Luke Thompson: Social Media rots my brain!

Luke Thompson doesn't have social media because it "wrecks" his "attention span" and he also believes it is damaging to actors.
The 35-year-old star - who is best known for his portrayal of Benedict Bridgerton in period drama series 'Bridgerton' - tries to avoid apps such as Instagram because he thinks they would ruin his concentration, but also because he doesn't think it's good for members of the public to know too much about the people they're watching on screen and he'd rather be an "empty vessel" for his characters.
Speaking to Rob Brydon on the 'Brydon + I' podcast, he explained: ”I think it wrecks my attention span and actually, in quite a sinister way. I think it's not anodyne….That's the first reason.
The second reason… it's not secrecy. I'm not secretive about it. The reason why I think is that there's something about it that doesn't make sense to me being an actor. It's about being imagined as other people and you're essentially an empty vessel.
"And the more you give chunks of yourself out, the more you sort of color how you're perceived. It's a personal thing… that's from my particular experience of what it's like to be an actor. For other people being actor is not that, but for me, it has always been about being some sort of empty vessel.”
'Bridgerton' was released in December 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Luke admitted his decision to stay away from social media made its success all the more surreal because he had no idea just how big it was.
He said: “It was such a weird time because it was all during the pandemic….which actually is one of the reasons… if you lock people up, they're going to watch. I think that people got very fervent about a few shows during that time and I think it partly is because that was our only escape.
There were loads of shows like that caught people's imagination but I feel like because… it was such a weird time because not being on social media, I didn't really have a sense of the fact that it had blown up in quite the way I had, which was very strange, because there was this sort of thing going on outside that we had no access to and didn't really know how to handle it.”
'Brydon + I' publishes one week early and ad-free on Amazon Music and Wondery+ before publishing on other podcast services.