Richmond Xavier Amoakoh, better known by his stage name Lawyer Nti, said he once found fame to be “strangling” even though he had yearned and prayed for it.
Talking about some of the effects of being called a celebrity on Class FM, he said “If you had asked me this a few years ago, I would have said a few things,” he answered.
However, “today,” he added, “I don’t think I can say anything.”
Currently, “the things I probably don’t like about this [being popular], in a way, helps me to be a better person,” he remarked.
“This is how it is. I am doing my work, hoping that people get to see it and appreciate me for it,” he said. “I’m getting that and then now I feel, you [members of the public] are in my business too much.”
The irony of it all is not lost on the Kejetia vs Makola hit TV series star.
“But I put myself out there,” he said. “I was hoping – years ago, when we were doing the stage plays and all, I was hoping that one of them would blow up [be massively successful]. It happen[ed], and because I wasn’t prepared for this, because it was, boom!, because nothing really can prepare you for something like this, I felt – it was strangling at a point.”
The fame and attention “was suffocating,” he stressed.
On a regular day “if I’m walking along the street,” he said, “naturally,” he wants to be that “normal person” but the contrary happens as “some of the people” point at him asking their friends to come have a look.
Though this is uncomfortable, he said having celebrity is something he once “prayed” and “hoped for” and “God listened to my prayers and he gave it to me”.
“Not just that,” he said, noting that people react how they do in his presence because “they love me, they love what I do, they love the effect I have on them, and so they’re appreciating me.”
The University of Ghana, Legon, School of Performing Arts graduate expressed his gladness for the fact that when people see him and his craft, irrespective of their circumstances, whether “broke or brokenhearted,” they laugh and are made happy.
Bemoaning that some fans “don’t have boundaries” and get oddly touchy, he remarked: “it’s all out of love”.
The scariest part of stardom, Lawyer Nti also said, is “people expecting you to live in a certain kind of way”.
He said it is worse when “you know that it is not within your means.”
Reacting to host Nana Kwesi Asare’s observation that 2017 was his peak, he said, “Yes, I was everywhere, I had a lot of opportunities to make all the money, but yeah, some of them I couldn’t [utilise].”
He explained: “I can’t just turn my life upside down to please everyone because you want me to live a certain kind of way, you want me to be a certain kind of person…”
He noted that some people found his on-screen and off-screen personas contradictory.
“…you want me to see you and go crazy, you know, fool around,” he said. “So people see me and they are like: ‘Ah, on TV you’re like this but [in person] you’re quiet.”
For him, this is “the big thing I didn’t like” about being a popular entertainment or public figure.
He said the ordinary Richmond Xavier Amoakoh is “quiet, in-door, very few friends, reserved, shy,” which is “totally opposite” the Lawyer Nti character he is famed for.
He stressed that the two are worlds apart.
He said he has been criticised for wearing caps, and during the pandemic, nose masks, because some people said he was disguising himself.
Meanwhile, “the person too was wearing a nose mask,” he jokingly observed.
Noting that the public reaction anytime he is seen outside “was scary,” he said it prompted his retreat to “take care of myself”.
“I had to take time, away from all that, to work on myself,” he said.
So, between 2017 and 2020, “I had given so much and pretended to be the person they wanted me to be – a lot of the times – few times, I gave them [the real] me and most people didn’t like it – but then, I felt, I had missed out on me, so I needed to step back, and go back to myself, reconnect with myself and with God too, and it has done great [things] for me,” he narrated.
He said he loves “the way that I have matured” and “the growth” which, to him, is part of the journey and makes it all complete.