Billie Eilish opens up about his teenage fame.
“Growing up in the public eye is one very bruising experience, and it’s really hard to grow and change,” Eilish told the BBC, who named the 20-year-old one of their 100 women of 2022. “I just didn’t really know what to do. I just grabbed straws.”
Eilish has been in the public eye since 2015, when a SoundCloud recording of her brother Finneas’ original song Ocean Eyes went viral overnight.
She now has one Oscar7 Grammy Awards100 million followers on Instagram and more than 60 million on TikTok.
Speaking to the BBC, she reflected on how “strange” it was for her to suddenly go from being “in the comments” on the internet to being someone who was talked about.
“I’m an Internet kid,” she said. “I saw everybody else in the public eye when they were (famous) and suddenly it’s me.”
For Eilish, the problem is that for most people her public identity was created when she was 15 and for many is forever set in stone. So it sometimes feels impossible to make changes to that persona as she gets older.
“It drives me crazy that you can look up Billie Eilish and videos that come up are things I said when I was 15,” she told the BBC. “Almost nothing I said until two months ago I still believe.”
Now that she’s 20, Eilish has found her footing and confidence, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing — and a big part of that, she said, is because she’s a young woman. It’s “really hard to get people to believe in you” as a woman in her industry, she added.
“It was a very satisfying moment when I realized that people actually either wanted to hear what I had to say or believed what I had to say. And when I finally had control, it was a really good moment.”
Stefanie Keenan/Getty for LACMA
Even now, having strengthened the power she said she had wanted in her career Oscar wins still struggling to feel she deserves the success she’s had.
“I had imposter syndrome as bad as it was,” Eilish said. “I’ve had it so many times in my life. And really like, parts of last year and the year before, whew — was just in the downward spiral of impostor syndrome and just grabbing at whatever I could to make me feel like myself again.”
That bad guy The singer is notorious for keeping her life private, but in recent months has opened the door to her relationship with the singer Jesse Rutherford — eleven years older than she.
After being tainted kiss Outside a restaurant in early October, Eilish took to Instagram with the 31-year-old Neighborhood singer on Halloween. They even grew one couple’s costume that apparently referenced their age difference, with Eilish dressed as a baby and Rutherford as an old man.
In November, they followed this up by making theirs red carpet debut in matching Gucci outfits on LACMA Art + Film Gala 2022.
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Eilish made her first commenting on her new beau in the recently published sixth volume of her annual Vanity Fair interview.
“It’s really cool and I’m really excited and I’m really happy about it,” she said. “I managed to get…to a point in my life…where I was not only recognized by a person who I thought was the hottest f—ing f—er alive, but resigned ass! Are you kidding me? We just can [get a] applause for me? Thanks, Jesse Rutherford, everyone.”
