Actor Josh Duhamel showed a rare streak of celebrity sensibility when, recently he announced that he was keeping his opinions to himself. Not that he doesn’t have any – in fact, he stated that he does “have real strong opinions about things” – but that he wasn’t going to bellow them at the world. “I don’t really talk about it,” he said, “because it’s like, ‘Why would I alienate half my audience?’ Because I respect their views on things but I’m not going to preach to them.”
He’s not the only celebrity wisely keeping their yap shut. Glen Powell, Vince Vaughn, Matthew McConaughey and others have remained pretty tight-lipped, politically. Keanu Reeves is probably at least partly so beloved because, like Duhamel, he refrains from alienating half his audience. Even mega-star Tom Cruise, for all his public Scientology, otherwise keeps his opinion cards pretty close to his chest (even the Taiwanese flag patch was only seen in Top Gun: Maverick for a few seconds).
Unfortunately, they’re very much in the minority. Most of the celebrity world seems to imagine that we hoi polloi are waiting breathlessly for our superiors to hand down words of wisdom from on high. But are we, really?
One of my favourite sideshows of modern politics is the celebrity chorus: the actors, singers and writers among whom ideological conformity is as thick as Beijing smog.
Paul Hogan recently added another layer to that smog when he criticised Pauline Hanson for suggesting Australia should be a monoculture. “She’s a pelican. Outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump,” the Los Angeles-based actor and comedian complained.
Barely had the geriatric expat opened his well-fed yap than Hanson responded in kind. The next episode of her hilarious Please Explain videos was funnier than anything Hogan has done since everyone thought leg-warmers were the height of fashion.
But the exchange only underlines the deeper farce: how much actual influence do these celebrity interventions ever have?
Start with Australia. In the lead-up to the 1998 federal election, veteran broadcaster Phillip Adams declared that John Howard’s Australia was poised to occupy “the proud place vacated by pre-Mandela South Africa”. Not to be outdone, novelist and playwright Bob Ellis warned that Australia would become “an international pariah like South Africa, with no way back”. Howard won (again).
Three elections later, actor Toni Collette lamented: “I think I’ll slit my wrists if Howard gets in again.” Howard did get in again. Two decades later, Collette is happily still with us.
In 2015, a group of entertainment figures – including Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce and Brendan Cowell – launched the #saveourboys campaign against Tony Abbott over the impending executions of drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia. They urged the prime minister to “grow some balls”, “show some ticker”, “be a leader” and do more to help the Bali duo.
The campaign changed nothing. Chan and Sukumaran were executed, and Abbott preserved Australia’s crucial relationship with Indonesia.
The pattern repeated itself during the 2023 voice referendum. John Farnham allowed his anthem You’re the Voice to be used by the Yes campaign, joined by figures including Shaquille O’Neal, Jimmy Barnes and Missy Higgins. The referendum was defeated decisively.
The pattern repeats itself around the world. Practically every Brit celebrity yammered for the Remain campaign. They lost. American celebrities fawned over both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, and voters ran in the opposite direction in droves.
When the Guardian enlisted celebrities to hector Ohio voters to reject G W Bush in a pivotal vote, they were bluntly told, “real Americans aren’t interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions”. Ohio voters swung solidly behind Bush (for better or worse). Republican strategists credited the Grauniad with helping them win.
When Donald Trump first ran in 2016, it got even worse. Meryl Streep, Madonna, De Niro, Sharon Stone threatened to flee to Europe. Trump won again. Stone stayed. Ellen DeGeneres did flee: to post-Brexit Britain, of all places.
As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion – Team America: World Police
The irony is how much hot air these celebrities expel calling Trump ‘stupid’, when most of them barely got past high school. Madonna dropped out of a dance scholarship, for chrissake: how dumb would you have to be? Anthony Hopkins was brutally honest when he said that “most actors are pretty stupid”, and declined to pontificate with his political opinions.
Well, sure, even stupid people are entitled to their opinions. We even let them vote. But they have no call lecturing and finger-wagging the rest of us. Especially not when their sole talent is faking sincerity and parroting words other smarter people wrote.
We’ve got politicians to do that for us.
