It has long been said that to put your best foot forward in Hollywood, you first need a foot in the door. However, years of quietly deploying family to find a way into film studios has been brought out into the open with the unmasking of the so-called “nepo babies” in hit shows.
Euphoria, for example, stars Maude Apatow, the daughter of the Hollywood stalwarts Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann; Stranger Things features Maya Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman; while Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, appears in The Boys.
A tweet about Apatow, 24, went viral after a Euphoria viewer lamented that she was a nepotism baby. Similar posts followed about Hawke. It was the beginning of a new online generation discovering Hollywood nepotism, with the hashtag #nepobaby amassing more than 30 million views on TikTok. Others identified include Zoë Kravitz, daughter of the musician Lenny and Lisa Bonet, and Dakota Johnson, daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith.
However, Oliver Hudson, 45, son of Goldie Hawn and stepson of Kurt Russell, said having well-connected parents can only take you so far. “There’s this misconception of me and Kate and Wyatt: we’re the sons and daughter of famous parents so everything comes easy, you get a bunch of jobs and life is set,” he told The Washington Post this week, referring to his sister Kate Hudson and his half-brother Wyatt Russell. “And yes, no doubt about it, it gets your foot in the door, both feet in the door. But at the end of the day you still have to prove yourself, you have to go to auditions and get the job. I learnt that the hard way.”
Hudson, whose credits include the television series Rules of Engagement, Nashville and Scream Queens, added: “My mom and Kurt can’t force you down someone’s throat. They can’t say, ‘he needs to be in this movie’.”
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Gwyneth Paltrow is another star with famous parents. Her father was the director and producer Bruce Paltrow and her mother is the Emmy Award-winning actress Blythe Danner. Paltrow, 49, made a recent appearance on the YouTube channel of Hailey Bieber, the daughter of Stephen Baldwin, and discussed nepotism in Hollywood. She argued that having famous relatives can be a burden. “As the child of somebody you get access that other people don’t have, right? So the playing field is not level in that way,” Paltrow said.
“However, I really do feel that once your foot is in the door — which you unfairly got in — then you have to work almost twice as hard and be twice as good. Because people are ready to pull you down and say, ‘you don’t belong there’ and ‘you’re only there because of your dad, or your mom,’ or whatever the case may be.”
Some stars are open about their famous DNA but others go to drastic lengths to conceal it. John David Washington, the son of Denzel Washington, admitted he used to lie about the identity of his father. “I used to say he was a construction worker, or in jail, just to have some sense of normalcy,” the star of films including BlacKkKlansman and Tenet said in 2020. “I felt like there was no way people would take me seriously, even if I was good.”
