I’ll bet you all of the money in my bank account that if you walk into any movie theater right now, Pedro Pascal’s face will be on at least two posters. It seems like directors have been recycling the same actors over and over again for the past couple of years, and it’s starting to become noticeable.
Pedro Pascal, Jacob Elordi, Jenna Ortega, and Paul Mescal are a few of the culprits. It’s not like there’s a limited crop of actors for directors to choose from, so why am I able to guess the cast of a new movie before it’s announced?
When I first heard about a Beatles biopic being in the works, I was so excited. Then they announced the cast… I literally thought the announcement was a prank when I first saw it. Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Joseph Quinn, and Harris Dickinson? Those are genuinely all the men I see edits of on my feed every day. But that’s a perfect example of why Hollywood is recycling these talents, because it got a reaction out of me and drew my attention to it.
Is social media to blame?
Spoiler alert, social media is pretty much always to blame. So much of this recycling is owed to the terrifying power of having an online presence. This doesn’t necessarily mean the actor themself has to have a significant online presence. Cillian Murphy has zero social media accounts, as we saw in his interview where he didn’t know what a meme was, but he has a strong TikTok fan base regardless of that.
Social media is the modern primary source of both income and audience influx for filmmakers. TikTok trends like “boy of the month” and “hot rodent boyfriend” bring certain actors into the limelight, and studios will want to take advantage of that by using these boys ASAP. The official Lionsgate TikTok account actually posts edits for their upcoming film releases, and they perform so well because they know their social media audience!
Why the repetition bothers me
I wish I wasn’t so annoyed by seeing the same actors in every movie, but I am. It completely ruins the immersion because I’m immediately like, “oh hey, it’s Timothée Chalamet again”. It’ll often make me dislike an actor if I see them too much because I get kind of sick of them. It’s so frustrating because they could be an amazing actor and likeable as a person, but I still get actor fatigue and can’t appreciate their talent as much as I’d like to.
On top of that, as someone studying film and hoping to enter the industry one day, picking the same A-listers is taking jobs away from the thousands of talented aspiring actors out there. It’s a little bit too reminiscent of the recent discussion of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. I’ve been loving movies with fresh casts and no immediately recognizable faces, like The Long Walk (2025) where almost all of the boys were breakout actors.
Business is business, and obviously bigger names tend to fill seats more. It just becomes an issue when there’s no longer art for art’s sake; everything has to be profitable these days. Studios used to fund low-budget, artsy films for movie lovers and for cast/crew to experiment with. This is how smaller names would climb their way up the industry ladder, but now it’s all about money and that means bigger names.
When It Backfires
Choosing a trendy cast isn’t a foolproof plan for a film’s success. Sydney Sweeney has definitely been one of the recycled actors in the past couple years, which we saw most recently in her new Christy Martin biopic Christy (2025). It opened with $1.3 million, which is fell below expectations considering the budget was $15 million. Even though Sweeney is a household name and all over social media, this movie statistically had one of the weakest openings ever for the amount of theaters it was being shown in.
This pains me to even talk about but Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie are also both 100% part of this recent recycling. The upcoming Wuthering Heights movie, starring both of them, worries me. Jacob Elordi being cast as a character described as “racially ambiguous” and Margot Robbie cast as a 16 year old… I love seeing both of these actors on my screen but seriously? There’s a time and place for them and these roles are not that time or place.
This repetition of casting backfires not just for us, but for the actor too. Jenna Ortega (love her) has accepted a ton of films in relation to the amount of time she’s been working. Some of these scripts have not been up to par with her acting ability which leads to her choosing quantity over quality and ultimately diminishes her reputation.
Trendy or Timeless?
Distinguishing the difference between the current trendy group of actors and actors that are simply A-list icons is difficult. Tom Cruise is everywhere, but no one would ever use the term “trendy” to describe him. However, this isn’t because about age, as seen with McKenna Grace. She’s only 19, but we’ve watched her grow up on our screens consistently and I’d consider her timelessly iconic.
Yet it’s typically a 3-5 year cycle of popularity. Adam Driver was everywhere in the mid 2010’s, but (no shade intended) have we really seen him recently?
Is it just advertising?
Like I said earlier, once an actor turns profitable, film studios will scoop them up and take advantage by advertising their face as much as possible. Trailers and ads are so impactful, because even when an actor is only in one or two films per year, constantly seeing their ads can trick us into thinking that actor is in more movies than they actually are. I see Tom Holland in interviews and blooper reels almost daily during my doom scrolling. This extensive exposure almost made me include him as an example in this article, but I was shocked to find out he hasn’t actually been in a movie since 2021!
Production studios underestimate how much we, as viewers, appreciate new faces. I can confidently say that while I’d like the Jacob Elordi edits on my FYP to continue, I’m ready for a new cycle of actors.