Being an 'influencer', a shortcut to work as an actor

BarcelonaMore and more we see how people with certain popularity in the digital sphere make the leap to big productions to give life to characters in both films and series. This is the case of Manu Ríos, in the series Élite; Álvaro Mel, in La Otra Mirada, or Marià Casals, in the film A través de mi ventana. It seems that there is beginning to be a change in the selection criteria of the casts of the productions, in which having followers on social media is a point that plays very much in favor.

In part, the value of an actor is the ability to claim the audience. The quotation of reputation was already a common practice in the sector but social media, and especially Instagram, have become the great contemporary showcases of faces, bodies and products, and so audiovisual companies are taking advantage of this spread. After all, it is very easy to viralize any content if you have enough followers. An example of this is the film Veronica which was trending on social media just because Dwayne Johnson commented that he wanted to see it. The actor, with 15.2 million followers, retweeted an image from the film with the comment "Well, I've traded the usual Saturday night plans of tequila and documentaries for... this. I can't wait to have a bad time. Has anyone else seen it yet?", and thanks to the global distribution that Netflix allows, it meant a special promotion for the film, which triumphed much more internationally than in Spain.

This is one of the main reasons why digital prestige is so important in casting. There are a variety of tools that calculate the influence capacity of users, based on the number of followers and the engagement understood as the commitment of the followers with this person, which is manifested with likes, comments, shares or visits to the profile. According to television producer Sergi Nadal, "it is a market that production companies have to exploit; the relationship between the number of followers you have and how famous you are or can become is quite direct. Depending on the casting and the audiovisual content that is being prepared, it is taken into account that the actors are more or less famous, but the majority of the industry is certainly interested in whoever comes has the most followers the better".

Audiovisual productions see the opportunity to take advantage of the digital reach of reputable profiles to boost their products. Because, as Nadal says, production companies gain views: "If the person who posts "don't miss the premiere of my new series" has 100,000 followers or 12 million, things change a lot". On the other hand, the influencers are interested in appearing in films to gain more visibility and broaden their range of followers, and in this way their reputation increases and so does the price per publication. A win-win between production companies and popular profiles.

The order of the factors

Not so long ago, professional success or belonging to the elite or public spheres was the pass to be reputable. But this dynamic is changing: the internet has democratized access to fame. Nowadays anyone with a camera phone can become an influencer. And this also has its downside. In the acting sector, there are many aspiring actors or actresses who see their chances of getting a role diminished due to lack of recognition from internet users. And there are even cast selections that do not go through a casting, but it is directly the production company that contacts the users it considers popular, or those among the followers of those who are the target of the product. Acting students and professionals consider that this entry requirement makes the sector more precarious, as it values people with less talent but more fame in a purely marketing operation.

In addition, actors who already enjoy popularity have an implicit obligation to promote themselves on social media, to be active, to generate content and engagement if they don't want to stop having relevant roles or lose their claim on the public. "Older actors, less digitized and with fewer followers, have a clear disadvantage in this regard to stay on the crest of the wave because we see that we capture an older and scarce audience", says Nadal.

The value of reputation and experience are different but are weighted almost equally in terms of remuneration. In the words of Sergi Nadal, "experience is paid for and an actor who has made 50 films is not the same as someone who has made none, but an influencer with 4 million followers, for example, can get paid the same as that actor". Despite the situation, actors with little projection so far do not dare to be very critical of the dynamics of the sector, since they consider that it is "a very small world" and that an unfortunate comment can affect the development of their career.

But there are people who have openly spoken out against it. The actor Aitor Luna criticized in an article in El Confidencial that the number of followers is a determining factor to get roles: "Instagram has become a new dictatorship [...] and there are people willing to work with undignified salaries if this will get them to increase their followers on Instagram", he laments. And he's not the only one: recently the #ArteSinFollow movement has emerged to make visible the intrusiveness of the influencers in the cultural field.