Drea de Matteo never was particularly political. Her only partisan statement got here via a 2010 music video she directed for Shooter Jenning’s “Summer of Rage” — a not-so-subtle jab on the Bush-Cheney administration’s ever-churning war machine. In 2020, she voted for the primary time in her life within the presidential election, casting her ballot for Joe Biden in his bid to interchange Donald Trump within the White House. Then, because the COVID pandemic entered its second yr, every thing got here crashing down for “The Sopranos” actress whose Adriana La Cerva provided the only real conscience in a sea of ethical degenerates.
“I’m a hippie. I didn’t wish to get the vaccine. I desired to wait it out to see what the consequence was,” she says.
Her family shunned her for being anti-vax. She became persona non grata among the many Hollywood set. And her agent, who she considered a friend, dropped her.
“With out a phone call or an email. Just told me through my manager, and that was that. I couldn’t work anymore,” she adds. “To be demonized over a medical selection once they keep screaming, ‘Pro selection,’ I’m like, ‘Do you guys hear yourselves?’”
Facing financial disaster, the one mother of two launched an OnlyFans page “just to save lots of my home” and started to reevaluate her politics, or lack thereof. “I used to be by myself. After which I began to make latest friends who felt the identical way,” she continues. Thus began a metamorphosis that now finds de Matteo amongst a small group of Hollywood’s vocal Trump supporters — a faction that features Dennis Quaid, Rob Schneider and Zachary Levi. And she or he isn’t the one Emmy-winning actresses to back the polarizing 45th president, with Rosanne Barr also being proudly MAGA.
On this fall afternoon, on eve of a presidential election that is simply too near call, the Queens native is bracing for civil unrest whatever the consequence.
“I actually have people coming to measure my house for gates. For the apocalypse,” she explains as she rocks forwards and backwards back in a swivel chair in her Laurel Canyon home. She’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with a machine gun from her Ultrafree streetwear line, which she launched earlier this yr with boyfriend Robby Staebler, drummer for UVWAYS (formerly All Them Witches). She adjusts a pair of oversized rose-tinted glasses and prepares to go scorched earth with Hollywood’s Trump-is-a-fascist crowd.
“I’m sorry, but is Sean Penn a CIA asset at this point?” she asks, noting the actor’s eyebrow-raising interview with El Chapo for a 2016 Rolling Stone article that was followed by the Mexican drug lord’s capture days later. “I’m so disillusioned in him. I don’t even know that I can watch him as an actor anymore. When he brought that Oscar to [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in Ukraine, I used to be mortified. Zelenskyy is aligned with the Azov Battalion, and everybody’s crying about racism and this and that. It’s like, ‘Get up America.’” (The Azov Brigade has drawn criticism for its neo-Nazi ideology and use of controversial symbols linked to Nazism.)
She’s just warming up as she moves on to Hollywood’s Kamala Harris supporters who represent each ends of the age spectrum.
“You have got like Billie Eilish saying, ‘I feel safer with Kamala as president.’ But why? Because you might have six security guards around you day-after-day once you walk down the road,” she scoffs. “My daughter has no one walking around along with her when she walks down the road in Recent York City. Because I see what’s happening. And even here in California, my kids aren’t allowed to go anywhere due to how bad crime is without delay.”
Then she moves on to one in all the entertainment industry’s most reliable Democratic Party voices.
“I’m Bette Midler talking about reproductive rights ad nauseam,” she says. “They’re nervous about this issue. Once we’re getting ready to world war, you must speak about your daughters? What in regards to the boys? What about our sons which are going to must go off to war in some unspecified time in the future. They usually wish to take your daughters, too.”
Despite her support for a president who appointed three Supreme Court justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade, de Matteo says she is pro-choice.
“My great-grandmother was the one abortionist in Fifties Harlem. I’m someone who’s had two abortions. I’m still pro-choice,” she notes. “But things have gone to this point within the pro-choice direction that it became form of an aberration of the rights that ladies have fought for, where those rights now not even appear to be human rights. It looks like an agenda and an ideology that doesn’t work in anybody’s favor.”
If de Matteo’s politics are confusing, she is quick to indicate that so are the views of her Hollywood brethren who once reviled Dick Cheney. The previous vice chairman endorsed Harris in September, prompting the Democratic candidate to say she was “honored” to get Cheney’s backing.
“Each time a star endorses her, I reiterate that they stand with Dick Cheney,” she notes.
De Matteo knows that voicing these views is an act of self-immolation in the case of her future film and TV prospects. Men may get a pass. In spite of everything, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight still work plenty. Quaid probably will proceed to seek out himself in demand. There’s not as clear a path for return for MAGA women. But de Matteo doesn’t care.
Even before COVID, she was pulling away from the industry. After working on arguably the best TV series of all time, de Matteo couldn’t top that have. And though she continued to work on such shows as “Sons of Anarchy” and “Desperate Housewives,” she became more selective, especially if a project meant she would have to go away home for prolonged periods.
“I used to be offered some Marvel thing, and I turned that down because my son was crying each time I’d go to Canada to only guest star on something,” she recalls. “And I used to be like, ‘Fuck it. I’m not gonna do it. I come up with the money for to get us through the winter.’ I don’t wish to be this Hermes-toting, Gucci shoe-wearing person. I just didn’t give a shit. I mean, I wear sweatpants and T-shirts all day.”
Her fall from grace in Hollywood coincides with a brand new profession path in fashion. She began Ultrafree to advertise free speech and take a swipe at a established order she loathes. The T-shirts feature phrases like “War Machine” and “thanks for remembering the intimate details of my locations and conversations big tech.” She’s also founded a jewellery collection called Tombstone that leans into the mob wife aesthetic that she pioneered on “The Sopranos.” Either way, she’s making enough money to afford a savvy publicist and is willing to be seen on the Trump rally in Coachella (she applauds the Republican candidate’s “anti-establishment” strain) or the Rescue the Republic gathering in Washington, D.C., where two of her favorites — Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — took the stage. And like Penn, who went on Fox News to make his Ukraine case on Sean Hannity’s show, de Matteo sparked headlines when she joined “Jesse Waters Primetime” to come back out as pro-Trump.
“I attempted not to be outspoken. I attempted to be under the radar. But I joined OnlyFans to save lots of my fucking house. And it was type of, in a weird way, a political statement. Like an enormous ‘fuck it.’ Get comfortable being uncomfortable. That was my statement,” she says.
And in a surprise twist, her family has come around, a minimum of with reference to her OnlyFans foray (she stays on the subscription service where content creators can reap big paydays for sexy or explicit content).
“[During the pandemic], my brother was like, ‘You realize, you’re risking everyone in your house’s life without delay [by not being vaccinated].’ After which years later, once I ended up having to open up an OnlyFans page just to save lots of my home, because no one would help me at the moment because I didn’t ‘do the proper thing,’ he was like, ‘Your body, your selection. I’m with you all the way in which,’” she says and rolls her eyes.
As her appointment with the gate installation team nears, she stresses one final point: Even in a solid blue industry like Hollywood, she insists that she isn’t an outlier due to her views. She is an outlier because she’s going to express them out loud.
“The people I’m around, a number of liberals are voting for Trump. I believe half of Hollywood is definitely voting for Trump,” she says. “I do know that I’ve gotten loads of messages in my Inbox: ‘Thanks for saying things I can’t say.’”
