Sometimes, acting isn’t enough to feel creative on a film set. There is a need to have more control over how the story is captured and told. That has given us the following six filmmakers who were actors before they stepped into the director’s chair.
These actors-turned-directors starred in their own movies, preferred to stay behind the camera, and one even became the first woman to direct a noir.
How many films by these directors have you watched?
Ida Lupino
‘Film 101’ (2022)Credit: Turner Classic Movies
Lupino had a prolific acting career, and according to a retrospective article by The Guardian, she joked that she was “the poor man’s Bette Davis” due to the roles she took. One notable role for Lupino was when she co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in They Drive by Night (1940) and gave a tour-de-force performance in the third act.
She would become the first woman to direct a film noir when she made The Hitch-Hiker (1953), based on the real-life mass murders committed by Billy Cook. It was one of the low-budget films completed by the independent production company The Filmakers, which Lupino and her then-husband Collier Young had founded.
She didn’t stop acting as her directing credits grew, with several other feature films and a move into TV where she directed episodes for The Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, and Gilligan’s Island.
Clint Eastwood
You know him from the Westerns that made him an icon, and while Clint Eastwood’s acting career might have begun with an uncredited part in Revenge of the Creature in 1955, he wouldn’t remain unknown.
‘Play Misty for Me’ (1971)Credit: Universal Pictures
He rose to prominence in the 1960s with the Spaghetti Western Dollars trilogy. His directorial debut then came with the psychological thriller Play Misty for Me in 1971, and he continued to direct until retiring after his final directing credit with Juror #2 in 2024.
Eastwood was interviewed for the book FilmCraft: Directing, by Mike Goodridge, and the actor-director looked back on experiences that left an impact on him. “Over the years when I was an actor, I became interested in working with actors and found different atmospheres that I liked with different directors that made acting more compatible,” Eastwood said.
One of the best perspectives given by Eastwood is when he stated, “A lifetime in movies is the same as a lifetime in any profession: you are constantly a student.”
Ron Howard
Ron Howard’s directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto (1977), would be the only time he acted in a project that he directed. Into the 1980s, he would make Splash (1984), Cocoon (1985), and Willow (1988). He has directed such a wide range of beloved films and has been doing it for so long that you may not remember Howard started his career in acting.
‘The Andy Griffith Show’ (1960)Credit: CBS
He was a child actor on the first seasons of The Twilight Zone and Dennis the Menace, before being cast in his most famous roles on The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days. The experiences on those sitcoms were essential in Howard’s interest in becoming a director, with his observations of the work done by the crew on The Andy Griffith Show.
Howard looked back on his early career during an interview with the radio talk show Fresh Air. He liked seeing “—how the cinematographer lit the set. What lenses were chosen and why. And it didn’t take me long to realize that the director was the person who got to, sort of, hang out and play with everybody, the actors on the one hand, the crew and the technical folks on the other.”
Kasi Lemmons
‘Eve’s Bayou’ (1997)Credit: Trimark Pictures
Kasi Lemmons turned to directing because she wanted more interesting work than what she was getting as an actress. She played the best friend to the leading white women in two of her biggest movies, 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs and 1992’s Candyman.
Lemmons explained in an interview for The Believer that, after fifteen years as an actress, she made a change. She was able to get into the Writers Guild when she wrote a screenplay with playwrights Lee Hunkins and P.J. Gibson. Writing had been a passion of hers during childhood, and while that screenplay went unproduced, what she learned from the opportunity led her to write the script for what became her directorial debut, Eve’s Bayou (1997).
Lemmons didn’t intend to direct it, but the story became deeply personal, and she wanted to be the one to put it on-screen. She has gone on to direct films like Harriet (2019) and has become part of the Graduate Film Department at New York University.
Xavier Dolan
‘Matthias and Maxime’ (2019)Credit: Les Films Séville
French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan has created films on messy characters dealing with heartbreak, motherhood, friendship, and queerness. He started with 2009’s I Killed My Mother, when he was 19 years old (directing and starring in it), with his most recent film being 2019’s Matthias & Maxime.
Before all of that, Dolan started as a child actor in commercials, and loved watching the biggest pop culture movies and TV shows of the late ‘90s, like Titanic and Charmed. They were unlike the arthouse-focused films he would direct, but they did inform him of the importance of storytelling.
Jordan Peele
‘Nope’ (2022)Credit: Universal Pictures
Jordan Peele got his big break on MADtv and then became one half of the duo on the comedy sketch series Key & Peele from 2012 to 2015. Yet, comedy wasn’t quite what he wanted to do. “I’d wanted to be a director since 13,” Peele said in a Deadline interview, “and horror and the suspense thriller were the most powerful genres to me.”
His debut, Get Out (2017), balanced horror and comedy with social commentary, and the comedy became more subtle in his follow-ups, Us (2019) and Nope (2022). If there is humor in a scene, it never dilutes the fear Peele wants you to feel in some of the most unforgettable, frightening imagery of modern horror.
Did you know these filmmakers as actors first or as directors?
