A lot of people metaphorically see themselves on TV, when they can identify with characters and their storylines. But not many people actually see a photo of themselves on the screen, except for Jim Carey in The Truman Show. But that happened to 29-year-old Copenhagen resident Alexander Burchardt when he was watching a season two episode of HBO’s Euphoria.
In the scene, a character goes to a jukebox and settles on INXS’s classic 1987 hit “Never Tear Us Apart.” When the camera pans over the album artwork, many eagle-eyed viewers noticed the cover looked more like an off-brand version of the official artwork. When Burchardt was watching the episode, he saw himself.
Wtf is this album cover, Euphoria? I almost thought I had my first undeniable Mandela Effect! pic.twitter.com/AxD6oqgDO9
— Eliza Skinner (@elizaskinner) January 24, 2022
“It was me. In the split second, we see the album cover, I saw it and I got so confused,” Burchardt told Rolling Stone. “You’d be surprised how easily you could recognize yourself when you least expect it. I remember that photoshoot [and] the clothes I was wearing but I was shocked. We thought it was impossible so we rewound the scene, paused again, and looked, and my girlfriend was screaming.”
As it turns out, Burchardt, like many twenty-somethings in the early 2000s, decided to take up modeling. The photos ended up on iStock, a stock image website, where the Euphoria art department likely found the photos in order to re-create the cover, likely due to licensing issues.
An entertainment lawyer confirmed to Rolling Stone that publicity laws are probably to blame. The show was able to secure the rights to their song but perhaps didn’t want to go to the trouble of securing the artwork for just a second of screentime. “The fact that they used the track itself — and that’s assuming they likely had the rights to use the song — coupled with them stripping the album cover so substantially [and] then changing the musicians out with stock images makes me think it was more because of a potential name and likeness or right of publicity concern,” Lawyer Christiane Kinney said.
So, even though an iStock model isn’t exactly the same as using the real photo featuring frontman Michael Hutchence, it gives Burchardt a great story to tell…and maybe an acting credit?
