When Rachel Brosnahan accepted her Emmy for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the 28-year-old used her speech to urge women to the polls.
"One of the things I love most about this show is that it's about a woman who is finding her voice anew," said Brosnahan of the critically-acclaimed Amazon hit. "One of the most important ways that we can find and use our voices is to vote."
Brosnahan is one of several women on this year's 30 Under 30 Hollywood & Entertainment list using her platform to speak up. Take NBC Champions' star Josie Totah, who has been a teenage advocate for LGBTQ rights since before coming out publicly as transgender, or Star Wars: The Last Jedi's Kelly Marie Tran, who railed against online harassment in a New York Times op-ed.
The chance for actors to tell stories on their own terms has led others to move behind camera: Actor Quinn Shephard became the youngest female director to debut at Tribeca Film Festival with Blame, which she also wrote, produced and starred in, and is now working on a show at FX.
The class of 2019 features the entertainment industry’s 30 best young actors, writers, producers, directors, agents, executives and entrepreneurs. All list members must be under the age of 30 as of December 31, 2018 and cannot have appeared on a previous 30 Under 30. Some are far younger than the cut off: This year’s list includes 15-year-olds Storm Reid and Elsie Fisher.
In order to form our eighth annual who's who of entertainment, we invited three industry experts to serve as judges: 30 Under 30 alum Jermaine Fowler, writer, comedian and producer; Mary Parent, Vice Chairman of Worldwide Production at Legendary Entertainment and Allison Schroeder, the Academy Award-Nominated writer of Hidden Figures.
In front of the camera, both box office stars and critical darlings earned nods. Newcomer Timothée Chalamet scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Call Me by Your Name, which catapulted him to stardom. Nick Robinson helped shift the presentation of teen romance in mainstream movies with the gay bildungsroman Love, Simon. But it was Tye Sheridan who scored a giant box office tally with Steven Spielberg's Ready, Player, One. The film grossed $137 million in the U.S. alone, according to Comscore, for a global total of $582.2 million--the best gross in a decade for the famed director.
"That's a massive global audience seeing Tye Sheridan," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at industry analyst Comscore. "When you're a young actor and a movie is resting on your shoulders, there's a lot of pressure, but he made this film his own."
On the small screen, Brosnahan is joined by Atlanta's Zazie Beetz, who is best known for her Emmy-nominated role as Van in FX's Atlanta. She also graduated to the big screen playing Domino in 2018's Deadpool 2, which grossed $734.2 million on a $110 million budget. A breakout star of FX's Pose, Ryan Jamal Swain makes the cut thanks to his role as a homeless teenage dancer who finds a new family in New York's queer ballroom scene.
This year's director honorees include Olivia Milch, who co-wrote and co-produced Ocean's 8, and Aneesh Chaganty, whose feature film directorial debut, Searching, won three awards at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
Among the entrepreneurs on the list are production company End Cue's Andrew Kortschak as well as OBB Pictures' Michael Ratner. Ratner's credits include creating, executive-producing and directing hit web series Cold as Balls, starring Kevin Hart.
Digital stars run their own production companies, albeit on a smaller scale. Take Liza Kosha: The Vine-comedian-turned-YouTuber has racked up 16.3 million YouTube subscribers and 2.5 billion views with her home-shot and edited clips of punnery, gags and parodies. She has also made the rare leap to traditional media, becoming the face of Nickelodeon's Double Dare reboot, a host of MTV's resurrected TRL and scoring a role in Hulu's drama Freakish. In 2018 she created, produced and starred in her own YouTube Red series, Liza on Demand, in which she works in the gig economy.
“The worst advice I've ever received was, ‘Don't post on YouTube, it's dying,’” says Koshy, who earned an estimated seven figures in 2017, thanks largely to her online output. “All of these different opportunities came from YouTube.”
Edited by Natalie Robehmed and Madeline Berg.
