Mention “that French Guy” to typical teenagers today, and they will know exactly which French guy you are talking about.
Jerome Jarre, they will tell you, is a 24-year-old from France who has become famous for making comical six-second videos on Vine, where he has eight million followers. The Vines include Mr. Jarre walking up to strangers in the street and hugging them, or hanging out with his best friend, a squirrel — though he pronounces it “sqiw-well” with his French accent.
Clips of his stunts have been viewed more than one billion times on Vine. He is so famous, that when he recently organized a meet-up in São Paulo, Brazil, the riot police were called in to quell the crowd of thousands.
What few teenagers know about Mr. Jarre, however, is that while his stardom took off in 2013, until last summer, he was essentially homeless in New York, surreptitiously sleeping on an office floor and using a promotional onesie from a start-up as a blanket. He showered in a nearby gym, gaining free access only because the young woman behind the counter recognized him from his videos, and scrounged for other people’s leftovers.
Jerome Jarre was born in Albertville, a small town in the French countryside, and raised by his single mother, Agnès Jarre. In stark contrast to his online persona, his mother said in a phone interview, “young Jerome was quiet, shy and constantly bullied. But he was always happy.”
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On Friday, Mr. Jarre challenged those watching to stop trying to take perfect selfies online, and to post ugly selfies instead. By the end of the weekend, there were more than 120,000 ugly selfies tagged with his name or the hashtag #UglySelfieChallenge.
“Everyone is looking for a purpose in life,” he said as we walked through New York. “The reason we all go to the cinema, or online, is because we haven’t found a purpose yet. We are always wondering why we’re here. But I’ve learned that we have to create that purpose for ourselves.”
When I asked him if he had finally found his purpose, he became shy for the first time. Then, a teenage girl ran up out of nowhere and gave him a smothering hug. “My purpose,” he said, “which I finally found thanks to social media, is helping all of these people find their purpose.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 2015, on page E1 of the New York edition. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
