

Several leading figures in the entertainment industry gathered for a panel at Variety and VIBE’s “Reimagining Creativity” event at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Saturday to discuss the significance of taking risks in Hollywood. The event, presented by Google TV and YouTube, hosted a panel, “Celebrating Innovation in Entertainment,” which invited a handful of notable figures in the industry to speak on how risk-taking and experimenting with imagination and storytelling are essential to creating captivating narratives in both film and television.
The panel, moderated by Variety senior entertainment writer, Angelique Jackson, featured Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin (CODA), actor and comedian Roy Wood Jr. (Love, Brooklyn), Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg, (It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley), actor Harry Hamlin (Mayfair Witches), and CEO of Neon Tom Quinn.
Matlin, although having won an Oscar fairly early in her career for Children of a Lesser God (1986), said that to this day, she’s not entirely sure how the entertainment industry works. After trying to get her own projects picked up over the years, she’s realized just how rigid Hollywood is when trying to pitch new work. “You know, you win an Academy Award, everybody’s so excited. ‘Oh, that’s great. Things are gonna change. It’s fantastic. You’re gonna be working, offers are gonna come in,’ and they didn’t,” she said. “So what I do is I have to do it myself. I create my own projects. I have a lot of projects on my plate, and I’m still knocking on doors saying, ‘Hey, look, here’s this project, here’s this project, here’s this project.’”
Wood Jr. shared his thoughts on his most recent role in the film Love, Brooklyn, which follows a romantic genre that he’s not typically used to, but he said that stepping into the unknown allowed him to, “exist in a place performatively that was a lot more still than where I normally get to exist.” He continued to say how his experience as an actor and comedian didn’t necessarily convey that he could take on such a role, yet the producer and director “took a chance” on him. “So then it’s on me to take a chance on actually nailing the performance and the subtleties of it,” Wood Jr. said.
Hamlin also emphasized the importance of risk-taking as an actor, as doing so has brought him the success he’s always worked towards. “I could look back on my career and pretty much every time I’ve taken a leap of faith and risked something big, it’s had a tremendous effect on my career and pushed me into another level,” he said. Referring to his 1981 film, Making Love, which was one of the first studio pictures about a gay love story, he shared how despite the doubts presented to him, he took the role anyway and never looked back. “All of my friends told me, ‘You can’t do that. It’ll ruin your career if you do that.’… I took that risk and it completely changed my career, but changed it in a really, really great way,” Hamlin said.
Quinn, who emphasized how Neon is a company that often takes bold and creative risks, also said that one has to be audacious in order to, “Have a vision and a belief in a slate of films, and to have a point of view and to be attracted to other filmmakers who also have a very clear, strong point of view…” He went on to say, “Ultimately I think that if you truly believe in the power of cinema and you have a vision about what you can stand for, you will persevere here.”