Social media has had an unquestionable impact on Hollywood from heightened trailer exposure to global audiences and detrimental controversies that can go viral online in minutes or hours. Like with anything some of those advancements are good and some are bad, but a new development spotlighted by Maya Hawke (“Stranger Things,” “Inside Out 2”) sounds increasingly bleak for new acting talent trying to get their foot in the door.
The young actress recently had a chat with “Happy Sad Confused“ podcast host Josh Horowitz, where Hawke detailed a conversation she had where someone told her that “some producers” are casting actresses based on total social media follower counts and that deleting her Instagram account could be ill-advised for future work.
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“It’s like, ‘I don’t care about Instagram; Instagram sucks.’ Right, but just so you know, if you have over this many followers, you can get the movie funded. Well, I want to make the movie, so you know, like, it’s a really confusing line to walk,” Hawke revealed when talking about her complex relationship with social media.
” I’ve talked to so many smart directors,” Hawke recalled. “I’m talking to them about how I’m going to delete my Instagram, and they’re like, ‘Just so you know, when I’m casting a movie with some producers, they hand me a sheet with the amount of collective followers I have to get of the cast that I cast. So if you delete your Instagram and I lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people I need to cast around you.'”
Anecdotes aside, are producers thinking that every person following a potential actress on Instagram is automatically going to buy a ticket, download, or stream a project? That’s the real question there. Maybe a good portion would, but there are some clear examples of actors with massive online followings who still experience box office woes and trouble getting people to watch their latest film or series.
Then again, we need to empathize that Hawke is navigating herself in Hollywood as a young woman, and there have always been many more hurdles for actresses to jump compared to their male peers.
It sounds like the bar keeps getting reset for what can get you work and social media is just one part of the looming trouble that could contribute to extreme gatekeeping on the casting side of the industry. Another modern tech issue that has been a problem for rising talent is the normalization of self-taping (actors are expected to record and edit their auditions themselves instead of professional casting departments handling all that) as in-room auditions are becoming less of a common practice.
Online experiences vary and there are plenty of people who decide to escape that madness and delete their accounts. Punishing actors for wanting to avoid the negative aspects of social media interactions (sometimes for their own mental health) feels a bit like a trend that is going to reduce newcomers getting big breaks.
You can watch or listen to that full conversation between Horowitz and Hawke below:
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