Remember that old Hollywood cliché that what actors really want to do is direct? These days, what so many female actors truly want to do is produce. What started as a trickle in the late 1990s and early 2000s with production companies by Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek, and Charlize Theron has accelerated into a torrent of talent creating movies and TV under their own production shingles. Regina King, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Garner, Amy Adams, and Kerry Washington are among the many stars whose companies are conjuring up a kaleidoscopic array of roles that otherwise might not exist for women (and everyone else). 

Hollywood long slotted actresses into narrow categories–ingenue, sidekick, sex bomb—and once you aged out of those bleak cells, you pretty much fell off a cliff. “I spent my career being the one girl in the cast of guys,” Elizabeth Banks recently told me. “I don’t get to be the ingenue anymore, and that’s fine because I do interesting things with other women now instead”—both onscreen and off-screen as a producer with her producing shingle, Brownstone Productions.

“A good producer is someone who’s connected, who’s smart, who knows story,” says Ida Ziniti, cohead of CAA’s motion picture literary department, who works with a number of actress-driven production companies. Many of these performers spent decades soaking up all the requisite skills even before they turned to producing. “They know how to speak to an artist, and they know how to pitch.” Ultimately, she says, “the reason that this is a trend is because they’ve proven themselves to be really good producers.”

In the past, actress-driven shingles sometimes found themselves patronized by Hollywood bigwigs who saw them as vanity projects. “When we started, we 100% got a little pat on the head from people in the industry,” says Michelle Purple, who cofounded Iron Ocean with Jessica Biel around 2006. That changed as more and more of these companies had success. Streaming also opened a lot of doors—both because there was so much competition for content and because the data showed them that there were audiences for a much wider range of shows.  

"In many cases, women are holding the remote,” says Lauren Neustadter, Reese Witherspoon’s producing partner at Hello Sunshine. She sees Hello Sunshine’s 2017 HBO hit, Big Little Lies, as a game changer: “A show that women were incredibly excited about watching but men loved as well, so I think that that opened the door in terms of showing what was possible.”

The mass meetings and informal conversations held among Hollywood women in the wake of #MeToo might have also accelerated the desire by actresses to have more control over their careers. “I think that when the MeToo movement started, this group of actresses were all together, and they built something really unique,” says Pilar Savone of Washington’s Simpson Street Productions. “From that, friendships were born and collaboration started to happen. It was like, Oh, well, let me call this person if we want to do that.” 

For much of her career, Neustadter remembers, “I often found myself as the only woman sitting at a table or one of two women sitting around a table.” In recent years, though, “the feelings of fear and competition dissipated…. With both MeToo and Black Lives Matter, there was all of this coming together, and that feeling of connection has really sustained over these years.”

So many of these actress-driven companies are developing and making projects together: Washington and Witherspoon worked together on the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere, jokingly branding their combined forces as Hello Simpson. Both companies have worked with Octavia Spencer’s production company, Orit Entertainment. Gabrielle Union’s I’ll Have Another is developing a project with Taraji P. Henson’s TPH Entertainment, while Biel’s shingle is working with Renée Zellweger’s company.

Successful actress-producers now find themselves giving advice to more fledgling performers on how to start their own companies. “It’s really fun to see so many young actors taking their destiny into their own hands and saying, ‘We’re not going to just sit around and wait for someone to bring us something—we’re going to find projects and champion them,’” says Shana Waterman, head of film and television at King’s Royal Ties shingle. “We love partnering with people who have that kind of spirit and ambition because we have the same kind of energy.” 

Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph launched Animal Pictures several years ago, and their slate is heavy on strong female characters and female creators, though “it’s not a mandate,” as Animal exec Danielle Renfrew Behrens points out. She’s aware that sometimes they can leverage Lyonne and Rudolph’s star power to boost a passion project, like Sirens, their 2022 documentary about an all-female thrash-metal band in Beirut. Behrens says, “Having Animal’s involvement can sometimes help bring attention to it or help with the financing.”

The assumption among many Hollywood insiders is that these actresses are attached to these companies in name only. Robbie told Vanity Fair that early in most of her projects, she’s left off of calls and email chains. “Then everyone realizes after a few months, Oh, she actually is a producer,” Robbie says. “But even still, people direct all the money questions at my producing partners, never at me. And so many times Tom [Ackerley] and Josey [McNamara] have to say, ‘She’s the one to ask, actually.’” 

Behrens echoes that sentiment. “Sometimes people are surprised when Maya and Natasha get on a call about scheduling or give notes—like, Oh gosh, I guess they really are producers!” says Behrens. “They are often delighted when they realize, no, actually we’re rolling up our sleeves and getting involved.”

Dozens of actresses are creating work worth watching in film and television, for 2023 and beyond. Here are just a dozen to keep an eye on. 

Founded in 2019 with Stacy O’Neil, Adams’ Bond Group Entertainment focuses on elevating female creatives. Its next project certainly fits the bill: the film Nightbitch, starring Adams and written and directed by Marielle Heller, is based on Rachel Yoder's novel of the same name, a feminist, magical-realist allegory about a stay-at-home mom who morphs into a dog. The movie's in post-production, and Bond has a slate of other projects in development as well, including a movie adapted from the memoir Finding the Mother Tree and Kings of America, a limited series inspired by a true story, about three women connected in different ways to a groundbreaking class action suit against Walmart.

Robbie has become not only one of the busiest actors in Hollywood, but also one of the industry’s most prolific producers under her LuckyChap shingle. Coming to Hulu in March is Boston Strangler, starring Keira Knightley as a reporter tracking a serial killer in 1960s Boston. In July, the long-awaited Barbie movie, starring and produced by Robbie, hits theaters. Several other films are in postproduction, including Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming thriller, Saltburn (LuckyChap previously produced Fennell’s Promising Young Woman), and the delightfully titled My Old Ass, a coming-of-age comedy directed by Megan Park.

Through her Hello Sunshine production shingle, Witherspoon is involved in two of the most anticipated series of the spring: Daisy Jones & the Six, an Amazon Prime Video adaptation of the hit novel, and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things, an adaptation of the advice column collection by Cheryl Strayed, whose book Wild was shepherded to the screen by Witherspoon almost a decade ago. She won’t appear in either of those, but she is starring (with Ashton Kutcher) in the Aline Brosh McKenna rom-com Your Place or Mine, due to hit Netflix in February, and in The Morning Show’s upcoming third season. 

After working on labor of love Russian Doll with Poehler, Lyonne joined forces with her old friend Rudolph to create Animal Pictures. Lyonne produced and stars in Poker Face, a mystery-comedy series created by Rian Johnson that lands on Peacock January 26. Rudolph’s series Loot will return to Apple TV+ for a second season likely sometime this year. Animal also has plenty of other projects in the works, including an upcoming Prime Video animated series called The Hospital.

Rae has always taken charge of her own work; she started out by creating her own YouTube series before making it to HBO with Insecure. She continues to produce original content under her Hoorae shingle: Look out for new seasons of HBO Max comedy Rap Sh!t and A Black Lady Sketch Show, as well as a reboot of the unscripted cinephile series Project Greenlight. 

Kidman, who’s previously produced alongside Witherspoon, has many projects on the go with her own Blossom Films, which has produced Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and Nine Perfect Strangers. Upcoming projects include Love and Death, an HBO Max true-crime miniseries written by David E. Kelley and starring Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery, and Expats, an Amazon Prime Video adaptation of the Janice Y.K. Lee novel The Expatriates.  

Launched in 2016, Washington’s Simpson Street Productions has a mission of making “everybody a hero of their own story,” according to EVP Savone. The Emmy-winning actor-director-producer has a number of projects in production, among them Unprisoned, an Onyx Collective comedy series coming to Hulu this year. Based on Tracy McMillan’s actual life story, it stars Washington and Delroy Lindo. A feature film, Shadow Force, is further down the line, as is a collaboration with Spencer and her Orit Entertainment.

One of the grand dames of this wave of actor-producers, Poehler and her Paper Kite shingle have been creating idiosyncratic programming (Broad City, Difficult People, Russian Doll) for some two decades. On the books for 2023 are a second season of Tracy Oliver’s Prime Video series, Harlem, and the movie First Time Female Director, written by and starring Chelsea Peretti. Fingers crossed for new seasons of unconventional reality-competition series Making It and Baking It too.

King created her Royal Ties production company with sister Reina in order to create work that “feels like it has something to say about the time that we live in,” says Waterman, Royal Ties’ head of film and television. The slate for 2023 is heady, with King starring as the great politician Shirley Chisholm in the Netflix biopic Shirley, directed and written by John Ridley. Also scheduled for Netflix sometime this year is the David E. Kelley series A Man in Full, which King directed and produced. 

Founded by Banks and husband Max Handelman, Brownstone Productions is best known as the company behind the Pitch Perfect juggernaut. On February 24, Brownstone thriller Cocaine Bear will hit theaters, directed by Banks and starring Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, and, of course, a bear. Bumper in Berlin, a streaming series spin-off from the Pitch Perfect universe, will also be returning to Peacock for a second season. 

A former child actor, Biel spent her career being pigeonholed. By creating Iron Ocean, she found a way to forge her own roles with projects like The Sinner and Candy. The current Iron Ocean slate includes a television series that she doesn’t star in—the teen drama Cruel Summer, which was a hit for cable network Freeform and returns for season two this year.

This story has been updated.