Anyone who pays attention to the stupid things said by actors these days is aware that actors saying stupid things has far less effect on how movies perform than they used to. These days all sorts of awful things barely make a splash. Even when they do, as in the case of Rachel Zegler with Snow White 2025, it’s highly questionable whether her offensive remarks had any effect beyond revealing what the movie actually was prior to its opening weekend. One interpretation of this is that audiences have grown jaded. I’d like to propose a contrary interpretation: stupid things said by actors don’t make a splash anymore because stars don’t exist anymore.

The studio system during the golden age of Hollywood, which very carefully controlled all public appearances by actors and made sure that stars were presented to the public only in very flattering ways, is often interpreted as being primarily about avoiding scandal. It is my belief that this interpretation is backwards. To coin a phrase, it’s putting the cart before the horse. The careful management of stars didn’t exist to avoid scandal. It existed in order to create stars. Lead actors are not naturally stars—they’re just people. As one member of the stage crew in a college theatrical troupe I was in put it: actors are just props with lines. That’s really the natural state of things. The careful management of the publicity of actors that the studio system was able to pull off for a few decades was what turned them into stars.

One of the main tools that the publicists during the golden age of Hollywood used was what used to be called mystique, but which might these days be called artificial scarcity. By keeping the appearances of actors—people who are frequently desperate for attention, hence the acting—rare, people tend to value them more. Plus, this hooks into the assumption people usually make that if someone keeps something a secret, it’s because it’s valuable. Thus actors were made to seem like they’re interesting by keeping their private lives (and their private thoughts) secret. This was paired with manufacturing occasional public appearances which were carefully controlled. This did not mean appearances where there was no chance of the actor saying something stupid, though. It meant appearances where the people the actors were with would help them to look impressive. There was an odd fad for “gotcha journalism” during the 2000s and 2010s, but for most of the time when there was such a thing as a public interview, a good interviewer is someone who knows how to ask questions which make his guest look good. Publicity agents know who the good interviewers were and would get stars interviews with the good interviewers. Other public appearances would be done with hosts or co-hosts who could make the stars look good. And, of course, the stars were also coached on what to do and say to get people to like them.

All of this intertwined with movie magic, of course. It won’t do a ton of good for a plumber to get a skilled publicist. Movies were magical things during the golden age of Hollywood and actors being visibly involved with this magic gave the publicists a lot to work with. And, of course, this secrecy and artificial scarcity helped to accomplish its primary purpose—it sold movie tickets. When people were obsessed with stars, who they didn’t see much of, the stars’ next movie was a way to see an hour and a half of them. (Movies back then were shorter.)

As I said, I don’t think that stupid things said by actors have no effect because people are jaded. I think it’s that stupid things said by actors don’t matter because nobody cared about the actors in the first place, so there was nothing to lose. No one was ever going to see the movie because the actor was in it to begin with, so they can’t decide that they won’t go see it because the actor was in it after all. There probably still is some minor ability for actors to hurt a movie in terms of making people who would have gone to the movie decide to not go after all because the actor is so distasteful, but I doubt there’s actually much capacity for that until you get into really extreme things like running a terrorist cell or a child grooming gang or something like that. We’re already ignoring the actor and pretending that they’re the character anyway.