Nepo Babies Aren’t the Problem. Bad Nepo Babies Are.

Hollywood nepotism isn’t new. The term “nepo baby” might be, but famous people have been helping their kids get into the business for as long as Hollywood has existed. Drew Barrymore comes from one of the most famous acting families Hollywood has ever seen. Nicolas Cage is a Coppola. Jamie Lee Curtis is the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Josh Brolin is James Brolin’s son, and Barbra Streisand has been his stepmother since she married his father. Nobody acted like any of this was some great secret back then. It was Hollywood.

Martin Sheen gave us an even better example with two sons who took very different paths. Emilio Estevez went out under his own name and built a career that included The Breakfast Club, Young Guns and The Mighty Ducks. Charlie Sheen may have become better known for everything that happened away from the camera, but the guy could act. He could do action, comedy and carry a television show. Did having Martin Sheen for a father help get them noticed? Of course it did. It still didn’t keep either one working for decades without some talent behind the name.

That’s the difference for me. I’m not bothered by somebody getting an advantage because of who their parents are. I’m bothered when the advantage keeps turning into opportunity after opportunity and I still can’t figure out what Hollywood sees. If your father is Martin Sheen, Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks, you’re starting the race about three miles ahead of the kid whose parents sell insurance in Nebraska. Fine. Just show me something once the race starts.

That’s where I think the conversation about nepo babies usually goes off the rails. I don’t care who your parents are if you can actually do the job. Drew Barrymore might be the greatest example of that. Wyatt Russell is one of my favorite actors working today, and I’d put Jack Quaid, Maya Hawke, Zoey Deutch, Lily Collins, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Lewis Pullman near that same level and rising. They had advantages most actors never get, but they also gave me a reason to keep watching them.

The problem is the other group. Scott Eastwood looks enough like his father that sometimes it feels like Hollywood decided the resemblance was enough. He’s never bothered me that much because he usually isn’t being asked to carry the whole movie, but I still haven’t seen anything from him that made me understand why his career keeps moving along. Jaden Smith had The Pursuit of Happyness, The Karate Kid and After Earth, including two movies with his father, and none of that convinced me he was somebody I needed to keep seeing on screen.

Jude Law's son Rafferty Law got the lead in Twist opposite Michael Caine and Lena Headey, and the reviews weren’t exactly glowing. Critics gave him some credit for the physical side of the role, but once the movie needed more from him, he didn’t give it much. That’s a pretty big opportunity to get that early and not leave much of an impression.

Lily-Rose Depp is also one of the easiest ones for me to point to because she was the lead in Nosferatu, a movie that gave her plenty to work with, and she did absolutely nothing for me. That’s not some tiny supporting part where she barely had a chance to make an impression. She was right in the middle of the movie, and I still walked away wondering what everyone else was seeing. Maude Apatow and Kaia Gerber have gotten the same kind of early attention most struggling actors spend years trying to earn, and so far I haven’t seen enough from either of them to understand the fascination.

Those are just some that make the whole nepo baby thing annoying, but none of them are really why I wanted to write this. I can shrug off Scott Eastwood. I can forget Rafferty Law, hopefully. Lily-Rose Depp can still change my mind somewhere down the line.

Dakota Johnson is different, and she’s the reason I started thinking about this in the first place. She’s the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren is her grandmother, and Antonio Banderas was her stepfather for years. This isn’t somebody with one distant Hollywood connection buried somewhere on the family tree. Johnson grew up surrounded by people who already knew how the business worked, who the important people were and what it took to get noticed. If anybody was born with Hollywood already knowing her name, it was Dakota Johnson.

None of that would bother me if I thought she was good. I absolutely do not! I think Dakota Johnson is the worst nepo baby working today, and I don’t say that because of one movie. Hollywood has spent more than a decade giving me opportunities to change my mind about her. Fifty Shades of Grey turned her into a major star. Madame Web put her in the middle of a superhero movie. Materialists gave her another high-profile lead, and now Verity put her alongside Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. The genres change, the people around her change and the size of the movie changes, but I keep coming away with the same problem.

She always feels stiff to me. There’s a flatness to her delivery that makes scenes feel like they’re happening around her instead of involving her. That becomes even more noticeable when she’s working opposite actors who are giving the movie some life, because the difference is sitting right there on the screen. I’m not asking every actor to chew the scenery or turn every performance into an Oscar reel. I just want to feel like there’s something going on behind the words.

That was my biggest problem with her in Verity. I just wrote in my Verity review that Johnson was the weakest part of the movie for me, and she was. Lowen spends most of that story trying to figure out what is happening around her, which should give an actor plenty to play with. There’s a lot going on in that character’s head, and the movie gives Johnson plenty of chances to show it. She still came across stiff and flat while Hathaway and Hartnett were giving me far more to watch.

That’s what separates Johnson from somebody like Scott Eastwood for me. Eastwood isn’t usually being asked to carry something I’m interested in seeing. Johnson keeps landing right in the middle of movies that catch my attention, and every time I find myself wishing somebody else had gotten the part. At some point I shouldn’t still be waiting for the performance that explains why Hollywood keeps betting on her.

That’s really where I land on nepo babies. I’m not interested in punishing somebody because their parents were successful, and I’m certainly not going to pretend Drew Barrymore, Nicolas Cage, Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Brolin or Wyatt Russell somehow don’t deserve their careers because somebody in the family got there first. Talent is talent, no matter what name is on the birth certificate.

The problem starts when the famous name keeps buying chances the work doesn’t justify. Getting the first big opportunity because of your family is one thing. Getting the fifth or sixth when you still haven’t shown me why you deserved the second is something else entirely. Plenty of nepo babies eventually made everybody forget how they got started because the talent became impossible to argue with.

Dakota Johnson has had more than enough chances to make me forget how she got hers. At this point, I’d rather Hollywood just let me forget her.