Hollywood’s Nicotine Habit Is Back

In the early 21st century, there was a concerted effort to curb smoking in movies. In 2007, the dean of Harvard’s school of public health gave a presentation to the Motion Picture Association, wherein he presented scientific evidence linking smoking in movies and increased youth smoking rates. In response, the MPA, which determines whether a movie is rated PG or R, announced that it would consider tobacco usage when assigning film ratings. One study found that smoking in movies began to decline after peaking in 2005; another reported that smoking in PG-13 movies fell to an all-time low in 2018.

For a brief moment, the way smoking characters were written reflected negative associations with cigarette use. (Denzel Washington’s portrayal of corrupt police officer Alonzo Harris in Training Day, for example.) A 2005 headline from The Independent declares, “The burning issue: only villains smoke in Hollywood,” and describes a study that found, in the 1990s, movie villains smoked at almost twice the rate of heroes.

A recent study reported that onscreen smoking doubled in 2022. However, it wasn’t measuring the number of works that contained smoking, but rather the popularity of media that contained tobacco use among 15-to 24-year-olds. (According to its methodology, the extremely popular Netflix streaming series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, accounted for one-third of all on-screen tobacco use.) The perceived resurgence of on-screen smoking goes beyond those statistics, though.

Movie and television characters surely aren’t smoking as feverishly as they did in the mid-20th century, but plenty of viewers have perceived an uptick in tobacco use on screen. “Is it my imagination, or is there a huge uptick in film characters who smoke cigarettes?” one Redditor inquired. (Other social media users have made similar observations—a few, conspiratorially, suggested it’s actually a secret plot masterminded by Big Tobacco).

“I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life.”— David Lynch, in a 2011 interview with The New York Times In a 2011 interview with the New York Times, director David Lynch (who died of a smoking-related illness in January of this year) lamented his life without cigarettes. “I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes,” he said. “I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life.”

Perhaps smoking will always have that sort of reputation among people who make TV and movies. At the very least, in 2025, when you see someone smoking on screen, it stands out way more than it would if we lived in a time and a place when real-life smoking was pervasive. Maybe that’s also why film and TV creators remain comfortable showing their characters using tobacco. In 2025, smoking is mainly just something people do in the pictures.

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