Dear Gossips,
Variety released their “young Hollywood impact report” this week, naming up-and-comers like Iain Armitage, Hunter Schafer—who has horror-thriller Cuckoo opening this month—Kaia Gerber, Merrily We Roll Along star Maya Boyd, Heartstopper stars Joe Locke and Kit Connor, NewJeans, Dominic Sessa, and Cailee Spaeny of the upcoming Alien: Romulus among others on their list.
They also have a feature on Daisy Edgar-Jones, star of summer success story Twisters, and how she is now part of a highly select group of twenty-something actresses who broke out on TV/streaming and then leveraged social media for film stardom.
Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Daisy Edgar-Jones are now the hope of Hollywood’s next generation. There are others, of course, I, for one, wouldn’t rule out Cailee Spaeny, and I’m sure there is young talent yet to be discovered coming down the pike. But Zendaya, Sydney, and Daisy all established their box office bona fides this year—technically Anyone But You is a December 2023 movie, but it made its bones by legging it out at the box office through January and February this year. And Variety is literally asking if Daisy could be the next Julia Roberts. (Somewhere, Julia Roberts just whispered, There can be only one.)
Could Daisy Edgar-Jones be the next Julia? I get why the question is being asked. Daisy Edgar-Jones has a similar earthy appeal, she’s beautiful but fun, glamorous but accessible, as Julia was back in the day (she’s much less accessible now). But Daisy is also British, so my knee-jerk answer is “no”. To evoke Julia Roberts is to evoke the ephemeral notion of “America’s sweetheart”. In that regard, Sydney Sweeney is a more likely candidate. She’s cute as a button and she likes American muscle cars and rom-coms. But Sydney has already been cast as “the body” of this generation, like Scarlett Johansson, Bo Derek, Marilyn Monroe, and Jean Harlow before her. “America’s sweetheart” and “the body” are separate archetypes, it’s the Madonna/whore complex at work.
So, to wholesome, brown-eyed girl Daisy Edgar-Jones we turn. In that way, sure, she could be “the next Julia”. She can probably fill those shoes. I need to see her do a comedy to judge for sure, what defined Julia early in her career wasn’t just her smile or her laugh, it was her ability to convincingly slide from comedy to drama, rom-coms to tearjerkers. We need to see more of Daisy first, though. It’s too early for these definitions, and more, it doesn’t acknowledge that this new generation of movie stars operates differently from the previous generations. Social media has changed the game, as has the much less stable nature of the film industry. Stars have to be far more diversified now than they ever were before, it’s not enough to star in movies, they have to be whole brands unto themselves. The demands are different, their careers will grow differently.
We shouldn’t be looking for the next Julia Roberts. There won’t ever be another one, because the conditions that produced Julia Roberts don’t exist anymore. But Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sydney Sweeney, and Zendaya are in the process of defining a new kind of movie stardom, one that depends on social media followers as much as it does box office dollars. Speaking of Zendaya, though, as long as we are throwing labels around, she’s obviously the superstar.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
