Title: “Find Someone Else”
Prompt: This puzzle’s contest answer is a five-letter word you don’t want describing your meta.
Answer: SHADY, found by 187 solvers, 79 of whom were solo solves

This one landed pretty solidly for a Week 3/4 (187 solvers, a bit low but still perfectly cromulent). Five theme entries, each a celebrity’s name:

19-A: [“After the Hunt” actress, 2025 (5-7)] = JULIA ROBERTS. A (5,7) name, so Gaffney’s just pointlessly giving us the enumerations of theme entries, which we all have anyway once we’ve solved?? What sort of madness is this! I demand answers.

26-A: [“No Time to Die” actor, 2021 (3-5)] = DANIEL CRAIG. OK, enumerations don’t match up so I guess we’ll keep looking…

47-A: [“The Book of Mormon” character (6-6)] = JOSEPH SMITH. (6,5). Enumerations must mean something else.

69-A: [Heavy metal guitarist whose name is one letter off from a “Friends” star’s name (6-5)] = COURTNEY COX. Not her, who spells it “Courteney.” But her instead.

79-A: [British actress in “The Bear” (6-4)] = OLIVIA COLMAN. Yet again, an incorrect enumeration. What gives?

As joon noted in his typically insightful review:

it’s curious to me that the enumerations have hyphens, rather than commas or spaces to denote the separate words. they might not be enumerations at all, of course, but if they are, this is a nonstandard way of punctuating them, unless they actually do enumerate hyphenated phrases

He was so close! It wasn’t hyphenated phrases we were looking for, but hyphenated names. So use the first name in each, then find a famous person with it who has a hyphenated surname as enumerated in clues:

19-A = JULIA with a 5-7 surname is JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS
26-A: = DANIEL with a 3-5 surname is DANIEL DAY-LEWIS
47-A: = JOSEPH with a 6-6 surname is JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT
69-A: = COURTNEY with a 6-5 surname is COURTNEY THORNE-SMITH
79-A: = OLIVIA with a 6-4 surname is OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN

OK, can’t be too many more steps left! Just one in fact. Take the two intials of their double-barrelled surnames and find a three-letter entry using those letters in the first and third spaces. They are:

L (S) D
D (H) L
G (A) L
T (D) S
N (Y) J

That yields contest answer SHADY, found by 179 solvers. Not the most fitting meta answer but we were so many steps in that the options for the perfect answer word were a little on the short side. So self-fulfillingly SHADY, maybe…

On to Week 4 of 4! Good luck and all that…