Florence Pugh
MOVIES: The Wonder, A Good Person, Dune: Part Two, Oppenheimer
She’s been fearless in every role, and became an icon of defiance just for holding an Aperol Spritz. Pugh stars in two of 2023’s most anticipated films, Oppenheimer and the Dune sequel. She hasn’t given up hope in the future of movie stars, partly because she knows Timothée Chalamet. “He’s our Leo,” she says. In that case, she may just be Kate Winslet.
Selena Gomez
TV: Only Murders in the Building, Selena + Chef
MOVIES: My Mind & Me
The former Disney Channel kid is now an acclaimed actor and mental health advocate whose frankness has won her 374 million Instagram followers, arguably more than anyone else in Hollywood. For a time, Gomez turned her social media passwords over to her assistant because the rare toxic comments were traumatizing: “These people get inside your head.”
Austin Butler
MOVIES: Elvis, Dune: Part Two
TV: Masters of the Air
Butler exploded from former child star to global icon in the vertiginous Elvis, for which he’s been nominated for an Oscar. With the Dune sequel, he’s now part of one of the most exciting casts of his generation. “If I had some film hit really big when I was younger,” he says, “I wouldn’t have had to keep going back to the drawing board and saying, ‘How do you get better at this?’ ”
Ana de Armas
MOVIES: Blonde, The Gray Man, Ballerina
The Cuba-born actor will star in the John Wick spin-off, Ballerina, and is starting to produce. But her turbulent, Oscar-nominated turn in Blonde is never far from her mind: “If you put Marilyn Monroe ‘the movie star’ aside, she’s just an actress trying to navigate life and this system, which is so hard to navigate for anybody.”
Jonathan Majors
MOVIES: Devotion, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Creed III, Magazine Dreams
If you haven’t followed Majors’s career yet, 2023 should wake you up. He’s put on weight and muscle to play a boxer and a bodybuilder, as well as Marvel’s new big bad, Kang the Conqueror. Says Majors, “I’m very happy with how everything is going, but I’m not satisfied—and that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Keke Palmer
MOVIES: Nope, Lightyear
She was a spirited, surprising hero in Nope, and—thanks to SNL—her baby bump enthralled the internet. Asked who her heroes are, the former Nickelodeon darling says, “One hundred percent Tyler Perry. He’s showing a path of ownership for Black creators. You want somebody else? We got Jordan Peele, we got Donald Glover, we got Issa Rae. It’s like, we have options.”
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Hoyeon
TV: Squid Game, Disclaimer
The Korean model turned actor rocketed to fame (and a best actress award from the Screen Actors Guild) with Squid Game. Next up? A role on Apple TV+’s Disclaimer, starring Cate Blanchett. It’s all made for an intense ride with “complex emotions coming from everywhere.”
Jeremy Allen White
TV: The Bear
MOVIES: Fingernails, The Iron Claw
After 10 years on the cult treasure Shameless, White broke big as chef Carmy Berzatto on The Bear. He’s since made the sci-fi romance Fingernails alongside two actors he loves, Riz Ahmed and Jessie Buckley, and donned “ridiculously skimpy clothing” as the late wrestler Kerry Von Erich in The Iron Claw.
Emma Corrin
MOVIES: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, My Policeman
TV: Retreat
Just being cast as Princess Diana in The Crown informed Corrin’s portrayal of the role. “I had a weird parallel experience of being plucked from nowhere and suddenly having people outside my house,” says the British actor. Corrin identifies as nonbinary and credits friends in the industry, like actor Dan Levy and comedian Mae Martin, with helping them on their journey.
Regé-Jean Page
MOVIES: The Gray Man, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
The British actor broke out in Bridgerton, then made clear he’s more than just a (breathtakingly) handsome face with The Gray Man. Page, one of two actors in this portfolio rumored to be in the running to play 007, has a strict policy of humility: “The actors are the piece of equipment that turns up last and fucks up most, basically.”
Julia Garner
TV: Ozark, Inventing Anna
Last year, she drew Emmy nominations for both Inventing Anna and Ozark, and won for the latter for the third time. Still, Garner remembers being 21 and struggling to find work. “But I booked Ozark,” she says, “and I kept pushing because I felt like I still had a lot to do.”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson
MOVIES: Bullet Train, Kraven the Hunter
The Englishman has character-actor depth, and enough magnetism to keep climbing the marquee. The Bond rumors are still just rumors, and he’s careful to keep them in perspective: “You just want to stay grounded, and stay around the people that you love and love you back.”
In Praise of “Sparkly People”
“LOOK, THERE WAS a time I thought it was a dirty word,” says Jonathan Majors. “You know what I mean?” He’s talking about stardom. He says the words movie star, then lets them hang in the air like an incantation. “In school, you would never dream of saying something so ambitious.” Majors grew up poor in Texas, where he was raised by his mom, who’s a pastor. As a teenager, he was combative. Anti-authority. Then he discovered the release valve that was acting. This year, the Yale drama school grad’s coiled presence is on display in Creed III and the new Ant-Man and the Wasp movie, and he’ll reign as the archvillain in the next phase of Marvel blockbusters. Majors pours himself into his roles and wants them to be seen, so he doesn’t shy away from the notion of stardom anymore. “I think it’s a word that I was afraid of, because it actually comes with a lot of hope,” he says, “and that’s scary.”
There aren’t many actors who give us as much hope as the 12 stars in these pages. None of them have been on one of our Hollywood covers before. We’ve chosen them because they’re riveting onscreen and driven and ever-evolving in real life. Florence Pugh, the British actor who entered the atmosphere like a comet not so long ago, recently shot Dune: Part Two with other bright lights of her generation, including Austin Butler. “They are remarkable people, number one, and unbelievable actors, number two,” says Pugh. “They’re stars in their own ways, not in the cliché way of using the word. They’re just—they’re sparkly people.”
Despite their youth, most of the sparkly people in this issue have been acting forever. Pugh played Mary in a school nativity play at the age of six—and decided her character should have a Yorkshire accent. Keke Palmer made her film debut as a child, and Butler and Selena Gomez found fame early on TV as well. “When I was filming Elvis, Selena found this photograph of the two of us when I did a guest-star thing on her show Wizards of Waverly Place,” says Butler. “And she sends it to me, just going, ‘Wow, remember this?’ It feels like another life. When you’re a child actor, you see so many people come in from Texas or something, and at a certain point they may quit or go back. We’re just so fortunate to have careers in this industry for this amount of time.”
Everybody here is ecstatic just to be regularly employed when, as Regé-Jean Page puts it, “a good 90 percent of my industry is out of work at any given time.” Page, who grew up in London and in Harare, Zimbabwe, is best known (for now) as the duke on Bridgerton. He regularly reminds himself that an entire fictional world has been built before he even steps on a set—that every project “has had love, sweat, tears, and breakdowns before I’ve ever read the script.” Palmer, a native of Illinois and a magnetic heroine in Nope last year, also refuses to take too much credit for her trajectory. “Anything that’s happened in my life—especially how it’s happened this year—was ordained by forces beyond me,” she says. “I give it up to God. I give it up to the universe, because I could not have written some of these things, you know what I mean? I’m not that good of an author.”
ARE THERE POTHOLES that everybody here has to swerve around on a daily basis? Of course. For one thing, how do you remain elusive and intriguing in a ravenous culture like ours? “When Paul Newman was acting, he was always 40 feet tall,” says Butler. “We didn’t see a ton of him outside of that big screen, and there’s something really special about that.” Julia Garner, whose talent felt like a bolt out of the blue in Ozark and who has been, justifiably, receiving awards on something like a conveyor belt ever since, worries about overexposure too: “Everyone is so out there, and the mystery is disappearing. And when a person doesn’t have mystery anymore, you can’t get it back.”
Three of these actors—Butler, Ana de Armas, and Emma Corrin—have given arresting performances as the most famously doomed icons in history: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana. Both Butler and de Armas even snagged Oscar nominations. So, yes, this generation knows the glare can burn. Their opinion of social media is…let’s call it complicated.
“If it was up to me, I would delete Instagram right now, but I can’t,” says de Armas, who grew up in Cuba and had to learn her first English-language roles phonetically. The reason she can’t delete it, of course, is that she needs to promote her projects and the brands she has partnerships with. “It’s tricky because you feel the pressure to share some personal insight, or something about your private life, to keep people interested in you,” she says. “You have to find a balance somehow, which I find very difficult.” Gomez, a toweringly popular figure online, as well as a key part of the delicious series Only Murders in the Building, has taken breaks from social media, but recently returned to posting on Instagram and TikTok, the latter of which she finds to be “a little less hostile.” Jeremy Allen White, who’s been inspiring a couple of different kinds of hunger as a chef on The Bear, may have landed on the healthiest way to filter out noise: “My mom tells me what they’re saying on Twitter, which is nice.”
GIVEN THE SCRUTINY, it’s been refreshing to see these actors admit to being human as devotedly, and publicly, as they do. Pugh wages a kind of campaign against the appearance of flawlessness. Is it ever a burden? “No, I love it, I love it,” she says. “When I started out, my granddad would always tell me off and be like, ‘Why are you showing everyone your ugly spots?’ He’d be really confused as to why I’d show my cellulite. My answer was like, ‘Well, I’d much rather do it than they do it, and then I feel ashamed.’ There’s no pretending with me. When I put on makeup and step in a wonderful dress, I give credit to the people that made me look like that, and I also want my fans to know that (a) I don’t look like that all the time, and (b) I also have stress acne, and I also have hairy eyebrows, and I also have greasy hair.”
Gomez has thought a lot about public personas since that photo of her and Butler was taken on the set of Wizards of Waverly Place, needless to say. “I wasn’t a wild child by any means, but I was on Disney so I had to make sure not to say ‘What the hell’ around anyone,” she says. “Now I think being the best role model means being honest even with the ugly and complicated parts.” Talking openly about her anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder had a dramatic, liberating effect, which she noticed even when encountering fans on the street: “I wasn’t just this prop to people. You’re so cute—let’s take a picture! It was more than that. It was a conversation about mental health or a conversation about courage or disappointment or grief or loss. And I started to go, okay, this is paying off.”
Corrin, the British actor who gave such raw, humane performances in The Crown, My Policeman, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, has been sharing their experience as a nonbinary actor. “No matter who we are or what our jobs are, we have a self that we present and how we feel on the inside,” they say. “Everyone has a journey of combining those to feel like we’re living as ourselves. In the past that has been so restricted. So, there’s a lot of joy for me in talking about that and sharing that part of myself, because I hope that it helps others as well.”
The message in all this is that pretending is best left in movies and on TV, where everyone in these pages is fully committed. “That’s the thing that I get the endorphins and the high from—being around great actors, working with directors, digging deep into characters where you’re really feeling vulnerable and on a path,” says the British actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson. “It feels therapeutic.” He remembers loving Brad Pitt’s movies when he was growing up: “I was a big fan of Brad when I was a kiddo. I loved his presence onscreen. He really was the master of cool.” This past year, he appeared in Bullet Train with Pitt. Now, like Page, he’s rumored to be in the running to inherit James Bond’s tux from Daniel Craig. So, you know, no complaints.
As her own star rose, the South Korean actor Hoyeon did have one small request: some time off to recuperate and filter through everything that had happened since Squid Game became a phenomenon. After last year’s Emmys she found herself overwhelmed: “These kind of complex emotions were coming from everywhere. I thought I could have a break, but I was working, working, working.” If it’s any consolation, as with all the stars here, we’ll be at our screens, ready to watch, watch, watch. —Essay by Jeff Giles
Interviews by Caitlin Brody, David Canfield, Yohana Desta, Rebecca Ford, Natalie Jarvey, Julie Miller, Chris Murphy, Joy Press, Katey Rich, and Savannah Walsh
— Read Every Story From Vanity Fair’s 2023 Hollywood Issue
— “A New Power Generation”: Radhika Jones Introduces the 2023 Hollywood Issue
— Florence Pugh on Authenticity, Dune 2, and the Thrill of Having Such “Sparkly” Friends
— Austin Butler Is Grateful That Overnight Success Never Happened
— Selena Gomez Is Ready to Leave Darkness Behind
— Jeremy Allen White on The Bear, Sudden Stardom—And the Thirst for Chef Carmy
— Jonathan Majors, the Conqueror: “I Have No Interest in the Fuckery of the Industry”
— Behind the Scenes of Vanity Fair’s 29th Annual Hollywood Portfolio
Photographs by Steven Klein
Styled by Patti Wilson
Set design by Jack Flanagan
Hair by Ward
Makeup and grooming by Kabuki
Manicures by Ashlie Johnson
Tailors, Hasmik Kourinian, Susie Kourinian, Hakop Jack Pogosyan
Lighting Director, David Devlin
Movement Director, Megan Lawson
Assistant Movement Director, Taylor James
Produced on location by Travis Kiewel for That One Production
Location, Milk Studios LA
Selena Gomez’s dress by Prada; sandals by Jimmy Choo; ear cuff and ring by Givenchy; choker by Swarovski. Jonathan Majors’s clothing by Hermès; bow tie by Paul Stuart; brooch by Tiffany & Co. Schlumberger. Austin Butler’s clothing and boots by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; jewelry and watch by Cartier. Ana de Armas’s clothing and bag by Schiaparelli; sandals by Pīferi; jewelry by Louis Vuitton. Florence Pugh’s dress by Valentino; shoes by Giambattista Valli; gloves by Lael Osness; ear clips by Tiffany & Co. Schlumberger; cuffs by Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti. Keke Palmer’s trench coat by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; shoes by Giuseppe Zanotti; necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s suit by Bally; boots by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Julia Garner’s dress by Richard Quinn; shoes by Pīferi; earrings by Gucci. Regé-Jean Page’s clothing and tie by Giorgio Armani; boots by Christian Louboutin; brooch by Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti; bracelet by Bulgari. Emma Corrin’s clothing by Area; sandals by Khaite; bra by Tom Ford; earrings and ring by Cartier; bracelet by Cartier High Jewelry. Hoyeon’s dress, sandals, and tights by Louis Vuitton; gloves by Lael Osness; jewelry by Louis Vuitton High Jewelry. Jeremy Allen White’s clothing by Valentino; boots by Alessandro Vasini; ring (left middle finger) by David Yurman. Additional sandals by Tom Ford. Makeup products by Estée Lauder (de Armas), Gucci (Garner), Lancôme (Hoyeon), Rare Beauty (Gomez), Chanel (all other women). Nail enamel by Gucci (Garner), Dior Vernis (all other women). Grooming products by Boy de Chanel.
