Fame, Fortune, Flounder: The Actor Crisis in 5 Parts
This week my series examines stardom's broken culture. Today: The table stakes of what's happening and why it matters for an industry's survival
I’m writing about actors this week, and the industry’s problem minting stars. If you have any thoughts on the problem and how to fix it, drop me a line at richard@theankler.com.
Many of you this past weekend probably watched the Coldplay video for the band’s new song, “All My Love.” The video features 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke, frontman Chris Martin’s Malibu neighbor, both dancing and in conversation.
In the video, clips of Van Dyke in iconic roles, whether dancing in Mary Poppins, or with longtime co-star Mary Tyler Moore, are interspersed.
As he reflects on his career, still going as he nears 100, he is enough of a household name to have stories written about the video in countless news outlets — and enough of a draw to be put in the video of one of the biggest bands in the world.
Which leads me to ask: Which star today can you possibly imagine having the same cultural impact and cachet when they are 99?
Hollywood’s list of plagues and problems is so long there really should be an office devoted to keeping track of them: Consolidation, offshoring, AI, #MeToo, the death of #MeToo, DEI, the death of DEI, the incursion of sports, the incursion of TikTok, mistreatment of child actors and animals.
And the list goes on.
But standing astride all of these is one crisis so big, you wonder why we talk about anything else.
I refer to the crisis of talent, at all levels in the industry. The crisis of creating new stars — and of maintaining them — in an era when we’ve sped right past Andy Warhol’s prophecy into a land, as comedian Patton Oswalt once put it, where everyone will have 15 minutes when they are not a star. The people who occupy the celebrity space today are not glamorous, meticulously branded actors but CEO assassins, TikTok influencers, YouTube talent and sports figures.
Beneath this basic cultural problem, we have a whole other layer of troubles: The disruption that has turned so much of this industry inside out has wreaked havoc on the acting profession. At a moment when we need as many as possible developing skills, growing followings, learning the trade, the ecosystem is looking at something like hive collapse.
So What’s the Big Deal?
Given the centrality of actors to Hollywood’s story, it’s amazing how little the industry talks about them. I mean, we’ll ooh and ah over a star signing a giant contract, swoon when a new star like Timothée Chalamet breaks through, fuss over who’s going to get to play a supervillain or a rebooted Green Hornet or what have you, and most of all, delight when a star has their comeuppance and gets tossed off the A-list for bad behavior or indifferent audiences.
But engrossing though that is, these are all individual stories that amount to a sideshow in the story of our Big Serious Business, here in the MBA-led era.
What we don’t ever talk about is the collective condition for these actors, how their roles have changed and the state of their profession.
