The question, as American 20-somethings in every field understand, is: What happens after graduation? Not many members of the remarkable young cast of Friday Night Lights have had parts as good since, and with every passing year you get the melancholy feeling that most of them never will. (The exception, so far, is Michael B. Jordan, who landed a big, challenging role in the 2013 indie drama Fruitvale Station and aced it.)

For English actors, there’s always the stage: at any given time there’s going to be somebody, somewhere, putting on Shakespeare—or Chekhov or Ibsen or Strindberg or Osborne or Stoppard—and even if it means hauling your weary carcass out to some godforsaken provincial repertory theater, it’s a chance to act. It nourishes the soul. American actors have fewer opportunities (and incentives) to explore the classical repertory when they’re young, which is when the experience would do them the most good. Established stars like Denzel Washington will take a turn on the stage every now and then, when the spirit moves them, but they’ve already had their share of great roles—they know what they can do. You wonder, though, about someone like Caitlin FitzGerald, whose subtle, delicate acting as Bill Masters’s wife, Libby, in Masters of Sex was the only good reason to watch that series’ misbegotten second season. She seems ideal for Chekhov—she’d kill as Nina in The Seagull—but will she ever get the chance?

A handful of younger American actors, mostly women, have been able to stretch themselves in parts like that onscreen. Jessica Chastain took on the demanding title role in Liv Ullmann’s film of Strindberg’s Miss Julie last year, and although I don’t think her performance is a complete success, it’s a brave attempt: you feel she’s pushing past the technique that’s served her in the past, and going places, emotionally, she’s never been before. (Strindberg’s psychosexual grudge matches will do that to an actor.) Maybe the most spectacular recent example of a young American movie and television actor tackling a classical part is Amy Acker’s radiant Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Joss Whedon’s nimble, and very faithful, 2012 movie of one of Shakespeare’s sprightliest comedies. Acker was always a welcome presence on TV shows such as Angel and Alias; in her current series gig, as the blithely lethal hacker known as Root on Person of Interest, she displays the ability to alternate a near-sociopathic sangfroid with unexpected bursts of genuine passion—and she has the best walk on television, besides. But her facility with the tricky verse of Shakespearean comedy is a real surprise; she’s at least as formidable a Beatrice as Emma Thompson was in Branagh’s 1993 Much Ado, and Acker is, I think, more touching and finally more believable.

And it’s not as if a wealth of good, nonclassical parts are being written for younger Americans in the movies either. In the fertile moviemaking environment of the 1970s, De Niro and Pacino and Gene Hackman and Jeff Bridges didn’t need the theater and its deep repertory in order to satisfy their creative urges and grow as artists. Actors can’t do what they do in isolation, as writers and painters and composers can. The theatrical arts are collaborative, both in the microcosm of an individual production and in the macrocosm of the culture that does, or does not, sustain them. It’s fair to say that American culture isn’t providing a high level of sustenance right now, and actors—like so many others in the every-man-for-himself climate of 2015—have to figure out, on their own, ways to get what they need. The question is whether they can muster the imagination, and the stamina, to maintain their technique (and their spirits) while dealing with the sort of material available to them in this movie culture: cop dramas, superhero adventures, rom-coms and bro comedies, the occasional earnest, glacially paced indie. It’s not impossible, but it can be a heavy lift.