In the age of celebrity “cancel culture”, few are truly cancelled for ever – most just sit it out until the internet forgets, whereupon they can be cancelled again on exactly the same charges. Just ask the actor Vince Vaughn, who is once again the object of public scorn after a viral video on Twitter showed him acting all chummy with Donald Trump at an American football game in Louisiana.
Sharing a private box, the two men were spotted shaking hands and conversing, prompting a flurry of online condemnation, with many of the incensed going so far as to renounce their Vaughn fandom. “I don’t need a Wedding Crashers sequel any more,” one recovering admirer stated: strong words indeed.
It is neither unexpected nor unjust that public figures should draw ire for fraternising with Trump, support for whom, by this point, should be regarded as beyond the pale even by moderate Republicans. What is surprising, however, is that eyebrows are raised when it is Vaughn showing such allegiances.
The actor has long been documented as one of the most demonstrably rightwing stars in the predominantly liberal enclave of Hollywood. In 2011, he campaigned for the Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, while he collaborated with the conservative firebrand Glenn Beck to produce the documentary series, Pursuit of the Truth, for Beck’s Fox News-aping network TheBlaze. Most controversially, he came out as vehemently opposed to gun control in a 2015 interview for British GQ, going so far as to call for firearms to be allowed in schools: “You think the politicians that run my country and your country don’t have guns in the schools their kids go to? They do. And we should be allowed the same rights.” Shaking Donald Trump’s hand is a pretty modest entry on his list of most liberally objectionable acts.
None of this has put a significant dent in Vaughn’s career, even if he has shifted out of benign commercial comedies and into vehicles that foreground his political identity a little more. He is an ally of fellow rightwing provocateur Mel Gibson, starring in his grisly flag-waving 2016 war film, Hacksaw Ridge, whose multiple top-tier Oscar nominations were a reminder, rather like the industry’s enduring celebration of Clint Eastwood, that Hollywood’s quiet conservative contingent can still make its presence felt.
Vaughn and Gibson, meanwhile, were cast last year as violent, racist cops in Dragged Across Concrete, a lurid thriller by S Craig Zahler – an auteur whose politics are outwardly ambiguous, but whose films consistently appear to troll the left with their brash political incorrectness. If more than a dozen people had seen Dragged Across Concrete in cinemas, it might have got Vaughn cancelled at least a couple of further times. As it is, the Trump incident will keep him in the public doghouse for only so long.
