Costar Network maps the film industry's working relationships. Each node is an actor or director, with dot size corresponding to the number of films they've worked on. An edge between two nodes indicates working together in a film. This network is organized so that people who work in the same circles sit closer together.
Search a name or tap a dot to view a person's connections. Use Subset to narrow the map to award-nominated marquee names.
Positions were learned from the collaboration graph in three steps:
1 · Random walks. Thousands of random walks were sampled across the graph, following edges with probability proportional to shared films. Each walk yielded a sentence of names from the same working circles.
2 · node2vec embedding. A skip-gram model (word2vec) was trained on these walks, assigning each person a 64-dimensional vector. People with similar collaboration neighborhoods received similar vectors, whether or not they ever shared a screen.
3 · UMAP. The 64 dimensions were projected to 3D, preserving local neighborhoods as faithfully as possible.
Proximity between neighbors is meaningful - frequent collaborators will sit almost 10x closer than a random pair. Global structure is partially preserved, but don't read too much into it.
Centrality. How central a person is to the industry's core, computed with PageRank on the collaboration graph: working with well-connected people raises your own score, weighted by films shared. Shown as a percentile of everyone on the map.
Clustering. The fraction of a person's collaborator pairs who have also worked with each other. Near 1 means a closed troupe that keeps making films together; near 0 means their collaborators come from circles that never overlap.
Bridging. Betweenness centrality: how often the shortest collaboration path between two other people runs through this person. A high percentile marks a connector between otherwise-distant parts of the industry.
Films. The TMDB 5000 dataset (1976–2017) plus the TMDB API (2017–2026): films with a rating of at least 6.0 from at least 100 votes.
People. Actors with at least 3 qualifying films and directors with at least one film are included, in all.
Links. Two people are linked if they've worked on a movie together, links in all.
Marquee. Oscar or Golden Globe nominees only.
Positions. Learned from the collaboration graph itself — see closer together for the three-step method.
This product uses TMDB and the TMDB APIs but is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.