C’mon, We Have to Stop Calling People “Nepo Baby”
On the most recent Saturday Night Live, host Dakota Johnson dragged herself to hell for being the child of famous parents. It happened during a sketch with the show’s in-house filmmaking trio, Please Don’t Destroy, two members of which can claim veteran SNL writers as their fathers. The sketch finds our host—the progeny of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith—locked in a roast battle with second-gen comedians John Higgins and Martin Herlihy. The insults are brutal. Many of them are based, thrillingly, in reality. Once they broach the topic of parents, both sides hesitate and the tension mounts. Johnson then suggests a “nepo truce,” and the three join rings like the Planeteers summoning Captain Planet, invoking what is meant to be their tribal mantra: a foot in the door and so much more.
This level of self-awareness is apparently what it takes to win the nepo baby narrative. Like Francesca Scorsese, who said earlier this month that she’s “just trying to be the best nepo baby I can be,” Johnson has now officially acknowledged her advantages on record. (Again.) Displaying a sense of humor about one’s charmed life has emerged as the last, best defense people like Johnson have against the charge of inheriting success as a birthright. But honestly, we should all just move on from calling anyone and everyone with famous parents nepo babies, regardless of their actual talent. It was a good idea for a short time—but now it’s run its course.
When New York magazine dedicated a late-2022 cover story to nepotism in show business, it crystallized a phrase that had gained steam all year and sent the discourse into hyperdrive. Professional and amateur opinion havers had not only an occasion to vent about a salient class issue, but a new vocabulary for it. At a moment when gatekeeping and other systemic tools of inequity were finally being discussed out in the open more often, the term “nepo baby” leapt out of Twitter and into broader ubiquity.
It was amusing for a while to watch celebrities squirm in trying to say the right thing when asked about being a nepo baby—a topic interviewers quickly learned led to sound-bite pay dirt. The discourse may have also helped keep alive broader conversations about class politics in Hollywood throughout Hot Strike Summer, when certain TV stars who could comfortably withstand going without work for a while showed up for their unions and others didn’t. At some point, though, legacy celebs either figured out that pretending they faced the same struggles as everyone else was a bad look, or their crisis PR teams did so for them, and the schadenfreude ended. Any conversations that bordered on being productive then fizzled out with the strikes. All that remains now are those two little words, which still get tossed around constantly, without much discernible point beyond insult. Even people who love Riley Keough often call her their favorite nepo baby, instead of calling her an electrifying actress or whatever.
Worse still, many of the folks who have most embraced the term “nepo baby” seem engaged in an ongoing performance art piece of pretending it’s just a neutral descriptor. In reality, calling an adult a “baby” already sounds like an insult, even before getting to the intention behind it or frequency of use. At best, it’s a fun fact that makes examining Maya Hawke’s cheekbones into an act of anthropology. But more often than not, it’s meant to diminish someone’s talent or dismiss it outright, and to gloss over more nuanced and interesting criticism. The members of Please Don’t Destroy should be able to make a movie you thought was horrible without seeing themselves photoshopped into a golden baby stroller.
The problem with calling for an end to nepo baby discourse, though, is that it sounds an awful lot like sticking up for some of the people who least need defending. It has the class-traitor aftertaste of rooting for the Walt Disney Corp., even if it’s because it’s up against Gov. Ron DeSantis. Many so-called nepo babies have only known life as a catered party with every possible whim on the menu. That’s probably why it’s so frustrating for them that they can’t force everyone to stop calling them nepo babies. But some of those nepo babies—the ones we all talk and hear about, because they are bona fide stars—have stuck around thanks to actual talent and tenacity. They are also not inherently ignorant, especially at this point, that their advantages gave them a start ahead of others. Yes, this is where we are now: Siding with genetically blessed millionaires who have a modicum of self-awareness now seems like a more attractive option than siding with the armchair antagonists who insult them all either equally or arbitrarily.
The nepo baby conversation has run out of places to go. It’s stuck in a repetitive cycle, like a toddler learning how to speak. Why bother still bringing up someone’s nepo-ness whenever their name is mentioned, with both the mic-drop confidence of a gotcha and the rote formality of a gesundheit? Where do we go from here: petition Wyatt Russell to credit his parents more often? Occupy Zoë Kravitz’s mentions? Add an asterisk to Jamie Lee Curtis’ Oscar? Does each “nepo baby” need to host SNL and do a song and dance routine acknowledging their nepo baby–ness for all the world to see?
This discourse has not yet yielded any concrete positive results, like inspiring new ways to give underprivileged creatives more opportunity. All it’s done is put publicists on the offensive and create awareness around Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe’s son, who has equally symmetrical features. It’s time for the nepotism conversation to actually go somewhere or go away entirely. If we must talk about the children of celebrities, though, let’s do it like adults.
