What Kind of Cigarettes Do Actors Smoke in Movies?

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.

Most cigarettes smoked on screen are not cigarettes. They are herbal props with no tobacco and no nicotine, supplied by prop houses, and when a real brand does appear it is there by the production’s choice, because tobacco companies have been barred from paying for placement since 1998. This page covers what actors actually smoke, why, how brands got into movies before the ban, and how on-screen smoking is treated today.

Last verified September 11, 2026. Sources at the end.

Herbal prop cigarettes

The standard prop is a herbal cigarette: a paper-wrapped, filter-tipped blend of plant material such as marshmallow leaf, mint, corn silk, clover, rose petals or lettuce, with no tobacco. Prop houses stock them because they look right on camera, light and burn like a cigarette, and can be handled by performers who do not smoke. They also solve a legal problem: most studios and many locations are covered by indoor smoke-free laws that apply to tobacco but not to tobacco-free products. Makers such as Honeyrose in the UK have supplied film and television productions for decades.

Herbal cigarettes are not harmless. Research summarized in the public health literature finds that burning plant material produces tar and carbon monoxide at levels comparable to tobacco cigarettes, and that the smoke condensate is mutagenic. What they lack is nicotine, which is why productions use them and why they are not a smoking-cessation product.

When real cigarettes appear

Some productions use real cigarettes, either because the performer is a smoker and prefers them or because the director wants the specific way tobacco burns and smokes on film. In those cases the pack is usually a real brand with the name turned away from camera or covered, or a fictional pack made by the art department (Morley, the fake brand seen in dozens of shows and films since the 1960s, is the best known). Performers’ union agreements treat smoking as a working condition to be disclosed in advance, and productions are expected to offer herbal alternatives; the specifics are in the current SAG-AFTRA television and theatrical agreement.

How brands got into movies

Until the late 1990s, they paid. Philip Morris paid $40,000 for Marlboro to appear in Superman II (1980), in which Lois Lane chain-smokes and Superman is thrown into a Marlboro truck; the placement prompted a congressional inquiry. Brown & Williamson paid Sylvester Stallone $500,000 to use its brands in five films in the early 1980s. Internal industry documents released in litigation show similar arrangements across the decade.

The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the major manufacturers and 46 states ended that. Section III(e) bars participating manufacturers from paying anyone “to use, display, make reference to or use as a prop any Tobacco Product” in films, television, theater, live performance, music videos or video games, with narrow exceptions for adult-only venues. The ban took effect 30 days after the agreement was signed on November 23, 1998. Cigarette advertising on broadcast television and radio had already been illegal since January 2, 1971. So any brand you see on screen today is there because the production put it there, not because the manufacturer paid.

How on-screen smoking is treated now

In May 2007 the Motion Picture Association announced that depictions of smoking would be considered in assigning a film’s rating, alongside violence and language, and rating descriptors now note smoking where it is present; the PG rating given to the animated film Rango in 2011, with more than 60 smoking scenes, drew public criticism on that basis. The CDC and the Truth Initiative both publish periodic counts of tobacco incidents in top-grossing films and in streaming series; those reports document that on-screen smoking fell sharply after the MSA and has risen again in streaming content since the late 2010s. Public health agencies and the World Health Organization treat on-screen smoking as a youth-exposure issue, which is the reason for the ratings treatment.

The short version

Actors mostly smoke tobacco-free herbal props. When a real brand shows up, no one paid for it, and it has been that way since 1998. Cigarettes on screen are a production and ratings question, not a product endorsement, and there is nothing glamorous to report about them.

Related: Who Invented Cigarettes? and When Were Cigarettes Invented?

Sources

• Public Health Law Center, Master Settlement Agreement, Section III(e)
• 15 U.S.C. 1335, Unlawful advertisements on medium of electronic communication
• Wikipedia, Herbal cigarette (with cited emissions studies); Superman II; Product placement; MPA film rating system