Vanessa Carlton‘s Grammy-nominated hit “A Thousand Miles” remains an instantly recognizable early-2000s classic, but it’s just become more intriguing, now that we know it was written about a famous actor.
In a VICE video feature titled The Story of “A Thousand Miles,” Vanessa reveals, “The song is about a crush I had on a Juilliard student. I would never talk to this person. I was very shy. I was like, ‘There’s just no way on God’s creation that this would ever happen."”
In fact, she explains that the lyric “If I could fall into the sky” was meant to express “the idea of, like, you have a better chance of falling up than ever having a relationship with this person.”
However, Vanessa won’t spill who inspired the song, explaining, “I can’t say this person’s name, because they’re, like, a famous actor and I don’t want to say.” She adds that this person don’t know the song is about them.
But as E! Online notes, fans have already started trying to figure out which famous actors attended Juilliard, the New York City performing arts school, when Vanessa was in Manhattan.
Fans are using a time frame based on the fact that Vanessa says she to moved New York at age 14 to study at the School of American Ballet; that would have been in 1994. Plus, in the VICE feature, her mom says Vanessa wrote the instrumental part of the song the summer she was 17, which was 1997.
So which famous actors around Vanessa’s age were at Juilliard then? Possible suspects, fans claim, are Oscar Isaac, Anthony Mackie, Adam Driver, Wes Bentley, Glenn Howerton, Christian Camargo and a few others. The timeline is off on some of them, but speculate away. And remember — speculation is all it is.
(Discussion of who the song is about comes at 4:02 into video.)
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