It’s Time for Canada to Make Its Own Star System

As someone who has worked in the screen industry for the past 50 years, I can say one thing without a doubt: in Canada we have some of the best actors in the world. So why are they not bigger household names?

Things were a little easier back in my day, because there were so few places you could consume content. I started acting in 1976, when I was still a high school student in Oshawa, Ontario. I was fortunate to have an agent, something many actors today struggle to find. I mainly did commercials and, as one of the very few Black actors on TV, I quickly became well-known. I did the Wear a Milk Mustache campaign, McDonald’s, Greyhound Bus, Scotiabank and Everfresh Orange Juice. I also did catalogue work for Sears, Eaton’s and the Bay. These catalogues arrived at every home in Canada, so people were forced to see my face regularly. For fun, I started dancing on a show called Boogie on CityTV, which a lot of people watched. Then, I got into the drama program at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University), landed the kids’ program Polka Dot Door, a show called Welcome to My World, the sitcom Check It Out on CTV and a lot of guest spots on series. All this to say—in nine short years I went from basic obscurity to becoming a very recognizable face to the general public. People might not have known me internationally, but I had a solid base of fans right here at home.

Then I went to L.A. and landed a job on The Young and the Restless, which pushed my recognition factor to international levels. I haven’t been on that show for 16 years, yet the soap magazines and fans still track what I’m up to. Audiences fall in love with and stay loyal to their actors.

You’d think with the invention of streaming channels and social media, it would be easier for Canadian performers to break through today. But it’s not. Take K.C. Collins, a lead in Law and Order Toronto and a fixture on Canadian screens for more than two decades. He should be a household name by now. So should rising talents like Wild Cards’ Vanessa Morgan, Transplant’s Hamza Haq and Trickster’s Joel Oulette. But they’re not. Why aren’t they getting national and international attention? Where are their magazine covers and advertising endorsements? So many Canadian actors have headed south of our border and become incredibly famous. What is the missing ingredient for them to get the accolades they deserve right here? 

The root of the problem is that we don’t have the infrastructure that other countries have to turn their onscreen talent into stars: the publicists, celebrity magazines, daytime and late-night talk shows and, most importantly, managers. The U.S., South Korea, U.K. and other countries across Europe have built global star systems and exported their shows to our screens. Japan, Nigeria, India and Australia have actors who command attention at home and abroad. But Canada has yet to build the same momentum. We are perhaps the only developed country in the world with very few local household names. As a result, our homegrown productions struggle to draw audiences. Between 2023 and 2024, English-language Canadian films comprised just 1.4 per cent of the national box office.

We need to build a star system for our actors. Celebrities are people who are recognizable to a general audience, not only nationally but internationally as well. The key to making this happen is to flood the audience with their faces. Then audiences get attached to them and will seek them out in any content they’re in. The more audience the talent attracts, the better the chance that their series or film will garner attention. 

In truth, we already have a star system for our athletes and singers—so this concept is not new to us. It’s only in the screen industry that we fall short. The lone exception is Quebec. They have talk shows like Tout le monde en parle, which draws almost two million viewers each week and consistently promote homegrown talent. Major Quebec newspapers and online outlets cover the content and debates from each episode the following day, which elevates the reach of the guests. 

Canada used to have a similar system. Back in the ’80s, we had The Alan Hamel Show and The Alan Thicke Show, which gave Canadian actors the national exposure they needed to become celebrities—people like Margot Kidder, David Steinberg and Susan Clark. These shows don’t exist anymore. For example, Supinder Wraich, the breakout lead of the CBC show Allegiance and a freshly minted Canadian Screen Award winner, should be a huge star. But I don’t see her on any talk shows celebrating her success. Meanwhile, Canadian celebrities like Sandra Oh, Simu Liu and Tantoo Cardinal got famous from their projects in the U.S. How do we build faithful fan bases? By reinforcing our Canadian stars to audiences through this media circuit. 

We also need much bigger marketing budgets to get stars in front of audiences. In Canada, we regularly spend the bulk of a project’s budget on production, leaving less than 10 per cent to promote it. That’s like inventing a delicious new soft drink and leaving it on store shelves with little to no advertising and hoping shoppers buy it. It’s never going to work. In contrast, major Hollywood studio productions regularly allot half of their high production budgets to marketing. That’s why you see all those U.S. shows promoted widely on our Canadian channels, and why homegrown audiences want to see those shows over our own. 

To break through the noise of today’s content-saturated landscape, we need to spend at least as much on promotion as we do on production—double, even, if we’re serious. For any new product you need to drown your audience in marketing. They should see plugs for that series or movie at bus stops, subways, billboards, magazines—everywhere they look. Maybe we could even get our Canadian broadcasters and streamers to promote our Canadian content for free or at a cheaper rate.

To further build hype, managers need to connect their talent to product brands. I loved seeing Keanu Reeves playing video games in his Rogers commercials, or Ryan Reynolds scoffing down some Tim’s. This kind of partnership needs professional cooperation. But in Canada, the machinery that builds these collaborations barely exists.

I hear excuses all the time that the U.S. is right next door, 10 times as big and we can’t compete with them. But that’s not a valid argument: other countries have figured it out. I recently spoke with a South Korean actor who explained how the industry works in his country. They have a population of around 50 million—not much bigger than us—and have to compete with content from two massive neighbours: China and Japan. To stand out, they built a star system centred around managers who find and cultivate young talent. These managers invest in the performer by paying for their acting, dance and singing lessons, for example. They shape their public image, curate their clothing, provide media training and build a social media presence for their talent. It’s the old-Hollywood way of creating stars—and it works. Parasite won the Best Picture Oscar in 2020, and South Korean films and series have been flooding our streaming channels. Today, many Korean actors have millions of social media followers. Lee Byung-hun is one of the most famous Korean actors in the world. He can get over 50,000 people to turn up at his events.

In Canada, we don’t have such managers. Imagine a Canadian producer who knows that the actor they cast in their show has millions of followers—that’s a guarantee of at least that many people watching that show or buying tickets to that film. Those are good numbers. To put it in perspective, consider the most-watched scripted shows in the country: Heartland garners about a million people in Canada an episode; Murdoch Mysteries, now in its 19th season, gets an average audience of around 730,000; and Law and Order Toronto got 1.1 million views per episode for its debut season. 

Another case for a star system is that it helps producers access private investors. If you want someone to invest in your project, they would first want to know who stars in your movie. Without them, a producer knows they won’t make much money on the film screening in cinemas, so they choose to skip theatrical releases and, instead, pre-sell the film to streaming or broadcast to recoup costs quickly. The key to an audience showing up at the theatre is that it has actors they recognize. Stars bring audiences, media buzz and investor confidence, making it easier for filmmakers to fund, market and release their work. In turn, that means more great films, more visibility for Canadian stories and a film industry that can sustain itself.

Recently, one prominent Canadian producer told me he opposed the idea of building a Canadian star system because actors would then want to be paid more. How short-sighted can someone be? He didn’t seem to realize that yes, he would have to pay more, but he’d also make way more money with his content than he would with actors no one ever heard of. I noticed he had no problem paying more for famous actors from other countries. 

Creating a star system is hard. It requires establishing a complex ecosystem of managers, agents, publicists and media, all working together, to make Canadian talent household names. But the investment will be worth it in the long run: a stronger screen industry, a richer economy and a clearer national identity in the global cultural conversation.

Lately, people have been asking me where they can find more Canadian content to watch and who the Canadian actors are. Let’s leverage this time of renewed nationalism and create a much-needed star system in our screen industry. There is no ego about building one. It’s purely business, a necessary part of how our content gets distributed, so that we can not only Buy Canadian, but also finally Watch Canadian too.

Tonya Williams, recently inducted to Canada’s Walk of Fame and appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the founder and executive director of the Reelworld Screen Institute.