Early Christian ascetics counted seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and lust—that threaten our ascension to goodness (and, by extension, to heaven). But in an era ruled by an all-knowing Internet, a surreal beauty standard, and an insatiable appetite for material wealth, these vices are more of a playbook for success than a warning. What is a sin in 2026? For the Indulgence issue, we asked seven figures—Jamieson Webster, Dries Van Noten, Christine Sun Kim, Griffin Dunne, Mia Khalifa, Brontez Purnell, and Helen Molesworth—to examine how one sin threads its way through their life and work. Here, Dunne reflects on envy.
Any actor who doesn’t envy the actor a step ahead of them is either lying or threw in the towel after landing a couple of credits on IMDb. From the first audition, there is always someone in the waiting room who shares your characteristics or vibe, with the main difference being that they often get the part you desperately want. At my first audition, an actor I would come to envy for years pulled a fiver from his wallet on his way out and gave it to the next guy in line, saying, “Blow the reading for me.” He went on to get the part. I thought that if I had his bravado, life might be different.
I often think of the lines Iago utters to Othello:
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”
The last time I spoke these words was onstage during a dress rehearsal. I had no idea that afternoon that there would be no opening night, or that it would be my last day as a high school student. I was caught smoking a joint hours later, and the headmaster of my boarding school sent me packing the next morning. Sitting on the Greyhound home, I decided to drop out and move to New York with dreams of opening as Iago on Broadway instead of in the school gymnasium.
Ironically, the green-eyed monster that drove Iago’s lust for recognition would likewise propel my own.
Years later, in my flightless career, the green-eyed monster set its sights on the kindest actor I had ever met: Jeff Daniels. We had about as much in common as Jimmy Stewart and Ratso Rizzo, and despite how moved I was after seeing him in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July in 1980, a tumor of envy gnawed at me when I thought of how I might’ve approached that part.
By the mid-’80s, my career was—supposedly—orbiting Tom Hanks’s. We were both up for the role of Allan Bauer in Splash, a part I wanted so badly I can still conjure the feeling.
We all know how that turned out. As we working actors age, burning with envy isn’t sustainable. Real things—like death, or divorce—finally trivialize the urge to deny our colleagues their hard-earned accomplishments.
Yet during my season of compare-and-despair, it never occurred to me that while I conjured jealousy for others, another actor might feel the same toward me. At a party during a bygone era in a SoHo loft, I was introduced to a man about my age, of a similar weight and height, and with similar coloring. I put my Styrofoam cup in my left hand and stuck out my right to introduce myself. He looked at me and spat, “We’ve met twice. You never remember my fucking name.” I was deeply stung and never forgot it again, especially when he’d pop up on Criminal Intent and many other shows, often playing angry lawyers.
Some years on, a close friend of mine asked me to star alongside her in a network series. I couldn’t do it for reasons now forgotten, which upset her enough to beg, “If we can’t have you, is there someone like you? Don’t you have a doppelgänger out there?”
I gave her the name of the angry young lawyer, and he landed the part. I learned later that, as the actors made small talk before the table read for the show’s pilot, my friend overheard him say, “Griffin Dunne thinks he’s such hot shit.” She stopped him cold. “How do you think you got this part? He’s the one who suggested you. I’d never even heard of you.” The table went quiet until the actor, shamefaced, said, “Griffin knows who I am?”
The entertainment industry—maybe all industries—thrives on the avarice, envy, and caged warfare that pits one constituent against another. But without a little green-eyed envy, we all might still be reading by candlelight. Maybe Steve Jobs had a bug up his ass about Edison, who had a bug up his ass about Tesla. Picture a young Robert De Niro nervously eyeing a young Al Pacino at a casting call. How many directors made their first great films while torturing themselves with the knowledge that Orson Welles was only 25 when he shot Citizen Kane? I have no idea, but I do know this: I have yet to play Iago.
More Deep Dives on the State of the Seven Deadly Sins
Jamieson Webster on Why She Distrusts Humility in Women
What Mia Khalifa Learned From Two Long Years of Celibacy
Deaf Artist Christine Sun Kim on the Anger She Carries in a Hearing World
In an Ozempic-Suffused Scene, Brontez Purnell on Being a ‘Fake Skinny Bitch’
Dries Van Noten Unpacks the Greed That Made Him Step Back From Fashion
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