The reasons people first want to become performers are as varied as the performers themselves. They include a desire to tell stories, to make people feel, to influence culture, to entertain, to be part of a community, and yes, to become rich and famous. At the core, I have found, is a simple desire: to be seen and heard.
The word audience itself comes from the Latin audire, meaning ‘to hear’. We live in the most visually obsessed society in human history, yet the performing arts industry stubbornly remains predicated on hearing. In an era when so many feel invisible or marginalised, no wonder more and more people are drawn to the profession. To be seen is to be legible. To be heard is to have agency.
Theatre, in particular, was originally built around argument and rhetoric. For centuries it has privileged voice before image. That axis now appears to be shifting. As images circulate faster than voices, legibility may begin to overtake agency. Visibility, on social media, in life and now, perhaps, on stage, can appear to carry the same, if not more, influence than agency itself. To be clear, visibility has always mattered in the performing arts. What has lately changed is how visibility is measured, quantified and, crucially, how it is interpreted.
In a clip that’s been doing the rounds on social media, from a recent interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Carrie Coon explained, “In order to do a play on Broadway, you have to do The White Lotus or else you’re not allowed. They have to replace you with someone more famous.” She framed the problem as an economic one and it’s true that in 2025 the only shows on Broadway to recoup their investment were limited-run, celebrity-led plays. While we don’t publish gross receipts in the UK, similar dynamics apply. Not long ago, the National Theatre’s casting director, Alastair Coomer, said at the Spotlight Conference that celebrity casting “is the biggest driver now for audiences”, citing funding cuts and a sharp decline in advance ticket bookings in the post-pandemic period.
Eyebrows were raised in my WhatsApp groups the other day when a Spotlight breakdown for a fringe production specified “strong social influence and audience reach”. It was not that we doubted this was already a factor, rather, as a fellow agent put it, “we’re now saying the quiet part out loud.”
Actors have always been marketed to some extent. When Spotlight first appeared as ‘the book’, the essential casting directory used by the industry, actors were categorised into different sections - Leading, Character, Ingenue, Juvenile, Star among others. For much of the 20th century, as a useful shorthand we talked of ‘types’ or, more accurately, archetypes.
Towards the end of the 1990s there was a societal shift towards what came to be called ‘personal branding’, but it was not until the mid-2000’s that this really took hold. This progression tracks almost precisely the development of the World Wide Web and the subsequent rise of social media.
In the late 1990’s my full-time job was in marketing for an international company. Branding, as we understood it then, was relational. For example, “X Brand cleans 25% better than Y Brand.” As branding escaped from marketing handbooks into the wider vernacular, brand shifted from a strategy to an identity. How often have you heard someone say, “your brand is the thing that makes you unique”? As self-help culture and life coaching became mainstream, ‘uniqueness’ became a qualifier. ‘Personal brand’ was reframed as authenticity or self-expression. The truth is that uniqueness should not be the goal. Uniqueness is ontological: you are, by definition, unique. The goal is definition, distinction, legibility.
This, really, is what Carrie Coon is identifying in her interview. The White Lotus did not change her technical ability as an actress, it did not make her ‘ready’ for Broadway in that sense. What it did was make her legible. In becoming more widely known, she became recognisable and defined. Legibility, in this sense, is not about skill but about being intelligible within an institutional frame. Recognition, in and of itself, does not create talent. It does, however, create consensus and where consensus consolidates, institutions follow.
Through platforms like LiveJournal (1999), MySpace (2003) and YouTube (2005) people were able to build large, loyal followings through a new digital ecosystem. The terms influencer and content creator hadn’t yet been coined and certainly no-one then was calling these creators ‘talent’. They existed, at first, outside the traditional entertainment ecosystem. A little bit niche, a little bit countercultural, a little bit punk. They may have lacked institutional finesse, but they were accumulating sustained attention, and attention is something the industry notices.
Audiences migrated from mainstream media to these new platforms and, in response, the industry adapted. Slowly, cautiously, some more successfully than others, they followed. Major agencies like CAA and WME added Digital divisions; new ‘digital-first’ agencies emerged. The market responded to demand. Agencies did not create influencer culture, nor did they legitimise it. They institutionalised it, but only after it had already proved its value.
This is how it has always operated. First, attention consolidates. A rising talent lands a role that momentarily raises their profile. There is a buzz around them. Then consensus follows, the buzz grows into something sustained, initial attention solidifies into recognition. It is not uniqueness that makes them stand out. It is distinction. They have become legible. This is the moment we believe we understand who the talent is, what they stand for, what they will bring to a project. Legibility becomes a shared reference the industry agrees on and can organise around. This is often the point at which ‘big’ agencies suddenly show interest in the previously unnoticed talent.
In detailing that progression it is essential to stress that the work came first. The rising talent landed a role because they were good, because they were heard. They were seen because they were heard. Voice preceded image. Attention and legibility followed from the work.
What has changed in recent years is a shift from qualitative assessments of attention. Social media affords us metrics, numbers, a verifiable rubric with which to quantify where attention is consolidating and where consensus is gathering. Even if it is reductive (spoiler, it is!) it is nevertheless actionable. In an industry decimated by funding cuts, progressively devalued by successive governments and exceptionally vulnerable to risk, relying on recognisable, definable, irrefutable numbers offers a kind of certainty that must be comforting.
Those who excel at social media understand clarity and definition. As we scroll, our attention lingers only where there is an immediate coherent story. We respond better to easily communicable identities. Social media does not reward authenticity, it privileges legibility: the ability to communicate who you are and what you stand for quickly and coherently. When industries are under pressure, short on time and lacking in resources, they often prioritise clarity over ambiguity. Social media presence is not overriding talent in casting decisions, but it is becoming another reference point, alongside training, recent work and skills.
Recently, the content creator, Angry Ginge, won I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! In some corners of the industry this was described as a seismic cultural shift. Angry Ginge has more than seven million followers across various platforms and yet, to a vast number of the population, he was unknown. ITV did not create his popularity; they capitalised on it. In casting him they leveraged his pre-existing relationship with a vast audience originally built through legibility. Even the name Angry Ginge is legible and distinct. His audience followed him from the digital ecosystem into the mainstream, giving ITV the highest rated show of 2025 in the 16-34 demographic. The lesson is not that visibility wins, it is that coherence and trust can travel.
Behind the scenes, the UK industry has known this for some time. BBC Studios established TalentWorks almost a decade ago to develop projects with established and emerging digital talent. Broadcasters’ digital strategies have shifted from treating online platforms as marketing adjuncts for ‘main’ channels into publishing original content there. Significantly, content creators have been engaged not merely as on-screen personalities but as writers, showrunners and IP originators. This transition happened faster behind the camera because those roles recognise the power of authorship. Content creators already circulate as voices, legible and defined by their consistently coherent worldview. This translates easily into mainstream institutions.
Perhaps this is why it has taken longer for the acting profession to discover how to leverage visibility. Acting, after all, requires transformation and opacity. Actors disappear into a role. Where the online world values clarity, acting demands interpretation. Online presence requires consistent visibility but, in the convincing creation of character, actors must refine the opposite: the art of disappearing. This creates an obvious tension if online presence is given too much weight in casting. The audience attends expecting the online personality but once in the theatre the role demands the occlusion of that personality.
There is tremendous anxiety in the industry around social media, profile and visibility. That anxiety exists, not only on the talent side but also among institutional decision-makers. It stems not from visibility itself, but from uncertainty about what kind of visibility is actually important. Traditionally, to stand on stage and speak with agency and authority, for words to be perceived as truthful and consequential, has relied on talent, technique and ability. This has always been an essential requirement for actors. We recognised the authority of voice. Visibility was secondary, a consequence of craft rather than a substitute for it.
For most of the history of the profession, image has followed voice: being seen was a consequence of being heard. We feel unsettled now, not because image seems to suddenly matter, but because a new means of transmission, social media, seems to be inverting the hierarchy. When visibility precedes voice, perhaps the very foundation of the profession is shifting. A culture that prioritises constant visibility asks something fundamentally different of performers. The anxiety we feel now is not about platforms or profiles, it is about what happens when visibility is no longer a means of communicating performance, but is increasingly treated as evidence of value in itself.
Stanislavski’s dictum to “love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art” seems particularly pertinent here. The self should exist in service to the work rather than become its subject. In a society that increasingly rewards self-display, this distinction is becoming harder to sustain.