Zachary Levi Is Finally Being Honest By Supporting Trump

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 30, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 30, 2024 |

I have been a bartender at various Broadway theaters for the better part of sixteen years. Some of those shows will have strict seating rules. One such production that did this was The Elephant Man starring Bradley Cooper. It almost always started on time. No delays. I was told to cut off bar service at 8 PM sharp. There was no getting around it unless you were Zachary Levi.

One night, Levi was late getting into the show. It’s not because he was late to the theater. He had been there for several minutes! Levi was late because he was saying hello and catching up with most people working there. Ushers, security, and box office, Levi was chatting with them all. He had starred in a musical on Broadway the year before and had made friends with house staff.

He was allowed to mingle, and the show started later than usual. I was flabbergasted, both by the fact that the show allowed such behavior and that a celebrity was hobnobbing with us regular folk. That isn’t normal at the theater. It’s not that celebrities are always standoffish, but a lot of them are offered rooms to hide in during intermission to avoid interacting with people (including house staff). Levi did the opposite. “Hey, Chuck’s alright,” I thought.

The thing is, Levi wasn’t a huge celebrity at the time. He had worked plenty, including successful stints on television. Still, he wasn’t a household name. I don’t know if he is now. But he was “known” and using that recognition to further cultivate a name for himself. Levi’s profile rose considerably with the release of Shazam in 2019, seen by many as a saving grace for DC during its Snyderverse Era.

Levi went from playing the child superhero to Evangelical Christian NFL star Kurt Warner. In a move usually reserved for people at the end of their careers, the actor dove right into faith-based cinema. However, he did explain on Twitter that he wasn’t religious. “I don’t believe in Christianity as a religion. I believe in the immeasurable love of a god that is in and thru all things,” the Wieners actor wrote on social media.

A sequel to Shazam was released in 2023 and was one of the biggest commercial and critical failures the DCU had. There were outside factors. The universe was rebooting, leaving Shazam’s place in it uncertain. COVID was still keeping people from theaters. Still, the movie was lackluster, Levi did not handle its failure well, and he’s been on a downward spiral ever since.

Levi has been vocal about his support for former Presidential candidate and Man Most Likely To Ask “Are you gonna finish that” About Your Dead Dog, Robert Kennedy Jr. RFK’s campaign for President has been a Shazam 2-sized failure with no one to blame but himself. Now, he’s thrown his support behind Trump, and so has Levi.

“I’m not gonna take too much time, but I did just wanna just give you a little context about why Shazam is sitting here talking to you about these various things,” Levi said at a Trump rally in Michigan. “I grew up in my family that was Christian conservative, that was pretty much the lane that we were in. My parents were Kennedy Democrats that then turned into Reagan Republicans, and they taught me to have a healthy level of distrust for the government and a healthy level of distrust for industry that runs amok.”

Two things stand out about that immediately. First, it sure sounds like the “I don’t believe in Christianity” stuff was BS! Maybe it’s just more convenient to be open about it now. Second, invoking Shazam, his biggest success to date, is sad. It isn’t connected to anything he is saying or doing. It’s just a less charming version of Troy McClure’s “You might remember me” bits.

Levi’s fall from grace feels swift. We were giving him the benefit of the doubt for some time. But now, he’s being honest about who he is. Being the “nice guy” worked for a long time, but it didn’t get folks to see Shazam 2 or Harold And The Purple Crayon. What’s left for him to do but grift?

Maybe his whole career has been a grift? You can’t really be a “nice guy” and endorse the man who spent the weekend calling Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” and literally calling for a Purge. That’s not how reality works. He can shake hands with as many Broadway employees as he wants; the show will go on eventually.