Entertainment Executives Want to Play Ball With Trump. The Stars Who Work for Them May Have a Different Idea

It’s not unusual to see an acceptance speech at an awards show fall prey to the lure of oversharing. (“You like me, you really like me!” is the mother of all oversharing Oscar moments.) What’s less common is to see a speech that reveals more than it says out loud. But that’s just what happened on Sunday night when the filmmakers and stars of “Emilia Pérez” took to the stage to accept the Golden Globe award for best motion picture — comedy or musical.

The film’s director, Jacques Audiard, had already spilled his guts earlier that night in an awkwardly translated, rather endless speech he made to accept the best director award. Now Audiard, looking like an aging golfer in his pork-pie hat, was out of words. “Clearly, I’ve not prepared anything,” he said through a translator. In what seemed a spontaneous gesture, he motioned his lead performer, the trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, to come forward, and she looked both tentative and very prepared.

Gascón, speaking slowly and quietly, said that she’d chosen to wear Buddhist colors (her dress was light and dark orange). Then, gathering steam, she declared that “the light always wins over darkness” — a noble sentiment, though not exactly “No justice, no peace!” But the audience knew what she meant, and their applause spurred her to go further. Shaking her head, speaking almost to herself, with a look less celebratory than shot through with mourning, Gascón said, “I have had a lot of things to say to you.”

You can put us in jail, she said. You can beat us up. But you can never take away our soul, our existence, our identity. This was phrased in an unintentionally beautiful way, because Gascón was talking about trans people, but the way it came out she could almost have been talking about any of us. And, in a way, wasn’t she? “I want to say to you,” she declared, “raise your voice” — which came out, due to her accent, as rage your voice, another beautiful accident. Moments later she ended by saying “I am who I am…not who you want.” Talk about defiance! Her message was about the dignity and rights of trans people, but given the timing of it, at a globally televised awards ceremony taking place two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump, you could hear another message nestled inside it: that the resistance isn’t going away.

Ironically, that message may have been aimed less at Trump and the forces he represents than at the corporations releasing movies like “Emilia Pérez.” Because they’ve been resisting the resistance like nobody’s business.

An early warning sign that the powers who run the entertainment industry were nervous about the possibility of a Trump victory — and what they would do if it happened — arrived eight months ago at the Cannes Film Festival, where “The Apprentice,” the incendiary biopic about the rise of Donald Trump, starring Sebastian Stan (as Trump) and Jeremy Strong (as his evil-genius mentor and Svengali Roy Cohn), created such a ripple of buzz that…not a single distribution company would go near it. This was, for a couple of weeks, a real head-scratcher, until people began to put together that the companies were scared of a Trump victory. They didn’t want to get on the wrong side of that; they had no interest in releasing a movie that spotlighted the scurrilous saga of how Trump became Trump (the lying, the backstabbing, and worse).

“The Apprentice” did ultimately find a distributor (Briarcliff Entertainment). But when the film came out, on Oct. 11, the interest in it had been so tamped down that I observed, at the time, that nothing in “The Apprentice” was quite as chilling as the struggle the movie went through to get released. You could say that the film was almost suppressed — not by political forces but capitalist ones, which can be nearly as severe.

The saga of treating “The Apprentice” as a movie with a scarlet letter affixed to it didn’t end there. When it came time to line up the participants for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, no actor would appear opposite Sebastian Stan — though given what a brilliant and well-liked actor he is, and how much actors tend to stick by each other, I overwhelmingly suspect that that decision was made by the studios whose movies the actors were starring in. Nevertheless, it was disquieting to see the prospect of an actor, in effect, being shunned because he’d dared to play Donald Trump in a movie that Trump hated.

There have been other signs, within the industry, of corporations overly eager to play ball with Trump. At the Sun Valley Conference in July, when David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, signaled that his top priority for a U.S. president would be one who’s friendly to mergers and acquisitions in the entertainment industry, and to a general atmosphere of deregulation, it can be read, in hindsight, as a tacit endorsement of Trump. So can the recent announcement by Amazon that its Prime Video has licensed an upcoming documentary about the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, with the subject herself serving as executive producer. And how’s this for icing on the new-Trump-era cake? The disgraced director Brett Ratner, accused of sexual misconduct by six women in a Los Angeles Times exposé, has found a post-#MeToo path back into the industry by signing on to direct the Melania film. Then there’s Pixar, the animation studio that recently announced it was dropping a trans character from its upcoming Disney+ series “Win or Lose.”

When you connect the dots of these very separate events, what you glimpse is the outline of a business whose leaders have a new agenda: getting along, culturally and financially, with an administration that has been more than open about its hostility to the entertainment industry.

But that industry may now find itself, more than ever, in conflict with the high-watt talent that makes it tick. Politically speaking, you could say that the Golden Globes maintained a rather restrained tone. The event’s historical party vibe reasserted itself, the closest thing to a “statement” was Brady Corbet’s assertion that film directors should have final cut on their loftiest dreams, and even the relatively edgy host, Nikki Glaser, sidestepped any mention of the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni imbroglio. But that’s because this is a limbo moment. Trump, after all, hasn’t been president in four years, and he isn’t the president again…yet.

But let’s assume that once he’s inaugurated, on Jan. 20, Trump does a number of the things he has pledged to do on Day One — or even in Week One, or Month One. Let’s assume that he pardons the Jan. 6 Capitol riot prisoners, that he takes the first steps toward handing Ukraine on a silver platter over to Vladimir Putin, and that he commences his plan for the mass deportation of immigrants. If that happens, the Academy Awards ceremony, on March 2, isn’t going to be a quiet platform. It’s going to be bustling, if not burning, with resistance.

And it should be. It has become routine to mock actors and filmmakers for weighing down their acceptance speeches with political advocacy. Some of the mockery is justified; advocacy on Oscar night can come off as self-serving or simply boring. But there are moments when it’s defining. And in a culture where the corporations that do nothing less than control information feel, increasingly, like they’re beholden to pleasing the political powers that be, it becomes essential that voices speak out from wherever they can. The point isn’t that Hollywood actors are going to be shaping policy. It’s that they’re going to be safeguarding the arena of art and entertainment as a place where free expression can thrive. But in doing so, they may now be holding their corporate overseers’ feet to the fire.