Film critic Christina Newland explores what it means to be a real star in the social media age.
The finest movie stars of yesterday had asymmetry, idiosyncrasy, personality. They had lived lives before they made it to motion pictures: waited on tables, and checked coats, and tended bar; they rode the rails, and read books, and trained studiously at other things. They provoked confusing emotions, made manifest our own paradoxes, offered their faces and bodies up as objects of public projection and symbol. The finest movie stars of yesterday smoked. Will the star of tomorrow be the same? Will they have a life unblemished by the problematic, or be amputated from any darkness by publicity protection? Will they always have a Letterboxd top four prepared on the red carpet? Will probiotics and face lifts slough off their rough edges? Will they be smooth, poreless, even made of AI entirely? Will they even be corporeal?
Will they be someone who touches us—whose face, like Bergman’s, is enigmatic and sublime, or who, like Redford, could be painted, or sketched, or sculpted by ancient hands? Whose imperfect beauty is somehow poignant, like Bogart’s; whose personification of trouble and hurt will feel breathlessly immortalised for the big screen, like Garbo’s?
In the past few years, a great complaint among film lovers was that movie stars had suddenly failed to exist in the age of high-concept CGI slop. It was beginning to feel like the real stars were only from an older generation—that we were destined to pine for the 1990s as the last time gods walked the earth in the form of Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, et al, and it was only their divine appearances that provoked the hushed, awed whispers that accompany the presence of a Real Movie Star. They gave us instantly iconic quotations like the older stars per Jerry Maguire (1996), romantic moments that you remembered for a lifetime per Titanic (1997). But they were ageing out of the business. Movie stardom has always been a cult of the young and beautiful. Who were the new ones?
It was beginning to feel like the real stars were only from an older generation—that we were destined to pine for the 1990s as the last time gods walked the earth in the form of Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, et al.
It was beginning to feel like the real stars were only from an older generation—that we were destined to pine for the 1990s as the last time gods walked the earth in the form of Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, et al.
Christina Newland
By 2025, it seems we have some answers. We have Glen Powell swaggering across our blockbusters in a cowboy hat; Margot Robbie, the crown producer- princess of her own sparkling projects; and mop-headed Timothée Chalamet, the biggest box office draw in all the land. We have potential, and personality, and beauty galore waiting in the wings. We have the sparky, coltish self-assurance of Zendaya and the Marlboro Man charm of Austin Butler; the disgruntled character-actor weirdness of Barry Keoghan and the feral babydoll of horror Mia Goth.
We have stars of tomorrow who have promise and plenty. Maybe even idiosyncrasy and personality, like the stars of yesterday. If only any of them smoked.
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