Or: who’s really an A-lister now?
Julia. Denzel. Leo. Clooney. Charlize.
You didn’t have to Google them. You just knew.
Now? The rope has frayed. Been tripped over. Pulled apart and posted in pieces.
The A-list isn’t a list anymore. It’s a mood. A feed. A contract that expires with the next algorithm shift.
And still, we try to make sense of who’s inside.
Star power or brand presence?
Let’s start with the obvious ones.
Zendaya. Yes. Effortlessly yes.
She can walk the Dune carpet like royalty, then vanish behind a coffee cup for six months and still trend globally.
No scandals, no interviews. Just presence.
Timothée Chalamet? Also, yes.
He’s a Dior muse, a wonky heartthrob, a walking contradiction of French cheekbones and Manhattan nerves.
He’s got the Oscar nods, the viral interviews, the surreal Willy Wonka press tour. He’s a star, even when the films are not.
But what about Taylor Russell?
Jacob Elordi?
Paul Mescal?
Anya Taylor-Joy?
Jenna Ortega?
None of them could open a Marvel film on name alone.
But they could break the internet with a single photograph.
They could front a Loewe campaign and alter the season’s silhouette.
They don’t own the box office.
They dominate atmosphere.
Fame as a filter
There was a time when to be famous, you had to be seen.
Now, to stay famous, you must be selectively unseen.
Jacob Elordi wears leather gloves to interviews and refuses to rewatch Euphoria.
Jenna Ortega cultivates mystery like a vintage Chanel ad — gothic but not gory.
Mescal smoulders in Normal People and ghosts the press line with a GAA cap pulled low.
They are curated. Branded.
Every red-carpet moment is an editorial shoot.
Every silence is a strategy.
It’s not just that they’re actors.
They’re aesthetic operators.
The collapse of charisma math
We used to measure stardom by heat. Box office, headlines, scandal, magazine covers.
Now, it’s all slipperier. Florence Pugh is in three films a year and hosts cooking tutorials on Instagram.
Margot Robbie produced Barbie and still got called underrated.
Meanwhile, the supposed A-list — the Old Guard — is either franchised out (Chris), disappeared (Brie), or mid-crisis (Ezra, Shia, Johnny).
There’s no clear succession plan. No top five. Just clusters of cool and shadows of influence.
What’s left of the A-list?
Maybe this is what we’ve become.
Fame without friction.
Celebrity without story.
Being A-list used to mean power: choosing your roles, rejecting offers, walking into a studio meeting and having them rearrange the calendar.
Now it means being able to disappear for six months and have the internet notice.
We don’t want mystery solved.
We want mystique maintained.
Not who we watch, but who we feel
Here’s what’s strange.
We no longer worship stars.
We orbit them.
They don’t beam down at us from marquees.
They slip past us, quietly. In mood boards. In lip-syncs. In tagged photos at Fashion Week.
And still, we follow.
Still, we care.
Because in a world where everything is exposed, the new A-list isn’t about access.
It’s about control.
They don’t just show up.
They shape the temperature.
And that, darling, is what we now call star power.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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