The New Rules For Making It In Hollywood

Beau Mirchoff is currently filming a movie called Party Boat. “It’s about a party boat,” he says. Beau is 28, with a puffy, amiable head of hair and mischievous eyes. He’s been acting professionally since he was 14. In 2006, he was in Scary Movie 4—that was kind of his big break. Later, he had a five-year run on MTV’s high school sitcom Awkward. He acted opposite David Duchovny on Aquarius, for NBC, and opposite Selena Gomez, when they were both younger, in Disney’s The Wizards Return: Alex vs. Alex.

He paces in his trailer on the Party Boat set down in Atlanta, where rain has been wreaking havoc with the shooting schedule. Party Boat is being made by a company called Crackle. Beau is the first guy to tell you he didn’t entirely know what Crackle was a year ago. Well—he knew it was the thing Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee was on. He loves that show, he says.

“So that’s the extent of my knowledge of Crackle,” Beau says. “But they had a really funny script, the character is awesome, they have great people attached—it was like, ‘Let’s do it. Why not?’ ” He peers out of his trailer and sees the same movie set he’s seen a dozen times before. “In terms of filming it, there’s nothing different between this film and another little film. You have the same departments. Same stuff.”

Life as a young actor in Hollywood has always been characterized by some degree of helplessness and confusion—the sense that somebody somewhere with more money than you can fathom is deciding your destiny. But 2017 feels unusual, somehow. At a moment when the entertainment industry has never seemed more crowded and confusing, more vibrant and more diffuse, guys like Beau are still trudging into audition rooms, reading sides, and ending up on movie and television sets…but now, sometimes, they’re making content for platforms that even they haven’t heard of. They’re getting calls from outlets that they didn’t even know existed.

“I’ve been a talent agent now almost 30 years,” says Maury DiMauro, one of the heads of Innovative Artists and who helped discover Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried. “The first 20 years were really very traditional: You look for actors in a school and you guided them in classes and programs, and get your head shot, and you sent them out in a traditional route. There isn’t a traditional route anymore.”

So guys like Beau are learning as they go. Crackle, for what it’s worth, is a streaming-content studio currently owned by Sony—not unlike go90, which is the proprietary streaming service owned and distributed by Verizon; or YouTube Red, the original-programming arm of YouTube; or Seeso, which is Comcast’s version. Last December, Facebook announced that it would begin buying and producing its own programming. Apple aired its first TV series, Planet of the Apps, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, and will.i.am, in June. These are the laboratories—the places where smart and/or risk-tolerant executives are playing around, trying to figure out what a show or a movie can be in 2017.

Then there are the streamers that have increasingly come to resemble, and at times have begun to replace, Hollywood’s traditional studios. Hulu is the one that has The Handmaid’s Tale and Difficult People. Amazon was nominated for an Oscar for Manchester by the Sea and won a Golden Globe for Transparent. Netflix is spending $6 billion on original content this year to make sure it’s mentioned in paragraphs like this one. Traditional movie studios and network television also remain, in various states of success and dysfunction.

And anytime any of these studios or streamers decide they want to put a show or a movie on the air, or in theaters, or on the Internet, or on a cell phone, they need what you’ve always needed. A script, usually. A director, almost always. And actors. I wondered what the new Hollywood looked like to those actors—the professionally beautiful people on the front lines. It’s why I wanted to talk to Beau. To try to make sense of what’s going on with his chosen profession, to the extent that anyone has any idea. He’s been doing this for 14 years, whatever this is. How has it changed?

When Beau was starting out, fresh off the ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, he took some of the money he made off a film called The Grudge 3 and bought a beat-up 1995 Plymouth Neon. The car had no air-conditioning, so during pilot season he’d drive around Los Angeles in his underwear with only a spray bottle of water for comfort and all his clothes hung up in the backseat. Then he’d hastily dress in order to attend audition after audition, in the manner of young men in Hollywood going back to the days before they had air-conditioning or Plymouth Neons.

Now, Beau says, pilot season doesn’t really exist. The three months at the beginning of the year in which TV did most of its casting have been replaced by something less manic but more unceasing: “You’re just getting barraged all the time. I have a pilot audition tomorrow that I have to put on tape. There’s this Amazon pilot. You no longer know when it’s going to be.” Or what, for that matter. “I feel like there are less big-studio auditions, for sure,” Beau says, thinking out loud. “Now they make $100 million movies, right? I rarely go out for those things. Because they’re usually straight offers, because they want the Brad Pitts of the world. So now it’s the lower-budget movies, but there’s a lot more of them. You have these smaller movies, which the non-Brad Pitts of the world get to do. And they’re more human stories, which I think is really cool.”

So that’s another thing Beau’s noticed—more interesting roles, albeit often in previously unknown or unglamorous places. Things that are often obscure but pay well, even a premium in some cases, because they have to in order to attract talent, and because they’re being backed by giant cash-rich companies. “I’ve been getting interest from YouTubers to do certain YouTube video stuff. Also, like, Verizon go90 stuff, which is literally on a cell phone.”

He brightens at this thought, the reminder that there is now no device or medium that someone won’t pay millions of dollars to put a sitcom or movie on. “There’s so many different avenues now.” Life as a working but not entirely famous actor, long a nebulous and tenuous career path, seems more stable and sustainable, Beau says. Less Plymouth Neon, more Audi A3.

On a sunny May afternoon in Hollywood, Jake Paul wanders into a restaurant on Franklin Avenue wearing the slouchy, all-black silhouette that is the default uniform here for young men who admire Kanye West. His hair is specifically tousled. He’s 20 years old. From a table in the corner, he orders a kale salad and a glass of water. He just came from the set of his Disney show, Bizaardvark, on which he plays a social-media star, which is apt, because that’s what Jake Paul is.

Two and a half years ago, he moved to Hollywood from Cleveland. Back when Vine was a thing, he and his elder brother, Logan, would regularly post videos there of themselves shirtless or dancing or glued together shirtless while dancing, and by the time he was 16, he had millions of followers and a substantial income from the advertising dollars they helped generate: “We were making more money than our parents, so we knew that something was here. People were reaching out to us, saying, ‘Come to Hollywood, like, star in this movie.’” So eventually they did.

By the time he got to Hollywood, Jake was already famous, in a way, but he didn’t know much about acting. So he started taking improv classes. “The way I saw it was, if I had the built-in following and the audience, but I also had the skill set of acting, that would shoot me to the top,” he says. “Because there’s so many good actors. There’s so many good-looking people. But the X factor now is social media.”

He attempts an analogy. “Like—reverse-engineer Hollywood is how I think of it. All the social-media stars are going in the back door, and everyone’s trying to get in the front—there’s a line outside. And then everyone’s trying to sneak around back, but then there’s security, you know? That’s an analogy, I guess.” After all, he says, Hollywood’s a business like any other. “Why would they cast someone with the same acting capabilities who doesn’t have the followers? They’re not going to make as much money.”

After Vine folded, Jake and Logan continued to upload videos to YouTube, where Jake’s channel now has more than 7 million subscribers, which is more viewers than, say, Atlanta gets on a weekly basis. Jake knows this—that he has leverage in an industry that has traditionally delighted in sending guys like Jake back to Cleveland the second they start using words like “leverage.” “Even Disney—off the record, but on the record—knows that I have the power,” he says. “They love me because of that. I don’t act like it. I’m not walking around all cocky, but the tables have turned.”

His kale salad arrives. He re-arranges some kale leaves on his plate. “The videos that I post every day are averaging 7 million views per day,” he says. “And I post one of those a day. I spend an average of $200 a day to make that. The Disney show that I’m on, they spend $2 million over the course of five days to create one episode that gets 1.7 million views. [Neither YouTube or Disney would confirm these numbers. This past weekend, Jake left Bizaardvark, after finding a new kind of viral fame as the subject of a potential neighborhood class action nuisance lawsuit.] Which is why all of these studios are scared and all these Disney channels are scared—they’re getting cut out of the picture.”

So why bother to work with Disney at all?

“It’s an old model, but it’s a model that’s still very important,” he says. “And they’re making more money off their 1.7 million views than I am off of my 7 million.” Someday soon, Jake says earnestly, he believes all of this will merge, and there won’t be social-media stars and regular movie stars but some seamless combination of the two. Hopefully in the person of Jake Paul himself. A year ago, he says, he auditioned for the new Spider-Man movie. Just the other day he went in for X-Men.

“I want to be a superhero or a super-villain in a giant action film,” he says. “I love Bane. I love the Joker. I love Batman. I want to do that. That would be a dream come true.”

Jake says the last time he was on a movie set was just a few months ago, when he shot his own movie, Airplane Mode, which he describes as “The Expendables with social-media stars.” He raised $2 million from Ron Burkle and Jonathan Ornstein, he says, and put all of his friends, who are also social-media stars, in it. “There was more than half a billion followers out of everyone who was in the movie. So if we sell to 1 percent of them, that’s $50 million in sales and so it’s like that’s how they see it, right? That’s a pretty good example of how this space is changing and where it’s going.” He says they’re having a buyers’ screening of Airplane Mode soon. He wonders aloud what the film might be worth. “Like, is it going to make $5 million? Is it going to make $10 million? Is it going to make $50 million, a hundred?”

Jake says he’s constantly in meetings where people pitch him on projects like Airplane Mode or try to get him to act in their movies. He’s got a meeting with a producer coming up, in fact, at his agent’s office at WME. Maybe I’d like to come?

Keith Powers has been mostly lucky so far. The second movie he ever shot was Straight Outta Compton—he played Dr. Dre’s brother. The first TV show on which he was a regular, MTV’s Faking It, ran for two seasons after he joined it. Right now he’s on a show with Bella Thorne called Famous in Love, on the Freeform network, which is what ABC Family became.

A few years ago, he was modeling in California; now he’s got a real career, and that’s a blessing. But modern-day fandom is weird, he says. You’re not allowed to disappear anymore, or maintain any amount of mystery. Fans talk to him on Twitter and Instagram all day, and mostly what they say is: Work more.

“That’s why my whole thing was to be on a TV show,” Keith says. “I’m not going to lie: These days I feel so much pressure from my supporters. I feel like: If I’m not giving them work? Nowadays kids don’t live with stuff. People used to live with an album. Michael Jackson put out Thriller and, what, five years later, he put out Bad? He was a whole different person. Literally, he had a whole different skin color.”

That kind of scarcity used to be the model—successful actors like Tom Hanks would do one or two films a year, and that was it. The rarity of it was a kind of power. But Keith says it’s no longer enough just to act and be part of great projects. You have to do it constantly. It’s why so many actors are moving toward TV—not just because they’re following the creative talents who increasingly work there, but also because TV puts them on screens consistently in a way that, say, an indie movie that shows at Sundance and then a few times in New York and L.A. does not. Actors, like everyone else now, have brands to consider and maintain. That’s exhausting, particularly so in an era where people tend to binge-watch.

“Famous in Love dropped—they watched Famous in Love in one week,” Keith says, sighing. “Then they’re like: ‘Okay, Keith, what’s next?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s crazy.’ They don’t live with stuff. They see it and ask what’s next.”

“Fucking helicopters!” Arturo Castro says, sitting in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. He’s just back in New York after going down to Colombia to shoot Netflix’s Narcos, and he’s trying, with some degree of incredulity, to describe what the set was like. “We have these shoot-outs, man.…”

It’s a warm day and he’s drinking iced tea, louche and handsome. A couple of weeks ago, Amy Schumer’s Snatched, his first big-studio comedy, came out. For the past few years, he’s starred on Comedy Central’s Broad City as Ilana Glazer’s drug-dealing roommate—still the role he’s probably best known for.

“I don’t know if the career I’m having right now would have been possible ten years ago,” Arturo says. Back then, when he graduated from acting school, there wasn’t anything like Broad City for a short Guatemalan actor to star on, he says. “I couldn’t get a TV audition to save my life.”

Broad City, which began on the Internet, gave him an outlet when none of the conventional studios would. “It’s a little oversaturated now that everybody has a web series,” Arturo says. “But back when we started on it, that was a stroke of brilliance.” He channels Broad City co-creators Glazer and Abbi Jacobson: “Like, ‘You know what? The work out there is not something that either appeals to me or is something I’m right for at the moment. Why don’t I write something for myself or write my own point of view?’ It was kind of the first show that really became successful through that.”

Broad City felt like a breakthrough for Arturo when it happened, and it was: After Comedy Central picked up the show, he was suddenly on every basic-cable package in America. But the scale of Netflix, Arturo says, is bigger than anything he’d encountered—including the Ang Lee war epic he starred in last year, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. “It’s crazy. That’s the difference I saw with the streaming world: The budget was just probably way bigger on Narcos than everything I’ve worked on put together. It’s a ten-hour movie with millions of dollars in production.”

Netflix currently spends a preposterous amount of money producing original content, in part because its distribution network is so vast. The company is in hundreds of countries around the world, which is why actors of all levels gravitate toward its content. “They don’t have Comedy Central in Guatemala,” Arturo says. “So for all these years that I’ve done all this stuff, nobody’s seen me in anything. To the point where my mom’s like, ‘So…how’s it going out there?’ And they love Narcos, and Netflix is this worldwide event. Millions of people see it. And that to me is one of the coolest parts, not just the exposure, but you want people to see the work and you want people to relate to the work, and you also want your parents to know that you’re actually doing something. Just the exposure level is a big difference between cable and a juggernaut like Netflix.”

Paris Berelc’s endearing dream is to one day do her own stunts in an action film like her hero, Angelina Jolie. Like so many actresses before her, Paris was a model first. Growing up outside Milwaukee, Paris, who has a round, earnest face, did shoots for Sears and Kmart. Then she got bored and started looking toward Los Angeles. Right before she arrived, she got cast on a Disney show, Mighty Med. “And then now I just booked Netflix: Alexa & Katie,” she says—the streaming service’s upcoming family-oriented comedy.

Paris says she’s acutely aware of all the people who have come to Hollywood the way she has, through modeling and Disney. She’s also aware of how different things are now from how they were then. For instance: social media. She has more than a million followers on Instagram, which is what happens to you these days when you’re a young person on a Disney show. This is an ambivalent prospect for her, though. Unlike Jake Paul, she’s an actress first—or at least that’s how she thinks of herself. And yet sometimes it seems like her success depends on things that have nothing to do with acting at all.

“When it was Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, or I guess you could even go back to Miley or Selena, but even further than them, I don’t think social media was such a big impact on this kind of world,” Paris says. “Britney and them—it didn’t matter about followers or if they’re verified on social media. And I think now it’s a little different because social media is such a great impact, and how many followers you have is a really big impact on whether or not you get a job. Like, I went into an audition a few weeks ago, and I walked in, and the first thing they asked me was how many followers I had.”

Really?

“And I looked at them, and I was like, ‘Wait. What?’ I did my slate. I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Paris Berelc. I’m five-four,’ whatever. Then they stopped me and they’re like, ‘Wait, how many followers do you have on Instagram?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know? Like 1.2 mil?’ And then they were like, ‘Okay, yeah, can we do the slate again, but can you just say that at the end?’ ”

What were you auditioning for?

“I think it was an independent film that was looking for funds or something, because people with followers will bring those funds in. Because a lot of my friends, who are also on Disney, were also in the room. And then once we all left, we met outside, and I was like, ‘All right. Was the first thing they asked you how many followers you had?’ And they said yes. It’s so weird. I think it’s very unprofessional. I don’t like it. That’s the part of the social-media thing that I’m not a big fan of. For someone like Meryl Streep, it didn’t matter—I mean, they didn’t have to worry about followers or anything before. It was purely about their acting. And I guess I just kind of missed that part.”

In high school, before she came out here, she was a gymnast. “I still train and do stunt training to keep up with it because action and stunts are something I really want to break out into film.” She says she plays the game, in terms of maintaining a social-media following, because she has to, and because it does help bring new viewers, at least theoretically, to the things she acts in. But what she really wants to do is hang off the side of a building in an action flick.

Keiynan Lonsdale was supposed to be a big movie star, and maybe he’ll still be one. A small key dangles from his left ear and glints in the light that comes in through the windows of his publicist’s conference room, a few floors up off Sunset Boulevard. He’s wearing a tucked-in long-sleeve PlayStation T-shirt. When his publicist asks if she can get us anything, he orders a hot chocolate. He says he’s a little socially awkward. Sometimes, he confesses, he forgets to leave the house. He has the best cheekbones of any shut-in I’ve ever met.

When Keiynan came to America from Australia, it was to star in the second film of what was conceived of as a four-film Divergent franchise, alongside Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller and Ansel Elgort. Divergent was going to be the next Hunger Games, until it wasn’t. “It was obviously a huge thing for me to be involved in it, and it was my first job in America, so it was pretty cool,” Keiynan says ruefully. But the first three films came out to disappointing reviews and lackluster box office. For a while, the fourth film was going to end up on television, instead of in theaters; now it may never come out at all. “Obviously the last film has been put on hold for quite a while—it’s disappointing,” Keiynan says. “That was definitely humbling: to know that you could be a part of this huge thing and get something, and then it can all sort of go away.”

These days he stars on the CW’s The Flash. Maybe once that would’ve seemed like a step down—to go from movies to TV. There was a stigma to it. “I think certain people felt like they could only do TV and they couldn’t cross over to film,” Keiynan says. “Now, I think, that problem doesn’t exist anymore. But also you don’t need to cross over to film anymore, because TV’s got so much great work there.”

This is mostly a blessing, Keiynan says—that TV has become what film once was. But it’s also a lot more competitive, finding TV work these days. Shailene Woodley was the star of the Divergent franchise—now she’s on HBO, in Big Little Lies. “You see so many actors that we’ve always thought were just film actors going into TV. And sometimes doing more TV than they are doing film, and preferring that. And so when I speak to a lot of my friends, whether they’re my age or older or younger, they’re finding it more difficult, because there are some huge stars pining after these pilots.” You might one day find yourself showing up for an audition, and there in the chair across from you, “it’s, like, Nicole Kidman.”

Harry Shum Jr. can still remember what it felt like to be on Glee in that uncanny moment when 26 million people tuned in after the Super Bowl. That surreal sense of being at the center of a phenomenon: “Literally all eyes were on us constantly.” He’s perched on a stool in a coffee shop in Hollywood wearing a Henley, a mildly whimsical hat, and a pervasively radiant sense of health.

The height of Glee mania was 2011. That same year, he shot a few short films for some guys who were making clips for YouTube. Wong Fu Productions—three Asian-American guys just playing around with the format. “We shot like three random shorts,” Harry says, “and those did really well, and then we shot another one that got like 10 million hits, and then it was like, “Oh, there’s something here.” And then they sold a show to YouTube Red.” Single by 30, which became an eight-episode romantic comedy set in L.A., came out last year and the first episode has more than 2 million views on YouTube. You might not have heard of the show. But that’s kind of the point of streamers like YouTube Red: They go deep for relatively narrow but passionate audiences, rather than broad, for everyone.

One thing working on the Wong Fu stuff taught Harry, he says, is that the new generation of viewers Hollywood is trying to reach often doesn’t care about Hollywood at all: “These people, they don’t watch TV or movies. They literally just watch whatever is in front of their computers or on their phones.” Even at the height of Glee, he says, “I would walk down the street, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re in Wong Fu shorts!’ That’s all they know me from. And they go nuts over that. Sometimes walking around with a lot of YouTube personalities that I hang out with, fans are going nuts over them and have no clue who Leonardo DiCaprio is.”

Harry sips his Vietnamese iced coffee. These days he’s got a regular role on a show on Freeform called Shadowhunters. He plays a warlock. Last year he did a Crouching Tiger sequel for Netflix. But what he’s most excited about right now is his role in a studio film just now going into production, Crazy Rich Asians. Warner Bros., one of the oldest studios in Hollywood, is making it with an all-Asian cast, which has more or less no precedent. “It’s one of those that wouldn’t have been able to get made a couple years ago,” Harry says.

All these alternative channels and platforms, he’s noticed, have uncovered audiences that producers and studios used to ignore or were never even aware of. Which in turn has been great for actors who might actually look like those audiences. “There’s so many projects now,” Harry says. “Being a minority—all my friends used to struggle so much for the longest time and only get certain roles, and I’m starting to see them get all these different roles and main-character roles on platforms that you might have not heard of—but they’re, like, working with huge names, right? Producers, huge-name directors. I think that’s incredible.”

Dear White People has just premiered on Netflix and Antoinette Robertson is still feeling the high. She used to work as a model and retains a professional glow. The gold bangle on her arm casts little wedges of light through the Hollywood conference room we’re sitting in. Antoinette has done her time on the kind of television shows that shoot fast and aim broadly: the CW drama series Hart of Dixie; Tyler Perry’s soap opera The Haves and the Have Nots.

But Dear White People, she says, is the first show she’s ever been on where it felt like she, and everyone around her, was making exactly the thing they wanted to make. “We hold no punches,” she says. Netflix’s data is sophisticated enough to pick up on infinite segments of dedicated viewers—who like romantic comedies in which someone dies in a horrible way, say, or Oscar-winning dramas that also have male nudity, or action films that occur in outer space—and in turn, the company has learned to empower creators who can reach those audiences, with minimal interference.

In an earlier era, Antoinette says, before companies like Netflix taught studios to seek out audiences that ran deep and committed, rather than broad and distracted, there’s no way Dear White People would’ve aired in the form that it did. She mimes an executive: “‘Maybe you change it like this, and make it essential to this kind of a character and not necessarily all minorities, because our demographic is this. That doesn’t work for us.’ And somebody might compromise because of that.”

But Netflix, she says, lets them make the show they want to make for the people they want to make it for. That’s rare. Even when she was just starting out, not too long ago, Antoinette says, “you wouldn’t have had that choice.”

Jake Paul’s WME agent calls me up and invites me to come see the promised meeting between Jake and a Hollywood producer. The producer turns out to be Douglas Banker—he’s the guy who made Party Boat, with Beau Mirchoff, for Crackle. Today, in the WME offices, Douglas is wearing Nantucket Reds and driving loafers and pitching Jake on a horror movie.

The concept, Douglas says, is basically an updated Scream or Heathers in which a group of young kids are investigating a murder that occurred years ago. That was the treatment he was working off, anyway. “But with your notes and your input,” he says to Jake, “we could contemporize it.” Douglas says he wants to “deficit-finance” the film himself, whatever that means. He wants to bet on Jake. “You just proved this week that your fans will transact,” Douglas says. “I think there could be tremendous upside.”

Jake nods. He hasn’t sat down. He’s standing, listening to Douglas pitch him. The spectacle feels symbolic: all of us circled around this 20-year-old kid. Jake says he likes the idea. His Yeezys squeak as he shifts his weight from foot to foot. He’s thinking out loud about the possibilities.

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“Maybe similarly to Get Out, where, like, the message of the whole thing is like, basically, that racism is terrible,” he says. “Maybe the message throughout this whole movie is, like, helping kids prevent against the stuff that’s been happening at the Manchester bombings.” Jake says maybe they could sell naming rights to a character. He has fans—“kids from Dubai with oil-executive parents”—who have money to burn on stuff like this.

He’ll cast some of his social-media friends, too, he says. Then he notices me in the corner, taking notes. Maybe there’s a GQ reporter, writing a story about this old murder, and that’s how the Jake Paul character finds out about it. He turns to me. “Would you be in the movie?” he asks. “I’m serious.”

I start stammering something.

“You’re definitely in the movie,” he says.

Zach Baron is GQ’s staff writer.

This story originally appeared in the August 2017 issue with the title “The Next Big Star Will Be Very Small.”