We Asked the Guy Behind the “Distracted Boyfriend” Pic What He Thinks About Your Memes

Forget Titanic. Burn all your copies of The Notebook. Delete Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from your memory.

There is only one doomed love story that matters now: "Distracted Boyfriend".

It’s the heartbreaking tale that has captivated a nation: A man—head cocked over his left shoulder and mouth puckered into a wolf-whistle—enraptured by a woman in red, to the utter disgust of his girlfriend.

Most impressive about the “Distracted Boyfriend” phenomenon is that all it took was a single photograph to ignite the globe’s imagination, and inspire thousands of memes.

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— n1m (@n1m161) August 19, 2017

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— 🐭 (@bilrac) August 22, 2017

This suddenly-iconic piece of stock photography—officially titled “Disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl”—has sparked many, many questions. Like, what’s the real story behind the characters in this tableau? What was the inspiration behind this artistic monument to infidelity? And how does the photographer, Antonio Guillem, feel about the people of the internet ripping off his creative property for the lolz?

We reached out to Antonio in Barcelona, who responded to us—and, presumably, many media outlets—with some boilerplate answers, as he didn’t “have the time to attend each one of the interviews individually”.

Although we don’t traditionally run email interviews—especially when the answers are distributed to multiple outlets—we felt the newsworthiness of his reply outweighed those conditions (and we kinda feel for the guy, who has suddenly become inundated with requests for a random photo he took in 2015).

last one probably pic.twitter.com/KYyKkdvZMg

— DougExeter (@DougExeter) August 24, 2017

Firstly, yes, he and the models have seen the memes.

“I never thought that one of my images [would] be that popular,” he explained.

“I didn’t even know what a meme is until recently, when the models started to tell me about the memes that people were doing with our work.”

Antonio said he couldn’t reveal the names of the models in the photo due to his company’s privacy policy. However, he revealed that their stage personas are ‘Mario’ and ‘Laura’. (The woman in red is apparently stage-nameless.)

“Two of the models and I have a great personal relationship, and the other model, we stopped working together around a year ago,” he explained, enigmatically.

As for the inspiration behind the entire series of ‘Mario’ and ‘Laura’ photographs, Antonio said the setting was “completely improvised as we didn’t have time to search for it.”

STOP I DIDN'T KNOW THERE WERE MULTIPLE PICS FJDJDDJDJD GIRL WYD DROP HIS CRUSTY ASS pic.twitter.com/eGi1oQ4XYz

— soft pau hours (@BTSlNTRO) August 24, 2017

“As I always work with the same models, it was quite easy to create the situation even though it was quite challenging to achieve face expressions that were believable,” he added.

“Mainly, because we always have a really great work atmosphere and almost all the time one of the models was laughing while we were trying to take the picture.”

Antonio said he hasn’t received any “economic profit” from the memes, but he isn’t worried, even though “each one of the people that use the images without the license are doing it illegally.”

(Don’t worry, we bought the license.)

However, you probably don’t need to be worried about Antonio taking legal action against you if you’re keeping things light.

“This is not the thing that really worries us, as they are just a group of people doing it in good faith, and we are not going to take any action, except for the extreme cases in which this good faith doesn’t exist,” he said.

However, he won’t stand for modifications to the models’ faces in an offensive manner.

“What really worries us and we are not going to allow it, taking the appropriate legal measures, is the use of the images in a pejorative, offensive or any way that can harm the models or me,” he said.

“I’m talking, for example, about the image where their faces are changed by a dog face, a garbage bag, and a dog food bag.”

Finally, Antonio said the credit for his pic’s meme-ification belongs to the internet, and not him.

“I think the image was a good foundation to whoever had the great idea to turn it into a metaphor that works for almost everything. And that’s not our merit.”

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— leon (@leyawn) August 22, 2017

Photo: iStock.com/AntonioGuillem