We’ve categorized them, we’ve ranked them, we’ve predicted their futures. Now, it’s time to pick our favorites. We asked Vulture writers to tell us about the nepo baby they love the most.
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Riley Keough
Elvis Presley was always bummed he never got to prove himself as a great screen actor, but his granddaughter Riley Keough — the child of Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie by her first husband, musician Danny Keough — has achieved the King’s dream. After standing out in the ensembles of The Runaways and Mad Max: Fury Road, Keough found her way into Steven Soderbergh’s orbit, made a small role pop in Magic Mike, starred as escort Christine Reade in season one of the Soderbergh-produced Starz series The Girlfriend Experience, and burned a hole in the screen playing the hot-car-driving kid sister of Channing Tatum and Adam Driver’s speedway robbers in Logan Lucky. Keough also dazzled as the Glengarry-esque sales-crew boss in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a daughter in a dysfunctional family in We Don’t Belong Here, the scandal-exposing journalist Sara Garmin in HBO’s Paterno, and a hellraising stripper turned sex worker in Zola while somehow finding time to act for Lars von Trier (The House that Jack Built) and direct her first film, the Lakota reservation drama War Pony, which won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at Cannes. Seven years ago, nobody but family recognized her name, but now, to paraphrase one of her granddad’s hits, we feel like we’ve known her forever. —Matt Zoller Seitz
on the cover
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Jaden Smith
Jaden Smith may never shake his reputation as the annoying kid who tweeted fake-deep musings like “How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real” in 2013. But out of that intellectual adolescence grew a figure who learned to play with celebrity. In 2014, he attended Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s wedding dressed as white Batman. In 2017, he attended the Met Gala clutching his chopped-off dreadlocks. The natural path would have been for him to embrace acting, which he began doing at 8 in 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness. But instead, he became a talented multihyphenate with a penchant for the off-kilter. One day, his branding of himself as an “icon” on his hit song of the same name may not seem so unrealistic. —Hershal Pandya
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Maya Hawke
Maya Hawke comes from high nepo-baby stock. Ethan Hawke is her father, Uma Thurman is her mother, and you can see the genetic blend of those two actors in her bone structure and hear it in the enthusiastic raspiness of her voice. She has proven herself as an actress with great presence — she burst into Stranger Things during the third season and quickly became one of its best characters — and a soulful musician. (All of her tour dates next March, in Europe and America, are sold out.) But what really distinguishes her is her curiosity about her craft and the world, a quality that came through loud and clear when she interviewed her father on Instagram over the summer. Maybe she inherited that quality from her parents, but she’s doing her own thing with it. —Jen Chaney
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Zoë Kravitz
As Gabriella Paiella aptly put it in last month’s GQ cover story, Zoë Kravitz “is so synonymous with the word cool that the phrase Zoë Kravitz cool yields 22,900,000 Google results.” Zoë Kravitz is so cool that I genuinely and regularly forget she is the daughter of two of the most attractive people on earth (Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz), so powerful is her own appeal. She’s a genre-hopping actor — equally fascinating and convincing as a slinky superhero, an agoraphobic tech worker, a bored yogi housewife–cum–murder accomplice — a fledgling writer-director with a bone to pick with the patriarchy, and a better dresser than 90 percent of Hollywood, even when just riding on the back of Channing Tatum’s bike across the East Village. She is so cool that I may be ready to admit that the Fantastic Beasts franchise is real. —Rachel Handler
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Sofia Coppola
While some members of the Coppola clan — like Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage, né Coppola — have enjoyed the distance of different last names, Sofia’s been a well-known nepo baby since she was, well, a baby making her movie debut in father Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. An infant can’t exactly be held responsible for their own screen credits, but Sofia continued on to a sporadic acting career that was heavily dependent on her dad’s directing one, reaching a nadir when Winona Ryder dropped out of The Godfather Part III and Francis slotted his daughter in as her replacement. The results were so infamously awkward that they are perversely endearing. Sofia would go on to become a cool-girl style icon, a prime purveyor of melancholy femininity, and an indisputably significant filmmaker in her own right, and yet she’ll also always be linked to Mary Corleone. That’s one downside of nep — whatever embarrassing things the rest of us may have done as teenagers, they weren’t preserved as part of one of the most important trilogies in film history. —Alison Willmore
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Lily Collins
Genesis is one of my favorite bands — they are, endearingly, a bunch of British nerds who know their way around an instrument. That’s what makes the surprise factor of Lily Collins being Phil’s daughter all the more satisfying. Here’s Emily in Paris, a glamourpuss with an American accent and incredible eyebrows who has the range to play a Polly Pocket doll and … Fantine. And there’s Phil, banging away on the drums and singing stanzas like, “There’s too many men, too many people, making too many problems.” It’s almost too random to be true until you go down a Wikipedia hole, confirm the lineage, and realize Phil wrote “You’ll Be in My Heart” for her. —Devon Ivie
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Juliet Landau
In Ed Wood, Juliet Landau plays Loretta King, a woman Ed Wood puts in his film Bride of the Monster solely because he thinks she’s an heiress who can fund the film with daddy’s money. In reality, she’s the daughter of actor Martin Landau, who plays Bela Lugosi, a name Wood uses to get distribution for his films. It’s a metatextual seven-layer burrito of a movie. Within the film, Loretta is a terrible actress who can’t even hack it in the world of Wood’s shitty films. In reality, Landau became a beloved actress on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She brought a wounded, anemic freak vibe to the vampire Drusilla and became a fan favorite. Landau’s got the goods — plus, her eyes are piercing like a haunted doll. She got those from her dad, too. —Bethy Squires
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Laura Dern
A true child of Hollywood, Laura Dern’s earliest roles were small parts in movies with her mom, Dianne Ladd. At 15, she served as Miss Golden Globe. That early exposure to the workings of showbiz gave her profound clarity and confidence about the kind of artist she wants to be. Well aware of the perils of typecasting thanks to her dad, Bruce Dern, who got stuck playing the heavy, she tends to choose jobs that are drastically different from the last. From franchises (Jurassic Park, Star Wars) to auteur passion projects (The Master, Blue Velvet) to a Taylor Swift music video, Laura Dern is always gonna zag. —Emily Heller
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Malia Obama
Most daughters of fathers who happen to be president were, no offense, kind of boring with their free fame. Malia Obama went to Hollywood where the real nepo babies thrive. Malia got an internship with HBO while she was in high school, where she got to work on Girls with Lena Dunham. In 2015, this meant a lot, especially to the NYU undergrads who missed out on that gig. Instead of defaulting to her parents’ alma mater, she detoured and interned at the Weinstein Company in 2017, a year before it went bankrupt. At the time of bankruptcy, the company still owed her money. What would have happened if a less well-off student filled that role? Malia actually did nepotism for good that time. And while she did eventually go to Harvard, she got a job writing for Donald Glover’s next show. He says she’s “amazingly talented,” and she probably is. When you’re that high up in status, working hard is like floating in zero gravity. —Zoë Haylock
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Drew Barrymore
Barrymore has been in Hollywood since she was an actual baby, but it’s her second career as a talk-show host that has captivated me. Her daytime series is known for its focus on lifestyle segments, like Drew’s Kitchen (where she learns a new recipe from a special guest) and Drew’s News (highlighting feel-good news stories), all through the lens of Barrymore’s humor and her willingness to learn something new. One of my favorite moments was her conversation with Keanu Reeves. Barrymore shares a story about how Reeves took her out on a motorcycle for her birthday when she was 16: “I was so free, I was such a free human being,” she recalls. “I just remember loving life and being so happy. I hold it so dear because the older we get, the harder it is to get to that feeling.” Every episode of her show is kind of like that — an attempt to conjure a feeling of pure, unadulterated joy. She brings the same energy to her TikToks, from laughing hysterically in the rain to crying tears of happiness upon discovering a window hidden in her home. Watching her in this stage of life, fully uninhibited, feels like when she’s been freest as a star. —Alejandra Gularte
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Apple Martin
In 2004, nepo baby Gwyneth Paltrow (daughter of Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow) gave birth to her first child with then-husband Chris Martin. The Taurus baby was born into immediate controversy stemming from her unique name: Apple. Her mom even had to go on The Oprah Winfrey Show to explain why she named her child after a crisp red fruit: “It conjured such a lovely picture for me — you know, apples are so sweet, and they’re wholesome, and it’s biblical — and I just thought it sounded so lovely and … clean.” And thus, celebrity-baby-name discourse was born. The last we saw of Apple, now 18, was a brief cameo in her mom’s Netflix series, The Goop Lab With Gwyneth Paltrow, where she lovingly trolled her wellness-obsessed mother for doing a borderline-psychotic soup diet, cheering on the starvation-for-content with a sarcastic “Yassss!” We also saw her a year prior to that, via paparazzi, walking barefoot in Malibu while getting iced matcha with her dad’s girlfriend (nepo baby Dakota Johnson). A powerful act of defiance! And one that even influenced a trend piece about barefoot being the new “It” shoe. When your legacy starts the moment your name is revealed to the world, you have to do very little to remain famous. —Morgan Baila
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Prince Harry
Is there anything more charming than the nepo baby who gave it all up for the woman he loves? Yes: It’s an actual duke who stepped away from his dukedom — choosing the path of most resistance — because of his own principles. And sure, he’s still very, very wealthy and privileged, but Harry’s willingness to expose the royal family for what it is — a collection of cold, rich, entirely regular human beings — only helps to further fuel our society’s slow progress toward the socialist utopia promised to us by Star Trek. —Anne V. Clark
More on the year of the nepo baby
- We’re Making Nepo-Baby Merch for Actual Babies
- These Magazines Ran on Nepo Babies
- How a Nepo Baby Is Born
