feels invasive and makes me feel scared and gets my adrenaline going every day.”
These days, Lawrence’s low-profile romance with Cooke Maroney is a perfect example of how she’s stepped out of the limelight.
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