12 More Actors You Didn’t Know Are ‘Nepotism Babies’
Reading Time: 4 minutesPeople like Nicolas Cage, Dakota Johnson, and Maya Hawke are great. They also had a little help.
Nepotism is the most natural thing in the world. Most of us would use our connections to help our family get jobs if we could, whether it’s calling your boss to ask about that third shift for your son or hooking them up with a spot on the board of directors of a multinational energy firm. It’s particularly noticeable in Hollywood though.
There’s just no such thing as a pure meritocracy, and being able to ‘make it’ as an actor takes more than talent. These dozen people all have famous folks, even if they try to deny it or it’s not immediately obvious. I’m not saying they’re bad at their jobs—pretty much all of these actors are great at what they do—but they had a little help.
Margaret Qualley is the daughter of Andie Macdowell, who appeared in every single major motion picture released between 1985 and 1995. Her dad is Paul Qualley, an actor-turned-Montana-rancher, so Margaret had important connections in the agriculture sector as well as Hollywood. Shockingly, Qualley chose acting and modeling, and starred in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Netflix’s Maid, for which she won a deserved best actress Emmy. Given her background, it can’t have been easy to portray a connectionless maid so convincingly.
I spent most of my life as a fan of both the quirky comedy of Maya Rudolph and the soulful style of 70s chartreuse Minnie Ripperton with no idea the two were connected—no one ever told me that Rudolph is Ripperton’s daughter. I’m not sure how much her mother being a soul icon helped Rudolph to get started in comedy, but it probably didn’t hurt. No matter how she got her gigs, Rudolph was the funniest person on SNL during her years, and she shared some of those years with Will Ferrell.
You probably already know that Hailey Bieber is married to Justin Bieber, and you might have known her dad is Stephen Baldwin. I’m pointing her out because Hailey is a case of pure nepotism; her profession of ‘socialite and media personality’ wouldn’t exist without the famousness she was born and married into. Which is cool. These kinds of people have always co-existed with the masses and are only rarely guillotined.
The career of Chad McQueen is proof that Hollywood nepotism doesn’t always work. The son of iconic handsome-cool-guy Steve McQueen, Chad’s career peaked at playing Dutch, the meanest member of Cobra Kai, in 1984’s The Karate Kid. He went on to star in low-budget action movies like 1992’s Death Ring (with Chuck Norris’s son Matt and Patrick Swayze’s brother Don), but he mostly races cars, just like pops did.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s parents are actor Blythe Danner and director Bruce Paltrow. In terms of fame, she eclipsed both of them, but I’m including her here because of a quote she gave Town & Country magazine about the double-bind of nepotism: ‘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’ or ‘You are only there because of your dad or your mom,” Paltrow said.
Hollywood nepotism is more complicated than it sometimes seems. Mariska Hargitay’s parents were Jayne Mansfield, the 1950s wish.com version of Marilyn Monroe, and Mickey Hargitay, the 1950s wish.com version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mansfield was household-name-famous in the 1950s, but by the time she died in a car accident in the 1960s, she was scraping the bottom of the fame barrel, so it’s hard to say if her parent’s fame/infamy helped Mariska become a television mainstay for more than 30 years.
Dakota Johnson is third generation Hollywood royalty. She’s the child of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, and the granddaughter of Hitchcock ingenue Tippi Hedren. With a family like that, you’d have to work hard to not be a famous actress. Dakota is probably best known for starring in 50 Shades of Grey, but she was excellent in the recent remake of Suspiria too.
In an interview with Variety, Maya Hawke, the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, not skater Tony Hawk, insisted that she had to audition like everyone else for her breakout role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’m sure she had to audition, but the ‘like everyone else’ part is sus. Given that her mom is basically Tarantino’s muse, I’l bet they took her audition a little more seriously than some unknown’s. This is not to put down Hawke, who is excellent in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Stranger Things, and she’s completely charming.
Acting is a mug’s game. People know your name, but they also know your business, and the real money goes to the people making the movies, not the meat puppets starring in them. Lyle Waggoner, a successful actor on TV for decades, figured this out. Rather than being content to star in Wonder Woman, in 1979, Waggoner bought a bunch of trailers and started renting them out to productions. Before long, just about every trailer rented in Hollywood came through Waggoner. He died in 2020, and in 2021, his children sold the ‘Star Waggon’ family business for $222 million. That’s my kind of nepotism.
Cage’s born name is Nicholas Kim Coppola. He is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola and of actress Talia Shire. Cage famously dropped the family name because he wanted to make his own way, but come on: Literally everyone who hired him must have known about his family. Either way, if having a famous uncle was necessary for Cage to star in movies, I’m okay with it. Nicolas Cage is just the greatest.
C0rrection: A previous version of this article wrongly said that Cage is Francis Ford Coppola’s son. Cage is his nephew.
Sigourney Weaver’s dad is Sylvester Laflin ‘Pat’ Weaver Jr., who was president of NBC between 1953 and 1955. It’s hard to say whether her pops helped her out or not—there was a lot of time between 1955 and Alien in 1979. I like to believe her uncle, Doodles Weaver, is why she got so famous. Doodles Weaver is the best for the following reasons:
- He was particularly colorful member of weirdo comedy orchestra Spoke Jones’ City Slickers.
- His actual name was Winstead Sheffield Glenndenning Dixon Weaver.
- He was a contributor to Mad Magazine in the 1950s.
- His first film was in 1936. His last in 1981.
- He’s in both Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor.
Riley Keough has Elvis’s blood flowing through her veins. She is the granddaughter of The King and the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley. Riley channeled the rock and roll power for her first film role as Marie Currie in 2010’s The Runaways biopic. She was also in Mad Max: Fury Road, Magic Mike, It Comes at Night, The Girlfriend Experience, and Zola, the best movie ever made based on a tweet.
Reference: https://lifehacker.com/12-more-actors-you-didnt-know-are-nepotism-babies-1849921029