How a 30-Year-Old Mastermind Fooled an Entire High School Into Thinking He Was a Teen—And What It Means for Trust in the Digital Age
Jono McLeod still remembers first meeting Brandon Lee. Not the actor son of the famous martial-arts master Bruce Lee — rather, the peculiar 16-year-old who was the new student in his class at Scotland’s Bearsden Academy back in 1993. “The door opened, and in he walks,” McLeod tells me over Zoom. “He was an unusual-looking and acting guy, but then a few kids at school were unusual-acting and unusual-looking. I was just another oblivious kid amongst all those others.”
Brandon appeared to be demonstrably older, prompting the students at this elite secondary school just outside Glasgow to cruelly nickname him “Thirtysomething.” But he proved to be a pretty good egg, helping classmates master tough subjects, offering car rides and befriending fellow outsiders so they didn’t feel so alone. Hailing from Canada and carrying some considerable emotional baggage — his mother, an opera singer, had died, forcing him to move to Scotland to live with his grandmother — Brandon eventually became the lead in that year’s musical, South Pacific. But his dream was to be a doctor, which with his good grades seemed to be an easily obtainable objective. Soon, he was off to medical school at Dundee University — and then things got weird.
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