The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4 per cent, this weekend Dame Emma Thompson led thousands at a Restore Nature Now march in London. The protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of nature and the climate, and was attended by charities, businesses and direct action groups.
Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot
During the march, the national treasure, millionaire and jet-setter Thompson was asked if she supported Just Stop Oil, days after the group had vandalised Stonehenge. ‘I think I support anyone who fights this extraordinary battle,’ she replied. ‘We cannot take any more oil out of the ground. I mean, there’s much argument about it. And I know there’s a lot of very complicated economic arguments about it.’
Yes, it’s very complicated. This is especially why we shouldn’t defer to the likes of Thompson on such matters. Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot, and not widely esteemed for their consistency on matters cerebral. Thompson is a tireless and tiresome campaigner on climate matters, who most infamously was spotted taking a flight to New York in 2019, seated in her personal booth in the luxury cabin of a British Airways jet, merely days after backing climate protests in London, and previously exhorting: ‘We should all fly less.’
As for that convert to Scottish independence, his glorious cinematic performances notwithstanding, Brian Cox’s claim of a 4 per cent shrinkage in GDP was based on a prediction made years back. Since the referendum, the UK economy has grown faster than Germany, Italy, and Japan and at a similar rate to France
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It would seem appropriate that this year of heightened political temperature and tempers, what with a wave of elections in the EU, the UK and the USA now underway, and the slew of actors making interventions – Dame Judi Dench also came out in support for Restore Nature Now – should also be the same year that the film Team America: World Police celebrates its twentieth anniversary.
This movie, featuring a cast of marionettes in homage to the oeuvre of Gerry Anderson, particularly Thunderbirds, was a satire on many things: the USA’s thoughtless foreign policy, sloganeering patriotism, the crassness of Hollywood films themselves. But like all good satire, in which those of all political persuasions are up for ridicule, it took an unforgettable swipe at vain, vacuous Hollywood actors, who believed, in the words of one marionette: ‘as actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.’
In the film, for all the well-intentioned efforts of the eponymous, blundering Team America to rid the world of terrorists and dictators, they were forever thwarted by the efforts of the Film Actors Guild, headed by Alec Baldwin, George Clooney and Matt Damon. This cabal was beholden to childlike liberal-left ideology, and so blinded by anti-Western antipathy that one of their number, the marionette in the form of Sean Penn, spoke up to say: ‘Last year I went to Iraq. Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place. They had flowering meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.’ Such was their naivety that the Film Actors Guild even ended up fighting on the side of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.
Back to real life: witness the carry-on of Stephen Fry this year, who was absolutely shocked to discover that London’s exclusive Garrick Club, of which he is a long-term member, also had a long-standing rule against female membership. Fry, a former president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, also protested recently that the same institution was ‘stinking of privilege and classism’. And then we had Robert De Niro, who last month launched a tirade against Donald Trump.
De Niro, Cox, Fry, Dench, Thompson: these are all figures many of us revered and still revere for the professions which made their name, and in which they still excel. But why do they do it? Why must they make fools of themselves by spouting sometimes hypocritical and ill-informed political views?
Their carry-on is, alas, intrinsic to who they are. Actors are given to narcissism and shallowness, to public utterances that expose their vacuity and vanity. Their job is to pretend to be someone else, to pretend to be someone they are not, to have emotions that they do not have. These sweet, insecure souls love to be the centre of attention – literally. And if that involves tapping into causes that makes them appear all the more caring and compassionate, all the better for them.
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