Why is the search for the next big movie star so limited?
by Kyndall Cunningham
Glen Powell at the Hit Man photo call at the Four Seasons Austin on May 17, 2024, in Austin, Texas.
For approximately a decade, it seemed like we were living in an age without young, male movie stars.
While burgeoning actresses like Jennifer Lawerence, Brie Larson, and Emma Stone were dominating the 2010s, the industry seemed strikingly unprepared in choosing successors to middle-aged stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Christian Bale — which resulted in some weird, onscreen age gaps. In 2013, several publications had declared a “leading man crisis” in response to the search for an actor to portray the role of Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey series, which unenthusiastically went to Irish actor Jamie Dornan. 
In this current boy-obsessed era in Hollywood, the idea that there was ever a dearth of young, male actors seems unfathomable. Since Timothée Chalamet’s 2017 breakout in critical darlings Call Me by Your Name and Ladybird, the industry has experienced a deluge of male talent in their 20s and 30s leading the buzziest movies, dominating awards conversations, and dating hot female celebrities. This index of in-demand actors includes Austin Butler, Glen Powell, Josh O’Connor, Jeremy Allen White, Callum Turner, Mike Faist, Jacob Elordi, Harris Dickinson, and Irish heartthrobs Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan. They’re also beloved on social media, where cinephiles and otherwise horny users come up with new ways to classify their “internet boyfriends” every other week. (The latest categorization is curiously “hot rodents.”) 
Looking at this new wave of prospects one thing is undeniable: The overwhelming majority of them are white. While the individual actors may be exciting, the lack of diversity seems to herald an uninspired, narrow future for Hollywood.
On top of that, it’s unclear whether all these guys are actual movie stars. After all, a movie star doesn’t just lead a film; a movie star can sell a film to audiences on just their name alone. 
It’s hard to deny the appeal of many of these younger actors. In a short period of time, Butler has proven his dynamism in the films Elvis and Dune Part II, Powell has reportedly brought back the rom-com with Anyone But You and Hit Man, and Mescal and O’Connor feel like callbacks to James Dean, representing a more sensitive, interior type of masculinity — much to Jerry Seinfield’s ire. But is the search for the next Tom Cruise really that exciting when most of our options are white? 
The ’90s and early aughts are often referenced as the last movie-star era by film critics and cinephiles. Prior to Hollywood’s IP takeover, A-listers like George Clooney, Denzel Washington, and Tom Hanks could attract moviegoers solely based on their beauty, talent, charisma, and, in some cases, their personal lives. It didn’t matter whether the projects they starred in had particularly compelling plots or whether they gave A+ performances. In many cases, it was enough that audiences got to spend a couple of hours watching their favorite faces on a giant screen. 
In our current post-Marvel landscape, it’s become harder than ever to separate working actors from actual movie stars. (Before the consecutive box-office success of Wonka and Dune Part II, this has become a popular topic of debate regarding Chalamet.) One popular explanation for this phenomenon is that IPs have replaced “star vehicles.” Iconic superheroes, toys, and resurrected characters from previous franchises are becoming the main draw for audiences rather than the famous people playing them. 
“There’s an argument that the system doesn’t create Chris Evans the star,” says Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi, who also covers film. “It creates Chris Evans as Captain America, and people want to see Captain America.”
Looking at Evans’ post-Captain America filmography, this feels accurate. Aside from 2019’s Knives Out — in which he was one piece of a large ensemble — most of his non-Marvel ventures have fallen under the radar. Hadadi also notes Thor star Chris Hemsworth and the latest Spider-Man Tom Holland as two actors whose career paths outside the MCU “just haven’t hit the same way.” 
On the flipside, Marvel was helping a few actors become stars during its height in the 2010s — specifically, Black actors. In 2018, Black Panther elevated the late Chadwick Boseman from a man in biopics to a household name. Boseman’s co-star Winston Duke would go on to lead another huge studio film, Jordan Peele’s Us. And Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger was arguably the performance that cemented him as a bona fide movie star, following the success of Creed. 
The enthusiasm around Black Panther seemed like an indication of where Hollywood was going in the mid- and late 2010s. Following the #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015, industry organizations pledged to make efforts toward racial equity. These calls for inclusion mainly resulted in the Academy of Motion Pictures diversifying its voting body. In 2023, the organization also announced representation and inclusion standards, which drew some public criticism for its bare minimum requirements. Although it focused on women in the industry as a response to the #MeToo movement, the Time’s Up campaign in 2018 also played a role in making diversity and inclusion a large talking point. By 2017, the Obama-era sentiment “representation matters” had become a popular rallying cry online and a subject of acceptance speeches.
On a surface level, Hollywood was also beginning to look a lot different, with some of the buzziest movies starring men of color. It seemed like we would no longer have to rely on aging veterans like Washington, Jamie Foxx, and Will Smith to lead blockbusters. In 2016, the Oscar-winning film Moonlight highlighted the talents of Trevante Rhodes, Andre Holland, Jharrel Jerome, and already familiar face Mahershala Ali. And in 2017, former Skins actor Daniel Kaluuya made his first film-acting triumph in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The same year, Crazy Rich Asians made Henry Golding the rare Asian romantic lead in a studio film, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani starred in The Big Sick.
On the whole, though, Hollywood has not been as inclusive as the past decade of activism has made it seem. Last year, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative revealed that Hollywood was mostly stagnant in terms of inclusivity from 2017 to 2022.
“Hollywood has a way of mocking efforts for real racial inclusion,” says University of Georgia associate professor Maryann Erigha. “Calls for racial diversity are addressed with a set of symbolic performances. Meanwhile, the arrangements that led to the racial disparities remain firmly in place.” 
Hollywood also tends to play scared when it comes to putting nonwhite men in blockbusters, even if audiences have proven repeatedly that they want to see them. Instead, Black and other nonwhite actors are constantly labeled “unbankable” in overseas markets by studio executives. In her book The Hollywood Jim Crow, Erigha writes that “assumed to possess an inherent disadvantage” stemming from “biased perceptions that place disproportionate weight on foreign-market revenue.” Most recently, though, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence proved, once again, that this theory is false. Their film Bad Boys: Ride or Die earned $105 million at the global box office, a notable triumph in a year of summer movie flops. 
The question of who’s given opportunities in Hollywood primarily lies in the hands of studios. However, it’s hard to deny the power of the internet in expressing demand for male talent and making them the main characters in pop culture. 
Stan conversations on platforms like X and TikTok have made discussing male actors a hobby, whether it’s selecting a “white boy of the month,” labeling sensitive men “babygirls,” or following which books Jacob Elordi is reading. However, it’s hard not to wince at the obvious exclusionary quality of the “white boy of the month” meme, even if it’s good fun. For the most part, nonwhite actors — with the exception of Charles Melton, Pedro Pascal, and Oscar Isaac, the latter two in their 40s — are largely absent from these viral moments and public acts of fangirling. 
It’s also important to distinguish the laundry list of “internet boyfriends” from actors who are prepped — or even qualified — to be movie stars. Sometimes, they overlap, like in the case of Chalamet or Butler. You could say the same about Glen Powell, for example, who was quietly working in Hollywood for years without women glomming onto him until fairly recently. Now, he’s being described as an heir to Tom Cruise and a modern-day Cary Grant. To some, the industry’s enthusiastic push of him feels a little unearned. 
“I can’t tell you what Glen Powell has done,” says film critic Murtada Elfadl. “But the internet is obsessed with him. I’ve seen Top Gun 2, and I don’t remember him at all. But there’s a lot of machinery behind him, and somebody decided he meets the moment.”
That same machine doesn’t seem to be working as generously for men of color. The last example of a Black actor who almost received that energy was Jonathan Majors, who made a huge splash in Creed III and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantamania last year. He was slated for several other big projects until his career was abruptly thwarted by an assault conviction. The apparent end of Majors’s Marvel career is no mystery (or loss), although it did come quickly, especially compared to DC’s attempts to rehabilitate Ezra Miller, who has been accused of starting fights and even grooming children.
Across Hollywood, though, there are plenty of nonwhite actors who are consistently employed but seem to be showing up in big projects less and less. It says a lot that the industry seemingly doesn’t have any obvious backups prepared to fill the void of Majors in the MCU, outside of Anthony Mackie’s upcoming turn as Captain America. 
“It’s just these white men because nobody’s pushing anybody else,” says Elfadl. “I don’t know what Kelvin Harrison Jr. is doing. I don’t know what Aaron Pierre is doing. I think these are people who should be taken seriously.” Pierre and Harrison Jr. respectively played Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in National Geographic’s latest Genius miniseries. However, it didn’t receive much fanfare. 
This isn’t to say there isn’t still excitement around someone like now-Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya — although his output is noticeably less frequent than certain in-demand white actors. Elfadl argues that Kaluuya “seems more like a Daniel Day-Lewis” than, say, a Brad Pitt, mainly taking on “serious” roles. Still, one wonders how the quantity (and quality) of parts he’s being offered. The same question lingers around Kaluuya’s fellow Skins alumni Dev Patel, who feels like he’s only given one shot every few years to star in something. Most recently, he turned to directing and acting in his own movie, Monkey Man. 
Still, following last year’s WGA and SAG strikes, studio executives haven’t given moviegoers much hope that the industry will at least look as diverse as it was just a few years ago, as the Wall Street-driven billionaires making decisions are less creative and more stubborn than ever. In a smarter, more equitable industry, the continued success of the Bad Boys franchise and Will Smith as a screen icon would not be a surprise but an expectation. Who knows when it will finally become a blueprint? 
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