Taron Egerton Skipped Reviews for 'Apex' — A Career First

Taron Egerton has spent years navigating the often bruising relationship between actors and the critical establishment, but his Netflix survival thriller Apex marked a genuine turning point — for the first time in his professional life, he walked away without reading a single review. The admission, candid and self-aware, offers a revealing window into how one of his generation's more thoughtful performers is renegotiating his relationship with external validation.

A Conversation That Cut to the Core

The revelation emerged during Egerton's recent appearance on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, according to TheWrap. Shepard, who counts himself among the fans of Egerton's sharp comic work in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, expressed genuine frustration at what he perceived as critics overlooking the sheer technical craftsmanship on display in Apex — the film, released on Netflix on April 24, pairs Egerton opposite Charlize Theron in an action-forward, athletically demanding thriller. Shepard's argument was essentially an auteurist one: that cinematic skill deserves acknowledgment independent of whether a film suits a given reviewer's sensibility.

Egerton, rather than deflecting the subject with the usual industry diplomacy, leaned into it. He acknowledged that there exists an unspoken rule in the acting world — a kind of professional taboo — around admitting you follow your own reviews at all. "It's like you should pretend it's not happening," he said, before wryly conceding that few performers actually manage to do so.

Breaking the Habit

What makes Egerton's stance on Apex notable isn't merely the restraint involved, but the reasoning behind it. He described the contemporary review ecosystem as one where the incentive structure actively works against balanced, good-faith appraisal. A fair and measured assessment of a film, he argued, simply doesn't generate the engagement that a sharply polarizing take does — making genuine critical integrity a difficult standard to maintain in a clicks-driven media environment. "A fair balanced appraisal of something coming from a place of goodwill does not make for good clickbait," he said plainly.

This is hardly an anti-intellectual position — Egerton wasn't dismissing criticism as a discipline so much as interrogating the conditions under which it currently operates. He acknowledged that reviewers bring their own subjectivities, agendas, and fallibilities to every piece of writing, which renders any single review an inherently partial document. It's the kind of media-literate observation that filmmakers and performers in earlier eras — before the algorithmic amplification of extreme opinion — may not have needed to articulate so explicitly.

Turning Inward

Perhaps the most resonant thread of Egerton's comments was a broader philosophical point about the trap of seeking external affirmation. He described a pattern, familiar to many in creative industries, of mistaking the approval of others for a substitute for genuine self-assessment. "We all slip into the mode of thinking that external affirmation validation is going to be the thing that makes us whole," he said, "and actually it never is."

For an actor whose career has ranged from the kinetic franchise energy of Kingsman to the emotionally exacting demands of Rocketman, this kind of introspection feels hard-earned rather than performative. It's worth noting that Apex itself drew mixed notices upon release, with considerable praise directed at Theron's physically committed performance — a dynamic that, in a lesser performer, might sting. Egerton's apparent equanimity suggests he's arrived at a more durable framework for self-evaluation.

As streaming platforms continue to reshape how films are received and discussed — a conversation worth watching as titles like Hugh Jackman's The Sheep Detectives and Gal Gadot's In the Hand of Dante navigate the same terrain — the question of what criticism is actually for grows more pressing. Meanwhile, Egerton continues to expand his own footprint, with a guest role in HBO's I Love LA Season 2 on the horizon. Whether or not he reads the reviews for that one remains, for now, an open question.