Are Timothée Chalamet and Selena Gomez secretly beefing? Are John Krasinski and Emily Blunt secretly getting divorced? Celebrity lip-reading has been around for a while now, but it certainly feels like it's reached new heights after the Golden Globes. Lest you doubt the power of the viral lip-read, Timmy himself was even asked on the street if Kylie Jenner told Selena she couldn't take a picture with him, which was the overwhelming Internet consensus after that clip with Taylor Swift and Keleigh Teller went viral.
So, BuzzFeed spoke to Jeremy Freeman, a Forensic Expert Witness Lip-Reader. He was born “profoundly deaf” and has been lip-reading since he was a child, making it into his career in 2007. His work can range from working with the police to helping tracheotomy patients communicate. He woke up after the Golden Globes to a barrage of videos of celebs talking, which he said he takes as seriously as he does when providing evidence for “a murder case.”
The first thing that Jeremy stressed is how time-consuming lip-reading is: One 10-second clip of Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift talking took him between 30–45 minutes to lip-read. As such, social media lip-reading takes that are done near-instantaneously are less likely to be accurate.
Jeremy noted how the mouth moves when saying the word “‘Timothée,” suggesting that the only credible alternative was Timotei shampoo. “Can I give you 100% guarantee? No, I can’t,” he said, noting that context clues were important to deduce the meaning. Indeed, things like camera angles, body language, and the speaker’s clarity can further impact lip-reading.
“I saw ‘divorce’ before I even saw the clip, so my brain started going, ‘divorce,’” Jeremy recalled. After about 15 minutes of forensic analysis, Jeremy concluded that John did not say divorce. “Divorce: dee-vorce. You’ve got to look for that.”
“I treat everything the same,” he continued. “That’s the difference between me and a TikTok lip-reader, the people who are here for fun.” Alas, Jeremy himself will not be joining the app anytime soon. “I don’t want all the criminal firms I work with to think I’m taking the piss out of them,” he added. “I have no interest in celebrity culture.”
“Lip-reading is not an exact science. Yes, occasionally I'll get it wrong. But if I go to court, and I'm dealing with a murder case, I have to be so confident about what’s being said. Otherwise I’d say, ‘You can't use that evidence.’ Would I use ‘Timothée’ as evidence in court? Probably, because I couldn’t think of any other word that matches ‘Timothée,'" Jeremy concluded.
