ByJennifer M Wood|Jan 16, 2024, 10:35 PM EST
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Is the truth really out there? The X-Files began its original nine-season run on September 10, 1993. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson returned to our televisions in 2016 to reprise their roles as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully for two new seasons, but both the network and the series’ stars have said that there won’t be another season. While we sit here and hold out hope that they might change their mind, here are 22 facts about the iconic series on its 25th anniversary.
1. THE IDEA FOR THE SHOW ORIGINATED WITH A PUBLIC OPINION SURVEY.
Chris Carter’s interest in the paranormal was piqued when he read Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/psychiatrist/Harvard Medical School professor John E. Mack’s analysis of a 1991 Roper Poll survey, which stated that at least 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens. “Everybody wants to hear that story,” Carter told Entertainment Weekly. “[Abduction] is tantamount to a religious experience.”
2. CHRIS CARTER WAS INSPIRED BY ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN.
When asked about his intentions in creating The X-Files, Chris Carter told Twitch that, “I’m a child of the Watergate era, so I question authority and mistrust it, that was in my blood. One of my favorite movies is All the President’s Men; the most amazing thing about it, and it’s watchable time and again, is that we know the outcome. Watching it, is where the entertainment value lies. So I knew I would be exploring these things, though I didn’t know I would be doing it for nine years.”
In the more than 20 years since The X-Files made its premiere, Carter has cited a number of movies and television shows as helping to inspire its style and tone. Among them: Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Twin Peaks, The Thin Blue Line, Prime Suspect, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and .
3. DANA SCULLY WAS PARTLY MODELED ON CLARICE STARLING.
Carter has been vocal about his admiration for Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs and the influence it had on The X-Files. “It’s not a mistake that Dana Scully has red hair like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs,” Carter told Smithsonian magazine.
4. JODIE FOSTER MADE A CAMEO.
In the fourth season episode “Never Again,” Jodie Foster (who won an Oscar in 1992 for her role as Clarice Starling) provided the voice of Betty, a homicidal tattoo (yes, a homicidal tattoo).
5. DAVID DUCHOVNY PUSHED FOR JENNIFER BEALS TO PLAY SCULLY.
David Duchovny and the Flashdance star became acquainted when the two attended Yale. “I used to see David on the street—he tried to pick me up on several occasions,” Beals recalled. “And I said, ‘Um, I’m living with somebody.’ And then I ended up taking this acting class in New York and who walks in the door but David Duchovny. And he’s like, ‘I swear I am not stalking you!’ And we became really good friends. He’s a real sweetheart … When he was doing The X-Files he had talked to me about doing that, but I think Gillian was much better suited for that part than me.”
6. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY PRONOUNCED THE SERIES D.O.A.
In a preview of the 1993 fall television lineup, Entertainment Weekly declared that “This show is a goner,” citing its genre and Friday night time slot as two indicators that the series wouldn’t last. Today, it’s one of the longest-running sci-fi series in television history.
7. IN REAL LIFE, SCULLY IS THE BELIEVER.
In a 1994 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Anderson admitted that Duchovny was a skeptic and she was the believer. “Psychokinesis appeals to me,” she said. “ESP, telling the future, I love that stuff.”
8. ANDERSON AND DUCHOVNY DID NOT GET ALONG.
Though Anderson and Duchovny are tight nowadays, that friendship—while based on the work they did together—didn’t really come about until after The X-Files ended. “The crucible of doing that show made monsters out of both of us,” Duchovny told Variety, saying that it wasn’t until filming the 2008 movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe that the two really clicked. “Once we got to step back, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, we really like each other. I didn’t know that was going to happen.’ The way we work together has changed. Whatever rapport we have as actors, we earned. It’s nice to be able to play that without ever even feeling like you’re playing it.”
“Our relationship has definitely become a proper friendship over the last few years,” Anderson added. “I think we’re more on each other’s side. We’re more aware of the other’s needs, wants, concerns, and mindful to take those into consideration—and just sharing more about our experiences in the moment, under the sudden realization that we’re both in this together, and wouldn’t it be nice if it were a collaboration?”
9. SCULLY WAS WRITTEN AS THE CENTER OF THE SHOW.
While it’s often stated that Carter’s goal in creating Mulder and Scully was to subvert gender stereotypes, he says that wasn’t a conscious part of the plan. “It just made sense to me in an instinctive way, that she would be the scientist,” he said. “I don’t know what that says about me, but I always saw it that way.”
“It was always a man and a woman,” Carter added. “I’m interested in strong women characters. For me, Scully is the center of our show, she is the skeptic in all of us. Science is at the root of science fiction, so Mulder, while he seems to be often right and it might seem to be his show, I always think of Scully as the grounding influence and the thing that keeps the solar system of the show in place.”
10. SCULLY’S CHARACTER HAS HAD A BIG INFLUENCE ON THE TELEVISION LANDSCAPE.
Anderson told the Chicago Tribune that Carter “fought tooth and nail to get me rather than what used to be the version of women [on] television back then, which was very different. And ironically it had an international effect on women and on television and how women were not just perceived but how they behaved … This funny old series we were doing had a huge influence on the history of television in many ways, from the lighting on television to the kinds of stories that were being told to the characters. The amount of things you see right now where they even just have a male and female as investigators. It’s almost a joke. It’s like, somebody should come with something different now!”
11. SCULLY MAY HAVE ALSO INSPIRED A NUMBER OF YOUNG WOMEN TO PURSUE STEM CAREERS.
In April 2018, a report [PDF] from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media claimed that Dana Scully served as a powerful role model for women who watched the show. The skeptical doctor helped inspire women to go into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers.
“In the world of entertainment media, where scientists are often portrayed as white men wearing white coats and working alone in labs, Scully stood out in the 1990s as the only female STEM character in a prominent, prime-time television role,” the report explained. Previously, anecdotal evidence has pointed to the existence of a “Scully effect,” in which the measured TV scientist—with her detailed note-taking, evidence-based approach, and desire to autopsy everything—inspired women to seek out their own science careers. This report provides the hard data.
12. THE CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN WAS ORIGINALLY CAST AS AN EXTRA.
When actor William B. Davis first appeared on The X-Files, it was as a background actor with no dialogue. At that time neither Davis nor the producers knew that he would end up becoming the show’s main antagonist. “There was a time when I wasn’t in any episodes, then all of a sudden I had a line or two and I thought, ‘That was interesting,’” Davis told the Palm Beach Post in 1996. “And that just gradually increased. Then, finally I had a big scene where Mulder comes after me with a gun. That was the turning point where the producers decided this character is really interesting and I guess they felt I was OK to handle it.”
“The character is very simply written and William is called upon to carry a lot of the weight of the character,” added writer/executive producer Frank Spotnitz. “He is utterly convincing. Even before he had words, he had looks where you could see his mind processing what he was watching and you could see there was intelligence behind his eyes.”
13. THE CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN WASN’T A SMOKER.
At least he wasn’t when he was cast in the role. But he had been. He had kicked the habit nearly 20 years before taking on the role, after smoking for 25 years. Though he eventually was given herbal cigarettes to play the part, the cigarettes were real for his first few appearances, and the job required him to inhale. “That was beginning to wake up some long buried desires,” Davis said.
14. THE SHOW EMPLOYED A NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS.
In an effort to make sure the series got its science right, the producers hired a number of scientists as consultants, including University of Maryland microbiologist Anne Simon, who was hired at the end of the first season, and came back aboard for the tenth season reboot.
“You’re not there to tell the writer, ‘Chris, you can’t have a Flukeman that’s half-man, half-worm,’” she explained of her role in the production. “But you want to come up with something reasonable.” (Simon is also the author of The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites, and Mutants.)
In addition, Carter has looked to his brother for help. “He’s a professor at MIT, and so I went to him for a lot of technical stuff,” he told WIRED. “A lot of the things that are in the pilot came directly from him. I had written something about time and space, and he corrected me on my terminology.”
15. IT LED TO A SHORT-LIVED SPINOFF.
The Lone Gunmen, a trio of conspiracy theorists who ran their own magazine, proved popular enough with audiences that they were given their own series in 2001. Just 13 episodes aired before the show was cancelled, though they were given the unusual opportunity to address the series finale’s cliffhanger in the ninth season of The X-Files.
16. MITCH PILEGGI’S SHAVED HEAD ALMOST COST HIM THE ROLE OF WALTER SKINNER.
Pileggi auditioned three times to land the role of FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner. “I thought, this guy [Chris Carter] either hates me or I must be a totally bad actor,” Pileggi recalled. “But he told me later it was because my shaved head was too extreme for an FBI agent.”
17. SKINNER MARRIED SCULLY’S STAND-IN.
Pileggi met his wife, Arlene Warren, at work; she was Scully’s stand-in. The couple married in 1997. From 1998 to 2002, Warren made a number of appearances on the show, playing Skinner’s assistant.
18. LUCY LAWLESS WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE A RECURRING ROLE.
In 2001, shortly after Xena: Warrior Princess came to an end, news broke that Lucy Lawless had signed on for The X-Files. Though the plan was that her character, Super Soldier Shannon McMahon, would be a recurring one, a high-risk pregnancy forced her to bow out after appearing in just two episodes. On May 7, 2002, Lawless gave birth to a healthy baby boy (but did not return to the series).
19. THE X-FILES GAVE BIRTH TO BREAKING BAD AS WE KNOW IT.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan (who also helped to create The Lone Gunmen) logged several years as a writer on The X-Files. Among his many credits on the show is the season six episode “Drive,” which stars Bryan Cranston as Patrick Crump, a “Monster-of-the-Week” who kidnaps Mulder. Cranston’s performance stayed with Gilligan over the years, and is what led to his being cast as Walter White on Breaking Bad. “You don’t have to like him,” Gilligan said of the character. “But you need to sympathize and feel empathy and sorrow for him at the end of the hour.”
Other future Breaking Bad stars Aaron Paul (Jesse), Dean Norris (Hank), Raymond Cruz (Tuco), Danny Trejo (Tortuga), and Michael Bowen (Uncle Jack) also appeared on The X-Files.
20. THERE WAS A PAY GAP ISSUE.
Earlier this year, Gillian Anderson revealed that she had to fight to be paid the same amount as Duchovny twice—first when the show originally aired, then again when it came back for two new seasons. According to The Daily Beast, “Anderson found herself fighting just to stand on (literal) equal ground with her male co-star. The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s.”
When the series was set to be revived in 2016, Anderson was shocked that she was offered just half of what Duchovny was paid to come back. “Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane,’” she told The Daily Beast. “And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”
21. CARTER DIDN’T THINK OF THE SHOW AS SCIENCE FICTION.
“I actually resisted the ‘science fiction’ label in the beginning, because the show is actually based in science,” Carter told WIRED. “If it weren’t for Scully, I think the show could be just kind of loopy. So the science and the accuracy of the science is all-important to the success of the storytelling. I think Steven Spielberg called Close Encounters of the Third Kind ‘speculative science’ and I would say The X-Files, for me, has always fit more into that category.”
22. CARTER WANTS TO BELIEVE.
“I’m definitely a skeptic,” Carter told Twitch of his belief in extraterrestrials, “but like Mulder, I want to believe.”
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25 Biggest Stars of the 2000s: Where Are They Now?
They made headlines, topped the charts, and took over the big screen two decades ago, but what are these icons up to in 2026?
ByPaul Anthony Jones|Nov 6, 2026, 5:00 PM EST
The Harry Potter movies in the early 2000s made overnight stars of their three young lead stars, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Emma Watson (Hermione).
All three have long since bucked the infamous curse of the child star, to carve out ever more varied careers for themselves—with Daniel Radcliffe now a Tony winner, Rupert Grint adding everything from M Night Shyamalan horrors to award-winning theatre to his résumé, and Emma Watson somehow managing to earn a degree in English literature from Brown University alongside being a UN Goodwill Ambassador and a Lancôme model, and fronting a billion-dollar Disney movie.
But what about the other major stars of film and TV of the 2000s?
MISCHA BARTON
Drama series The OC made London-born actress Mischa Barton a household name in the mid 2000s after a string of childhood roles (and an infamous jump-scare cameo in The Sixth Sense) in the 1990s. In the 2010s, Barton largely stepped back from major film and television roles and turned instead to independent projects, and returned to the theatre for the first time in 15 years in 2012, appearing in a well-received production of Steel Magnolias in Dublin, Ireland. Besides recent roles in The Hills reboot and legendary Australian soap Neighbours, she returned to the theatre again in 2026 in a touring production of Double Indemnity.
SEAN BEAN
Sean Bean was already an established star with two decades of credits on both sides of the Atlantic when he was cast as the flawed yet heroic Boromir in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 2000s. He has continued to work solidly ever since, adding the likes of Game of Thrones, Silent Hill, The Martian, and Possessor to his résumé in the 2010s and 2020s. He won his third BAFTA in 2022 for the acclaimed miniseries Time, and more recently took on the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham in MGM+’s acclaimed adaptation of Robin Hood.
ORLANDO BLOOM
Sean Bean’s co-star in both The Lord of the Rings trilogy and 2004’s Troy, Orlando Bloom continued one franchise’s immense success by jumping straight into another, joining the cast of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies in 2003. He then reprised his Lord of the Rings role of Legolas in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy in the 2010s, and has continued to work both in film and theatre ever since in everything from Peppa Pig to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
ROBERT CARLYLE
Scottish actor Robert Carlyle became a star in his native UK with the quaint police drama Hamish Macbeth in the 1990s, before roles in the likes of Trainspotting, The Full Monty, the Bond movie The World Is Not Enough and Stargate Universe made him a major name in the 2000s. He has continued to mix TV successes, in the likes of long-running favorites Once Upon a Time and COBRA, with work in film, famously reprising his role as Begbie in the 2017 Trainspotting sequel T2. Back home, however, he recently earned his staggering eleventh BAFTA Scotland nomination for ITV drama The Hack in 2026.
HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN
Being cast as a young Darth Vader (aka Anakin Skywalker) understandably made Canadian actor Hayden Christensen one of the biggest names of the early 2000s, and he followed the Star Wars prequels with the likes of Shattered Glass, Jumper, and heist thriller Takers. With the prequel movies having gone through something of a fan reappraisal, Christensen recently reprised his Star Wars role in spinoffs Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka in the mid 2020s.
MARION COTILLARD
Acclaimed French actress, musician and model Marion Cotillard swept the awards season in 2007–8, picking up a raft of awards for her transformative portrayal of singer Édith Piaf. Roles in the likes of Public Enemies, Inception, Contagion, The Dark Knight Rises and Two Days, One Night (which earned her another Oscar nod) followed in the 2010s, and Cotillard has continued to establish herself as one of the biggest and most varied stars in European cinema ever since. Besides her work on film, Cotillard is a singer and multi-instrumentalist, was the face of Chanel No. 5 in the early 2020s, is a tireless campaigner for human rights and environmental issues, and was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, in 2016.
MATTHEW FOX
As one of the lead stars of Lost, Matthew Fox became one of the biggest names in TV in the mid 2000s. A string of legal issues and rumors derailed his career somewhat in the 2010s, leading to Fox taking a hiatus from acting in the second half of the decade to spend time with his family. More recently, however, he has returned to television with a role in Paramount series The Madison.
MEGAN FOX
As her role as Mikaela Banes in 2007’s Transformers movie, Megan Fox became a global superstar with just her fourth ever film role, and quickly followed it up with cult horror Jennifer’s Body in 2009, Judd Apatow comedy This is 40 in 2012, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboots in the mid 2010s. Fox subsequently stepped back from major roles, partly out of fear of becoming typecast as little more than a sex symbol, and started a family with her husband, Brian Austin Green. The couple separated in 2022, and Fox has since had a fourth child with her recent partner, music star Machine Gun Kelly. She continues to keep something of a low profile out of the limelight, recently even taking a year off social media to raise her daughter. She will next be seen, however, in a long-awaited sequel, Jennifer’s Body 2 in 2027.
SALMA HAYEK
Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek had been acting since the late 1980s when blockbusters From Dusk Til Dawn and Men in Black made her a global superstar in the 1990s. She went on to earn a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her extraordinary portrayal of artist Frida Kahlo in the 2003 biopic Frida, and has continued to work across a mix of genres ever since. Recent credits include voice roles in the Puss in Boots animated movie series and Ridley Scott’s acclaimed fashion drama House of Gucci in 2021. She will make her directorial debut with the epic romantic drama Arena in 2027.
FAMKE JANSSEN
Dutch actress Famke Janssen broke into Hollywood with a role in 1995 Bond movie GoldenEye, before becoming a major star in the 2000s as both Jean Grey in the X-Men movies and as Lenore in the Taken trilogy. Alongside her work on film, she has starred in TV’s Nip/Tuck, Hemlock Grove, The Blacklist, and How to Get Away with Murder, and in 2025 took the lead role in the acclaimed Dutch Netflix series Amsterdam Empire.
ANGUS T. JONES
Angus T Jones became a household name thanks to his long-running role as Jake in the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men in the 2000s and early 2010s, but a newfound faith led him to dismissing acting in the series as being a “paid hypocrite,” and he eventually stepped back from all but a handful of cameo appearances in the final series. He has since effectively stepped away from Hollywood and all acting roles.
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY
The Pirates of the Caribbean movies made Keira Knightley one of the biggest stars of the 2000s, while her role as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 2005. She has since revealed that at the height of her career in the mid 2000s, she had a mental breakdown and suffered panic attacks and PTSD for several years afterwards (even needing hypnotherapy to attend the BAFTA Awards when she was nominated for yet another acclaimed performance, in Atonement, in 2008). Despite her struggles, however, Knightley has continued to carve out a stellar career, earning a second Oscar nomination for The Imitation Game in 2014, and adding Everest, Misbehaviour, Boston Strangler and the literary thriller The Woman in Cabin 10 to her filmography. More recently, she has starred in Netflix crime series Black Doves, and returned to the London stage in November 2026 in a critically acclaimed adaptation of The Lives of Others.
JUDE LAW
Having come to international attention in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Jude Law became a major star in the 2000s with roles in A. I. Artificial Intelligence, Road to Perdition, Cold Mountain (which earned him an Oscar nomination), and festival favorite The Holiday. He has continued a long and varied career in film, television and theatre ever since, adding the Fantastic Beasts movies, Melissa McCarthy comedy Spy, Hugo, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew to his list of credits, and earning two Tony Award nominations for his work on stage. He will next be seen in Nancy Meyers’s Paris Paramount in 2027.
EVANGELINE LILLY
Canadian actress Evangeline Lilly became a major star thanks to her role in Lost in the mid 2000s, and went on to star in the likes of The Hurt Locker and Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy on the big screen in the 2010s, before joining the MCU with a role in the Ant-Man movies. In 2024, however, Lilly announced that she was taking an indefinite hiatus from acting to focus on her family, and spend time “living my dreams and being fully in my joy.”
TOBEY MAGUIRE
Star of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy in the early 2000s, Tobey Maguire earned a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the 2009 war movie Brothers, starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s lavish retelling of The Great Gatsby in 2013, before going on to take an ever bigger role off screen, having established his own production company, Material Pictures. He recently returned to film to reprise his role as Spider-Man in No Way Home in 2021, but continues to work chiefly behind the camera in the 2020s.
VIGGO MORTENSEN
Danish-born actor Viggo Mortensen had his international breakthrough in the early 2000s as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, after almost two decades working in film. Since then, however, Mortensen has carved out an increasingly acclaimed filmography and a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most talented and intriguing character actors, earning Oscar nominations for his roles as a Russian gangster in Eastern Promises, an anti-capitalist anarchist in Matt Ross’s black comedy Captain Fantastic, and Italian-American bouncer-turned-driver Tony Lip in eventual Best Picture winner Green Book. He made his directorial debut with the drama Falling, about a middle-aged gay man dealing with his homophobic father’s dementia, in 2020, and has a string of yet more varied and challenging roles and movies in the pipeline.
FRANKIE MUNIZ
It’s certainly not uncommon for child stars to turn their backs on Hollywood, and Frankie Muniz is no exception. As the lead in the ever-popular sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, he became one of the most recognizable faces on TV in the early 2000s, but after the show ended, Muniz put his career on hold to embark on an entirely new challenge as a racing driver. A severe injury derailed his driving for several years, and Muniz took tentative steps back into the public eye following his recovery, but he continues to drive today alongside reprising his role in the Malcolm in the Middle revival.
HALEY JOEL OSMENT
Haley Joel Osment earned an Oscar nomination for his role in The Sixth Sense in 1999 at the age of just 11, and followed it up with performances in the likes of Steven Spielberg’s A. I. Artificial Intelligence and comedy drama Secondhand Lions. Since the 2010s, however, Osment has stepped back from major roles and has continued to work prolifically in a varied array of independent movies, including the body horror Tusk, supernatural drama Clara’s Ghost, and romantic comedy Somebody I Used to Know. To millions of video game fans around the world, Osment is also known as a voice actor who has appeared in the Kingdom Hearts series for over 20 years.
NATALIE PORTMAN
Having been acting on film since the early 1990s, Natalie Portman was another star who achieved a whole new level of fame in the 2000s with her role as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequels (opposite Hayden Christensen and, oddly, Keira Knightley, who played one of her doubles in Episode 1). Portman went on to win an Oscar for her role as a troubled ballet dancer in Black Swan in 2010, and has worked consistently in film and television ever since. More recently, however, she has expanded her filmography with documentaries, production credits, and voice roles, recently voicing one of the characters in Netflix’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Twits.
JONATHAN RHYS-MEYERS
Irish actor and model Jonathan Rhys-Meyers made his film debut in 1994, but became a star thanks to late 90s and 2000s roles in the likes of Michael Collins, Velvet Goldmine, Vanity Fair and Match Point. He went on to earn a Golden Globe for the biopic miniseries Elvis in 2005, and a further two nominations for his role as a young Henry VIII in The Tudors. Sadly, several personal issues caused problems in the 2010s, and despite a handful of further roles, he kept something of a low profile until his first major interview in over a decade in 2026, in which he revealed he now happily lives a quiet life on a farm in rural Ireland with his wife Grace and two children.
IAN SOMERHALDER
Lost made American actor Ian Somerhalder a star in the 2000s, before he continued his television success with The Vampire Diaries in the 2010s. When that show ended in 2017, however, Somerhalder stepped back from the limelight after almost 20 years in show business and later revealed that he had retired from acting to pursue a quieter life on a farm outside Los Angeles.
AUDREY TAUTOU
French actress Audrey Tautou gained international acclaim (and a BAFTA nomination) for her title role in the quaint Parisienne romantic comedy Amélie in 2001. She soon broke into mainstream English-language movies, appearing in the acclaimed British thriller Dirty Pretty Things and the big-budget adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, opposite Tom Hanks, in the 2000s. But the majority of Tautou’s career since Amélie has, by choice, been in her native France, where she has since won great acclaim for the biopic Coco Before Chanel, the romantic comedy-drama Delicacy, and the Jacques Cousteau biopic The Odyssey. Having never taken to life in the spotlight nor the big city, however, Tautou has recently drifted into semi-retirement, and pursued a career in photography alongside selecting acting roles.
STUART TOWNSEND
Irish actor Stuart Townsend was infamously hired to play Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies before being unceremoniously replaced by Viggo Mortensen when it was decided an older actor was required instead (and, according to rumors, it appeared Townsend’s preparation wasn’t gelling with the production). Townsend went on to star in the steampunk superhero movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, opposite Sean Connery, in 2003, and in Æon Flux, opposite Charlize Theron, in 2005. But in the 2010s he largely stepped back from acting, reportedly choosing instead to live a quiet life with his family in Costa Rica. In 2025, however, he took on a lead role in the acclaimed British drama series Shetland—his first ever role on UK television.
LIV TYLER
Daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, Liv Tyler starred in 90s hits That Thing You Do! and Armageddon before taking on the role of Arwen in the Lord of the Rings movies in the early 2000s. She has kept herself busy both on and off camera ever since, with roles in movies such as Jersey Girl, The Strangers and Ad Astra, television series The Leftovers and 9-1-1: Lone Star, and has worked as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2003. She recently reprised her role as Betty Ross from Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World, some 15 years after her first appearance in the MCU.
ELIJAH WOOD
His lead role as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings movies might have made Elijah Wood a global superstar, but by the time the first movie was released in 2001, he had been acting onscreen for more than a decade. Childhood credits in the likes of Back to the Future Part II, Flipper, The Ice Storm, Deep Impact, and The Faculty were followed by post-LOTR roles in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City, Happy Feet, and the acclaimed 2012 slasher flick Maniac. Alongside acting, in recent years Wood has continued to work behind the scenes as a producer, musician, and voice actor, recently voicing the Scarecrow in the acclaimed video game Batman: Arkham Shadows. He is next due to reprise his role as Frodo in The Hunt for Gollum in 2027, in a career now spanning five decades.
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25 Biggest Stars of the 1980s: Where Are They Now?
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