The Real Kevin Bacon

The conventional wisdom is that Kevin Bacon is the all-encompassing center of Hollywood, so prolific that the game is a lot easier than if it were called the “Six Degrees of John Doe.”

Samuel L. Jackson is the center of Hollywood, with a remoteness of just 2.09. Willem Dafoe is second at 2.13, and Robert De Niro follows at 2.14.

Women are underrepresented among the top 100, taking only 16 spots. Nicole Kidman is the highest-ranking woman at #21.

Let’s create time machine for the center of Hollywood and calculate actors’ remoteness in previous years. Our time machine starts at the end of 2025.

Let’s time travel to 2006, when Samuel L. Jackson took the crown.

Kevin Bacon still does not appear; his highest rank was #108 in 1996 after his role in “Sleepers.”

We can view all centers of Hollywood since 1980. Use the slider to look around.

How might we predict who will take the crown from Samuel L. Jackson? Let’s apply this idea to the future.

To do that, we need to find what affects an actor’s remoteness score.

One obvious metric is film count. Indeed, Samuel L. Jackson appeared in far more films than anyone else in our 169,000 actor dataset. Nicolas Cage, who’s the next closest, appeared in 96 films.

While the relationship between film count and remoteness is strong, it doesn't fully explain actors’ scores. For example, Natalie Portman and Anna Kendrick differ significantly in their remoteness, despite appearing in the same number of films.

The difference between Natalie Portman and Anna Kendrick lies in their co-stars: Natalie Portman is cast in films with more prolific actors than Anna Kendrick. Of the 250 most-connected actors, Natalie Portman has worked with almost three times as many as Anna Kendrick has.

So if you work with more “big dog” actors compared to someone with the same film count, you'll almost certainly be closer to the center of Hollywood. Consequently, co-star film count is the next important factor: this is an actor’s 50 most prolific co-stars by number of films, taken as an average.

Test your knowledge with a few examples: for these actors with similar film counts, who do you think works with more “big dogs” and is more connected to all of Hollywood?

We now have everything we need to predict the future Samuel L. Jackson using film count and co-star data. Our contenders are 99 actors born since 1997 (i.e., Gen Z) who have appeared in at least 5 films.

For the prediction, we need to model actors’ film count and co-star trajectory. To do this, we look at what has happened to actors with similar data in the past.

When predicting film count, consider Sydney Sweeney, who has appeared in 16 films since her debut 15 years ago. By the same point in his career, Robert De Niro also racked up 16 films, and he went on to have a brilliant career totalling 87. By contrast, Chevy Chase reached the same 16-film milestone, but ultimately only appeared in 27 total.

Conversely, after 47 years in Hollywood, Kevin Bacon has a similar film count to Helen Mirren and Gene Hackman.

You'll remember Gene Hackman from the time machine; Kevin Bacon could have been the center of Hollywood if he were born 20 years earlier.

To model a Gen Z actor’s trajectory, we consider comparable careers based on film count and career age, randomly selecting one weighted by similarity.

By applying the same approach for co-star film count, we can start predicting.

To achieve a stable result, we'll run the simulation 10,000 times and see who comes out on top.

Chloë Grace Moretz is the most likely Samuel L. Jackson for Gen Z, winning over 10% of simulations. It’s by no means a landslide: her median remoteness is 2.19 and median projected film count is 66, quite far from Samuel L. Jackson’s stratospheric numbers of 116 career films and a 2.09 remoteness score.

As time goes on, Samuel L. Jackson will eventually stop appearing in films and have fewer connections to new actors, lowering his remoteness score.

Meanwhile, younger actors will continue starring in films and overtake his status as the center of Hollywood. What we don’t know, however, is exactly how long that will take.