When the actress Claire Foy – still best known for her deservedly award-winning performance in The Crown – was interviewed recently by Harper’s Bazaar to promote her new film H is for Hawk, an adaptation of the Helen MacDonald memoir, she must have expected an easy ride. Estimable title though Harper’s Bazaar undoubtedly is, few would confuse it with a hard-hitting investigative magazine. Yet Foy made some remarks that have blown open the whole vexed question of what the point is of actors getting involved in public discourse, and whether they should, instead, stick to reading other people’s lines.
Foy said, when asked about her public opinions, that it was not her place to sound off on social or wider issues. She commented, “What I believe and who I am and where I stand on things is constantly in flux, as much as it is for everyone else, and I have absolutely no authority to discuss or proclaim about anything other than what I do as an actor.” She concluded, “If you’re just making noise for the sake of it, then you should probably shut up – so I tend to shut up.”
These were nuanced, intelligent words from a nuanced, intelligent actor. Foy has conspicuously not parlayed the career success that she won with The Crown into boring identikit Marvel roles, but instead continues to make interesting, original films, such as Damien Chazelle’s space odyssey First Man and Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed All Of Us Strangers. She is probably someone who people would listen to if she started offering her opinions, and the fact that she has explicitly disavowed her ability to do so – without suggesting for a moment that she is some sort of limited bimbo who doesn’t hold strong views – is a refreshing and surprising shift in an industry that has usually valued blowhards, as long as they say what is perceived to be “the right thing.” How else to explain Mark Ruffalo’s hard-left views, which would have the actor cancelled if they were on the opposite end of the political spectrum?
Nobody would put Foy down as a conservative or right-winger, and indeed her refusal to discuss her political opinions publicly should not indicate for a second that they are in any way unorthodox or extreme. Yet the Overton window of what is and isn’t acceptable in Hollywood is continually shifting, and there are some unexpected characters emerging, too. Keira Knightley’s recent half-scornful, half-incredulous response to those who criticized her casting in a new audiobook version of Harry Potter – “I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure out how to live together, aren’t we?” – was widely and probably correctly seen as her mocking the anti-Rowling brigade. Overnight, she became a heroine for TERFs and a hate figure for the woke. It may have made her life easier if she’d taken a leaf from Foy’s book and kept quiet.
Actors have always had political views, and historically, the likes of John Wayne and Charlton Heston campaigned as hard for Republicans as most Hollywood stars do for Democrats today. The difference was, in the era of Wayne and Heston, that holding different opinions to your neighbor was unlikely to lead to the end of your career. Therefore, while we should not read too much into Foy’s statement other than it being a sensible and overdue acceptance of actors’ need to shut up and avoid wading into issues that do not concern them, the fact that someone has finally said something that obvious is a rarity in the entertainment industry. We should applaud her for it.
