Celebrities are smoking again: Things are grungier, edgier, sleazier

Not long ago, stars showed off their green juice and yoga mats. Now they’re showing off an old-fashioned vice

Last month, Lily-Rose Depp left The Idol’s Cannes premiere in La Dolce Vita cosplay, wearing vintage Chanel, a Brigitte Bardot updo, and cat eye sunglasses. But one accessory stood out the most: a lit cigarette, which the actor and noted nepo baby conspicuously puffed as she waved for the paparazzi.

The picture was no accident. “She wants that Pinterest paparazzi pic so bad with the cigarette,” one person wrote in a comment underneath footage on @cigarettes, a popular Instagram page that documents celebrities smoking.

“That photo is so clearly staged,” said Brock Colyar, a New York magazine writer who covers nightlife. “No matter how casual she may be trying to look, she knew she was going to be photographed, and the smoking is a conscious decision. She looks fabulous, unfortunately.”

While fans speculated that getting “caught” looking louche and European was part of The Idol’s PR game plan, Depp is hardly a novice cig smoker. The 24-year-old was photographed puffing away at an In & Out Burger drive-thru when she was 17, and professed her love for Virginia Slims a year before that.

Depp is also far from alone in smoking conspicuously. After years of health-conscious posturing, which saw stars leaving their houses toting green juices or yoga mats, many gen Z stars are holding old Hollywood’s once beloved props: cigarettes.

There’s Anya Taylor-Joy, whose curbside cig-and-coffee break was captured by paps in 2021, and who’s snapped smoking nearly everywhere she goes – in parks, on balconies, and while staring deep into the eyes of her boyfriend, the musician and Liam Gallagher lookalike Malcolm McRae.

The Wednesday star Jenna Ortega may only be 20 years old, but she was photographed dragging on a cigarette during Memorial Day weekend, with the vacant, dead-eyed intensity of a 40-something divorcee on her lunch break.

Matty Healy, the 1975 frontman best known for his romance with Taylor Swift and inability to shut up on podcasts, has also made tabloid headlines for onstage antics that include mid-song puffs.

Though Hollywood has long imposed penalties for onscreen smoking, driving up the MPAA rating with each puff, it does not deter film-makers. Seven of the 10 best picture nominees for 2023 contained tobacco imagery, as did nearly two-thirds of all Oscar-nominated films. It’s so prevalent that even Aiden Shaw, the formerly anti-smoking boyfriend of Carrie Bradshaw, reportedly takes a few drags in the forthcoming second season of the Sex and the City reboot. (It’s a total 180 after the character said he “couldn’t date a smoker” and almost left Carrie because of her devotion to Marlboro Lights.)

If gen Z’s nostalgia for Y2K culture has enabled a renaissance for low-rise jeans, the Strokes, and an obsession with the “heroin chic” body type, then it makes unfortunate sense that young celebrities would be smoking again. Not that some celebrities ever stopped – but they did their best to hide it. For decades, says Giles Harrison, a longtime paparazzo and founder of London Entertainment Group, celebrities have avoided the association. They have asked him for years to delete the photos he takes of them smoking. “They’ll say, ‘Use whatever you want, except for that,’” he said.

The New York Times reported that sales of cigarettes increased for the first time in 20 years in 2020. That may be alarming, but rates of smoking are still at historic lows: now, about 11% of adults are smokers, according to the CDC. Which is just as well, given that smoking is the No 1 cause of preventable death in the US. Perhaps it’s not relatability celebrities are striving for when they pose with cigarettes. Rather, they seem to enjoy the edginess of it.

While e-cigarette use rose a bit, from 4.9% in 2021 to 6% in 2022, visually, it may lack the star power of cigarettes. “I’m not sure if it ever looked cool to vape, but it definitely doesn’t look cool now,” Colyar said. Culturally, “vaping has entered its death phase. There’s just something about cigarettes.”

And doesn’t gen Z know it. “There’s something in the air, three years after the pandemic: things are grungier, edgier, sleazier,” said Colyar, who added that they’ve picked up a “really awful” habit themself: trying to smoke inside any club that will allow it – or at least turn a blind eye to it.

Tyler McCall, a writer and the former editor-in-chief of Fashionista, blames the boon in celebrities lighting up on the Ozempic craze. While the obesity drug reportedly curbs addictions like smoking and drinking, it has become most synonymous with weight loss, and fashion media has cited it as a reason for the return of “thin is in”. Since cigarettes have long been used to curb appetite and reduce hunger, McCall sees a connection.

“I think the two trends are adjacent,” she said. “Before prescription drugs were widely accepted, a lot of stars stayed skinny on those classic cigs/Diet coke/coffee diets that traumatized so many of us millennials.”

Kirbie Johnson, a writer and host of the podcast Gloss Angeles, says: “I hate to even acknowledge it, but there’s something sexy about smoking a thin cigarette: the lips, the smoke, the way it sits between the fingers.” She suspects it is the culture of thin worship that makes cigarettes appealing to younger stars: “I’m not sure any of the aforementioned celebrities are doing it [to be sexy]. Seems like a means to an end in their case.”

If the pandemic made us a little more aware that we all have vices, that doesn’t mean celebrities are entirely off the hook for promoting smoking. After The Idol premiered last month, one of the main Twitter takeaways seemed to be just how much Lily-Rose Depp’s character Jocelyn smoked. In one scene that might even leave Humphrey Bogart coughing, she lights up while inside a sauna.

“Jocelyn has smoked like 5 cigarettes and we’re only 30 minutes into the first episode,” read one tweet. Of course this is a character fans were talking about, not Depp herself, but the chronically online can have a hard time separating the two.

Jenna Ortega’s smoke break also earned critiques from the internet – and one very important fan in particular. After the photos went viral, her mother, Natalie Ortega, posted a series of anti-smoking PSA memes to her Instagram page.

“That sort of says it all,” Colyar said. “At the end of the day, everyone knows that if they post a photo of themselves smoking, their mother will send them a message or post a snarky comment.”

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