By Anyssa Roberts | Assistant News Editor

aroberts@kykernel.com

Nev Schulman is the guy who brings online strangers together. The star of the documentary “Catfish”  and host of MTV’s “Catfish: The TV Show” came to UK Tuesday to continue the Student Activities Board’s Behind the Lens series.

Schulman brought his own advice to students and discussed the truth about being “catfished,” which is when someone thinks they are in a romantic relationship over the Internet, but the other person is not who they say they are.

He said the term “Catfish” comes from when fish merchants used catfish to keep cod active and fresh on the trip to the final destination. In other words, catfish keep people active, or on their toes.

“I’ve learned in my 29 years of life … to be brutally honest,” Schulman said.

Screams of admiration for the star erupted as Schulman walked out from behind the curtain on stage at the Singletary Center for the Arts.

“I assure you I was not always this great guy,” Schulman said in his presentation to the crowd. “When I was young, I was a disaster.”

Schulman’s journey to fame began when a photo he took for a ballet film wound up in the The New York Sun. It also wound up on the doorstep of a woman in Ishpeming, Mich.

That woman, Angela Wesselman-Pierce, became Schulman’s catfish, meaning she pretended to be someone she wasn’t.

The award-winning documentary “Catfish” by Schulman’s brother, Ariel Schulman,  followed the story of Nev Schulman as he discovered he was being catfished by Wesselman-Pierce.

It later sparked the TV show, which has officially signed on for its third season.

The term “catfish” has even found its way into the official Urban Dictionary, but Schulman said the term is not all that bad.

A lot of the people on Schulman’s show deal with insecurities and find their outlet through social media, but he emphasized that confidence should not be gauged on how many followers one has on social media.

“You only need about two or three friends,” Schulman said.

“Four if one of those three doesn’t have a car,” he joked.

The audience of nearly 1,000 people, mostly women, included freshman Maggie Schrader, who was at the front of the line to see Schulman.

Schrader had just taken her picture with the TV show host when he walked out to greet fans. She said she wasn’t sure what to expect out of the show, but was excited to see Schulman.

“We just came because we are obsessed with the show,” she said.

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