It would have been better if we had started out the history of films by never using the same actor more than once.
For a lot of films it’s more about watching Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Anniston etc. play a new character with the focus on them instead of seeing a fresh unknown face and the focus on that character’s personality.
I wouldn’t mind a world where once you were in one movie you were never cast again. It would make movies more unique and mysterious. Personally, I like Indie films with unknown actors more than many Hollywood mainstream movies with recycled actors.
I will concede that an amateur actor would probably not have crushed the role of Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” like Daniel Day Lewis did. But that is an exception where the actor disappeared into the role and I never thought I was watching an A list actor. The majority of actors don’t disappear into the role.
Also, a bonus to never using the same actor is that more people would be able to be in a film at least once.
So, when Hollywood first began to build what we know today as the modern film industry, they faced a dilemma: talent is scarce, but for people to see the same face in more than one story they’ll have to suspend their disbelief quite a bit. Using new actors for every movie doesn’t scale because most people suck at acting, and you can’t grow your industry as much as you want with this model. What to do?
Their solution was to turn this into a selling point rather than a downside: they invented celebrity. They created this industry cornerstone of allure and mystery and a whole swath of papers to talk about these individuals that appear in movies. Now, it’s not ridiculous to see the same face in a 10th movie, it’s part of the joy. The movie star as an object was created, fabricated, in order to have a rich film industry at all.
The fact that you like this actor and that actor, that you know who they married and divorced and who they fucked, is deliberate, the industry needs you to care about these things even though they have no impact on your life at all. The truth is humans only knew of people we knew in real life, some historical figures, maybe the emperor’s name. Most people didn’t even know what George Washington looked like while he was president. Most people around the world didn’t even know he existed. The relevance if celebrities isn’t real and they only are relevant because we follow the noise. Their lavish lives only exist because we give them our attention, their names are in our minds for no reason benefitting us, but to them it’s their bread and butter. Bear that in mind next time you see one of them complaining about their feature in the national inquirer.