As a natural follow-on to yesterday’s post about Celebrity fatigue, here’s Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press hoping that we can somehow make actors apolitical again:
During the Vietnam War, actress Jane Fonda visited North Vietnam and expressed strong support for the regime’s struggle against the United States and South Vietnam.
If I have to listen to an actor talk about politics, let that actor be Gabriel Basso.
You might know Basso from his breakout role in Netflix’s hit series The Night Agent, in which he stars as an FBI agent who works in a secret basement office beneath the White House. But Basso has another White House connection. In 2020, he played J.D. Vance in the big-screen adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, which was based on the vice president’s memoir about his childhood in Appalachia — which means we now live in a world where the vice president could be Netflix-and-chilling in the White House, watching the man who once played his own younger self doing espionage in the basement of the building he’s sitting in.
In a recent interview, Basso called his entanglement with Vance’s timeline “kind of weird”, which it is — but what’s weirder is that Basso describes Vance himself as “a cool dude”, as if he’s talking about some guy in his Wednesday night bowling league as opposed to one of the most powerful and polarizing political figures in the United States.
This type of comment is typical for Basso, who doesn’t believe actors should embroil themselves in politics. “We’re saying words that we’re told to say. We’re told how to say them. We’re told where to stand. And then we’re telling people how to vote?” he said on a recent episode of the Great Company podcast. “You should be quiet; you should do your job. You should be a jester, entertain people — then shut the fuck up.”
To hear an actor talk like this is especially remarkable in the middle of awards season, when the great and the good of Hollywood use the red carpet as a pulpit to preach their politics, which are reliably blue. Last Sunday, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Jane Fonda used her acceptance speech for the Life Achievement Award to rally the crowd to the right side of history. “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” she declared. “And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people!”
[…]
The entanglement of Hollywood and Washington only intensified in the final weeks of the 2024 election cycle — which included, among other things, a political ad voiced by Julia Roberts, a Democratic National Committee headlined by Oprah Winfrey, and the Avengers literally assembling to campaign for Kamala Harris. The bitter irony, of course, is that despite the entire Hollywood apparatus coming out in support of Harris, all we got was a Trump landslide and the absolutely dire image of a bunch of our favorite actors wearing “White Dudes for Harris” T-shirts.
It’s enough to make you long for the golden age when it was the norm for actors to, as Basso so artfully put it, “shut the fuck up”.
