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Bernard is Leaving the North Pole, David Krumholtz is Quitting Hollywood
David Krumholtz has been working in Hollywood for more than three decades. Now, the longtime character actor says he’s had enough. At least for the time being.
Krumholtz, probably still best known to an entire generation as Bernard the elf in The Santa Clause, announced that he has put his acting career “on hold,” saying that years of fighting for work in an increasingly unforgiving industry have left him “frustrated, fed up, fried.”
It’s a surprisingly bleak admission from an actor who, from the outside looking in, would seem to be doing pretty well.
Krumholtz has been a working actor since the early 1990s, appearing in everything from Addams Family Values and 10 Things I Hate About You to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Superbad, and This Is the End. He also spent six seasons starring in CBS’s Numb3rs.
More recently, he played physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a relatively small role that nevertheless reminded audiences what a talented character actor Krumholtz can be.
Unfortunately for him, his more recent résumé also includes this year’s box-office disaster, Supergirl, in which he played Kara Zor-El’s father, Zor-El.
Still, Krumholtz’s decision doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the failure of The Girl of Tomorrow. Instead, the 48-year-old says it’s the culmination of years spent watching the business that supported him for most of his life transform into something very different.
According to Krumholtz, he finally sent what he called the “definitive email,” putting his acting career on ice, and immediately felt an enormous sense of relief.
He doesn’t know exactly what comes next. What he does know is that he’s tired of what it apparently takes to remain a working actor in Hollywood.
Krumholtz described spending the past year fighting for parts only to find opportunities that he believes would exploit his talent and decades-long reputation for increasingly little compensation.
He contrasted today’s Hollywood with the industry he entered as a teenager, when helping a studio make money generally meant another opportunity was on the horizon. In his telling, corporate consolidation has steadily destroyed that relationship.
Even more tellingly, Krumholtz says established actors are now expected to essentially become social-media influencers, building personal brands, collecting followers, and chasing convention appearances or internet advertising simply to replace income that acting itself once provided.
David Krumholtz in Numb3rs
Imagine spending more than three decades becoming good at your job only to discover that being good at your job is no longer enough. Now you also need to dance for the algorithm.
And there’s another elephant creeping into the room.
Artificial intelligence
Krumholtz didn’t point to AI as the reason for his decision, and it would be unfair to put words in his mouth. But his frustration comes as nearly everyone who actually makes movies seems to be asking the same uncomfortable question: How many of us will Hollywood eventually decide it no longer needs?
The executives and bean counters, naturally, seem considerably more enthusiastic about finding out.
AI isn’t some hypothetical technology waiting outside the studio gates anymore. It’s already inside.
Hollywood insider Matthew Belloni recently told WIRED that AI has quietly become commonplace throughout the entertainment industry. Corporate uses are widespread, but generative AI is also increasingly finding its way into the creative process. Belloni even described hearing about a prominent showrunner who chastised her writers for not using ChatGPT to help creatively.
Meanwhile, The Economist reports that AI is already being used across virtually every stage of filmmaking, including script development, production planning, visual effects, editing, and shot generation. Netflix says it has used AI in roughly 300 titles this year alone.
And there’s the part that should make working actors, writers, visual-effects artists, and countless other craftspeople a little nervous.
The selling point is efficiency.
One Netflix production reportedly created AI-enhanced material twice as fast and at half the cost of traditional methods. Another filmmaker used AI to create an effect that otherwise would have required a much more elaborate physical production.
Twice as fast.
Half the cost.
Those are magical words to the people signing the checks.
They may sound considerably less magical to the people receiving them.
That doesn’t mean every use of AI is inherently sinister. Using a computer to create a dangerous effect without putting actors at risk is difficult to argue against. Using technology to make tedious production work easier isn’t exactly unprecedented either.
The question is where “making the artist’s job easier” ends and “we don’t need the artist anymore” begins.
Some of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers aren’t interested in waiting around to find out.
Christopher Nolan has called AI a “Trojan horse,” warning people to look skeptically at the motivations of those pushing it. Steven Spielberg has said he won’t use AI to replace writers or other creative positions. Guillermo del Toro deliberately avoided it during work on the 3D rerelease of Pan’s Labyrinth, while Tim Burton has described AI imitations of his work as disturbing and lacking humanity.
Actors and writers have even more obvious reasons to be nervous. The possibility of digitally recreating performers or generating scripts was already one of the major flashpoints surrounding Hollywood’s 2023 labor battles.
And yet, while the people in front of and behind the cameras argue about protecting the human beings who make movies, the studios are being handed technology promising to make those same movies faster and cheaper.
You don’t need to be Nostradamus to spot the potential conflict.
David Krumholtz in “Leopoldstadt” on Broadway
For someone like Krumholtz, that makes his complaints feel less like the grousing of one disgruntled actor and more like a warning flare.
This isn’t an unknown performer who couldn’t get his first break.
This is Bernard from The Santa Clause.
It’s a guy who starred in a successful network television show for six seasons.
It’s an actor who was just in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and appeared in a major DC superhero movie this year.
And after 34 years in the business, he says he’s tired of fighting to convince Hollywood he’s worth employing.
Krumholtz isn’t technically retiring. He’s still willing to act when the right opportunity comes along, but he’s done begging Hollywood to let him work under terms he considers increasingly exploitative. He’s considering other ways to spend his time, including motivational speaking for children.
It’s not even the first time he’s considered walking away. Seth Rogen once recalled Krumholtz becoming so disillusioned with acting around 2020 that he was considering leaving Hollywood and selling BMWs. Rogen talked him out of it, and Krumholtz subsequently landed acclaimed stage work in Leopoldstadt before returning to prominent film roles like Oppenheimer.
This time sounds different.
For all the attention given to Hollywood’s struggling box office, collapsing television model, streaming wars, and increasingly bloated blockbuster budgets, Krumholtz’s comments offer a glimpse at another side of an entertainment industry that increasingly seems unable to figure out how to sustainably employ the people actually making the entertainment.
AI may ultimately prove to be another tool, no different from the countless technological advances Hollywood has absorbed over the last century.
Maybe.
But when an industry already has experienced actors complaining that there isn’t enough work and that the work that does exist pays too little, introducing technology whose most attractive selling point to corporations is that it can accomplish more with less isn’t exactly going to calm everyone’s nerves.
The stars will probably be fine.
The studio executives certainly aren’t losing sleep.
The David Krumholtzes of Hollywood may be another story.
And if an actor with 34 years of credits, a successful network television series, The Santa Clause, Oppenheimer, Broadway acclaim, and a brand-new DC movie on his résumé can’t figure out how to make acting financially worthwhile anymore, Hollywood might have a bigger problem than another box-office bomb.The post Bernard is Leaving the North Pole, David Krumholtz is Quitting Hollywood first appeared on Worth it or Woke.
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