Dan in Details magazine

[Carol]

Geoff:
> Yes. I did say "perceived, rightly or wrongly". I must admit that I
don't recognise all the names on your list but certainly Elijah Wood
comes to mind as someone not unlike Dan - comparisons have actually
been drawn in the past.
> 
> I think that where there is discussion about young actors who have
gone off the rails, there are less names which spring to mind over
here in the UK.
>
Carol responds:

Possibly because the UK has no equivalent of Hollywood, a whole city
devoted to the show business industry? That accounts in part for the
celebrity-obsessed culture. The size of the country is probably
important, too. It's much easier for a kid to commute from, say,
Liverpool to London than from, say, Houston to Hollywood. The area of
the continental U.S. is more than 3.5 million square miles as opposed
to around 94,000 square miles for the UK. (California alone is  just
over 163,707 square miles.) For whatever reason I think it's harder
here for a young celebrity to live a normal life in the U.S.

BTW, Geoff, I share your dislike for the "Details" article. If Dan's
selection is any indication, the passages that he was supposed to
choose from to illustrate his American accent were in poor taste.
Someone said that the one he chose made him sound like a spoiled young
celebrity. I thought it made him sound like a foul-mouthed rapper
(minus the racial epithets often found in that genre). At any rate, it
was no representative sample of the kind of English used by the
average American.

Carol, who agrees with Magpie that it's the young celebrities who
abuse drugs (or develop anorexia or get pregnant out of wedlock) who
get the publicity, at least in the U.S.