Ethan Hawke has responded to daughter – and fellow actor – Maya Hawke's claims that producers look at an actor's amount of Instagram followers when casting for a project.
"I really feel for these people. It’s really hard," Ethan Hawke said at the Berlin Film Festival (H/T Variety).
"Sometimes I’ll be setting a movie up and someone will say, ‘Oh, you should cast Suzie.’ I’m like, ‘Who is she?’ ‘She has 10 million followers.’ I’m like, ‘OK cool, has she acted before?’ ‘No, but…’ And you’re like, ‘Wow, so this is going to help me get the movie made? This is crazy.'"
Hawke added, "So if I don’t have this public-facing [platform], I don’t have a career? And if I get more followers I might get that part? What?"
While stunt casting is nothing new in Hollywood, Maya Hawke's recent comments on the Happy Sad Confused podcast will have certainly raised eyebrows – particularly the idea that a project may need an "amount of collective followers" from its actors, which can affect the makeup of the entire cast.
"It's like, 'I don't care about Instagram; Instagram sucks.' Right, but just so you know, if you have over this many followers, you can get the movie funded," Maya Hawke said. "Well, I want to make the movie, so you know, like, it's a really confusing line to walk,"
She continued, "I've talked to so many smart directors. I'm talking to them about how I'm going to delete my Instagram, and they're like, '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 of the cast that I cast. So if you delete your Instagram and I lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people I need to cast around you.'"
Instagram or no Instagram, Maya and Ethan Hawke remain booked and busy in the months ahead. Maya Hawke, of course, will return as Robin Buckley in Stranger Things season 5 (and has already teased the movie-length runtime of its eight episodes), while Ethan Hawke is reprising his role as The Grabber in the upcoming Black Phone sequel, with filming getting underway last November.
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