Nina Metz: Do we need movie stars?

Why aren’t actors like Jon Bernthal, Oscar Isaac and Walton Goggins “the biggest movie stars in the world right now?,” someone wondered on social media recently, comparing their talents to Robert De Niro and his peers in the 1970s.

Hollywood has weathered shifting tides since the dawn of cinema. But it’s only more recently that stardom itself, as a pop cultural force, has taken such a hit. Even so, the question gave me pause. What are we being denied, if anything, when actors we admire aren’t “the biggest movie stars in the world”? What are actors themselves being denied?

Maybe audiences are feeling nostalgic for a time when the world around us, even notions of stardom, seemed more simple. What’s the difference between a famous actor and movie star, anyway? I tend to think it has something to do with an aura that builds around a performer when they reach a certain level of commercial and artistic success. It’s also something about their persona — a compelling force of nature — both on screen and off.

Fame has its perks. Kevin Bacon recently told Vanity Fair that, as an experiment, he went out in disguise, experienced anonymity and wasn’t impressed: “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a coffee or whatever. I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.’” But even Bacon isn’t considered a global movie star.

There’s an endless gap between being recognizable and well-liked and a star who is the sole reason audiences flock to a movie. If you consider Bernthal, Isaac and Goggins, each has found success across the professional metrics that matter. How much more stardom is required of them? They seem to be doing just fine, lacking neither opportunities, nominations nor financial stability. Maybe it’s healthier for actors, as human beings, to not carry the mantle of Movie Star?

Either way, the importance of cinema has become diminished. Films don’t occupy our preoccupations the way they once did. If an actor’s stardom is still measured by ticket sales, it’s worth considering which movies were the highest earners in the past. In the ’70s, it wasn’t just the popcorn films that made money (though they certainly did). It was also movies that offered something different than spectacle. Stories that created room for leading actors to stretch their talents were regularly among the top earners: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “A Star is Born,” “Kramer vs. Kramer” (the latter of which was the No. 1 grosser of 1979; try imagining a movie about divorce and single parenthood achieving that today).

Hollywood has done its best in recent years to diminish the power movie stars once had, relying instead on intellectual property and the franchise-ification of familiar titles. Turns out, that will only get you so far. Now those same industry executives are embracing the movie stars that are still around, from Will Smith to Tom Cruise to Denzel Washington, but they remain flummoxed as to how to recreate an enduring system for newer, younger actors. Look how hard Glen Powell’s team is trying and … it’s proving to be a challenge. If you’re wondering why the likes of Bernthal aren’t considered major movie stars today, you also have to contend with the fact that non-white actors have had these same frustrations for years.

“Maybe this is controversial but I don’t think we live in a very glamorous era,” Izzy Custodio says in a recent video for Be Kind Rewind, her YouTube channel about Hollywood history. The lack of Hollywood glamour extends to a subject that may surprise you: The Muppet known as Miss Piggy. But Custodio calls her “the ultimate reflection of Hollywood ambition, obsession and glamour run rampant.” Some aspects of the character are timeless, but it’s been a struggle to adapt her to the current era because “many of the references that originally made her resonate” — her distinctive movie star aspirations and affectations — “aren’t really relevant anymore.”

Premiering this weekend on HBO, a documentary about Faye Dunaway touches on some of these elusive qualities. “Faye is perhaps someone I have created,” Dunaway says, referring to herself in the third person. “It’s a persona that is related very much to my work, that’s specific to my career — that’s the actress, I suppose.”

We don’t often hear stars talk about how they navigate this psychologically. We all have a public self. But for celebrities, this is exaggerated and intensified — a deliberate and calibrated performance all its own.

“In a lot of my films, the clothes have created statements,” she says. Yes, that seems to be missing right now, too. She also talks about Steve McQueen, who was her co-star in 1968’s “The Thomas Crown Affair.” The pair had a “wonderful chemistry,” she says, “because he was an actor, for sure, but he was also Steve. He had a persona that was something that defined him perhaps more than this quote-unquote acting.”

Maybe an actor like Austin Butler comes closes to that at the moment. But what Dunaway is describing is a larger-than-life quality, which used to have a literal meaning: Projected on a massive film screen, movie stars were larger than life. Now, we’re usually watching them on our TV screens and iPads, which have shrunk them back down to size.

In 1950’s “Sunset Boulevard,” about the vicissitudes of stardom, Norma Desmond, a grand dame of silent film who is past her prime, talks with a screenwriter who doesn’t recognize her at first — and then suddenly he does. You used to be big, he says. “I am big,” comes the retort. “It’s the pictures that got small.” A great line that has nevertheless been proven wrong two decades into the 21st century.

If Hollywood is unable to cultivate new stars, AI companies are all too happy to use this to their advantage by resurrecting old stars — from Judy Garland to James Dean to Burt Reynolds — for modern times. Their voices, at least. The possibilities are endless. And creepy.

“They took the idols and smashed them,” goes another line from “Sunset Boulevard.”

“And who’ve we got now? Some nobodies.”

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(Nina Metz is a Chicago Tribune critic who covers TV and film.)

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