Josh Duhamel has opened up about his reluctance to speak publicly about politics, insisting that he’s not willing to risk “alienating” half of his audience.
“I have real strong opinions about things but I don’t really talk about them,” Duhamel, 53, said on the Wednesday, March 25, episode of The Megyn Kelly Show. “Why would I alienate half my audience? Because I respect their views on things but I’m not going to preach to them. They can believe what they want.”
He then joked: “I’m just here to make cool stuff.”
Duhamel mentioned that he spends “a lot of time in the Midwest,” where people are never shy to share their unfiltered feelings about Hollywood.
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The Ransom Canyon actor recalled one specific incident when a friend from Georgia picked him up at the airport wearing a T-shirt that read, “Nobody Cares What Actors Think.”
Host Megyn Kelly insisted that “all [people] want” on the right is not to be “lectured” by those on the other side of the aisle.
“You don’t need to share our points of view on the big issues of the day but we definitely don’t want to be lectured by Hollywood leftists,” Kelly, 55, said, before clarifying: “I don’t think you’re [Duhamel] a leftist.”
Duhamel suggested that it “should be” a growing trend in Hollywood for actors to keep their political views to themselves.
“It makes perfect sense,” he added. “If you really want to be a success in this business, why would you make half of your audience despise you by your political beliefs? Maybe they don’t care? I don’t know. I look at it like a business decision.”
Duhamel compared himself to a “court jester” whose primary responsibility is to entertain the masses.
“If I want to preach to you about what I believe politically, I’ll go run for office, which I’m not going to do, by the way,” he insisted.
Duhamel hasn’t always kept his political views private. As a Minot, North Dakota, native, the Transformers star backed Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Burgum in the state in 2016 and later endorsed Burgum’s brief presidential run in June 2023. (Burgum ended his presidential bid in December 2023 and currently serves as the secretary of the interior under President Donald Trump’s second administration.)
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“I don’t normally get involved in politics, but Governor Burgum has become a good friend over the years and I can’t think of anyone better than him to be our president,” Duhamel wrote via Instagram at the time.
Duhamel’s recent comments, however, echo those of Vince Vaughn, who recently slammed perceived “agenda-driven” comedy on the late night shows during his own appearance on the “This Past Weekend” podcast.
“It started feeling like I was f***ing in a class I didn’t want to take,” Vaughn, 55, complained on Tuesday, March 24. “I’m getting scolded.”
He went on, “I think that talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based. They were going to [evangelize] people to what they thought. You know what I mean? And so people just rejected it because it didn’t feel authentic.”
