EXCLUSIVE: Italian-Senegalese social media personality Khaby Lame is the world’s most followed TikToker, with 161.3 million followers.
This puts him way ahead of U.S. influencers Charli D’Amelio and Bella Poarch who are currently in second and third position with 151 million and 92.6 million followers each.
Lame’s star has been rising since spring 2021 on the back of his silent TikTok vignettes making fun of life-hack videos, or capturing the absurdities of life and, more recently, his comic on-pitch interactions with soccer stars such as Ronaldinho.
Deadline caught up with the 23-year-old star at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily after he flew down from Rome to world premiere autobiographical short I Am Khabane, skipping sleep having just wrapped jury duty on Italia’s Got Talent overnight.
Lame first gained traction on the back of a 40-second 2021 video in which he unpeeled a banana, made in response to a video of a banana skin being intricately sliced off with a chef’s clever knife.
At the end of his demonstration, Lame holds out his hand palm up and shrugs in what has now become his trademark gesture.
“This person really complicated his life and I wanted to find a way to make it a bit easier,” he explained.
The social media star believes the silent aspect of his work is the bedrock of his success until now.
“The fact it’s not spoken, makes it a universal language. Every kid, every person around the world can see the video and get a laugh, simply by watching the images,” he said.
Lame originally threw himself into making TikTok content after being laid off from his factory job in the early days of the Covid pandemic.
His rags-to-riches tale is reminiscent of the journeys of the original silent movie stars Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, although Lame says he has not taken inspiration from their work.
“I’m trying to be myself. These are legends, who have made their own story. Every person is a person in their own way, with their own dreams and I just want to be Khaby Lame,” he said.
Short film I Am Khabane explores Lame’s early life, his TikTok beginnings and also follows his trip to L.A. to attend this year’s Oscars.
Co-written and directed with friend and collaborator Adriano Spadaro, I Am Khabane marks a departure for Lame as his first longer-format, scripted film and also because he speaks, and mainly in English.
“Over the course of a few minutes we told an entire life until now… it means a lot to me,” he said. “Some things can be conveyed without words, but I wanted to tell my story and I couldn’t do that only with gestures,” he said.
Having moved to Italy when he was just one year old with his Senegalese parents, Lame grew up in a social housing complex in the town of Chivasso, on the edge of the northern industrial city of Turin.
He recalls his childhood with fondness even though he struggled at school due to dyslexia and dyscalculia, with his parents sending him to a Quranic school in Dakar for a time.
Lame says he has always considered himself to be Italian even if he was only officially granted nationality in August 2022, on the back of his success.
Today, alongside his TikTok following and Italia’s Got Talent jury role, Lame has another 80 million Instagram followers as well as a multi-year partnership deal with fashion brand Hugo Boss and a raft of other media tie-ins.
Lame’s life story and message of never giving up on dreams has also spurred his popularity among youngsters at home, with teenage fans staking out a press conference in Taormina in the hope of connecting with the star.
He regards the short work as a next step in his long-term goal to make films.
“I want to make films. This is my main objective. I’ve wanted to make movies since I was a child,” he said. “To convey emotions through my acting and getting people to believe in something.”
Lame is aiming high after his trip to the Oscars where admits to being overwhelmed by being in the same room as so many “myths.”
“I was like wow, one day I want to be on the stage at the Oscars,” he said.
Quizzed on Hollywood inspirations, Lame points to Will Smith and his 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness.
“That film teaches a lesson about perseverance in the face of adversity, and it helped me a lot,” said Lame.
Click on the link above to watch the full Deadline Studio interview.
