The weight of followers in Hollywood

How important are Instagram followers to getting a job? In the world of entertainment, definitely a lot. Elle Fanning, an actress who hails from independent cinema and has moved into arthouse cinema with films like The Neon Demon and Somewhere, while making some mainstream impact with Maleficient and the more recent Prime series The Great for Disney, knows this well. On the popular podcast Happy Sad Confused, she recounted how her limited social presence once actually cost her a role, proving that an Instagram or TikTok profile is often just as valuable as CV: "I applied for... I will not say what it was, but I once did not get a role for something big because ... maybe it was not just that reason, but that was the feedback I heard ... it was because I did not have enough followers on Instagram at the time. So it was something like ... I am not a firm believer in not getting a role [because of that]. It was for a bigger thing, a blockbuster thing.

Fanning did not name the film she was rejected for or the actress she lost out on the role for, but fans noted that Sophie Turner told a similar story to The Telegraph UK in 2017 about how she landed a role ahead of another "much better" candidate, presumably in X-Men: Apocalypse, thanks to her followers on Instagram. Shriya Pilgaonkar, an Indian actress, director and producer, also wrote on Twitter, "Actors should not feel forced to have a certain social media following to be considered for projects."


Stories that are on point reveal a very different trend in the industry than in the past, in the days of stardom and Variety titles. While Netflix now prefers to select little-known faces for its productions and then introduce them into the star system as actor-influencers with viral appeal - remember that Corey Mylchreest did not even have Instagram before The Queen Charlotte premiered, while Regé-Jean Page only needed one season of Bridgerton to become an Armani testimonial - big sagas like the Marvel movies have to calculate well to ensure box office success. Apparently, Elle Fanning's 6.2 million followers were not enough compared to Sophie Turner's 14.5 million.