The most important actor of all time, according to science
It seems like a question that doesn’t have a definitive answer, because how does anybody accurately measure the importance of an actor? It’s about as open-ended as it gets, and there are plenty of variables to take into consideration.
Is it the amount of awards they’ve won personally? Is it the amount of awards the movies they’ve been a part of have collected? Is it their ability to entice audiences to the cinema based on their name alone? The amount of money their star vehicles have made? The amount of money their filmography has accrued, regardless of whether they took top billing or played a supporting role?
It’s enough to make anybody’s head spin if they put too much thought into it, which is where science comes in. Instead of pub debates raging long into the night over which performer made the biggest contribution to cinema, numbers were crunched, and data was pored over to come up with a statistical and scientific analysis that puts all of those unanswered queries to bed.
For context, the good folks at the University of Turin pulled their findings from nearly 400,000 performers and 47,000 films to evaluate their careers as a whole. The metrics were then based on critical acclaim, box office performance, user-generated evaluations from across the internet, and how influential their movies have been in relation to the ones that followed, using a points system split into three categories: gold, silver, and bronze.
In this instance, a ‘gold’ point is earned by an actor being part of the cast in a feature that ranks in the top 5% of the overall study, ‘silver’ comes from a picture that resides in the top 10%, and ‘bronze’ is anything that makes the top 15%. With that in mind, the single most important, influential, and successful actor to ever grace the silver screen was revealed to be none other than Samuel L Jackson.
He’s already the highest-grossing actor of all time, so in a way, it makes perfect sense that he’d emerge at the head of the pack. After all, Jackson isn’t only one of the most prolific stars of his generation; he’s developed an innate ability to attach himself to projects that seize the zeitgeist, dominate the pop culture conversation, gain plenty of admirers, and influence the medium to a massive extent.
From his collaborations with Spike Lee to his recurring role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe via Quentin Tarantino’s transformative Pulp Fiction, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Brad Bird’s Oscar-winning The Incredibles and its billion-dollar sequel, and countless more, Jackson has always seemed to have his finger on the pulse of Hollywood and known exactly how to toe the line between commercial glory and prestige pictures.
And for anyone who thinks the results might be skewed in favour of cold, hard cash above anything else, it’s definitely worth mentioning that Clint Eastwood comes in second. The highest-grossing release of his career was a movie he didn’t even appear in, and when adjusted for inflation his biggest on-camera hit was a buddy comedy in which he partnered up with an orangutan.
