Apr 17, 2025 04:09 PM IST
Letterboxd’s list of most-watched actors of 2024 has been topped by an unlikely candidate, a 69-year-old actor who is not a superstar.
Every year, Letterboxd, the social platform for film reviews and discovery, puts out a list of its numbers from the previous year. This retrospective includes the most popular films, the most highly-anticipated releases, and even the most watched actors. In this last, for the last three years, an unlikely candidate has been beating some of the biggest superstars in the business.
The world’s most watched actor
Letterboxd’s Year in Review 2024 included its most watched actor list, which was topped by Willem Dafoe. The 69-year-old appeared in five releases in the year – Kinds of Kindness, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Saturday Night, Zero, and Nosferatu -but none of them as the lead. Despite this, he beat more popular stars who had big releases in the year, including Timothee Chalamet (Dune Part Two) and Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool and Wolverine). The top 10 is largely dominated by character actors such as Stellan Skarsgard, JK Simmons, Josh Brolin, Samuel L Jackson, and Dave Bautista. The only leading men who make it are Chalamet (#2), Javier Bardem (#8), Mark Ruffalo (#9), and Brad Pitt (#10). Willem Dafoe had been the most watched actor in the world in 2022 and 2021 as well, beating the likes of Ryan Gosling, Robert Pattinson, and Matt Damon.
How Letterboxd creates these lists
Letterboxd is a community where users can log the films they watched, leaving reviews and comments. The platform uses the collective data left by all its users in the year to determine which films have been watched the most, and which actors feature in them. Since Letterboxd does not limit the most watched list to only films released in that year, older actors with bigger filmographies have higher chances of appearing in them. That is how Willem Dafoe – who has appeared in everything from Spider-Man films to Oliver Stone war dramas – routinely tops the list.
Also, the community is largely US and Europe-based with very limited presence in Asia. That is how no Chinese or Indian films or actors make it to the top 10 lists.
