World's most-watched actor is a 69-year-old with no lead roles; beat Tom Cruise, Timothee Chalamet, Ryan Reynolds, SRK

Letterboxd's list of most-watched actors of 2024 has been topped by an unlikely candidate, a 69-year-old actor who is not a superstar.

Updated on: Apr 17, 2025, 16:09:49 IST

By Abhimanyu Mathur

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Every year, Letterboxd, the social platform for film reviews and discovery, puts out a list of its numbers from the previous year. This retrospective includes the most popular films, the most highly-anticipated releases, and even the most watched actors. In this last, for the last three years, an unlikely candidate has been beating some of the biggest superstars in the business.

The world's most watched actor

Letterboxd's Year in Review 2024 included its most watched actor list, which was topped by Willem Dafoe. The 69-year-old appeared in five releases in the year - Kinds of Kindness, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Saturday Night, Zero, and Nosferatu -but none of them as the lead. Despite this, he beat more popular stars who had big releases in the year, including Timothee Chalamet (Dune Part Two) and Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool and Wolverine). The top 10 is largely dominated by character actors such as Stellan Skarsgard, JK Simmons, Josh Brolin, Samuel L Jackson, and Dave Bautista. The only leading men who make it are Chalamet (#2), Javier Bardem (#8), Mark Ruffalo (#9), and Brad Pitt (#10). Willem Dafoe had been the most watched actor in the world in 2022 and 2021 as well, beating the likes of Ryan Gosling, Robert Pattinson, and Matt Damon.

Willem Dafoe's most prominent release of 2024 was Nosferatu.

How Letterboxd creates these lists

Letterboxd is a community where users can log the films they watched, leaving reviews and comments. The platform uses the collective data left by all its users in the year to determine which films have been watched the most, and which actors feature in them. Since Letterboxd does not limit the most watched list to only films released in that year, older actors with bigger filmographies have higher chances of appearing in them. That is how Willem Dafoe - who has appeared in everything from Spider-Man films to Oliver Stone war dramas - routinely tops the list.

Also, the community is largely US and Europe-based with very limited presence in Asia. That is how no Chinese or Indian films or actors make it to the top 10 lists.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abhimanyu Mathur
Abhimanyu Mathur is Deputy Editor, Entertainment at Hindustan Times. With almost 15 years of experience in writing about everything from films and TV shows to cricket matches and elections, he inhales and exhales pop culture and news. Currently, he watches movies and TV shows and talks to celebrities for a living, while occasionally writing about them as well. A journalism graduate of Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, Delhi University, Abhimanyu began his career with Hindustan Times at the age of 20, swapping classrooms for newsrooms at an early age. He began his journey in the early days of digital journalism, later switching to the madness of print journalism. Work has led him to far off places like Japan and Jordan, as well as to the interiors of Haryana and the Indo-Pak border. He dabbled in city reporting in places like Meerut, Gurgaon, and Delhi, covered the Olympics and Cricket World Cups, before finding his calling in entertainment and lifestyle during the pandemic. A Rotten Tomatoes Certified Film Critic, he is equally at home covering stories on ground as he is interviewing celebrities and studios, and sometimes prefers to shepherd teams in delivering traffic through the day. Even as his role has evolved from reporter to supervisor over the years, his first love remains writing (and of late, talking on camera). With a good understanding of cinema and its trends, and a keen eye for detail, he continues to spark conversations around showbiz for readers around the world.Read More

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