'Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall': How a viral TikTok trend celebrated the “Popeye” star

Duvall became the unwitting soundtrack to hundreds of thousands of fashion videos on social media last year.

How many actors become viral social media sensations decades after they retire from movies?

Shelley Duvall hasn’t appeared on screen since 2002’s Manna from Heaven, but she still managed to pull off such a feat.

Video and audio of the Popeye star, who died Thursday at age 75, found a second life on TikTok last year, as her soft, sunny introductions on a TV show soundtracked a deluge of fashion videos on the platform.

The original footage from the trend comes from Faerie Tale Theatre, the children’s anthology television series that Duvall created and hosted from 1982 to 1987. The series aired on Showtime, and saw the actress introduce herself at the beginning of each episode as she prepares the audience for the evening’s entertainment. The show boasted an all-star cast of guest performers playing various fairy tale characters, including Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Matthew Broderick, Alan Arkin, James Earl Jones, Leonard Nimoy, Helen Mirren, Christopher Reeve, and Elliott Gould.

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Social media user Sarah, who runs the Shelley Duvall Archive fan accounts across X, TikTok, and Instagram, recreated the Faerie Tale Theatre introduction with the actress herself during a visit in 2020, which she posted in a 2021 TikTok.

In most iterations of the trend, a user would edit videos of themself in five distinct outfits, jumping from one look to the next as Duvall repeatedly says, "Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall."

Related: Shelley Duvall returns to acting after 20 years with indie horror film The Forest Hills

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The audio came from TikTok user LauvSongs, who remixed Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre introductions with an intense rock instrumental behind her voice. That remix audio was originally posted in December 2021, though the outfit trend didn’t take off until March 2023 — and it’s been used in over 160,000 videos to date.

However, supercuts of Duvall’s greetings persisted before the TikTok trend took off, as viewers have been entranced by the repetitiveness of the actress’ line deliveries across every episode of the children’s series.

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These supercuts only feature the Shining actress speaking the same four words, over and over, but in their simplicity, they do capture much of what made Duvall such a captivating screen presence. Duvall’s pitch-perfect introductions immediately welcome audiences to the show with a comforting sing-songy quality — and viewing them back to back reveals an almost absurd consistency in the actress’ performances, down to identical pauses between the first two words that make the clips virtually indistinguishable from an auditory perspective.

Of course, the reason the repeated clips of "Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall" lend themselves to outfit supercuts is because in the original video footage, Duvall’s similar line deliveries are juxtaposed with wildly different visuals. In every episode of Faerie Tale Theatre, Duvall greets viewers in a completely new environment with varying camera maneuvers framing her arrival — and, perhaps most importantly, she looks absolutely stunning in a ridiculous variety of off-the-wall costumes, elegantly encapsulating the actress’ glamorous oddball fashion sense both on and off the screen.

Through the simplicity of these videos, we get a glimpse of what made Duvall such a singular performer: she was persistently gentle and inviting, yet also otherworldly and uniquely gorgeous every time she appeared on camera. She possessed an innate warmth and ease about her that cannot be taught or trained — not necessarily a natural actor, but one whose confidence in her unconventionality allowed audiences to embrace the artistry of artifice and the playful eccentricities in each of her films.

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