When my performance was over, my professor asked: “Would you have done that if you were painting your nails in your room alone?”

“Yes,” I said.

But the truth was, I wasn’t sure — and 20 years later, I still think of this moment every time the brush slips when I’m painting my toenails and I say “god damn it”. I wonder: am I authentically a person who swears when she messes up her pedicure? Or have I become one because, all those years ago, I said I was?

I thought of that moment, too, while reading Emily Bootle’s new book, This Is Not Who I Am, an examination of authenticity in the digital age, which attempts to suss the “realness” of everything from politics to personal brands. One early definition of authenticity, offered in the book’s introduction, is drawn from Rousseau: that you must not only be who you are but be seen to be who you are. But surely being seen, especially if you’re trying to be, influences your behaviour? If you dance (or paint your toenails) like no one is watching but in full awareness that an audience does, in fact, exist, where does authenticity end and performance begin?

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This was a difficult enough question to answer back when authenticity was synonymous with the mundane — when those “They’re Just Like Us!” photo spreads of celebrities running errands or exiting the gym wearing sweatpants were the realest thing out there. It’s even more difficult in an era when authenticity is increasingly synonymous with tragedy, when being real requires nothing less than eviscerating your own trauma in public so that everyone can see the suffering. That well-known meme, “pics or it didn’t happen”, implies a constant burden of proof, a sort of Turing test whereby you prove your humanity by posting. The irony: there remain circumstances when whipping out a camera to post the moment is decidedly inhuman.

One of the most disturbing things I saw amid the posting-mad days of the pandemic, now gratefully deleted, was a selfie from a woman standing in a hospital room, the camera angled so that the patient, her father, was clearly visible in the bed over her shoulder. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and not only was it unclear whether he was merely dying or already dead, it is hard to say which of these things would have been worse. “Overexposure to this type of image diminishes their power to induce revery,” Bootle writes in the chapter titled “Celebrity”. She’s talking about Beyonce’s pregnancy photo shoot, but she could just as easily be talking about this. This is the content we’re most rewarded for sharing: the Botticelli-style pregnancy photo shoot or the deathbed selfie (but not much in between).

Having become synonymous with the ugliest moments of life, the notion of authenticity intersects with another term, relatability, which is equally hard to pin down. Bootle notes that it is “overwhelmingly used to describe a generic self-sabotaging personality that leans towards extremes”:

“It is relatable to lie in bed all day; it is also relatable to try to cram too much into the day. It is relatable to run out of money… it is relatable to spend a lot of money on something frivolous but not on something sensible. It is relatable to have a panic attack. It is relatable to eat burgers; it is relatable to forget to eat. It is not relatable to resist sleeping with your ex, and it is not relatable to have a gym membership… It is not relatable to get married. Relatability, in short, suggests mess.”

The question, then, is what happens when we start thinking of our mess as something to be posted about instead of something we need to clean up.

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For every person who quietly recoiled from the sight of that hospital room selfie, from the gaping mouth of the dying man looming like a black hole over the picture-taker’s shoulder, another punched the retweet button and praised her bravery, her realness, in sharing that moment. This is perhaps unsurprising — it’s widely known by now that negative post receive more engagement online because they make people feel good — but less studied is the peculiar alchemy whereby positive posts can get the same sort of traction if they make people feel bad

Last month, a woman who posted about the pleasure of spending mornings drinking coffee in her garden with her husband became Twitter’s main character of the day. Her authentic expression of joy accrued outraged demands that she check her privilege. When a person is seen to be who they are, but who they are is a happy and well-adjusted adult, we don’t quite know what to do with it. We don’t like it. We don’t trust it. And if you won’t show us the mess lurking under the surface of your seemingly-happy life, we’ll just have to make one for you.

This toxic breed of engagement isn’t unique to Twitter, but it does seem to find its purest expression on that platform. Recently, on a friend’s podcast, I listened while he spoke ruefully about the behaviour that Twitter incentivises, comparing the site to a drug from which he wished some external force would cut him off. But I wondered how much we can get away with blaming the platforms for the behaviour of the people on them — and said as much. My friend, a sweet and mild-mannered guy in real life, has an entirely different persona on Twitter: pompous, caustic, bullying, openly antagonistic. Surely this is at least partly a choice, I said.

My friend conceded that Twitter does not bring out the best in him. Then he told me that personal responsibility is a Right-wing talking point — which is, ironically, exactly the kind of argument that would play maximally well on Twitter. Does this manifestation of extremely-online silliness in a non-online dialogue just go to show the lengths to which Twitter has rewired our brains, just as that acting class might, I sometimes think, have rewired mine? Or is it simply revealing what was already, authentically there?

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Bootle asks questions like this without ultimately offering answers. She concludes: “If any self we put out into the world is subject to the same analysis and questioning, to the same rules of performance, is being authentic materially different from being inauthentic?” As a means of understanding who we are and how we live in the present, then, her book is inscrutable — but I don’t think that’s the book’s fault. Perhaps the only conclusion that can be drawn about authenticity is that it’s become a useless term.

But the emptying-out of how we gauge “realness” has very real consequences. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he announced his intent to upend the old system that delineated verified versus unverified accounts. Overnight, the site’s blue check was transformed from a sort of “trusted source” badge into a commodity anyone could buy — and within hours, Twitter was overrun with accounts touting “inauthentic” blue ticks tweeting all manner of nonsense and wreaking all manner of havoc. When you consider that this is where some people get their news, where some influential people form their opinions, where political movements have been known to begin: authenticity is more than a question of what your average social media user feels able to share with a small circle of friends online.

But as for the average social media user’s search for authenticity, it seems fundamentally self-defeating. The most recent great hope was the app BeReal, which encourages the sharing of in-the-moment mundanity during an arbitrary two-minute window each day. This is understood to be the nearest thing available to a spontaneous and honest glimpse of a person’s life, yet is achieved only through the most rigid of constructs, the strictest rules — which, of course, self-conscious and digitally-savvy users are already figuring out how to manipulate (and sometimes using to go viral on other, more performative platforms). BeReal might be the app on which posts share the closest relationship with the truth, but it is not the truth — any more than brushing your teeth or painting your fingernails in an acting class, for an audience, is precisely the same as the real thing.

And even if you manage to draw back the curtain on your real life so that the internet can see everything, the act of drawing it back is inherently, well, unreal. Erasing the barrier between our inner and public-facing selves doesn’t reveal our authentic selves; it creates a third self, something uncanny, like those mirror-image photos that show what you would look like if both halves of your face were perfectly symmetrical.

Obviously, we all contain multitudes; obviously, we all make context-dependent choices to display some aspects of our inner selves while withholding others. Obviously, it is fully possible for a person to be a terror on Twitter, a doting cat dad on Instagram, a glib interlocutor in political debate, and an absolute peach to have a beer with. But which of these personas is real, or most real? All of them? Or none?

Jamie is closer to Rickman than any of his other parts: not only was Rickman also a Labour activist who played the cello, but he was similarly needling and obsessive. And I wonder if Madly, Deeply is supposed to perform the same spell for a different woman: the resurrection of a loved one. This book is not a finished piece of art. Its publication feels personal: it is a fragment of a man, a fragment of the cult of the actor, and vanity by proxy. Obliviously, this book investigates that cult of the actor.

People will say that they like the diaries because they like Rickman the actor, and they want more of him: but you don’t get that from the diaries. He was clearly likeable, and generous: he mocked himself in Galaxy Quest, playing a Shakespearian actor slumming it in a Star Trek rip-off for money, and he felt that tension between artistic and commercial imperatives. (An entry written during a Harry Potter film says bleakly: “More Great Hall. More turkey. More Hogwarts song”.) But the diaries aren’t good. Rickman is a subtle actor, but he is not a writer, and I think he knows it. He agonises over the entries. He hints that he lied to them, fretting that he cannot remember the “coded details and the sharp thoughts hidden between the safer lines”. A good diarist will betray his friends and, above all, himself, as consciously and willingly as an actor will put “the chicken” on his head for the part. But Rickman is more oblique: his confessions are accidental.

You yearn for him to tell more — to inhabit himself consciously. But the most he manages is to call women he dislikes “Ms”, beadily; suggest that famous actresses are controlling, and write “[He] has a wonderfully pitched reading. I wish he would find different mouth-shapes,” about Simon Russell Beale. He is fragile. He struggles. He watches Yes To The Dress.

Rickman knows that fame is self-hating: the phenomenon of wanting to engage with fantasy people not real ones, that is, not engaging at all. I suspect his battles with the media are a proxy for his battles with himself: art versus commerce. He notes the terrible questions journalists ask on press junkets: “Alan, what are the smells of Barcelona?”

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He notes the offensive diary items. He suspects a female masseur is taking sexual pleasure from touching him in a professional capacity. Did she confuse him with Hans Gruber, or the Vicomte de Valmont? Many actors excel at playing who they are not — it’s the ecstasy of transgression. He is nothing like a villain, or a satyrmaniac: he was in a relationship with the same woman for almost 50 years.

I think a large part of Rickman was repelled by his fame — he mocks actors who care who is playing what and for how much — but it addled him anyway. Fame corrupted and exposed him, and we know that because in the diaries he accidentally exposes himself. He and his partner are distraught to discover that there are no Leftists at the luxury hotel in the West Indies they visit over Christmas: why would there be? He frets that the (presumably First Class) airport lounge he finds himself in has no space for “Eccentrics and Weirdos” like himself. So why not step outside?

His serious politics — and I am willing to believe they are serious in intent — are made absurd by the publication of these diaries. If you place serious things next to trivial ones — and the lifestyle of a famous actor can only be trivial — they become trivial too.

This is Rickman at an anti-austerity march in 2011. It reads like parody. “Straight to EAT for coffee and a sandwich before wandering down to Trafalgar Square and long wait for the Equity banner. At Park Lane the sight of the Dorchester proved too much.” “Ms [Mia] Farrow talked long and expertly about Darfur,” he writes in another entry. “Salma Hayek talks of her time in India as a volunteer for Mother Teresa — this utterly beautiful woman talking of wiping up shit and worms and keeping the flies off a dying woman’s face.”

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It often reads like parody, Adrian Mole grown up: “On the way home, a visit — forced — to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is. A sort of shopping equivalent of our shoddy government.” Or: “St James’s Christmas Mass. The sermon evoked Stalin as a reason for the need for God. Mostly I was looking at the congregation and wondering why we don’t have a local Waitrose.” Or: “Tonight the tree frogs were silent. What do they know?”

He should have written a book about acting. He is, of course, a superb critic: “Emma [Thompson] needs to work with someone who will ask her to dig rather than skim”; “Ms [Georgina] Cates [in An Awfully Big Adventure] suffers from only functioning from her sense of the story. She listens to nothing, responds to nothing. She’s a butterfly inside her own glass case, watching herself bat around.” “Every line,” in a Henry Goodman performance of Shylock, “is a thought contained in a body which has a life.”

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But mostly it is Rickman in an unfinished play: what would he think? It is a fair metaphor for our treatment of the acting class: deification is objectification, and destruction; the end of Perfume, in which the desired man is torn apart. It is fragments from a nervous man who hated gossip, and now will be read for it: “Bumped into P. Mandelson & Reinaldo [his partner] in Westbourne Grove. He was eating a choc-ice and trying to rent a video. Tea with Mussolini.”

So it is a tragedy, then: with the publication of this book, perhaps commerce won. A question from the Sweeney Todd press junket is cruel, but it displays his predicament neatly: Alan, if you were a pie which flavour would you be?

Newly married to Jennifer Lopez (we’ll get to that), Affleck turns 50 today. He is of the same generation as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Ethan Hawke and his friend Matt Damon, but he’s the one whose career best illustrates the ups and downs of modern movie stardom, on and off the screen. He has never enjoyed an imperial phase, when he could do no wrong, nor a real Benaissance, when all is forgiven. Tom Cruise, who recently turned 60, is perhaps the last true movie star due to his somewhat inhuman denial of vulnerability. Affleck, with his candidly acknowledged flaws and regrets, is Cruise’s opposite. I find him fascinating. As Dave Itzkoff wrote in a 2016 New York Times profile, “you may find yourself envying, pitying and disliking him all at once”.

Affleck was born into a working-class family in California and grew up in Massachusetts with his younger brother Casey, who also became an actor. Their mother was a teacher and activist. Their father was a sometime actor, a gambler and an alcoholic. Affleck met Damon at school and the two travelled to auditions together, but their paths diverged. While star student Damon went to Harvard, the bright but distractable Affleck dropped out of the University of Vermont after a few months. Self-consciousness about his class and education has been a nagging drumbeat throughout his career. He always has something to prove, and something to atone for. In a 2016 Buzzfeed profile called “The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck”, Anne-Helen Petersen argued that his defining feature was shame: “about the roles that he’s taken, the relationships he’s made public, his lack of education, his drinking habits, and, most recently, his tattoo”.

Handsome in a brash and bro-ish way, with an oblong head and beefy, six-foot-four physique, Affleck started out playing jerks in School Ties, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. He graduated to doofus in Chasing Amy but even his nicer characters weren’t very smart. So when he and Damon broke through in 1997 with their Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting, the impression was that, off screen as well as on, Damon was the star and Affleck the sidekick. I still remember a waspish line from Esquire’s film critic, to the effect that Ben Affleck was put on the earth for the sole purpose of making Matt Damon look like the clever one.

Their next moves compounded that stereotype of art vs commerce. Damon moved into prestige pictures such as Saving Private Ryan and The Talented Mr Ripley, before striking oil with the Bourne franchise. Affleck became an action star in Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Daredevil and The Sum of All Fears, none of which played to his strengths. In a recent interview with Damon, Affleck joked about feeling “deeply jealous and developing a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing” but it wasn’t entirely a joke: he wasn’t getting the same opportunities. “It’s not as if actors are turning down something way better,” he once told me. “It really doesn’t come down to X vs Y so much as X vs nothing.”

In smaller movies, he was once again a braggart (Shakespeare in Love) or an asshole (Boiler Room), which might explain why his brief experiment with romcoms never paid off. Only Roger Michell’s 2002 drama Changing Lanes, in which he clashed with Samuel L Jackson, was a persuasive advertisement for his acting chops. Meanwhile Gwyneth Paltrow, his girlfriend from 1997 to 2000, publicly described him as a “complete knucklehead”, which didn’t help. “What many people don’t know is that he’s crazy smart, but since he doesn’t want that to get awkward, he downplays it,” said David Fincher years later.

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Affleck never seemed at ease in blockbusters. If I were ranking his performances, I would put his brilliant comic turn in the DVD commentary for Armageddon in the top five. He’s like a college smart-alec heckling the screen, only he’s actually in the movie. Unfortunately, it’s not a great look if you come across as thinking you’re too good for the movies you’re being paid handsomely to star in. He recalls challenging director Michael Bay on an absurd plot point in that thoroughly absurd film: “He told me to shut the fuck up.” The real joke’s on Affleck for thinking he’s above it all.

All in all, Affleck’s reputation was in a precarious state when he met Jennifer Lopez on the set of Gigli in 2001 and everything went awry. Gigli was the kind of brutal, unqualified flop that might as well have police tape around the scene of the crime. Their next movie together, Jersey Girl, also tanked. The hostile reception was inextricably tied up with the stars’ two-year relationship and the rise of celebrity media at its cruel, carnivorous worst. Affleck later blamed snobbery and racism: even his taste in women was deemed trashy. Whatever the reasons, no relationship could have survived the obsessive scrutiny applied to “Bennifer”. Their wedding was first postponed and then cancelled. The backlash left them both shellshocked. When Affleck bumped into Damon around the release of Gigli he said: “I’m in the worst possible place you can be. I can sell magazines, but not movie tickets.”

GQ called Affleck “the world’s most over-exposed actor”. The Los Angeles Times wrote a long autopsy called “Ben Big’s Fall”. Yet Affleck was never a bad guy. Critics often praised his capacity for self-doubt and self-deprecating humour, so it’s apt that he won his first acting awards for playing George Reeves in 2006’s Hollywoodland, the Sixties Superman actor who was sent flying by fame and brought to earth with a humiliating crash. He’s stayed on good terms with his exes (very good in Lopez’s case) and he’s loyal to his friends. Directors including Linklater and John Frankenheimer have called him one of the nicest actors in the business. He’s always been a great interviewee, providing a clear-eyed running commentary on his career.

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Now married to his Daredevil co-star Jennifer Garner, Affleck rebounded by moving behind the camera for his directorial debut, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, starring his brother Casey. “Nobody knew whether he was going to be any good or not, so people were surprised,” Casey told me at the time. “But I wasn’t surprised. I knew that he’s so much smarter and more interesting than the person that’s depicted in the gossip magazines.” Suddenly there were comparisons to Robert Redford, the gold standard for actors turned directors, but Affleck still appeared bruised and wary when I interviewed him. Whenever talk turned to his rough patch, he began nervously flicking a bottle opener. Poker players would call that a giant tell. He still seemed to think that his comeback was fragile.

Affleck directed another satisfying crime thriller, The Town, in 2010 and then Argo in 2012. “We were wrong about Ben Affleck,” wrote the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane. “Few of us, watching Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, could see a way out, or back, for an actor so utterly at the mercy of his own jawline.” But Hollywood’s ambivalence towards him was betrayed by the fact that he was only the fourth person in the history of the Academy Awards to win Best Picture without getting a Best Director nomination, as if Argo’s excellence had nothing to do with its director and star. OK, he wasn’t the ideal choice to play CIA agent Tony Mendez, but who else was going to give him a part like that?

Affleck took a giant step backwards with the snoozy 2016 mob drama Live by Night but he still has a better actor-director track record than George Clooney. He’s shown real flair for action sequences, and a talent for getting great work out of ensemble casts, steering five actors from his first three movies to awards buzz. So it seemed incomprehensible when, in the afterglow of Argo, he signed up to play Batman. Affleck is always torn: while he may have a low opinion of superhero and action movies, he can’t quite let go of stardom. He didn’t seem like he really wanted to be Batman but then he was playing a Bruce Wayne who didn’t want to be Batman anymore either: angry, jaded, bitter. He might have pulled it off with a better director than Zack Snyder. A 2017 alcoholic relapse put paid to a solo Batman movie, which was probably for the best.

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Affleck has had bad luck with superheroes. His recent action movies, The Accountant and Triple Frontier, are background noise. He’s also struggled to find sympathetic directors. Unlike his contemporaries, he’s never worked with Scorsese, Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh or the Coen brothers. His movie with Terence Malick, To the Wonder, was one of the director’s weakest. The towering exception, and his best performance to date, was David Fincher’s Gone Girl. With a perfect blend of charm and menace, his Nick Dunne is a fuck-up who could be victim, villain or both. Affleck isn’t playing himself but he’s playing with who people think he is. “I think it’s interesting how we manage the best version of ourselves,” he told the New York Times, “despite our flaws and our weaknesses and our sometime tendencies to do the wrong thing.”

Where does Affleck find a lane these days? The failure of Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, which Affleck co-wrote and appeared in, confirms that the movies he really likes barely exist in cinemas anymore. He was sensitive in The Tender Bar and convincing as a recovering alcoholic in The Way Back but neither move made much impact. At the same time, he’s yet to commit to a prestige TV series in the vein of True Detective or Mare of Easttown. His slate of forthcoming projects looks underwhelming: two more outings as Batman, his eighth Kevin Smith movie, and a sci-fi thriller called Hypnotic. His return to directing with a film about Nike co-starring Damon could go either way. I’d love to see him play a role that fully exploits his talent for exhausted masculinity and gallows humour — Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, perhaps.

At least he seems happy now. More than any other movie star, Affleck is relatably candid about life not working out as planned. He has a consciousness of disappointment and failure that you don’t find anywhere else. Cruise and DiCaprio are too successful, McConaughey too upbeat, Johnny Depp too weird. It makes me want to root for him, which is why I find his recent marriage to Lopez, 20 years after their last attempt, so cheering. We’d all like to believe that life gives us second chances.