One look at this young lad and you end up telling yourself - "So this is what Joffrey Baratheon would be like if he were a nice person, and in the real world, not in HBO's Game of Thrones".
We know him as Ronan Farrow, but little do most of us know that his first name is actually Satchel, named after a baseball player named Satchel Paige. This name is more of a testimony to how one can achieve so much whilst being so young despite being born with a first name that says Satchel and the last name Farrow.
Growing up in America, and being the biological son of the ever-so-scandalous pair of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, could not have been an easy job. But then again, Ronan is someone who tweets - "Happy Father's Day -- or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law's day." It's just refreshing to see a Farrow who knows how to poke fun at the nasty Allen-Farrow situation and it also shows that Ronan Farrow is a funny man. And why wouldn't he be? He's just like any other young 26 year old American with a Twitter handle.
Agreed, they call him a boy genius who graduated high school at 15, was a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth from 2001-2009 and also a Yale Law School graduate by the time he was 21, part of Hilary Clinton's entourage for diplomatic assignments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and after that, a Rhodes scholar from Oxford, but at the root of it, he's still a lively American boy.
The main reason why that's the label that suits him best - just like many from our generation, he's tried his hands at various positions because maybe, just maybe, he hasn't found his true calling yet.
Often, the problem with smart and intelligent young people is that they have no clue about what they're best at. Their minds are occupied with too many ideas about how to get things done.
I mean, after graduating from Yale, he could have easily settled for a cushy job with some law firm and talked mergers and acquisitions. But the one thing that sets him apart from most young, smart Americans is that the entire media obsessed world knows his back story. On closer inspection, perhaps we can also draw out a conclusion as to why Ronan Farrow is who he is - nothing like the mother he grew up with and a lot like the father he loathes.
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow dated from 1980 to 1992, and they broke-up after Dylan Farrow, one of Farrow's adopted children, came out with the accusation that she was sexually abused by Allen. Dylan was seven years old at that time, and this accusation and the much media covered custody battle that followed, naturally tore the family apart. The kids went to Farrow even though Farrow's lawyers could not prove that there was any actual abuse on Allen's part. The nail on the coffin was when Allen revealed that he and Farrow's adopted daughter from a previous marriage, Soon-Yi Previn, were in love. They soon got married.
While some fans describe young Ronan Farrow having Greek god looks with those blue eyes and dark blonde hair, the irony cannot be missed when I say that it seems his back story actually reads like a Greek tragedy. And that would have been all that he was had he not had the heart to take control of things.
Cruising through academic achievements while being entrenched in humanitarian work, he is now looking at a promising career as a talk show host. His new hour long show on MSNBC will be called 'Ronan Farrow Daily' where he'll interview politicians, authors and a host of other serious people. But seeing how he's been handling his twitter, he could very well be the next Bill Maher or Jon Stewart.
While Ronan has stayed away from publicity throughout his life, he's been making his presence felt this year prior to the launch of his talk show.
In the January 31st episode of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher he was one of the guests on the panel surrounded on both sides by heavy political names such as Republican Senator Darrell Issa and Canadian MP Chrystia Freeland. Seeing Farrow talk about economic policies and income equality and getting cheers from a highly educated audience also proved that a politically themed talk show might actually be the best step for him to launch a career in public life.
The near future seems packed for Farrow who has written op-eds for magazines like The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy Magazine, LA Times, The Atlantic, etc. and Penguin also acquired his book Pandora's Box: How American Military Aid Creates America's Enemies which is scheduled to come out sometime in 2015.