This article is featured in The Australian and is republished with permission.
We’ve been through endless eras of celebrity since the turn of the 20th century – the Silent Age of Chaplin and Keaton, the Golden Age of Monroe and Hepburn, the Dark Age of the Kardashians – all met with varying degrees of adulation, curiosity, cynicism. But in our current algorithmic age, the spectacle of fame has splintered. A-listers are heavily guarded by a militia of PR execs carefully controlling their every appearance while anyone with a smartphone can broadcast their lives for consumption. Then there’s cancel culture: an extreme sport fuelled by a rage cycle on social media with little to no prospect of redemption. One mistake and you are done.
Such mutations of celebrity form the basis of Apple TV’s latest comedy, Outcome, the third film directed by Jonah Hill that skewers the world of fame.
“You know, all the political incorrectness that we’ve been tethered to, with virtue signalling and all the stuff – we’re throwing that back in people’s faces and saying, ‘how is this sticking on the wall?’,” Cameron Diaz, one of the film’s stars, tells Culture.
“If you look back at 90s comedies, there was very little of that. This is a commentary on how we really gauge that, what’s the value of it? Does it serve us and where do we land and this moment, relative to where we were five years ago or four years ago? What’s the balance of it all?“
It’s a broad query for a film that runs for an (increasingly rare) 84 minutes. At first glance, Outcome is about a universally beloved star, Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves), who learns he is being blackmailed by an anonymous source threatening to up-end his life. Publicly regarded as the “nicest guy” in Hollywood, he sets out on a journey of forgiveness to right his wrongs and figure out who the perpetrator is – and, more selfishly, what they know – flanked by childhood best friends Kyle and Xander (Diaz and Matt Bomer) and guided by his crisis lawyer, Ira (Jonah Hill).
The secret? We’re not exactly sure – it could be a mistake made amid a period of his concealed drug abuse, all the D-list people he’s managed to piss off over the years on his climb to A-list status, or something far worse. Cue the apology tour.
While the film skewers the full machinery of modern fame, from over-coached press junkets to bimbos of all genders hunting social media stardom, one scene delivers a more unsettling indictment of how celebrity culture has fractured.
Picture a boardroom with portraits of cancelled icons: Kevin Spacey, Kanye West and their ilk. Around the table sits a coalition of specialists, each hired to rehabilitate Hawk’s image with a different constituency – women, black audiences, the LGBTQ community. One group, however, is conspicuously absent. “Research shows hating Jews doesn’t negatively affect a person’s career – in fact it can even help,” a lawyer announces, deadpan.
“It was all about ‘we can’t say that anymore’,” continues Diaz, who points to that scene as a flashpoint in the film. “Because where it’s holding us all in standards, it might be exactly where we’re meant to be and it might be a little misguided. How does that land?”
We’re speaking on a typically sunny LA day[ via Zoom?], and Diaz needs no introduction, having been famous for much longer than she wasn’t. After a debut opposite Jim Carrey in The Mask in 1994 solidified her as an overnight success, the blockbusters followed; Charlie’s Angels, The Holiday, There’s Something About Mary, with the odd drama thrown in the mix over the years, including Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise.
With Outcome, Diaz says, she was drawn to the “outrageous” script, indicative of a genre of social commentary popping up more regularly: Netflix’s star-studded Don’t Look Up (2021) skewered social media outrage cycles with its bleak look at how society dismisses inconvenient truths; American Fiction (2023) offered sharp satire about what culture rewards and punishes when it comes to minority storytellers, and; SNL parody boy band The Lonely Island helmed their film, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), examining the follies of the PR damage control machine. Comedy on a knife edge is getting sharper, directing itself back at the people it has promoted.
“It’s kind of what it’s for,” Reeves, Diaz’s Outcome co-star, tells Culture. “It’s part of the pig.”
“Even going back to being a court jester, that’s kind of what they did, right?” Bomer adds. “They weren’t afraid to tell the king exactly what was going on, but with just enough humour in there to keep their head on.”
“And it can be inappropriate. Culturally, there’ll be some lines where all of a sudden the torches come out, and (people shout) ‘you can’t say that, it’s too much too far!’,” announces Reeves, as the trio laugh.
Reeves, who previously starred with Diaz in Feeling Minnesota, was famous by the age of 25 off the back of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989, and a bona fide star at 30 in action thriller Speed in 1994. Bomer’s fame was firmed up later, a TV regular turned living Ken figure in Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper trilogy, Magic Mike, and more recently the unintentional poster boy of the looksmaxxing trend sweeping the internet.
The trio have also all fallen victim to fame’s cruel side. Reeves’ grief following the 1999 stillborn birth of his daughter, Ava, and 2001 car crash death of his partner, Jennifer Syme, was pictured and publicised across the world. Bomer’s early career was derailed after being outed as gay by infamous tabloid tsar Perez Hilton. And Diaz, following a decade’s break from acting, acknowledged, during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in 2024, that the absence was a moment to “reclaim my own life”. She noted, during the speech, that being in the spotlight was “intense”, saying, “there’s a lot of energy coming at you at all times when you’re really visible as an actor and putting yourself out there”.
Examining privacy now, the mother of two , who juggles the concept both in the film and off-screen, believes “you can have privacy. You just have to work at it, it has to be a value of yours”.
“A lot of people don’t value privacy and that’s okay – there’s no judgment,” she says. “But if privacy is a value of yours, then you have to make certain decisions to protect it.”
So much has been written about cancel culture that the term induces an immediate eye roll. Online vigilante justice, ruthless de-platforming, the phenomenon has swept through institutions the world over – and comedy is among its most reliable victims.
Australian Psychological Society CEO Dr Zena Burgess tells Culture some perceive the term as a “form of modern-day vigilantism, empowering ordinary people to hold public figures and corporations accountable for their actions”.
“Cancel culture doesn’t have a clear endpoint,” Burgess says. “For some individuals, there can be a form of “endpoint” through a public apology, accountability or gradual public forgiveness, but that process is often inconsistent and may depend on the audience and context.”
The examples are wide-ranging. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel faced temporary suspension over controversial remarks about Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Louis CK’s career ground to a halt in 2017 after numerous sexual misconduct allegations surfaced (he was back by 2022, winning a Grammy and selling out Madison Square Garden the year after).
Then there’s Dave Chappelle, a heavyweight opponent of political correctness, who continues to release specials on Netflix and performed at the now-notorious Riyadh comedy festival, doubling down on the very material that drew backlash in the first place: jokes at the expense of transgender people.
Even Outcome’s writer-director has been “cancelled”. Jonah Hill, the comedy star of Superbad and 21 Jump Street, who previously directed indie skateboard drama Mid90s and candid psycho-doco Stutz, divided opinion when his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Brady, alleged emotional abuse during their relationship.
The professional surfer shared exchanges between them on Instagram, claiming Hill subjected her to a “list of expectations”, such as removing photos revealing her in a swimsuit, and restrictions on her friendships with men in the surfing world. Hill was lampooned for leveraging “therapy speak” – phrases such as “boundaries” and “triggering” – while making the requests, fuelling the fire. Brady later clarified she never intended to cancel the comedian, but shared her experience as a warning for others. Hill’s last acting appearance was in You People in 2023, and he has remained widely out of the public eye until now.
The spectacle of disgrace, and the question of whether rehabilitation is ever coming for people in the spotlight, weaves throughout Outcome. We’re in an era where celebrity interviews are more managed than ever, publicists ready to jump in if you dare ask the wrong question, so naturally the idea of how the stars of Outcome perceive tabloid “hit pieces”, and the over construction of celebrity emerges …
… to a long pause.
“Maybe you can speak to this as a journalist?” Reeves says, breaking the silence.
“With hit articles – what’s behind that?” he asks.
He immediately laughs, and diverts to Outcome’s culminating moments. “Most writing is just for the money, what’s the pleasure in it? The film just presents it as is.”
Reeves draws a parallel to Outcome’s central tension – his character’s desperate search for whoever holds the blackmail over him – as a reflection of our inherent desire to watch public figures both rise and fall. Tall poppy syndrome is one version.
Bomer jumps in, noting that such complexity as Outcome explores both from the blackmailer’s perspective and from Reeves’ leading character, “puts a human face on it all”.
We all nod, musing on whether scandal ever comes with an aftermath of redemption. No one has a concrete answer, but Reeves says he appreciates the idea of “forgiveness”. “There’s compassion, understanding,” he coos down the line.
Psychologist Burgess describes it as a product of being on a pedestal. “Celebrities are seen as both role models and symbols rather than just people; when they make a mistake, people sometimes feel a real sense of betrayal,” she says. “Celebrities often face amplified responses, both positive and negative, because their actions are often interpreted through the lens of influence, status and public expectation rather than everyday human fallibility.”
In Outcome, this emerges as a series of sketches that mirror the absurdity of modern entertainment: a confrontation between Reeves’ character and his estranged stage mother unfolds on the set of a Real Housewives episode, while an apology to his former, washed-up talent agent (played in a stellar cameo by Martin Scorsese) lays bare the heartbreak of being discarded the moment a child star makes it big.
Generational tensions ripple throughout, with politically correct sensibilities and competing paths to stardom constantly contradicting themselves. Creativity feels simultaneously oversaturated and on the verge of extinction as technology encroaches. Anyone can be a star through their phone or, as Reeves puts it, “get their own My Own Private Idaho”.
“That’s the trick, that’s the new part of (fame),” he muses.
“Anyone can engage in it,” Diaz adds, instead looking to the positive nature of social media stardom: musicians who no longer need the radio to fill out arenas, and artists who don’t rely on galleries to sell paintings. “It’s a wonderful thing that talent can be now. You know, this is a really tricky business, it used to be a trap for a lot of people who were reliant on someone discovering them,” she says.
Modern celebrities haven’t shied away from documenting their struggle with fame. Most recently, Grammy-winning artist Chappell Roan has had a number of highly publicised clashes with fans and photographers, announcing online: “It’s come to the point that I need to draw lines and set boundaries”, and recording her altercations with paparazzi.
Diaz says entertainment “used to be a trap for a lot of people because they would be reliant on somebody coming and discovering them. You’re kind of just following somebody down a road and hoping they’re not leading you to someplace really scary. There’s a lot of slippery slopes in Hollywood. The fact that people can own their own content, their own talent and put it into the world the way they want to I think is really incredible.”
Where Outcome delivers a darkly humorous social commentary, it’s anchored by a moral core: how the image we project shapes us internally and, at times, leaves everyone around us picking up the pieces. The trio, who spent two months working together, frequently improvising on set and breaking scenes to laugh, speak of the “delicate balance” that comes with exposing yourself so starkly.
“You’re outsourcing this curated version of yourself for public approval,” Bomer explains. “I’ve certainly been in proximity of people who rose to a certain height of fame, and seen all the wild trappings that come with that – and what it means to be on the periphery and try to support somebody and at the same time keep them afloat, keep them accountable.”
So what do the famous three really have to say about the price of fame and all its baggage?
“It’s the only time I could say Andy Warhol was too conservative when he said everyone can get their 15 minutes of it,” Bomer laughs.
Reeves and Diaz nod in agreement. “I think it’s gone well beyond that.