Two conservative actors took very different paths after falling out of the Hollywood consensus
Kevin Sorbo may well be the most notorious actor who was never involved in a scandal. About twelve years ago, the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys lost his filter and became an outspoken champion of reactionary causes. He formed the vanguard of what we would now call the anti-woke movement, complaining about the “liberal mentality” of Hollywood and talking about how “The Muslims have completely taken over. “
Sorbo’s public attitudes persist. This month, for example, the man best known for playing a Greek demi-God in a goofy syndicated action show has aligned himself with Elon Musk in sharing his distaste for the casting of Zendaya as Athena in The Odyssey. Without a script and after his 1997 stroke, it’s hard to pin Sorbo down on precise language. After that Vice interview, he’s leaned into a trolling style that’s difficult to quote, even if the meaning is obvious. Sure, he’s probably just being racist, even if technically speaking, the text of his criticism of Christopher Nolan is that the famed director just makes Greece overly ugly.
A Hollywood outsider now, Sorbo blames his Christianity for why he doesn’t get work anymore. The more obvious explanation, of course, would be that Hollywood doesn’t think they can make money from him as a post-stroke actor with a penchant for non-PC PR.
Sorbo, though, is still appearing in movies — via JC Films, which makes low budget full length Christian family films. They post new ones on YouTube every few weeks, the most recent one being Eden’s Choice, which you probably don’t want to watch unless you really, really want to see Sorbo spend ninety minutes trying to convince a teenage girl not to have an abortion.
Not everything from JC Films is quite so grim. Sorbo’s previous joint, Pickleball Pete, is a sports spoof with Christian elements, while later this year will see the arrival of Night at the Museum of the Bible which is, I assume, exactly what it sounds like — a romp around Green family (Hobby Lobby)-funded Christian Bible museum in D.C. Evidently the filmmakers are hoping Sorbo as Ben Stiller can do for it whatever Night at the Museum did for the American Museum of Natural History.
As acting work goes, it’s more dignified than just complaining about a lack of acting work. But more importantly — especially since he’s a discount star — they are cheap to make. Hollywood tends not to churn out cheap movies because the “quality over quantity” big budget model crowds them out. That is the real reason Hollywood isn’t calling Sorbo, there’s just not much for call any more for convention tier cult figures like Sorbo. Despite her sword-and-sandals syndication show having better numbers than his Lucy Lawless (who has, unlike Sorbo, not pissed off swathes of her fans) also can’t get work.
Enter Kelsey Grammar, who like Sorbo, has seen a hard-right turn to his politics in not-so-recent years, gaining some notoriety for trying to start a Tea Party TV channel back in 2015 while generally being careful enough to avoid doing much social media in places where his liberal fans can see them. He’s still the face of such endeavors as doing history documentaries for Fox News where his conservative fans can see him though. He even showed up at the White House last month as per his role big role in Young Washington, Angel Studios’ July 4 romp the guest of Trump who he has described as “one of the greatest president’s we’ve ever had”. As with much of the output of Angel Studios, the extent to which Young Washington is actually conservative as opposed to just discussing a topic which seems more vaguely conservative adjacent is ambiguous. We live in an era where major studios are more likely to love the idea of doing a prequel to The Big Bang Theory than The American Revolution.
It’s a story whenever a cheap quantity item performs better than a Hollywood quality item which is what happened this summer when Grammer’s Young Washington humiliated Warner Brothers’ summer superhero flick Supergirl at the box office. Hollywoord has not cancelled Grammer, despite him palling around with Fox News, and Angel Studios, and Donald Trump. He made a cameo in The Marvels — perhaps the single most woke movie of the current era — as the Beast, reprising his role from the X-Man franchise movies. He’ll be back in Avengers: Doomsday too.
For a guy whose Christian schlock roles in movies like Jesus Revolution barely edge Sorbo, Grammer’s main advantage seems to be that he’s good at working the system, letting fans see what they want to see from him without ever strictly speaking needing to be dishonest about his own political beliefs. It’s strange to think that merely by feuding with Sorbo, Lucy Lawless, probably makes herself less marketable because regardless of the moral defensibility of her opinions, knowing when to shut up is an important part of personal brand marketing.
All of this comes down to how Hollywood is fundamentally a business, a business which has decided, for whatever reason, that people would rather see Beast come back than Xena. But their track record at predicting anything lately has been pretty lousy. Obsession and Backrooms overpowered Star Wars and He-Man. Incredibly, for all the big budget disappointments this year the only one to actually justify its budget has been The Odyssey, which had the most bearish estimates from industry analysts who worried that Christopher Nolan’s bloody-mindedness was leading the studios to another Heavens Gate. Maybe Nolan just did a good job of making an epic in its fourth millennium look cool. If nothing else, he divided the right-wing noise machine. Sorbo’s sarcasm, meet Ben Shapiro’s approval.
The right wing influence on the media industry is subtle in that it spotlights the usefulness of celebrity in terms of prompting conversation pieces. Whether we’re discussing low, mid, or big budget film, whatever movie we want to talk about has to be interesting enough somehow that people will want to argue about it. Ultimately, that Sorbo felt the need to weigh in on The Odyssey at all may have been one of the better predictors of its surprise success. He’s part of such an alien media ecosystem now that anything that could penetrate his bubble, must have penetrated darn near everyone’s bubble.
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