Jake says he’s constantly in meetings where people pitch him on projects like Airplane Mode or try to get him to act in their movies. He’s got a meeting with a producer coming up, in fact, at his agent’s office at WME. Maybe I’d like to come?

3. Constantly Reminding People You Exist Is Now Part of the Job

Keith Powers has been mostly lucky so far. The second movie he ever shot was Straight Outta Compton—he played Dr. Dre’s brother. The first TV show on which he was a regular, MTV’s Faking It, ran for two seasons after he joined it. Right now he’s on a show with Bella Thorne called Famous in Love, on the Freeform network, which is what ABC Family became.

Keith Powers

Networks: Freeform, MTV, Yahoo! Screen

A few years ago, he was modeling in California; now he’s got a real career, and that’s a blessing. But modern-day fandom is weird, he says. You’re not allowed to disappear anymore, or maintain any amount of mystery. Fans talk to him on Twitter and Instagram all day, and mostly what they say is: Work more.

“That’s why my whole thing was to be on a TV show,” Keith says. “I’m not going to lie: These days I feel so much pressure from my supporters. I feel like: If I’m not giving them work? Nowadays kids don’t live with stuff. People used to live with an album. Michael Jackson put out Thriller and, what, five years later, he put out Bad? He was a whole different person. Literally, he had a whole different skin color.”

That kind of scarcity used to be the model—successful actors like Tom Hanks would do one or two films a year, and that was it. The rarity of it was a kind of power. But Keith says it’s no longer enough just to act and be part of great projects. You have to do it constantly. It’s why so many actors are moving toward TV—not just because they’re following the creative talents who increasingly work there, but also because TV puts them on screens consistently in a way that, say, an indie movie that shows at Sundance and then a few times in New York and L.A. does not. Actors, like everyone else now, have brands to consider and maintain. That’s exhausting, particularly so in an era where people tend to binge-watch.

“Famous in Love dropped—they watched Famous in Love in one week,” Keith says, sighing. “Then they’re like: ‘Okay, Keith, what’s next?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s crazy.’ They don’t live with stuff. They see it and ask what’s next.”

4. Netflix Is the Biggest Thing Currently Out There

“Fucking helicopters!” Arturo Castro says, sitting in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. He’s just back in New York after going down to Colombia to shoot Netflix’s Narcos, and he’s trying, with some degree of incredulity, to describe what the set was like. “We have these shoot-outs, man.…”

Arturo Castro

Number of AT&T commercials: One

It’s a warm day and he’s drinking iced tea, louche and handsome. A couple of weeks ago, Amy Schumer’s Snatched, his first big-studio comedy, came out. For the past few years, he’s starred on Comedy Central’s Broad City as Ilana Glazer’s drug-dealing roommate—still the role he’s probably best known for.

“I don’t know if the career I’m having right now would have been possible ten years ago,” Arturo says. Back then, when he graduated from acting school, there wasn’t anything like Broad City for a short Guatemalan actor to star on, he says. “I couldn’t get a TV audition to save my life.”

Broad City, which began on the Internet, gave him an outlet when none of the conventional studios would. “It’s a little oversaturated now that everybody has a web series,” Arturo says. “But back when we started on it, that was a stroke of brilliance.” He channels Broad City co-creators Glazer and Abbi Jacobson: “Like, ‘You know what? The work out there is not something that either appeals to me or is something I’m right for at the moment. Why don’t I write something for myself or write my own point of view?’ It was kind of the first show that really became successful through that.”

“I went into an audition a few weeks ago, and the first thing they asked me was how many followers I had.”

Broad City felt like a breakthrough for Arturo when it happened, and it was: After Comedy Central picked up the show, he was suddenly on every basic-cable package in America. But the scale of Netflix, Arturo says, is bigger than anything he’d encountered—including the Ang Lee war epic he starred in last year, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. “It’s crazy. That’s the difference I saw with the streaming world: The budget was just probably way bigger on Narcos than everything I’ve worked on put together. It’s a ten-hour movie with millions of dollars in production.”