Gaming stopped being a “surprising” hobby for celebrities a long time ago, but some famous players still feel more convincing than others. The best examples are not just people who once posed with a controller for a campaign, they are the ones who talk about games with the oddly specific affection of someone who has lost weekends to them. Some lean toward cozy Nintendo routines, others treat competitive games like a second sport, and a few have made gaming part of their public identity in ways that are hard to separate from their actual fandom. Celebrity gaming can be messy, promotional, sincere, or all three at once.
Henry Cavill
Henry Cavill’s gaming reputation did not come from one cute press-tour anecdote. He has talked for years about playing on PC, about finding The Witcher through the games before going deeper into the books, and about being drawn to big fantasy worlds with lots of lore attached. That background made his casting as Geralt feel unusually tidy, though not in a fake way, because Cavill seemed to understand why fans were so protective of the character. World of Warcraft, Total War, Overwatch, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are the names most often tied to him, which is not exactly the playlist of someone who only plays for ten minutes between flights.
Mila Kunis
Mila Kunis talking about World of Warcraft on late-night TV still feels like a small relic from the older internet. She did not make it sound like a polished celebrity hobby, she talked about guilds, playing seriously, and eventually stepping away because the game was taking up too much room in her life. That is probably why the story stuck. WoW gave her a place to be anonymous for a while, which must have been part of the appeal when the rest of her life was very much not anonymous.
Brie Larson
Brie Larson’s gaming taste runs warmer and more Nintendo-heavy, and she talks about it with a kind of relaxed specificity. She has appeared in Nintendo Switch campaigns featuring Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Fortnite, and Ring Fit Adventure, but her interest never seemed limited to the campaign. Larson has spoken about growing up with Nintendo games, and her affection for Animal Crossing and Luigi’s Mansion 3 feels more personal than decorative. Super Mario Galaxy also comes up as one of her favorites, which tells you a little about the kind of Nintendo fan she is, not just nostalgic, but attached to the weirder, more dreamy corners too.
Drake
Drake’s Fortnite moment was not subtle. In March 2018, he joined Tyler “Ninja” Blevins on Twitch, with Travis Scott and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster also pulled into the orbit, and the stream drew more than 600,000 concurrent viewers. Drake said he had been playing Fortnite during breaks from recording, which made the whole thing feel both enormous and weirdly casual. For a night, gaming, rap, sports, and Twitch all collapsed into the same chat window.
Snoop Dogg
Snoop Dogg’s gaming life has always had a couch-and-controller feel to it. Madden NFL is the game most tied to him, especially through his Xbox habits and those very public moments when a server problem or glitch pushes him into a rant. It is not the neatest kind of celebrity gaming image, but maybe that is why it works. Snoop does not come across like someone carefully managing a gamer persona, he comes across like someone annoyed that the game is not doing what it is supposed to do.
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Ronda Rousey
There is a clear logic to Ronda Rousey being drawn to games with creatures, rankings, systems, and grind. She has talked about Pokémon, World of Warcraft, and Mortal Kombat, and her old gaming interviews tend to sound more like someone answering a real hobby question than someone trying to look relatable. Pokémon fits the public nerd profile, but WoW probably says more about the way she plays. It takes a certain kind of patience to live inside that sort of game for long.
Jack Black
Jack Black’s gaming persona is exactly as chaotic as expected, but there is real time underneath the jokes. His YouTube channel, JablinskiGames, has featured gaming content, including Red Dead Redemption 2, and he has talked about putting hundreds of hours into Rockstar’s western during the pandemic. Then there is Minecraft, which became more than casual research after he joined A Minecraft Movie. He reportedly spent over 100 hours in the game while preparing, which feels like both homework and the sort of homework he would enjoy too much.
Ariana Grande
Ariana Grande’s gaming habits are more varied than the Eevee tattoo might suggest. Pokémon is the obvious starting point, especially after she said in 2019 that she spends part of his days off playing Pokémon: Go, Eevee! on Nintendo Switch. But she has also become part of Fortnite’s pop universe through her in-game skin and event appearances, and her most oddly relatable gaming confession may be Monopoly on her iPad. In a Vogue “What’s in My Bag?” video, Grande said she plays a lot of online Monopoly with strangers while traveling or waiting on set, and that she was around level 80, which is the kind of detail that sounds too specific to be invented.
Travis Scott
Travis Scott’s most visible gaming association is still Fortnite. He was part of that 2018 Ninja and Drake stream, and later his relationship with the game became much bigger than simply logging on for a match. Even before the in-game concert made the crossover impossible to ignore, his presence in that stream helped make the link between rap, sports, Twitch, and battle royale culture feel normal almost overnight. It was not just that celebrities were playing games, it was that they were entering the same loud, unstable live space as everyone else.
Maisie Williams
Maisie Williams has been around gaming culture in a quieter way than some of the names here. She fits the broader celebrity-gamer conversation because she has been comfortable in Nintendo-related and game-adjacent spaces without seeming like she is trying to prove a hardcore résumé. Not every famous gamer needs a raid story, a Twitch record, or a dramatic server meltdown.
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga’s gaming history has a funny little detour, because she once became a meme for asking “what’s fortnight” before eventually appearing in Fortnite Festival years later. The more revealing moment, though, came in 2018, when she tweeted about playing Bayonetta and reacting to its difficulty in a way that felt instantly familiar to anyone who has been humbled by an action game. Bayonetta was an amusingly good fit, too. All style, speed, theatrical posing, and chaos, not exactly distant from Gaga’s own universe.
Finn Wolfhard
Finn Wolfhard’s gaming interest feels almost baked into the culture around him. Stranger Things helped push Dungeons & Dragons, arcades, and retro game references back into mainstream conversation, but Wolfhard has also shown his own comfort with gaming spaces outside the show’s nostalgia bubble. He has been associated with Nintendo and has spoken in game-related contexts in a way that makes the interest feel pretty natural. It is not his whole public identity, which is probably why it does not feel forced.
Gaming fandom looks different depending on the person. For some celebrities it is a comfort habit, for others it becomes part of the brand, and for a few it leaks into the roles they chase or the projects they choose. The most convincing examples usually have the same thing in common, they talk about games with too much specificity to fake it neatly.
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