Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue 2023 Cover: Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh & More

Keke Palmer

MOVIES: Nope, Lightyear

She was a spirited, surprising hero in Nope, and—thanks to SNL—her baby bump enthralled the internet. Asked who her heroes are, the former Nickelodeon darling says, “One hundred percent Tyler Perry. He’s showing a path of ownership for Black creators. You want somebody else? We got Jordan Peele, we got Donald Glover, we got Issa Rae. It’s like, we have options.”

WATCH: Cover Stars Reveal Their Party Tricks

Hoyeon

TV: Squid Game, Disclaimer

Jeremy Allen White

TV: The Bear
MOVIES: Fingernails, The Iron Claw

Emma Corrin

MOVIES: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, My Policeman
TV: Retreat

Regé-Jean Page

MOVIES: The Gray Man, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves 

Julia Garner

TV: Ozark, Inventing Anna 

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

MOVIES: Bullet Train, Kraven the Hunter

The Englishman has character-actor depth, and enough magnetism to keep climbing the marquee. The Bond rumors are still just rumors, and he’s careful to keep them in perspective: “You just want to stay grounded, and stay around the people that you love and love you back.”

In Praise of “Sparkly People”

“LOOK, THERE WAS a time I thought it was a dirty word,” says Jonathan Majors. “You know what I mean?” He’s talking about stardom. He says the words movie star, then lets them hang in the air like an incantation. “In school, you would never dream of saying something so ambitious.” Majors grew up poor in Texas, where he was raised by his mom, who’s a pastor. As a teenager, he was combative. Anti-authority. Then he discovered the release valve that was acting. This year, the Yale drama school grad’s coiled presence is on display in Creed III and the new Ant-Man and the Wasp movie, and he’ll reign as the archvillain in the next phase of Marvel blockbusters. Majors pours himself into his roles and wants them to be seen, so he doesn’t shy away from the notion of stardom anymore. “I think it’s a word that I was afraid of, because it actually comes with a lot of hope,” he says, “and that’s scary.”

There aren’t many actors who give us as much hope as the 12 stars in these pages. None of them have been on one of our Hollywood covers before. We’ve chosen them because they’re riveting onscreen and driven and ever-evolving in real life. Florence Pugh, the British actor who entered the atmosphere like a comet not so long ago, recently shot Dune: Part Two with other bright lights of her generation, including Austin Butler. “They are remarkable people, number one, and unbelievable actors, number two,” says Pugh. “They’re stars in their own ways, not in the cliché way of using the word. They’re just—they’re sparkly people.”

Despite their youth, most of the sparkly people in this issue have been acting forever. Pugh played Mary in a school nativity play at the age of six—and decided her character should have a Yorkshire accent. Keke Palmer made her film debut as a child, and Butler and Selena Gomez found fame early on TV as well. “When I was filming Elvis, Selena found this photograph of the two of us when I did a guest-star thing on her show Wizards of Waverly Place,” says Butler. “And she sends it to me, just going, ‘Wow, remember this?’ It feels like another life. When you’re a child actor, you see so many people come in from Texas or something, and at a certain point they may quit or go back. We’re just so fortunate to have careers in this industry for this amount of time.”

Everybody here is ecstatic just to be regularly employed when, as Regé-Jean Page puts it, “a good 90 percent of my industry is out of work at any given time.” Page, who grew up in London and in Harare, Zimbabwe, is best known (for now) as the duke on Bridgerton. He regularly reminds himself that an entire fictional world has been built before he even steps on a set—that every project “has had love, sweat, tears, and breakdowns before I’ve ever read the script.” Palmer, a native of Illinois and a magnetic heroine in Nope last year, also refuses to take too much credit for her trajectory. “Anything that’s happened in my life—especially how it’s happened this year—was ordained by forces beyond me,” she says. “I give it up to God. I give it up to the universe, because I could not have written some of these things, you know what I mean? I’m not that good of an author.” 

ARE THERE POTHOLES that everybody here has to swerve around on a daily basis? Of course. For one thing, how do you remain elusive and intriguing in a ravenous culture like ours? “When Paul Newman was acting, he was always 40 feet tall,” says Butler. “We didn’t see a ton of him outside of that big screen, and there’s something really special about that.” Julia Garner, whose talent felt like a bolt out of the blue in Ozark and who has been, justifiably, receiving awards on something like a conveyor belt ever since, worries about overexposure too: “Everyone is so out there, and the mystery is disappearing. And when a person doesn’t have mystery anymore, you can’t get it back.”

Three of these actors—Butler, Ana de Armas, and Emma Corrin—have given arresting performances as the most famously doomed icons in history: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana. Both Butler and de Armas even snagged Oscar nominations. So, yes, this generation knows the glare can burn. Their opinion of social media is…let’s call it complicated.

“If it was up to me, I would delete Instagram right now, but I can’t,” says de Armas, who grew up in Cuba and had to learn her first English-language roles phonetically. The reason she can’t delete it, of course, is that she needs to promote her projects and the brands she has partnerships with. “It’s tricky because you feel the pressure to share some personal insight, or something about your private life, to keep people interested in you,” she says. “You have to find a balance somehow, which I find very difficult.” Gomez, a toweringly popular figure online, as well as a key part of the delicious series Only Murders in the Building, has taken breaks from social media, but recently returned to posting on Instagram and TikTok, the latter of which she finds to be “a little less hostile.” Jeremy Allen White, who’s been inspiring a couple of different kinds of hunger as a chef on The Bear, may have landed on the healthiest way to filter out noise: “My mom tells me what they’re saying on Twitter, which is nice.”