People were bitterly disappointed when Zachary Levi endorsed Trump last month. He’d been sliding down the right-wing road for a while, but Trump was the last nail in the coffin. Levi had gone from having lots of goodwill in geek circles to having none.
DC fans found it especially galling that Levi namechecked Shazam, his superhero movie character, while singing the praises of alleged rapist and convicted felon Trump. “I did just wanna just give you a little context about why Shazam is sitting here talking to you about these various things,” he said at a Michigan Trump rally, as if he owned the character.
But the Shazam franchise flopped at the second installment, Shazam: Fury of the Gods… and some people think this career failure is what caused Levi to embrace MAGA. Don’t forget, there was a time when he said he disliked Trump!
A new tidbit released to The Hollywood Reporter certainly seems to indicate this. An “insider who has known Levi for years” told the outlet that the one-time star was resentful over his lack of superhero movie stardom. “When he was cast as Shazam, it was literally his dream,” they said. “He thought this was his ticket to being The Rock or Chris Evans. But it didn’t happen for him, and he’s bitter about that.”
Levi called his Trump endorsement “career suicide” due to Hollywood being “a very, very liberal town” but no-one’s really buying that, either. Whoopi Goldberg, herself the subject of a Trump rant recently, told Levi off on October 1. She said on The View, “From the beginning of Hollywood, it’s always been a very right-leaning town,” and explained, “The truth of the matter is, very few people seem to bite it because they’re Republican. Jon Voight, who is working. Dennis Quaid, who is working. People work—stop that. It’s more BS, and it’s unnecessary.”
So it really seems like Levi was just playing the martyr with those comments, a tiresome habit of hardcore conservatives. And now he’s running with the right-wing grift. According to the Hollywood Reporter, he’s moved to Texas now and his upcoming The Unbreakable Boy is a faith-based movie, the kind beloved of MAGAs. It seems like Levi is hanging all his hopes on the right-wing crowd to restore him to his previous level of fame. And his Shazam is deader than dead. Maybe he should have tried embodying the actual values of the character?
Published: Oct 11, 2024 01:18 pm