A-listers are absolutely bourgeois through-and-through and I’m baffled that anyone would consider them proletarian, even labor-aristocrat.

You are a proletarian if your labor-power is assimilated with the mass of the labor power of the proletariat; ie your labor-power is indistinguishable, of the same quality, as any other worker’s labor power. Do you think this applies to Sandra Bullock or Matt Damon?

A-listers have effectively created a new commodity over which they have a total monopoly: their brand, their visage and likeness. It is furthermore backed by laws in the US which prevent unlicensed use of another person’s likeness for profit.

Sandra Bullock made over $70 million from Gravity. It was not earned as a wage paid for labor power. Much of her paycheck came as, effectively, royalties, for the use of her unique brand as Sandra Bullock. She was able to leverage her unique commodity to carve a fraction of the surplus value, not as a proletarian but as a capitalist, in the same way that money capital carves out part of the surplus value as interest.

Furthermore, these very well known actors make a ton of money outside of acting; from endorsements, from real estate, from co-ownership of movie production firms, etc. They are bourgeois!

As some have correctly pointed out, class is about your relation to production. Whether or not someone labors at all does not determine class. Do not the petite bourgeois “labor” to produce their commodity for sale on the market? Does that make them proles? The majority of actors do work for a wage, but this is absolutely not the case for the highly paid ones.