Shazam! actor Zachary Levi recently said that supporting President Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential election made him an outsider in Hollywood, revealing that there are people who no longer wish to work with him, which is a similar experience to many celebrities who have been bold enough to stand up for their conservative values.
“I know that there are people that would prefer not to work with me now because of my opinions. My team has let me know,” he went on to say during an interview with Variety. “They haven’t given me any specific names, but there are people who prefer not to work with me at this time. And it’s unfortunate. I knew that was probably going to happen. I didn’t make this decision blindly or casually.”
Before the 2024 election, Levi took quite a few hits for openly expressing his support for then-candidate Trump; however, he noted that he does still have allies in the entertainment industry. “While there are some people who might prefer not to work with me anymore, there’s a lot of people on that side of the political spectrum who are even more inclined to hire me and to want to do business with me because ‘I need some people who voted another way,'” he said.
“They see that what I did was at great risk. And they were like, ‘You know what? I give you a lot of props for that because that’s not an easy thing to do.’ And I go, ‘I appreciate that,'” he remarked. “I was not a fan of Trump’s Trumpiness. I didn’t like a lot of these personal things, the ways that he carries himself a lot of the time. I understand people’s aversion,” Levi said during the interview, according to Fox News.
“Do I think the whole package is somehow perfect? No. In fact, most people who voted for Donald Trump recognize a lot of the imperfections in all of it. Nobody was saying, ‘This is the Orange Messiah,'” the Chuck actor explained. Levi then told the outlet that a lot of people in Hollywood “secretly” voted for Trump during the last election.
“I know it to be true because I’ve gotten messages from lots of people who I won’t name but who were very grateful to me for taking the stand that I took. And also they would tell me, ‘I want to do that, but I’m so afraid,'” he said. “And I would tell them, ‘Listen, you’re on your journey. I’m on my journey. You’ve got to keep trusting God.”
“And if you feel compelled to step out in that way, then do it boldly and know that you’re going to be OK. And if you don’t feel that conviction yet, then don’t. It’s all good,'” he added. Levi uploaded a video in October 2024 that addressed “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg’s claim that Hollywood was a “right-leaning town” where “very few people seem to bite it because they’re Republicans.”
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Levi strongly disagreed with her comments, noting that she was only able to name two examples, Jon Voight and Dennis Quaid, out of the thousands currently working in the entertainment industry. He went on to add that actors like them usually only come out as Republican “at a certain level of your career to get away with it.”
“And what that means is there’s plenty — and by the way, they have sent me lots of messages — plenty of people in my industry in Hollywood that are terrified to publicly say that they would vote for Donald Trump or be conservative in any way,” Levi stated at the time. “That’s why you don’t see them. That’s why they’re not very prevalent or prominent because they know that there’s ramifications for this kind of s—.”
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video