Meme Celebrities

First World Problems: the actress who cried on cue

Silvia Bottini was asked to cry for a stock photo on a trip to Shanghai. Three years later her tears were the face of every trivial complaint online.

In 2008 Silvia Bottini, a young theatre actress from near Varese in Italy, went to China with the man she was dating, a stock photographer. She was his translator, his assistant and his model. At a temple in Shanghai he asked her to meditate, to play a tourist - and then to cry. She did it the way an actress does, hand over her face, and the picture went onto a stock photo site.

Every small complaint, at full volume

It sat there for three years. Then, in 2011, someone paired it with the phrase "first world problems", and it became one of the best known advice-animal memes of the decade. The captions are always tiny inconveniences told as tragedy: the Wi-Fi doesn't reach the bathroom, the fridge is too full to choose. Silvia found out when the man who built her website sent her one. Her first reaction was: what is it?

First World Problems: The heated car seat has two settings: too warm and off.

A face she didn't own

She was never paid for the shoot, and has received nothing from the meme. Strangers put words in her mouth and insulted her looks; as an actress, she felt it made a joke of her work. A friend gave her a board game with her face on it, and when Domino's in Spain made an advert with the meme, she still had to pay for her own pizza.

Making it her own

In 2015 she moved to Los Angeles to act, and by 2019 she told the BBC she had made peace with it. She has since written a short film and a web series around the character, playing herself - the woman who cries about first world problems, finally telling her side.

Watch her tell it

How I Became the 'First World Problems' Meme (Know Your Meme, YouTube)

More stories

• What is a meme, anyway? - A word a biologist made up in 1976 now names the internet's favourite kind of joke. How a picture and two lines of text became a language millions of people speak.
• Advice animals: the colour-wheel years - A dog in front of a rainbow wheel started a whole family of characters, each with one personality and one job. How Advice Dog's descendants took over the internet around 2010.
• Rage comics: when the internet drew itself in MS Paint - Wobbly lines, a handful of faces and one big feeling per panel. The crude comics that gave us Trollface, Forever Alone and Y U No.
• From the big screen to the top text - A line from The Lord of the Rings, a smirk from 1971, a beer advert and a squinting cartoon. How film and TV became the internet's favourite raw material.
• Beyond two lines: panels, boxes and captions - Top and bottom text is only one way to caption a picture. The newer formats put words in boxes, beside panels or above the image - and you can make all of them here.