Hollywood’s Nicotine Habit Is Back

Onscreen cigarettes aren’t just for the Don Drapers and Thomas Shelbys of the television and movie world anymore. In fact, it seems more contemporary characters than ever are blowing smoke. After years of Hollywood butting out, why are so many stars picking back up for roles in 2025?

People have smoked tobacco for millennia, so naturally, characters have been smoking on film for almost as long as the medium has existed. But as smoking rates have decreased among American adults, it would also be reasonable to assume that cinema would follow suit. Fewer American adults partake than ever (just 11.6%, down from a whopping 42.6% in 1965), yet movies and television can’t seem to cut the habit.

Smoke and Mirrors

As an avid movie and television consumer—and an ex-smoker—I’ve observed countless characters with cigarettes dangling from their lips or nestled neatly between their fingers in the last two years. Despite the relative rarity of spotting an actual smoker on the street or outside your office, in 2024, nine of the ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards contained tobacco.

Some of these examples can be attributed to the films’ temporal settings. If you’re watching Oppenheimer, heavy tobacco use is key to creating the texture of a bygone era. When a piece of fiction is set in the past, it makes sense to show characters puffing away. (To return to the Mad Men example, how could one dig into the 1960s world of Pan Am-flying ad executives without a devil-may-care approach toward smoking?) Now, though, contemporary movies and TV are no longer shying away from compelling narratives that center on chain-smoking protagonists.

One possible reason: Nostalgia is at an all-time high. (With the world on fire and everyone in a constant state of dread, can we really blame modern society for looking to the past for comfort?) This is evident in the influence that smoking has had on some screenwriters’ creative choices. In at least one instance, the setting can be an excuse to feature tobacco usage liberally. Director Emerald Fennell told Vanity Fair that part of the reason she set her BAFTA-nominated 2023 film Saltburn in 2006 and 2007 was because it was the last year you could legally smoke indoors in the United Kingdom.

Barry Keoghan in Saltburn. Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/A24

Turn on a movie like Julia Roberts’ latest, After the Hunt, which is set in 2019 and features the actress glamorously donning a white suit while casually smoking a cigarette.

There’s also Materialists, the A24 romantic dramedy that grossed over $100 million in 2025. Set in modern-day New York City, it tells the story of a professional matchmaker (portrayed by the vacantly beautiful Dakota Johnson) who finds herself in the middle of a love triangle. In one scene, she gracefully holds a cigarette between her fingers, dreamily looking into the eyes of her handsome ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans), telling him, “I missed you.” He replies, “You don’t even remember my face.” She closes one eye, and, still holding onto her cigarette, raises her arm and traces the contours of his face in the air.

TV, too, has its ardent smokers. For instance, the chefs on buzzy FX drama The Bear puff away throughout its anxiety-inducing episodes. (Redditors have even said that the high-stress show makes them miss smoking.) While similarly popular programs like, say, Euphoria or The Queen’s Gambit may have shown cigarette-smoking leads, those characters were often depicted as troubled, their frequent tobacco usage mirroring downward spirals and dark life stages.

With all this mainstream smoker representation, you might be tricked into thinking that smoking is making a bit of a comeback in the real world. In reality, smoking rates have steadily declined for decades, which can almost certainly be chalked up to increased awareness about the perilous nature of the habit, laws prohibiting cigarette use in indoor public spaces, and the ascension of vaping and products like Zyn.

Smoking, Both Onscreen and Off

Jared Oviatt, who operates Cigfluencers, a popular Instagram account that posts photos of celebrities smoking on and off screen, told the New York Times that when he started the account in 2021, he struggled to find new pictures of famous people smoking and was “really dipping into the archives.”

One early Cigfluencers post shows a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio holding a lit cigarette while making a butterfly gesture with his hands, with the caption “Leo was SO much cooler when he smoked REAL cig.” A cinema-focused throwback shows a teary Nicole Kidman in the 1999 surrealist drama Eyes Wide Shut.

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Nowadays, Oviatt has no problem finding new Cigfluencer content. His newer posts have far fresher photos, with shots of A-listers like Jeremy Allen White, who stars on the aforementioned The Bear, and cig-themed quotes from modern icons like French designer and fashion figure Michèle Lamy. There’s up-and-coming actress Rachel Sennott smoking at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a man lighting a cigarette for Hannah Einbinder after she won an Emmy for her performance on HBO’s Hacks.

Where There’s Smoke…

As a millennial, the oft-grisly and totally pervasive anti-smoking ads of the 2000s are burned into my brain, and did nothing to stop me from picking up the habit at age 15; these PSAs were nevertheless fairly effective. I quit in my late 20s, and now vape like a fiend, which is seldom depicted in cinema, because, for whatever reason, it will never look half as cool. (It’s worth noting that while cigarette usage continues to decrease, the number of American adults who vape is rising.) In film, however, vaping works best as a punchline. In Osgood Perkins’s horror-comedy The Monkey, which came out earlier this year, the eponymous villain causes the death of one character by making him choke on his vape.

Even though we all know smoking causes lung cancer and a bevy of other undesirable diseases, there’s something about smoking that remains fundamentally chic. In reality, smoking smells bad and can feel grimy, but because it’s impossible to transmit scent or air quality, on-screen, smoking signifies glamor and sophistication. Yet, just a decade ago, even stars who portray chic smokers felt compelled to detail the inner workings of how they do so without real cigarettes, like when Jon Hamm was asked to explain Don Draper’s nonstop puffing to ABC News during the show’s run.

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 photo illustration of Evan Peters in Dhamer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. — Evan Peters in Dhamer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Netflix

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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