17 Actors Who Struggled To Get Roles After Their "Big Break" (And Why)

Typically, we'd expect an actor to get lots of offers after their "big break," like how Titanic made Leonardo DiCaprio an instant A-lister or how The Wolf of Wall Street catapulted Margot Robbie's career.

However, for many actors, a breakout role doesn't always lead to a major breakthrough in the industry. For others, the well of opportunity may dry up sooner than they expected it to. In both cases, actors can often attribute their lack of job offers to factors like racism, ageism, or typecasting.

Here are 17 actors who opened up about struggling to find a job after their "big break":

1. After wrapping Everything Everywhere All At Once, Ke Huy Quan "could not land a single job, not even one callback." He also lost his health insurance after not booking any roles in 2021.

However, after the movie premiered, he started getting offers from some of Hollywood's biggest producers.

On SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show, he said, "Our movie came out in March. And in April, I got a call from Kevin Feige, asking me to join the MCU family. And I was so touched, and I, I was like, all that time when, when nobody wanted me, and he was one of the most powerful producers on the planet, says, 'Hey, we want you to be in Loki Season 2.'"

2. Nearly four decades into her career, Michelle Yeoh found that "as you get older, the roles get smaller" and "you start getting relegated to the side more and more."

Everything Everywhere All At Once broke that cycle by casting her in the lead.

She told the LA Times' podcast The Envelope, "The first thing is you feel like, 'Finally, thank you. You guys [the directors] see me, you guys really see, and you're giving me the opportunity to show that I'm capable of doing all this.' ... All at once, it was very emotional because this means that you are the one who's leading this whole process, who's telling the story."

3. After her Oscar-winning performance in West Side Story, Rita Moreno felt that "Hollywood really took a break from [her]." She turned down any stereotypical roles she was offered, and the fact that she wasn't getting more substantial parts "absolutely broke [her] heart."

She told BuzzFeed, "I was offered some gang-type movies on a much lesser scale. I remember taking my Golden Globe and my Oscar and just saying, 'I'm never gonna do those kinds of parts again. I just won't.' And I showed them. I didn't work in a movie for seven years."

4. Mena Massoud beat 2,000 other actors for the leading role in Aladdin (2019), which made $1 billion at the box office. Afterwards, months later, he hadn't "had a single audition since Aladdin came out."

He told Daily Beast, "I'm kind of tired of staying quiet about it. I want people to know that it's not always dandelions and roses when you're doing something like Aladdin. 'He must have made millions. He must be getting all these offers.' It's none of those things."

5. For Bella Thorne, it was "really hard to get a job" after her Disney Channel series Shake It Up ended in 2013. Casting directors didn't want to see her "because they were like, 'She's a Disney actress.'"

She told the Happy Sad Confused podcast, "It was like starting back at the bottom and working my way up all the way again."

6. After winning an Academy Award for Monster's Ball in 2002 (which made her the first and, so far, only Black actor to win Best Actress), Halle Berry didn't receive offers in a way her white peers might, and she often had to take certain parts in order to provide for her children.

She told Ent