The Actor Model describes precisely what it means for computation to be distributed: encapsulated and isolated behaviors process messages that are sent asynchronously between them. Akka’s implementation of this model has been widely successful, but for a long time it had the restriction that Actor interactions were not statically type-checked. With the addition of the akka-typed module we have finally found a formulation that brings Actor messaging to the same type-safety as normal method invocation—if not beyond—while being simple and intuitive. In this presentation we will look at why this addition has taken so long, how it works, and what we can express with it. Actor-skeptics beware: this may shift your world-view!