Bald Ann Dowd on making Twitter weird again
“I forget that everyone can see all of this.”
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
If you’ve spent any time on Twitter’s For You tab these past few months, then you’ve seen the above image. It’s a profile picture of acclaimed actress Ann Dowd with her hair photoshopped off, and it belongs to an account named … Bald Ann Dowd. Sprung from a photoshop by user @fartandsoul_, Bald Ann Dowd is the good kind of Twitter main character, whose dril-adjacent takes and commentary on every major cultural event, be it Joe Biden dropping out of the race or Bill Hader doing literally anything, regularly go viral.
Bald Ann Dowd is run by a 25-year-old named Ali who created her own news moment recently, when a fit of frustration navigating Delta flights in the wake of the CrowdStrike glitch prompted her to change her Twitter persona to Deb, a stock photo of a polite midwesterner who would be taking over the account until Ali found her way home. While Bald Ann Dowd has thankfully returned, her hiatus was mourned by the 22,000 followers who make up a fervent Bald Ann Dowd community.
“I've laid awake in bed at night wondering, ‘What am I actually saying? Why is anybody interacting with it?’” Ali says when we get on a call. “Like, I don't understand when people tweet about Bald Ann. I don't understand why this is occupying your brain at all.”
Understand it or not, Bald Ann and all her lore are here to stay as perhaps the example of committing to the bit. I worry that if you’re unfamiliar with the account, you still might not understand exactly who Ali, and by extension Bald Ann Dowd, is, so I’ll let her tell you herself.
What can you tell me about yourself? I’m not sure how much you share online.
I am 25. I work in New York. I'm from Pittsburgh. If you wanna get into the true lore of it, I moved to New York in 2022 and then last September, my parents flew me home for what I thought was my dad's birthday, and they told me that my dad had cancer. My mom had just had cancer the year before. So I just got [back to NYC] this weekend. Bald Ann Dowd was born out of me being stuck in my childhood home for ten months, going crazy.
Oh my gosh. I did not know any of that background. I hope everyone's doing okay, under the circumstances.
They're doing a lot better, which is good. Not a lot of people know that. A year ago I only had, like, a thousand followers. People knew what was going on pretty well, but then as it grew, it got out of hand and I don't think anyone really knows that part of it anymore.
So this all happened in the past year? And before that were you active online?
I've had this Twitter account since I was 11 years old. So I've been tweeting pretty consistently. I have a really special form of brain damage that they haven't discovered yet. I was on TikTok for a while and I was starting to gain a little bit of traction, but then I didn't have storage on my phone so I deleted it. And also I got bored of it because of the expectation to constantly be coming up with video ideas.
So when did the Bald Ann Dowd of it all come about?
You're gonna ask me so many of these questions and I genuinely don't know, 'cause it's so bizarre. Sometimes people I know in real life will bring it up and I'll be like, “Oh my God.” I forget that everyone can see all of this. So a year ago, literally today, I saw Oppenheimer for the first time 'cause I wanted to be up on the memes. I got so obsessed with Oppenheimer that I started tweeting obsessively about it. I saw it ten times in the theater. That's when the followers started to pick up a little bit, because I was having so much fun talking about that movie online. And then in, I think, November, so a couple months later, I made the shift to Bald Ann Dowd one night. Just very randomly. Obviously it's not a thing that existed before I thought of it. I thought I would change it back pretty quickly, but people started being like, “What is this? Why are you doing this?” And people thought it was so funny that I kept going with it.
How would you describe your online presence? And was it always this way?
I used to, two or three times a year, change my display name to “Ann Dowd Updates” and nobody cared at all. Nobody even commented on it. So I've always been doing stuff. How would I describe my online presence? This is actually such a good question 'cause I wanna ask other people this and I want to know how other people are perceiving this. I think I'm just very honest. I say whatever comes to my mind. I've laid awake in bed at night wondering, “What am I actually saying? Why is anybody interacting with it?” Like, I don't understand when people tweet about Bald Ann. I don't understand why this is occupying your brain at all. I'm just kind of doing my thing.
I guess if you were to put it in really basic terms, it would be “pop culture commentary.”
I talked to
about this too, because she had me on her newsletter to talk about Challengers. And at that point it felt very much like a pop culture thing. I would never wanna describe it to anyone older than 40.You are an internet figure to people. When did you realize that and how does that feel?
Pretty recently. It feels very strange. I've started accumulating followers at a faster rate than I ever have before. Anything I think people know goes away very quickly because there's a new influx of people. People are always learning that I'm a woman and they're very surprised by it. So many people think I'm a gay guy. When did I notice? I think like when people I love started following me. Like John Early followed me, Martin from Please Don't Destroy, Joel Kim Booster...the thought of them pressing follow on this picture of Ann Dowd without hair is bizarre to me. And at the very end of May, my tweet was on a billboard in Times Square. And people, instead of referring to it as the Sabrina Carpenter promo that it was, they started referring to it as “the Bald Ann Dowd billboard.” And that was absolutely crazy.
There was this tweet when Joe Biden dropped out, and someone had screenshotted the way Twitter shows what profiles they'd missed recent tweets from, and it was Pop Crave, Liza Minnelli Outlives, and Bald Ann Dowd. And they wrote something like, "I knew I'd missed something when I saw this." Do you try to stay on top of current events?
If anyone's getting their breaking news about big elections from me I would implore them to follow true news networks. I've always been that friend who, if you send me a tweet, I saw it two days ago. I see things very quickly 'cause I'm always plugged in, which is really bad probably for your brain. But I keep up with stuff very naturally, so the commentary comes very easily.
Where do you spend time online, or what would you describe your interests as?
Oh God. Whatever moves me. I grew up obsessed with comedy, so anything that's kind of absurd and makes me laugh. One of the funniest tweets in the world to me is Cher's "what's going on with mycareer." Also anything with hot people. Challengers really moved me. And if I can think of anything that I wanna add to any conversation, I will. I try not to chime in if I don't feel qualified to. Like I have it pulled up on my computer right now and it says 22,000 followers, and that's just a number. But if you really think about 22,000 people standing there, I wanna use the attention that I'm getting, my platform, for good. I wanna just put good vibes out there. I don't wanna speak out of turn. There's also that side of the coin where it's like, I don't wanna move too fast and anger a lot of people.
That was kind of my next question. Have you had to learn the hard way?
Anytime I've tried to speak earnestly about Taylor Swift's new form of releasing 75 versions of an album, I have had so many Swifties wanting me dead. I grew up as a Swiftie, so I kind of know how to handle them. You just have to ignore it. I don't wanna jinx it. I don't think I've done anything awful. I definitely have gone back and deleted things, just because I've tweeted a joke and then thought of any way that someone could possibly misinterpret it. I think growing up online gives you a really good filter, for better or for worse. Like, I think of something and then every part of my brain fires immediately and is like, “How could anyone possibly misconstrue this to make it bad?” I don't wanna ever come off in a bad way, 'cause I do have very good intentions.
Just tweeting about hot people.
Exactly. That's where the fun's at. I don't want it to get too serious
Totally. And you recently took a hiatus and changed your profile to a new character named Deb. I would love to hear the lore of Deb.
Wow. Where to start. Basically two things happened at once. I was in my childhood home. I was really losing my mind. I had very high screen time. I was on Twitter all the time. I was searching my indirects, I'll admit it. I know it's embarrassing. But someone bravely was like, “I'm sick of Bald Ann Dowd.” And I was like, that's actually so valid and true. So that happened and I had in my mind, I think I might be getting Bald Ann fatigue as well. I think this person made a really good point. And then I tried to book several Delta flights that just were not working. So I was like, you know what? Maybe Bald Ann needs to go out of office. Maybe we need to rotate someone in. She can take her time off. She will return when I can physically get back to New York. So, I don't know. There's no real logic to this. I googled stock photos of middle aged women and Deb really spoke to me. So I made Deb Bald Ann's out of office contact. So Ann could not get her flight back. I could not get my flight back. Stayed in Deb's basement. People then kind of realized, “Oh my God, does Deb have Bald Ann chained up in her basement? Is Deb evil? What is Deb's story? She seems nice, but there's something kind of sinister here.” And then Ann came back. She escaped. She's good. I tried to maybe plant the question, is she a body double?
That would be a fun next chapter for her lore.
There's just a lot of very stupid lore that I really don't think through. So I've kind of had to go back in my head and connect the dots.
It's one of those things that probably feels silly to explain but is intriguing to me because your swapping in and out of characters and, for lack of a better word, fucking around has kind of been the most creative use of Twitter I've seen recently. Especially post-Elon Twitter. A lot of people say Twitter's dead, but I feel like whatever's happening now is actually a new fun thing happening on the platform. What are your thoughts on Twitter in general?
Oh, Elon truly has just stripped everything. So I hate what he's done and I almost hate to keep people on his platform because I am very vocally anti-Elon. But it's been really fun and people have said to me, “You're the reason I'm on this app.” I'm like, well I don't wanna hold you hostage.
You're like, “I'm not Deb.”
I would love to do more characters. I'd love to bring more people into the Bald Ann cinematic universe. I was in this stage before I went home where I was thinking maybe I'll take an improv class, maybe I'll take an acting class. Just something to get me out of my head and have an activity. And then I couldn't do that and I wasn't really around people and I couldn't really be around a lot of people for health reasons. So it's almost me just riffing off of myself, which probably looks very strange to other people. All of the insane things that I put online kind of kept me sane during that time.
That really makes total sense to me. Do you hope to leverage this into anything?
I'm not the type of person who can plan out my life and try to work toward one thing. My mind's always pretty scattered, but I've wanted to write TV since I was 16. I would love to do anything in comedy even if it's not a full-time gig. Just anything to keep this part of my brain going. This is really my first foray into something that people have seen and responded to and it feels really good, not just for all of the probably narcissistic reasons that it feels good to search Bald Ann and see a million people saying things about it. But I've met really cool people and very funny people, and for all these people I admire to be even just liking a stupid thought I have is really nice. So I would love to work in, I don't know, comedy in some capacity. I don't really have any concrete goals. I would absolutely love to leverage this in some way that's—I feel like the word leverage sounds so evil, probably 'cause I'm watching Veep right now.
No, no, I know what you mean. It's a base for doing fun stuff. Have you ever had to introduce yourself as Bald Ann?
No, but now that I'm back in New York, it's gonna happen. I've yet to be noticed, 'cause my face is out there. Someone could very easily walk by me in New York and be like, “Oh that's that girl.” Not in any real way, like no one's writing into DeuxMoi, like "saw Bald Ann Dowd in Trader Joe's." So that has not happened yet, but who knows.