How Chewbacca Mom Is Hustling to Stay Famous
Candace Payne was returning a pair of leggings at Kohl’s, a quick errand, when she bought a Chewbacca mask on a whim. She had more to check off her to-do list before picking up her two children, then 6 and 7, from school, but she couldn’t resist playing with her new toy first. So she set up her phone camera and streamed herself cracking up for four minutes on Facebook Live. In 24 hours, her video had accumulated more than 24 million of its eventual 162 million views and Payne went from stay-at-home mom to Chewbacca Mom, becoming a household name.
More than seven months later, Payne still gets recognized on the street; she still gets Facebook friend requests from strangers. But internet fame and its perks are fleeting: The $2,500 in gift cards she was given by Kohl’s won’t last forever. Her free Walt Disney World trip has come and gone. Talk shows are no longer flying her around the country, as they did in the week after she popped. She’s post-viral, which means she’s either going to fade into obscurity or build on her success - and if she has it her way, her fate holds the latter.
“I am absolutely taking advantage of every opportunity to make the most of this moment,” she says over an early-November lunch at Bakersfield Tacos in Nashville, Tennessee (she’s in town from Grand Prairie, Texas). When we meet, she has spent two, maybe three days home with her family in the span of three weeks. She’s busy pitching a book to publishers (which brings her to Nashville) and a web series to a producer she can't yet disclose. Both projects would draw from her personal experience and aim to “bring joy into people’s lives.” (If Payne has a personal brand, it’s joy evangelist.)
The way she sees it, going viral was a gift from God and the start of “a new season.” She wasn’t necessarily tired of being a stay-at-home mom but she was “ready for something to happen,” she says. “I would seek counsel from God, saying, ‘What do you want for me to do on this planet?’ I would have never guessed that [my purpose] would come from a viral video. Really, I’m able to do my dream job, which is to be myself and share who I am.”
Payne, 37, graduated from high school in 1997 and went to Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas for musical theater, dropping out after three years to help take care of her aging grandparents. For a while, she worked for a church, leading student worship (she's been a devout Christian since childhood). Then she married her husband in 2001 and committed to being full-time mom shortly before the birth of their first child. On some level, she always hoped she’d make a name for herself as a singer or performer (one of her early dreams was to be on Saturday Night Live and she tried out for The Voice last year) - hence her delight in sharing videos with friends and family. Then came May 19, 2016.
She noticed her video had an unusually high number of views not long after dinner, just five or six hours after she posted it, at which point she says there were a million and counting. “I knew I didn’t know 1 million people,” she says, recounting the events of her last normal evening. She asked her husband, Chris, to take a look. “He said, ‘You know what? You send me videos all the time. I don’t have four minutes to sit here and watch another video!’”
Before bed, Payne Googled what makes something “viral.” One source estimated 5 million views in a 24-hour period. She wasn’t there yet, but by the next morning, she says the video had almost 24 million views. “My husband got to work and he heard my laughter coming from different offices in his warehouse,” she says. “He was like, ‘What is that?’” Finally, he watched the video on his coworker’s computer.
Meanwhile, press requests were flooding Payne’s Facebook inbox along with a recommendation (from a friend) for a publicist. By the following week, she was giving a phone interview to Entertainment Tonight while driving to her appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden, where Star Wars director J.J. Abrams showed up to surprise her. Her video was mentioned on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and she appeared on Good Morning America twice (once via Skype).In less than a week, Payne had been on as many talk shows as an A-lister promoting a summer blockbuster, and all because she bought a silly mask and filmed herself laughing in it.
At our lunch, Payne is wearing jeans and a long-sleeve flannel button-up; she rolls up a sleeve to reveal a three-week-old forearm tattoo of a cartoon Chewie she sketched herself. Her glasses are gone (LASIK eye surgery), and she’s dyed her hair into a mix of platinum highlights and burgundy lowlights, which are pulled to the side in a tiny, bedazzled comb. She orders the mole tacos, pronouncing the dish like the small, burrowing mammal, and the waiter corrects her.
“Oh, mo-lay,” Payne adjusts. Her publicist, from the same firm her friend recommended back in May, is there and nods supportively.
As with all things viral, some of the views on Payne's video were hate views. Many people found the video grating - a slap in the face to professionalcontent creators whose videos garner a fraction of Chewbacca Mom’s views. She faced her first wave of intense backlash in July, after posting her rendition of “Heal the World” in response to the Dallas shooting of police officers. “And lo, the world began to turn against Chewbacca Mom,” the A.V. Club wrote, rounding up the negative responses her video received on Twitter. “I don't ask for much in life, but I'm really not interested in a world where Chewbacca Mom is still a thing making news,” one critic tweeted. “No. One. Cares. What. Chewbacca. Mom. Thinks,” another said.
“I don’t Google myself,” Payne says. But she is of course aware of her detractors and mostly writes them off as haters, quoting Taylor Swift when asked how, exactly, she ignores them (she “shakes it off”). “People see you as a public person, someone who they can say whatever about,” she says. “Listen, I’m guilty of doing that! For me, my favorite this summer was Ken Bone. That man was adorable! He’s so cute. But you see him as this moment that happened instead of as a person.”
After lunch, we head to The Stage on Broadway, a honky-tonk bar down the street, where her publicist has arranged for her to join the afternoon’s cover band for fun. Payne has been singing since she was 4 and she’s good. At the very least, she’s good enough to have made it through the Battle Rounds on The Voice.
“For our last song, please welcome a very special guest, Candace Payne,” the lead singer announces to polite clapping. Payne climbs up on stage, clips her iPhone into the microphone stand for lyrical reference, and whispers to the guitarist. She’s beaming as the band begins to play Shania Twain’s “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under.”
“Oh, wow,” a woman near the front whispers to her friend. “That’s the lady who got famous from the Chewbacca mask.”
A few people get up to take selfies with Payne in the background. Most stay seated, clapping along, and at the end of the song, it’s clear there are a few fans in attendance.
“I just love your attitude,” an older woman says, clasping hands with Payne. “And I can’t believe you can sing like that!” her husband adds.
We wrap up soon after the performance for Payne’s photo shoot, at which point her publicist pulls out the Chewbacca mask, and Payne smiles her most emphatic smile of the day, holding it beside her cheek for two flashes. Before we part ways, I make a joke about meeting the woman behind the mask. “As a metaphor, it’s almost too on the nose,” I say. Her publicist jumps in: "Right?!” Then she turns to Payne: “By the way, tell her what you call it when you put the mask on too much."
"Oh," Payne chuckles. "I call it chafing Chewy chin." Then she glances down at Chewbacca’s decapitated head and hands it off to her publicist, who shoves the thing back into her purse.
Chewbacca Mom is part of Cosmopolitan.com’s list of 2016's most fascinating people on the internet. See the rest of the list:
2. Huda Kattan
3. Simone Biles
5. Joanne the Scammer: Branden Miller
8. Ryan Lochte and his fiancée, Kayla Rae Reid
9. #MrStealYourGrandma: Irvin Randle
10. Russian Leo: Roman Burtsev
11. Dicks Out for Harambe: Brandon Wardell and Brandon Zaboklicki
12. Janice Joostema
13. The Damn Daniel Boys: Daniel Lara and Josh Holz
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