It’s a long-held belief among those who think way too much about this stuff that movies and television are fundamentally different mediums, with fundamentally different ways of telling stories. One condenses a story into its best parts, favoring economy over detail. The episodic nature of the other has much more room (provided it’s renewed often enough) to build complex plotlines and character relationships over many years.
This doesn’t mean that the actors who work in these two disparate mediums can’t make the transition from one to the other. Ever since we’ve been making movies and TV shows simultaneously there have been stories of actors hopping from a career on the small screen to an even bigger career on the big one, and vice versa. Sometimes, that works out. Other times, an actor can spend decades trying to make the switch.
For this list, we’ve chosen to highlight ten actors who were big on TV and always will be big on TV, regardless of how many feature films they act in. We ought to mention that things were very different before the advent of prestige TV, which blurred the lines somewhat between film and television and attracted big Hollywood stars to the small screen. And we also have to take into account the simple fact that plenty of TV actors don’t necessarily want to give up the steady paycheck to weather the risks of the movie industry. Still, it’s interesting to examine these actors’ careers and imagine what could have been had things gone a little differently.
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