After over a decade spent hosting a podcast about celebrities, the two of us have witnessed the industry’s evolution from a medium where any normie with a mic could develop a dedicated listenership to one almost completely dominated by celebrity voices. Now, thanks to the rise of “video podcasts”—a term we still believe is an oxymoron—it’s dominated by their actual faces, too.
In the following excerpt from our forthcoming book, I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity, we explore the origins of the “celebrity podcast,” from a niche genre populated largely by Whos to one now attracting some of our biggest Thems.
An obsession with being perceived as authentic on mic (and on camera) has reverberated across the celebrity media ecosystem—making celebrities seem more accessible and more available to criticism, but overall, less famous.
Celebrity journalism as we’ve known it for the past 75 years has irrevocably changed. As media brands falter and career entertainment reporters find themselves—and their jobs—in a more precarious position than ever, they’re being replaced by celebrities themselves. And all it took was a microphone.
When we started Who? Weekly in 2016, the biggest stars podcasting were Anna Faris, Marc Maron, and Shaquille O’Neal. (Before you name others, well, do you consider Adam Carolla a celebrity? If so, then yes, he was podcasting then too!) This is to say that back then, the podcasting ecosystem wasn’t awash in celebrity to the extent that it is today. It barely had the ability to turn someone into a celebrity, let alone attract an already-famous person to the microphone. In 2016, Forbes noted a “rise” of celebrity podcasting, listing notables from “Steve Austin to real housewife Heather Dubrow to Maria Shriver.” One could hardly call that a boom, but it was certainly prescient. It’s now harder to name the influencers, actors, singers, reality-TV stars, and retired politicians who don’t have podcasts than those who do.
The celeb-on-celeb interview goes back long before Variety launched “Actors on Actors.” Interview magazine’s been publishing conversations between celebrities for years. Who needs a professional journalist when you could just read Kristen Stewart fielding questions from Justin Bieber, or Cindy Sherman in a tête-à-tête with Grace Jones?
Maron and Faris had quite a lot to do with ushering other celebs to podcast. When Faris launched Unqualified, the premise was that she was doling out “not-great relationship advice from completely unqualified Hollywood types.” Not a bad idea! But unsurprisingly, listeners wanted less advice and more behind-the-scenes celeb banter, and the show slowly pulled away from its original premise and toward a chat show between Faris and a famous guest, which included everyone from Tony Hawk to Lena Dunham to her now-ex-husband, Chris Pratt—who was at that point way less famous than Faris herself.
No matter the quality of jokes Faris was making, listeners remained way more engaged with small, revealing details about her personal life. Their relationship with the actor went from fandom to parasocial: “I’m in love with you, Anna!” an Apple review reads. “Not creepy at all, but really thank you, every morning my dog and I enjoy your voice. And your shoes.” The beauty of a podcast was that it gave even the most untouchable stars the ability to at least attempt to appear relatable. And the Whos—who were already quite, uh, touchable?—could turn that existing relatability into a type of deeper, albeit one-sided, emotional connection with the consistency of regular missives.
While Faris’s pre-pod stardom pushed listeners to tune into her show, the success of Marc Maron’s WTF undoubtedly brought him more celebrity as a podcaster than he’d had as a comedian. Once a niche comedian’s comedian, Maron went on to book high-profile acting roles on shows like Louie, GLOW, and even star in his own Curb Your Enthusiasm-style, semi-autobiographical comedy, Maron, which ran for four seasons on IFC. In so doing, he became the first “celebrity” to parlay his podcast into broader fame by altering what people thought podcasting was capable of. Just six years later, sitting President Barack Obama took a seat in Maron’s recording-studio garage. In 2021, Obama would eventually host a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen as part of his own Spotify deal. By then, it was just a thing that celebrities did—even if (or especially when?) they were former presidents.
Marc Maron once told The Guardian: “I’m not a journalist, I don’t write down questions. So, you know, go fuck yourself, I’m having a conversation, following my own instincts about what’s interesting to me.” Is he the most notable celebrity podcaster decrying any sort of journalistic tutelage—or, more importantly, responsibility? That title might be best suited to another comedian, Joe Rogan, who launched his podcast, the wildly popular and even more wildly controversial Joe Rogan Experience, in 2009: the same year Maron launched WTF.
Though both Faris’s and Maron’s podcasts are no longer airing, they formed the blueprint for other celebs who’d always fancied themselves capable enough to play journalist. Or clever enough to know that something other celebrities might want out of an interview is a fellow famous person to agree to their hard limits. We call those types of questions softballs. Why might a celebrity launch a podcast now? Dax Shepard, another actor perhaps better-known as a podcaster, launched Armchair Expert in 2018. His wife, the more famous actor Kristen Bell, was his first guest. Notably, the show offers its guests the option to cut parts of the interview after it has been recorded. (“Interviewees frequently take them up on this,” wrote The New York Times in 2019.) Perhaps this is Shepard’s gesture toward a fellow famous person—attempting to cultivate a safe space where a celeb wouldn’t feel as if they might be set up to fail. Or so that no one “of note” would have the opportunity to get mad at him?
The podcast would soon become more lucrative than Shepard’s acting career: The Wall Street Journal reported that in July 2024—seven years after his last attempt at leading a studio comedy, 2017’s CHiPS, flopped at the box office—Shepard signed an $80 million podcasting deal with Amazon’s Wondery platform. While most celeb hosts aren’t signing $80 million deals, they’re likely making solid payouts from ad reads. Nothing to scoff at, but relatively small compared to other types of more traditional Hollywood projects. Brands tend to get a much better deal buying an ad read from a celebrity podcaster on their show than offering them a more traditional brand partnership.
Celebrities also start their own podcasts as a way to keep themselves in the conversation—if no one’s talking about them, maybe they should just talk about themselves? Actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett started the podcast SmartLess together in 2020, reportedly out of mid-pandemic boredom. And when the pandemic came to a close, the podcast had become such a success—the most lucrative of their careers, in fact—that despite having actual acting work, they kept recording it.
But it’s not always merely about the money. Reality stars are known to launch podcasts after their seasons air as a way of telling their sides of the story without the intervention of television editors. “Scandoval” was a cheating scandal in 2023 that unfolded on the reality show Vanderpump Rules and unexpectedly broke out beyond the show, giving its stars 15 minutes of fame that they each turned into various opportunities: sponsorships, hosting gigs, and…so many podcasts. While so many stars dream of themselves in the Johnny Carson late-night seat, it may be more lucrative (although certainly less glamorous) to pursue a podcast route instead. Take former late-night host Conan O’Brien—who launched Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in 2018, while his TBS talk show, Conan, was still on the air. It took convincing: “Someone said, ‘You should do a podcast.’ And I was sarcastic, like, ‘Oh, really? Because I’ve been on television for, at that point, 25 years. So a podcast is what I should do, you think? That’s good thinking,’” he told Adweek. Unsurprisingly, O’Brien’s has become one of the biggest podcasts out there.
The proliferation of celebrity podcasting, which goes hand-in-hand with the decline of access to celebrities for traditional journalism, meant that these podcasts would become an abundant source of gossip for the remaining tabloids. They started tuning in and picking out the juiciest moments, where a celeb might slip up and reveal something relatively compelling. So many “exclusives” are pulled from audio these days that we’ve started a segment dedicated to them on our podcast (meta!) called “Podcast Mouth.” Here’s where actor Dean Cain claims his Lois & Clark costar Teri Hatcher could be “difficult to work with” (on the Inside of You podcast) or where actor Sarah Paulson told the hosts of SmartLess that an actor named Tricia Hawkins once gave her six pages of notes on a theater performance she did in 2013: “It was really outrageous. Trish Hawkins, I have not forgotten it, and I hope to see you never.” Calling out Hawkins on SmartLess was funny in context, but once pulled from the podcast episode, it produced such damning headlines as “Sarah Paulson Eviscerates Actress Who Critiqued Her with 6 Pages of Notes,” “Sarah Paulson Trounces Actor for ‘Outrageous’ 6-Page Email of Notes on Her Performance,” and “‘I hope to see you never’: Sarah Paulson Shades Actor Who Criticized Her Performance.”
Perhaps that’s the price you pay for the platform to really show off your personality, something celebs are always craving more of—forever walking that tightrope between over- and under-exposed. This used to divide the Whos and Thems for us: those seeking more attention were the Whos, while the Thems remained simply too famous to engage. They didn’t need to!
Now there are more forces at play; both Whos and Thems are seeing podcasting as not only a personality play but the opportunity to better carve out a personality brand—lucrative to bigger synergistic opportunities with actual brands, but also with their own community of fandom. Now membership platforms like OnlyFans, Patreon, and Substack make it so anyone with an audience can go directly to them for financial support. Quite like how celebs once took their “exclusive” content away from the tabloids and placed it directly onto Instagram, generating followers and peppering in sponcon, the podcast is yet another piece of content for a celeb to offer up for sale.
Now that bright lights and foundation makeup have been added back to the equation, it’s not likely we’re getting any more revealing long-form conversations like those that once aired on Marc Maron’s WTF. What’s to be gained? Why make things purposefully uncomfortable for their guests in the name of truth? There exists no one less curious, less willing to ask the burning questions that make an interview potent than… someone who is also famous.
Excerpted from I WANT TO BE FAMOUS: When Everybody and Nobody is a Celebrity by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber. Copyright © 2026 by Robert Finger and Lindsey Weber. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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