Axel Webber: tiny apartment tenant, aspiring actor, and TikTok’s white boy of the month.
He first rose to Internet fame through a viral TikTok showcasing his criminally small NYC apartment that he rents for an extortionate $1,600 per month—though there is evidence that he comes from a wealthy family and is potentially profiting from exploiting the working class struggle for Internet notoriety, but that class analysis is a different article for a different day. Webber quickly amassed a following of 3.8 million. Then came a miniseries of TikToks about his auditioning for Juilliard, arguably the most prestigious performing arts college in the U.S. with alumni like Viola Davis, Robin Williams, and Anthony Mackie and an acceptance rate of 8 percent in 2021. To say the competition was tight would be an understatement, but Axel didn’t seem phased. With a positive, adorkable disposition and unrelenting universal support from a fanbase numerically comparable to the population of Los Angeles, it felt like we were tuned into the 2022 TikTok version of High School Musical with Axel Webber as our Troy Bolton, living his best underdog life. There was nothing Axel couldn’t do…
Except pass his Juilliard audition, apparently.
On January 10th, Webber published the bitter conclusion to his Juilliard audition series, confirming his rejection. A part of you has to feel for him; it’s not pleasant to experience rejection, and he handles hearing the “no” with an ironic air of acceptance as though he almost expected it. In a TikTok posted presumably right after his audition, he reveals that he “absolutely botch[ed]” it by taking on an accent when delivering his lines, the one aspect of acting that he admits to being unable to do well.
This is where we all think the chapter should end; he experiences the rejection but takes it in stride and continues to pursue his acting dream with his supporters offering their comfort and encouragement. However, a considerable number of his fans chose a different approach to helping Axel achieve his dreams: obnoxiously spamming the comments of Juilliard’s Instagram posts.
“LET AXEL IN”, “Here for Axel!”, even “Justice for Axel” promptly flooded the comments sections of almost all Juilliard’s posts, with unfortunately the most inundated being a screen capture of an aspiring pianist identified as “Luca from Mexico” with a caption for applying to Juilliard’s Winter Festival with over 18,000 comments compared to 2,600 likes. Comments expressing annoyance with the spammers have since overtaken the spammers’ to appear first in each post’s comments section, but it doesn’t take much scrolling to encounter at least one. Most egregiously, they’re even in Juilliard’s post for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The terrible irony of demanding institutional validation for an average white man on a post about honoring the most celebrated black civil rights activist in American history should be lost on no one capable of thinking critically for at least five seconds.
Because who is Axel Webber if not a mediocre white male? He’s done next-to-nothing to prove himself worthy of admission to Juilliard. A quick look at his LinkedIn or Backstage profiles don’t offer much beyond an introductory acting class, experience as an extra in Superintelligence, a voiceover for a PPP loan commercial, and a day in the life YouTube video that’s been made private. Juilliard rejects 92 percent of its applicants—singers, dancers, musicians, actors who have dedicated years, if not their entire lives, to perfecting their craft. Who is rallying en masse for them in Juilliard’s comment section?
Webber is yet another case study in the ceaseless phenomenon of TikTok’s granting overnight virality to a white man for his mediocrity. If anyone other than Webber’s race or gender identity delivered the same performance (and I’m not talking about the numerous industry plant conspiracy theories surrounding him; again, that’s for another article), it’s near impossible to imagine they’d receive the same attention. There’d be no New York Times article, no interview on a national news outlet, no shoutouts from mainstream entertainers, no modeling contract, and certainly no retaliative bombarding of Juilliard’s Instagram comments. Even on TikTok, it’s difficult to see them gain the millions of followers and near endless praise that Axel has enjoyed. If anything, their comments would be more along the lines of “okay and?” and “nobody cares ❤️”, and they’d simply fade into obscurity.
We see white male mediocrity everywhere: history, politics, business, parenting, education, entertainment, and in the industry of Internet influencing. To be mediocre isn’t innately a bad thing; we’re all average in one way or another. The issue is when mediocrity is rewarded as exceptionalism like in the case of the white man, while exceptionalism is rewarded as mediocrity in the case of the woman, nonbinary or queer, and/or person of color.