Are foreign actors taking over Hollywood?

If you’re an avid reader of culture journalists, then it seems as though there is always some country or other “taking over Hollywood”. In the 2000s it was the Australians. In the 2010s it was the Brits (when Spider-Man, Superman and Batman were all Englishmen), and the latest “invasion” is coming from the Irish. But just because journalists can sell a piece about it doesn’t make it true. I dug into the numbers to see just how “Un-American” American movies are when it comes to casting.I crunched the numbers on roughly 16,000 American-made feature films released in US cinemas, pulled out every actor flagged as a lead, and matched them to their recorded birthplaces. That gave me 5,408 leading actors and 17,867 lead performances between 1990 and 2024.How American are the leads of American films?At the risk of sounding like I should be wearing a red baseball cap, movies are a lot less American than they used to be. The American-born share of leads has fallen from 82% in the 1990s to 64%…