Maya Hawke’s dishing out industry secrets about how social media clout is shaping Hollywood casting.
On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, she shared how some top directors convinced her to stay on Instagram, spilling that an actor’s follower count can actually help secure movie funding.
“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.”
Maya Hawke dropped a bombshell about what producers told her: “‘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 continued. “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.”
Turns out she’s not alone in this social media casting drama. Elle Fanning shared a similar story on the same podcast in 2023, revealing she lost out on a major role partly because her Instagram following wasn’t big enough.
“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].”
