Justine Bateman, known for her role as Mallory on Family Ties and Sarah Stretten in Men Behaving Badly, defended Zachary Levi after Laura Benanti attempted to cancel him.
Benanti who starred alongside Levi in the Broadway revival of She Loves Me attempted to cancel him during an appearance on That’s a Gay Ass Podcast hosted by Eric Williams.
Williams asked, “Thinking of tainted memories because Zachary Levi’s become such a monster does it change your memories looking back?”
She replied, “Yeah, I never liked him. Everyone was like, ‘He’s so great!’ And I was like, ‘No, he’s not. He’s sucking up all the f***ing energy in this room. He wants to mansplain everybody’s part to them.' He really sucked everybody in with his dance party energy, like, ‘We’re doing a dance party at half-hour.’ I was like, ‘Good luck, have fun.’”
“But for him to use Gavin’s memory, a person he was not friends with, to use his memory for his political agenda and to watch him try to make himself cry until he had one single tear which he did not wipe away, I was like, ‘F**k you forever.’”
“And everybody’s like, ‘It’s career suicide.’ But it’s not career suicide because Christian faith-based TV and film is huge. He’s going to be a huge f***ing star in that realm. He’s going to make more money than he ever has. It makes me nauseous. And also a little bit like, ‘I told you motherf***ers!’”
For context, Creel also performed alongside Benanti and Levi in She Loves Me and passed away at the age of 48 earlier this year from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma.
Levi commented on Creel’s death in an Instagram live video back in October. He said, “I know that this is going to offend some people and make some people mad. And I wish it didn’t. So a few weeks ago, my friend Gavin Creel died. He was 48 years old. He was 48. He was one of the healthiest people I knew. We did She Loves Me together and I would always want to get drinks afterwards and a few of us would always go get drinks and Gavin would always be like, ‘Nah, I got to go home and I got to be with my dog.’ He ate well. He took care of himself. He was active. He was healthy. He was a healthy man.”
“And a few weeks ago out of nowhere I’m on Instagram and I see a mutual friend had posted that Gavin had died of this crazy out-of-nowhere, came out of nowhere sarcoma, advanced stage four like immediately stage four. There was no gestational period. There was no stage 1-4 that they could have detected. It just happened. This turbo cancer just happened,” he continued.
“And you better believe that with everything in me I believe that if these Covid vaccinations were not forced on the American public that the theaters weren’t being pushed and leveraged—,” he said. “I’m not blaming any of the theater owners. I’m not blaming any of the producers. I’m not blaming anybody other than the people at the top who knew, who knew, they knew the cost benefit of these shots and it was garbage, guys. It was garbage. They knew that there would be plenty of side effects including turbo cancers. They knew. And I without a shadow of a doubt that Gavin Creel would be alive right now. Right f***ing now he would still be alive if that stuff didn’t get put into his body.”
A little bit later, Levi who teared up, wiped them away from both his cheeks, said, “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, y’all, we all have these different ideas and different opinions about what’s true and what’s not, I get that. And I do believe I have just enough humility to recognize that even though I feel very convicted of what I believe in I could be wrong.”
Bateman reacted to Benanti’s comments on X. She wrote, “I’ve heard of Zachary Levi. However, I’ve never hear of Laura Benanti.”
She then declared, “The era of attacking past co-stars as a means to impress the judges at the Victim Olympics is over. It does not result in more work. In fact, it simply telegraphs one’s capacity to torpedo projects, past, present, and future. And I don’t know one film, series, or play producer who wants that anywhere near their projects.”
Reacher actor Matthew Marsden also shared his thoughts. He wrote, “Next… not attacking fans. Be nice if Disney stopped hiring actors that did that.”
What do you make of Bateman’s pronouncement that the era of cancel culture is over in Hollywood?