Zachary Levi is reflecting on why it was more important to be candid about his support for Donald Trump than worry about his career.
While on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Show, the Shazam! actor recalled being asked by Tulsi Gabbard to moderate a town hall that she and Robert Kennedy Jr. were doing in support of Trump. Despite initially feeling hesitant to do so, Levi said he “felt peace” after doing it.
“I felt peace because I knew that this was more important than saving my career,” he told Kelly. “I think we too often fall into these paradigms, these thought processes of self-preservation, and it is not good. We need to be wise and we want to survive and we want to live and flourish and all those things, but we can’t merely make decisions off of ‘Well I hope nothing bad happens to me.’ You got to sacrifice.’”
Levi said that before everything, he thought “a lot” and “prayed a lot” about how this could impact his career and thought, “What will all this look like down the road?”
Always feeling like he was “called to be a leader,” Levi said that because “the world needs help” the only way to “help the world is to love the world. Nobody hating the world is actually going to make it a better place.”
While speaking at a Trump rally in Michigan at the time, Levi publicly endorsed Trump for president after having previously declared support for RFK Jr. “We’re here to make sure that we are going to take back this country, we are going to make it great again, we are going to make it healthy again. And so, I stand with Bobby, and I stand with Tulsi [Gabbard], and I stand with everyone else who is standing with President Trump,” Levi said at the time. “Because I do believe, of the two choices that we have, and we only have two, Donald Trump, President Trump is the man that can get us there. And he’s gonna get us there because he’s gonna have the backing and the support and the wisdom and the knowledge and the fight that exists in Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard.”
When further reflecting on the decision to speak at the rally and show his public support, Levi said, “What am I really afraid of at the end of the day? That I’m somehow going to lose jobs in an industry that I already believe is completely falling apart? And that won’t even be creating jobs for me in a few years anyway? Like come on. If I lose all of my acting career, and I hope I don’t, and so far I haven’t. … But none of that matters. If the world goes off a cliff, what does it matter?”
He continued, “That’s why I said on the podcast, when I talked to you before: What is it to gain the world, but lose your soul in the process, lose our ability to have liberty, freedom, free speech. The things, ironically the people on the other side are suggesting that Trump is trying to take away. Which I’m like, do you understand free speech? I think a lot of people don’t understand free speech, that it actually protects hate speech — stuff that I don’t want anyone to say. I don’t want any of that to come out of people’s mouths.
”And so it was like, listen, I’m not even giving up my life for that. Some people have died for that. Many people have died for that. If anything, my career dies, my acting career that I’ve been blessed enough to do for 25 years. If that’s in the cards for me, then OK, God, if I’m walking with God, God will protect me,” Levi said.
Kelly went on to explain how it seems like we’re in a “dawn of a new day in America” where we’re no longer obsessed with “identity politics and dividing each other based on things we can’t control about one another.” Levi agreed and noted on how it is time for a “cleanse and transparency.”
“Why don’t you want to know what’s in all of our drugs and food and water and everything? Why don’t you want to know that? We all deserve to know that. By the way, these are our leaders. They’re public servants. That is their freakin’ job. Not to tell us what’s good for us and what’s right …”
Levi commented on how Trump’s approval ratings are good, saying, “At least the guy’s doing what he said he was going to do. And more than that, these are some of the things I was kind of even secretly hoping he was going to do because, damn it, we do deserve to know what’s going on.”
Levi recently starred in Jon Gunn’s The Unbreakable Boy, also starring Meghann Fahy, Jacob Laval, Drew Powell, Peter Facinelli, Patricia Heaton, Amy Acker, Gavin Warren and Pilot Bunc.