The Opportunity Advantage
Catherine Zeta-Jones is hardly alone in defending the children of famous performers from the “nepo baby” label. Kate Winslet, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gwyneth Paltrow and others have reeled off versions of the same argument: these children did not choose the families into which they were born; talent still matters; nobody can sustain a career purely because of a famous parent. All true, and all beside the point. Nobody sensible is arguing that Dakota Johnson, Maya Hawke or Sean Lennon personally engineered the circumstances of their birth. The question is what those circumstances supplied. Are we really supposed to believe that Sean Lennon’s ability to pursue a career in music bears no relationship whatsoever to growing up as the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and to the musicians, studios, knowledge, introductions, expectations and sheer imaginative possibility surrounding him from childhood? Acknowledging that advantage does not require us to declare him talentless but it does very much require a willingness to stop pretending talent develops and reaches the marketplace in a vacuum.
Zeta-Jones has also asked why the children of actors are singled out when the children of surgeons and lawyers routinely follow their parents into the same professions without being called “nepo babies”. But that comparison is wrong in many interesting ways. First, a lawyer’s child cannot simply announce that she is a barrister because her father is one: there are degrees, examinations, professional training and regulatory barriers that family connections cannot formally waive. Acting has no equivalent protected threshold; one can call oneself an actor without a qualification, a conservatoire place or indeed any formal training at all. Second, the children of lawyers, doctors and other professionals absolutely are beneficiaries of nepotism and inherited advantage, we simply tend not to call them “nepo babies” because their surnames are not known in the ways an actor’s or singer’s last name is routinely splashed across entertainment pages.
Yet, a lawyer can secure an introduction, a placement, work experience or any informal route into chambers; a doctor can transmit years of knowledge about how the profession works before another child even knows those rules exist. The entertainment industries merely make the mechanism spectacularly visible. The same machinery operates everywhere. Had I followed my father into hairdressing, I would already have understood something about clients, repeat business, appointments and the daily mechanics of a salon simply because I spent time in his as a child. More than that, I would have been handed the keys to a fully functioning, already established business without having to give a thought to how I might finance one from scratch. Nepotism is not merely somebody handing their child their job. It is the inheritance of access, information, introductions and familiarity: that special, accumulated and immense head start that allows one person to approach a profession through an already-open door while another is still outside trying to find the handle she may realise, twenty years later, was never there for her to grab. It is time we acknowledged that what the vast majority of people across all industries lack is not education, intelligence, resilience or great ideas; it is opportunity.
