Having been one professionally for the last 2 years I can safely assure you that my time spent as an actor has had no impact whatsoever, positively or negatively, on my ability to form an opinion on contentious matters. A level politics, debating society, University and argumentative friends did that, not acting. And so it is with mild annoyance and not so mild wincing that I continue to see ‘famous’ actors sticking their noses into political issues they are just not quite properly qualified to lecture us about.
I sincerely hope that people watching these multi millionaires, who profess to feeling in touch with us normals, take it with a large pinch of salt and listen instead to not so famous but much better informed academics and writers. I’m sure this phenomenon happens on both sides of the political spectrum but recently it has been the ever vociferous Left with Emma Fracking Thompson and Patrick Human Rights Stewart having a right old go.
Also whilst we are on that can we just get one thing straight, almost all of those rights Pat bangs on about in his monty python spoof video concerning the ECHR, we had before the EU got involved. Britain wrote the textbook on human rights (admittedly we lost it occasionally throughout our history, but we wrote in all the same). So we don’t need an EU that is fast tracking the entry of a country (Turkey) which openly disregards those rights Patty Mc Pat Face was so keen on, telling us how to do rights thank you very much.
So fine, politicians will always use famous actors to get their message across but please just remember that they are actors, great at pretending to know things they might actually know very little about. But I don’t hold out hope because as my brother pointed out to me, sometimes those same actors get actually voted into office.