Maya Hawke says that movie casts are being decided by actors’ Instagram followers.
The actress revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that she was talked out of leaving Instagram by “so many smart directors” because the amount of followers actors have “can get [a] movie funded.”
"The line between actor and celebrity has gotten extremely blurry," Hawke said. "What I always wanted to be is an actor where the work is what the draw is, not the personhood. But the industry keeps changing, and you have to change with it and understand that all of these things are getting blurred."
Hawke then claimed that she’d been told, “‘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 [from] the cast that I cast. So if you delete your Instagram and I lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people that I have to cast around you.'”
"It's like, I don't care about Instagram,” she explained. “Instagram sucks. 'Right, but just so you know, if you have over this many followers you can get the movie funded.' Well, I wanna make the movie so...it's a really confusing line to walk."
Hawke isn’t the only actor to speak about the impact of social media in casting for roles. In 2023, Elle Fanning appeared on the same podcast and revealed that she was passed over for “something big” because she didn’t have enough Instagram followers.
“I’m not going to say what it was, but I didn’t get a part once for something big because — it might not have just been this reason, but this was the feedback that I heard — was because I didn’t have enough Instagram followers at the time,” Fanning said.
"I firmly don't believe in not getting a part [for that reason]," she added. "But yeah, I would not say no to those [opportunities to star in a franchise]."