While it may look like glitz and glamour all the time, being a movie star seems enviable when you’re not at the top. There are countless actors just waiting to take your place, and time is not on your side. Zachary Levi, who just suffered two box-office bombs in a row with Shazam! Fury of the Gods and Harold and the Purple Crayon, is feeling this more than most. So much, in fact, that people are saying his recent heel turn as a Donald Trump supporter is more of a ploy to save his drowning movie career than a political one.
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It looks like Levi may be taking a page from the Gina Carano playbook at this point. You might remember that Carano was once the talk of the town, with a star-making role in The Mandalorian and talks of movies and spinoffs in the future. Then, it all came crashing down when she started posting about resistance to masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The hardest one to ignore was when she compared conservatives being criticized to the Holocaust. Hard to come back from that. She now “stars” in conservative films that no one really watches.
Levi is by no means unsuccessful in Hollywood. He starred in the TV series Chuck from 2007-2012 and he’s had bit parts throughout the last decade or so. He had a hit with Shazam! in 2019, too. Unfortunately, the Hollywood mantra is you’re only as good as your last hit, and he hasn’t had one in a while.
He’s made no secret of his desire to join the A-list, nor how he hoped Shazam! would be the ticket to take him to Chris Evans and The Rock’s levels of fame, per The Hollywood Reporter. So when that didn’t happen, he did something drastic. Like Carano, he cleaved himself to former President Donald Trump, at a Sept. 28 rally in Michigan.
Also like Carano, he’s leaned into conservative projects. He now lives in Texas on a cattle ranch and released 2021’s Christian-themed movie American Underdog. Another faith-based movie, The Unbreakable Boy, will release soon. That one’s about a boy with brittle bone disease. Levi plays the father. This has people hypothesizing about whether he’s simply trying to salvage a career.
After Carano was fired from Disney, she teamed up with the conservative organization The Daily Wire to star in a movie called Terror on the Prairie. That movie made about $13,000 in theaters, so take from that what you will.
Will we be seeing Levi finally achieving his dream when he inevitably stars in a Daily Wire production as the father of someone who may be misusing the Bible to lay out why women need to live by rules created by men? It’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility, especially since he’s seemingly burned the bridges he could take back to mainstream Hollywood.
During the aforementioned Trump rally, Levi told the crowd that “Hollywood is a very, very liberal town.” This attracted the vitriolic words of Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of Trump’s least favorite show The View. She pushed back on the notion, saying that the town was “a mixed bunch” and mentioning Jon Voight and Dennis Quaid as examples of right-wing actors. When Goldberg is calling you out, you know things are bad. But as the Hollywood Reporter‘s page out of Levi’s doomed days ahead, he is considering this step as “more a savvy career move than professional suicide.”
On the bright side, I’m sure Carano has a pretty open schedule, so the two could definitely team up on some movie about angels with guns who stop woke culture or something.