More than 25 years after photobombing a QVC host Gabrielle Kerr’s photo from a Clinton inaugural event, Lord of the Rings and Stranger Things star Sean Astin popped up in one of her photos again — this time by design. The whole thing was shared on Reddit a few days ago, with the woman Astin photobombed sharing the story of how she called the original to his attention after a random encounter, leading to a second photo opportunity. The experience was shared to a subreddit dedicated to extremely unlikely things happening — which is both totally fair and a little off key since the second photo was staged. Still, it’s such a fun, cool thing that we’ll call it fair.
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Here’s the setting: last time around, the OP and some of her friends had managed to sneak in to an MTV party for Bill Clinton’s 1993 Presidential inauguration. After getting their photos developed later, they noticed that Sean Astin was in the crowd, looking straight at her camera and smiling.
26 years later, she apparently saw the actor at Disneyland and, after some encouragement from her fellow travelers, approached him to show the original photo.
Here’s Kerry’s full story, as shared in the comments below the photos:
Here’s the story. Back in ’93 my dad got the hook up for one of the Clinton inaugural balls. Said hook up fell through and we wound up crashing maybe 4 different parties. I think this was the MTV inaugural ball so the crowd was younger and lots of celebrities were there. While we waited for Clinton to make his appearance my dad took a selfie. We had no idea Sean was standing there let alone photo bombed us until we developed the film.
Flash forward 26 years I’m at Disneyland for the opening of Galaxy’s Edge and guess who walks by?! I ask my hubby if I should try and show Sean the picture (which I had in my phone) and he said go for it. So I run after Sean and yell ‘excuse me Sean, you photo bombed me, do you want to see the photo?!’
He stopped and said sure and while I pull up the photo I give him the backstory. When he and his wife and daughter see it they were so excited. And then he says ‘let’s recreate it!’
Given the rule of threes in storytelling, it seems like we can all agree there’s at least one more of these photobombs coming, right? Maybe she can get Astin to appear in an online video with her about the art of staging one!
