Wilfred Warrior
Wilfred Warrior is a Persian cat from London who looks like someone stuffed Steve Buscemi into a white fur coat and ran him over a few times. I know that sounds mean, but it’s the first read you get when you see him—something went catastrophically wrong in a lab somewhere, or the universe played a prank that landed in exactly the right way. The face you’d normally avoid looking at, except it works. He’s got this grin, these huge eyes, this stare that somehow has personality underneath it.
There’s a whole lineage of these cats now. Maru, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, all the others who became mascots before anyone thought to give them contracts. Wilfred is the latest, and he might be the oddest. Not the cutest—the oddest. That’s a different currency on the internet these days.
He got pushed into view by Michael Rapaport, the comedian, who took one of Wilfred’s videos and re-dubbed it. That’s the whole story. Someone took this genuinely weird thing and gave it a frame, and now it’s everywhere. The algorithm picked it up. People started showing it to each other. Now Wilfred’s growing by the day, and I understand why. Once you see his face you think about it at odd moments. You want other people to know what it’s like to encounter him.
There’s something about being this unresolved, this genuinely peculiar, and just not caring. Most internet cats are cute or funny. Wilfred is just unsettling in a way that’s funny to me. The blankness of it. The confidence. Like he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be endearing and that’s exactly what makes him work.