Meme Celebrities
Hide the Pain Harold: the stock photo model who smiled through it
A retired Hungarian engineer posed for a few hundred stock photos. The internet looked at his smile and saw a man quietly falling apart.
András Arató was born in 1945 in Kőszeg, Hungary, and spent his career as an electrical engineer. After a holiday in Turkey he posted his photos on a Hungarian social network, and a professional photographer got in touch: would he like to model? He agreed, on the condition that the pictures were never used for anything political, religious or sexual, and posed for more than a hundred stock photos - at the doctor's, at a laptop, holding a coffee cup, giving a thumbs-up.
The smile that didn't reach the eyes
Around 2011, people on the internet found the photos and noticed something. Harold, as they named him, was always smiling, but his eyes seemed to say something else entirely. He became the face of anyone keeping it together while everything goes wrong, and the internet started captioning his pictures with life's small and large miseries.
Hide the Pain Harold: Hide the Pain Harold is András Arató, a retired Hungarian electrical engineer whose stock photos - smiling over a coffee cup, at a laptop, at the doctor's - all seem to hide a quiet sorrow behind the smile.
For years many people assumed he wasn't real. When a fan finally tracked him down by email, Arató posted a photo of himself holding a sign that said, in Russian, “I'm alive”.
Making peace with the meme
At first he found it hard to read what people wrote about his face. Then he decided to enjoy it. In 2018 he gave a TEDx talk in Kyiv about waking up as a meme hero, and since then he has travelled the world meeting fans, starred in a Coca-Cola advert in Hungary and even appeared on the Hungarian version of The Masked Singer. The smile, it turns out, was real all along.
Watch him tell it
Waking up as a meme-hero | András Arató | TEDxKyiv (TEDx Talks, YouTube)
I Accidentally Became A Meme: Hide The Pain Harold (BuzzFeedVideo, YouTube)
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