How Hollywood’s Biggest Leading Men Got Their Jobs By Killing People

On screen, of course

There are two large media empires built on the idea that Hollywood is liberal: Hollywood itself, and the ever expanding, ever losing-its-damn mind, right-wing outrage machine.

“Liberal Hollywood” benefits both industries.

Hollywood gets to pat itself on the back and attract talent, while the right-wing media not only gets an enemy, but gets its favorite of all enemies: one which it can tell its followers they are the victim of.

If Hollywood is liberal, it is liberal in an American interpretation of the word, that is to say, neo-conservative: a belief that status sanctions the means taken to procure it, toxic self-reliance, and a whole bunch of guns.

Here at TheHiighLow we’ve already explored the idea that Hollywood’s biggest hits have been its most conservative.

Now, we’ll look at how the biggest non-comedic leading men in Hollywood got their leading man status by killing a whole bunch of people.

In every case below, the turning point in the A-list actor’s career, the turning point which vaulted them to A-list status, was a breakout role in which they killed people.

Liam Neeson’s Revival

Liam Neeson is an exception to, and a great example of, the “kill people get more famous” rule. He both reinforces and contradicts it in interesting ways, making him a great example to start the discussion on.

He is an exception in the fact that, for the most part, everyone on this list went on to become big stars across the board after they killed people, where Neeson went on to become a big star…in action movies very similar to his break out role.

In that way, he’s the stand-in for all the Jackie Chan’s and Jason Statham’s not included here, for all the action stars who stayed action stars.

At the same time, he is a great example: the stand-in, the go-to example in the last decade for all actors who’ve reached Hollywood leading-man status due to their role as a lethal killer.

Another layer, one that separates Neeson from those action stars, is that Neeson was a relatively big star before his kill spree (much more than say, Vin Deisel’s small but smart roles in Saving Private Ryan and Boiler Room before he went full triple-X) making his rise all the more dramatic – as it was pretty well proven he had not been able to reach big budget, lead role status without killing 1,000 European men.

Who was Liam Neeson before Taken?

As Liam Neeson told The Viginia Pilot in 2011, “I never saw myself as an action star”.

Besides Schindler’s List it’s hard to remember Liam Neeson pre-Taken: he seemed to be most prominent as the fatherly-figure supporting role in larger films. A priest in Gangs of New York, Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, Qui-Gon Jinn Star Wars: Episode I.

It’s fitting then, that his transformative role in Taken saw him starting out as a father, only to become a…father who tracks down terrorists and kills them with karate.

EW spoke to the transformative nature of the Taken role, 2 years after its release.

He’d had one previous great action role — as the kilt-wearing Scottish medieval-swordsman hero of Rob Roy (1995), a much better movie than Braveheart — but now, after years as an A-list actor who has never really been a pop movie star, he had crossed the line

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar

Leonardo’s career is an exception that proves so many Hollywood rules.

He has the career kids dream about when kids dream about becoming movie stars: his choice of roles and directors, and, because he continuously makes great choices, a continuous perch at the top of Hollywood’s A-List.  

All that, and his big breakthrough role was about drawing naked ladies and freezing to death in the Atlantic.

It helped that Titanic was the highest grossing film of all-time, stayed at #1 for 15 weeks, and ran for 287 days on American screens.

But for all his amazing roles, he didn’t win the Oscar until he grunted and growled his was through the American wild killing native people and sleeping inside animals.

Bruce Willis: Diehard

From Moonlighters to Mcclane, there may not be a more dramatic shift on this list than Willis’ transition from small screen rom-com lead to A-list movie star by killing people.

But, in one of Hollywood’s most dramatic casting stories, it didn’t come easy.

Willis was originally not wanted by the studio because he wasn’t big enough of a star, or for that matter, big enough of a person: rumors have it that at least 8 leading man turned down the role before Willis took it on, including, you guessed it, Frank Sinatra.

(I’m guessing you did not guess that).

The studio even left him off the poster at first, thinking a tall tower more manly, and a bigger draw, than wimpy Willis.

Will Smith: Bad Boys

Will Smith was a revelation in Six Degrees of Separation, but 2 years later, the one-two punch of Bad Boys (1995) – in which Smith shot naughty men – and Independence Day (1996) – in which Smith shot down spicy aliens – put him on top of the box office.

By 1997’s Men In Black Smith was starring alongside the veteran Tommy Lee Jones and holding his own on the marquee.

It’s honestly one of the clearest examples of how shooting lots of people in a big budget movie can leapfrog an otherwise rapper/sitcom actor, to the top of the Hollywood heap.

Chris Pratt: Zero Dark Thirty

Before Chris Pratt was allowed to shoot aliens and dinosaurs, he had to hunt not only the most dangerous prey of all (human), but America’s most feared villain: Osama Bin Laden.

Shortly after killing America’s #1 enemy, in a moment that seemed short lived, and now, easily overlooked, Chris Pratt glowed-up with his Kumail-in-Eternals-before-Kumail-in-Eternals instagram post.

I mean, he was Andy Dwyer before this. No one saw this picture coming and the internet was a buzz.

His kill-people-become-leading-man path may only have Bruce Willis to compare with in terms of unexpectedness.

Matt Damon: The Bourne Identity  

The quote that started it all.

By “it all” I mean this single essay.

This quote from The 40-Year-Old Virgin was the original insight I used to create this derivative piece of pop culture paraphernalia.

You know, I always thought that Matt Damon was like a Streisand, but I think he’s rockin’ the shit in this one

Certainly, Matt Damon was a star after Good Will Hunting but, as Apatow and Carrell via Paul Rudd posit: America didn’t think he was manly enough to take the lead role in movies until he could prove it in a lead role in which he killed people.

The Rock: Faster

The Rock was already a star when he starred in Faster in 2010. But he wasn’t the #1 box-office star in the world that he is today.

After The Tooth Fairy, the star was at a crossroads: how to get a larger audience to smell what he was cooking.

Garcia explains of the star’s early tribulations in the movie business after transitioning from WWE to Hollywood permanently in 2003. “He was like: ‘Okay, I need to conform. Maybe, I’m too big.'” Normally weighing somewhere between 260 and 270 pounds, Johnson had dropped to an unusually low 230 pounds for 2007’s Disney caper The Game Plan

Newsweek

Turned out, getting larger (and focusing on shooting people) was how to get a larger audience.

“We had a movie come out called Faster [in 2010] at the tail-end of his CAA run. It was a small but important movie because the decision was made that he would be himself from this point on; he was going to train the way he trained, eat the way he eats. He was going to make Hollywood make room for him instead of trying to fit himself into Hollywood.”

After switching agencies and eating more, Faster was the role, the kill-people-and-be-your-super-jacked-self persona, that Johnson would base the next decade of his career – and rise to astronomical success – on.

Seeing the way the industry didn’t react super positively to The Tooth Fairy and how killing people immediately after that seemed to put a different taste in their mouth – rewarding The Rock with franchise after franchise lead roles – it’s relatively safe to say that killing people helped, rather than hurt, The Rock’s rise to global domination.

Tom Cruise: Top Gun 

Tom Cruise has a more complicated path to movie stardom, that is he was legitamtely a leading man before Top Gun.

Not to mention, he was in every single hit movie of the 80s (slight exaggeration only).
This is a list of only the most iconic films Cruise starred in in that decade:

• Risky Business
• The Outsiders
• Rain Man
• The Color of Money
• Top Gun
• Born on The 4th of July

But of all 80s Cruise films, none is more predictive of his later career than Top Gun.

Shooting down MIGs is arguably more intense than most leading-man-making roles because you’re not only shooting people, but the insanely expensive jet planes they’re riding in.

Not to mention Top Gun was an unironic overload of testosterone the way only steroids can be nowadays.

And just when he needed it in the 90s Mission Impossible allowed Cruise to re-energize his gravitas with explosions and a plot we all pretended to understand.

Tom Cruise’s career appears like it was never in doubt, but you don’t stay on top for 4 decades mixing cocktails and crying next to your dying on-screen dad.

Every few years you need to shoot someone, or preferably, lots of someones.

Christian Bale: American Psycho

Though Bale was something of a child prodigy, acting in Hollywood films for 13 years before American Psycho, his wikipedia page literally labels 1999-2004 as the “rise to prominence” phase of his career, starting with American Psycho in 1999.

In the next 5 years Bale would star in Reign of Fire which made $95M and in which Bale fought dragons, and Equilibrium a role which, a for a while     put him in the Top 5 for Confirmed Character Kills in all Hollywood history (moviebodycounts.com doesn’t seem to be up to date, as Wick is nowhere to be seen). 

All that killing landed Bale the lead in one of the largest film franchises of the 21st century, with Batman Begins being released in 2005.

The Counter Argument(s)

A counter argument is that these actors actually got these big leading roles before they killed people.

Another counter is that action films are just super popular in general, so it would make sense that actors would become famous doing an action movie that went on to be very popular.

To address the latter: action films being super popular only reinforces the point. Americans like seeing people get killed. Our censorship laws all but breed it into us: no sex or you get a X rating, shoot 100 people without squibs and we’ll keep it PG-13.

I started with the latter argument because it’s easier to address.

As for the fact that these actors got these big roles without killing – at some point we get into semantics and, eventually, the truth at the core of this essay which is that it’s all conjecture.

That said, it’s fun conjecture.

And, if any of what I write can be said to be “important”, it’s important to look critically at our assumptions.

Assumption: of course Tom Cruise has always been a A-list leading man.

Actual Reason: an actor and his team of agents – whose entire job is to get said actor roles in successful movies and promote them – chose, time and again, to put their client in movies that have a high chance for success, and determined that the movies that have the highest chance for success involve their actor shooting as many people as possible. Oh, and their strategy worked.