At the London premiere of the latest Marvel movie, “Thunderbolts,” last month, the usual crowd was invited: models, celebrities and Hollywood types. Slipping between them, his tattoos peeping out of his button-down, was a less typical invited guest: a 32-year-old man who makes a living nailing metal shoes onto horses’ feet.

No one was more surprised that a farrier from West Yorkshire, England, nabbed an invite to a film premiere than the man himself. For half his life, Samuel Wolfenden has pared and filed horse hooves in relative obscurity alongside his father at his blacksmithing business in Halifax, just west of Leeds, SW Farriers. He was happy to hammer shoes onto the overgrown hoofs of stout Suffolk Punch horses and little Dales ponies, and go to bed in his hometown, satisfied with the polished equine toes he left behind.

Then one day two years ago he propped his phone on his toolbox of rasps and nippers in the barn while he was nailing a shoe onto a shaggy Shire horse and pressed record.

“I wanted a portfolio of what I’m doing to look back at,” Wolfenden said in an interview in May, recalling why he filmed and then posted that 10-second clip on Instagram before going to bed that night. “I woke up the next day and had millions of millions of views; I had one hundred thousand followers,” he added. “It was wild.”

The combination of adorable animals, good-looking men (and some women) and the satisfaction of watching a shabby hoof get scraped and hammered into something seemly, has emerged as must-scroll viewing for the millions of people — many with nothing to do with horses — who appear to be transfixed by farrier content.