Per Deadline, Rider Strong said on his own podcast that he "stopped revealing my star count on Letterboxd" "for the sake of my professional career." He has removed about half his ratings, which he described as a "complete flat line" of half stars and five stars.
The mechanism is the background check. "People check each other's Letterboxd" is the most honest sentence about Hollywood casting since the casting couch. A 90s sitcom kid explains, on his own podcast, that rating one of an actor's films a half star "is not a good look" if he is trying to recruit that actor for his movie. Not a comment on the film. A comment on the meeting.
He calls himself "extremist": love it or hate it, no third star. And the fix for being an extremist in a town where everyone is a future co-star is not to moderate the taste, it is to delete the evidence. Half the ratings are gone. The rest are, in his words, "still out there," a half-erased chalkboard waiting for someone to read it.
His profile bio reads "Was an actor. Now a writer. Director. Podcaster. I teach, too," then quotes Socrates, who "once said," "We're all influencers now." Socrates did not say that. Socrates would have given the movie a half star and not blinked, because Socrates never once had to ask an actor to be in his movie.
YOUR TURN: if a half star can cost you the role, is the star the problem, or the man who needs a third star?
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