With free speech under threat in Hollywood, Poppy Liu refuses to separate her politics from her art.
The I Love Boosters star, who has been a vocal supporter of Free Palestine, recently commented on potentially being “blacklisted” in the industry, explaining that being silent “would be the death of me as an artist.”
“Honestly, if it’s cheesy, bigoted, genocide apologists who I’m blacklisted from-Alhamdulillah, amazing. Thank you,” she said in Tasbeeh Herwees’ No Bad Days newsletter. “But there are so many artists I do want to work with.
Earlier this month, Liu shared a post calling for the release of Palestinian political leader Marwan Barghouti, who was imprisoned by Israel in 2002.
Liu continued, “Hollywood’s not a monolith. It can seem that way because it’s so gatekept, and it feels like you have to bend yourself to everything. But if you take Hollywood out of the equation and just start with, I’m an artist who does this specific thing-you’ll find a way to do it. There is a world for you that doesn’t require you to pander and sell your soul to Hollywood.”
Noting that even “zombie films are literally political,” Liu doesn’t understand the insistence to separate art from politics. “That’s what was so frustrating—these half-assed excuses from people who wouldn’t say anything,” she explained.
“Do you dare look in the mirror and call yourself an artist, saying ‘I don’t engage with politics’?” she asked. “It makes you less interesting as an artist. We tell stories because we’re trying to make sense of the world we live in, and we pass those things on. It literally is political.”
The Hacks actress added that she doesn’t “want to do the energy of doing the selecting” of what parts of herself she expresses to her fans. “I want to be so clear about who I am that other people self-select for themselves— they do the labor on my behalf,” she said.
“When you’re really clear about yourself, you become a magnet, attracting the right things but also repelling the right things. There’s a lot of people I’m just repelling. Don’t even get near me. And everything is about Palestine, and also beyond Palestine too. What is the cost of your soul? To be silent in the face of this genocide is the cost of a soul. That would be the death of me as an artist. I might as well go work at a hedge fund at this point.”
In her ongoing support for Free Palestine, Liu was one of more than 1,200 film industry professionals to sign the Film Workers for Palestine’s pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
