Why Is Hollywood Suddenly Silent About Trump?
The digs at Hollywood were blunt and unusual. The Apprentice stars were mad — stunned — that so few of their peers would engage with them.
“People have been afraid to touch this film, to be seen as complicit in the film, to support the film, to publicly endorse the film and certainly to show the film on a streaming platform,” Jeremy Strong, who plays Roy Cohn in the independently financed Donald Trump origin story, told me recently. “But the role of storytelling is to hold up a mirror. It’s not to make people feel comfortable. It’s not simply to entertain. It is to hold feet to the fire.
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“I can’t think of a subject more relevant to what all of us are living through,” he added. “Not to be embraced by the industry has been really hard.”
His co-star Sebastian Stan was almost as pointed.
“When it comes to artistry and creativity, we have to be able to protect free speech. It shouldn’t be selective free speech,” Stan, who plays Trump, told THR soon after calling out colleagues for shunning him on Variety’s Actors on Actors. “It should be free speech on all fronts. We can’t get normalized about what we can and can’t talk about.”
Something strange has been happening to The Apprentice, which despite acute timeliness and an 83 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes has been willed away by the industry. Most distribution execs wouldn’t touch it; actors won’t talk about it. The film shows how Cohn’s bare-knuckle approach shaped a young Trump. And whether entertainers fear validating Trump’s relevance or worry about repercussions for seeming critical of his power, they’ve sidestepped the subject. What if they made a movie about Roy Cohn and everyone was afraid of a blacklist?
(Journalists do not seem to feel the same: The Golden Globes nominated both Stan and Strong.)
Such a reception metaphorizes current Hollywood. After deploying every weapon to stop Trump from regaining the White House — letting loose every Beyoncé performance, George Clooney op-ed and Taylor Swift endorsement — the industry has pretty much gone Harold Lloyd-silent since he won.
Yes, Mark Hamill has said that “we get the leaders we deserve,” and indeed, Billie Eilish noted Trump wages “a war on women.” But most contemporary stars haven’t made a sound since Nov. 5. No Jennifer Lawrence “Do not let this defeat you — let this enrage you!” as after the 2016 election, no Robert De Niro commentary (“a real racist”) as he was fond of making last time. Back then, Steve Levitan derided “Trump’s lies,” and Barry Jenkins swore at Trump and his immigration policy from the National Board of Review stage.
Awards season is celebrities’ access lane to politics. Yet at the starting gate of an eight-week sprint, no frenzy awaits at the turn.
Before the 2017 inauguration, Meryl Streep told the Globes that seeing Trump imitate a disabled reporter “broke my heart” before passionately decrying his toxicity. Stranger things have happened, but such speeches do not seem on tap for the upcoming show.
The truest comment about Trump of late is from the man no one is listening to: Stan’s “we can’t get normalized about what we can and can’t talk about.”
Is this a temporary lull, the daze of a resounding loss from which celebrities have yet to awaken? Or a reversion to a permanent state? For decades, entertainers didn’t wade into politics, unconscious cosigners of Michael Jordan’s famous aphorism “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
Trump disrupted that; suddenly, criticizing a president was acceptable, fashionable. But what seemed like a sea change may in fact have been a blip.
Perhaps the silence isn’t cowardice but recalibration, one may wonder. The 2024 campaign saw every possible celebrity endorsement, Oprah, Clooney, Beyoncé, Taylor — mononymous repositories of our collective trust. Yet a majority of voters didn’t believe. And so an inferential reasoning abides. “If Taylor and Oprah couldn’t sway people, how could I?” “If all the yelling in 2018 didn’t stop him, maybe we try something else?”
The rationale would be easier to embrace if a fresh approach had been advanced. Fine enough to put the knives away. But nothing else has come out of the drawer.
The balance between Silicon Valley and Hollywood long has been tipping — in wealth, in social influence, even in fame. And now the proof: entertainers aware of their diminishing power or, through their silence, contributing to it.
Or perhaps it is just cynical self-interest. If non-MAGA figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos fear for their businesses in Trump: The Return, perhaps celebrities should too. After all, his popular support is that broad.
But is it? The 77.3 million who voted for him cannot drown out the 76.5 million who didn’t. If you were Stan and Strong, you, too, would be perplexed, even furious. “You egged us on,” would be their justifiable attitude. “You wanted us to fight. And when you realized we were losing, you acted as if we didn’t exist.”
If you’re a Democratic fan of liberal celebrities, you’d be right to feel angry. When conservative fan bases stan their stars, the stars stan them back. Joe Rogan. Matt Walsh. Ben Shapiro. Democratic fans might look to their heroes and ask, “Where’s our representation?” “Where’s the mobilization?”
“We got motivated,” they’d say. “And you went and normalized what we can’t talk about.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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