By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While the first Shazam movie proved to be a hit, the failure of its sequel was effectively the beginning of the end of lead star Zachary Levi’s career. He seemingly came out as an anti-vaxxer at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and according to one of his costars, these beliefs recently caused him to sink to a brand-new low. Levi and Laura Benanti both starred in the Broadway play She Loves Me, and she recently called him out for implying that their mutual costar Gavin Creel’s cancer death was actually caused by him getting vaccinated.
Zachary Levi’s Costar Goes Off
Creel was diagnosed in July and died on September 30, and Zachary Levi subsequently hosted a pro-Trump Instagram Live. During this, he brought up Creel’s death, bizarrely saying “if these COVID vaccinations were not forced on the American public, that the theaters weren’t being pushed and leveraged,” before pausing and then blaming “people at the top.” It sounded to most people like he was implying Creel’s cancer was caused by getting vaccinated, which angered costar Laura Benanti: “For [Levi] to use [Creel’s] memory – a person he was not friends with — to use his memory for his political agenda…I was like, ‘F— you forever,” she said.
Interestingly, Benanti disagrees with those who think this conservative virtue signaling is “career suicide” simply “because Christian, faith-based TV and film is huge.” She believes Zachary Levi is “going to be a huge f—– star in that realm” and is “going to make more money than he ever has,” a possibility which makes her “nauseous.” Only time will tell how much Levi’s increasingly loud politics will help his career, but blaming a costar’s cancer death on a COVID vaccine is a new low for a star that, frankly, I didn’t think could get much lower.
The Rise and Fall of Zachary Levi
The breakout role for this DC star was in the television show Chuck, and he also voiced Flynn Rider in the hugely successful Disney film Tangled. All of this led to him getting cast as the title character in Shazam!, and after that movie earned $367.8 million against a budget of $90-$100 million, he seemed poised to become a Hollywood megastar. However, Shazam 2 was a huge flop, earning only $134.1 million against a budget of $110–125 million, and the star’s reaction to the movie’s failure revealed a sad and downright desperate aspect of his personality that might have otherwise remained hidden.
After Shazam 2 bombed, Zachary Levi posted a series of meltdown videos to Instagram where he seemingly held back tears and blamed Dwayne Johnson for killing a post-credits cameo tying the superhero sequel to Black Adam. This grievance is particularly bizarre because while Johnson’s egotistical decision seems very petty, there is no way in the world that the addition of a tepid post-credits sequence with relatively no-name characters like Hawkman and Cyclone would have transformed Shazam 2 into a monster hit. It was even sadder to see Levi end one of his videos with a plea for fans to consider seeing his sequel rather than John Wick 4.
Zachary Levi’s first major film after Shazam 2 was Harold and the Purple Crayon, and it also bombed, earning only $32 million against a budget of $40 million. This second big-budget failure seemingly spelled the end of the actor’s chance to become a major movie star, and many have speculated if the star’s downfall began with his early 2023 post on X where he agreed with a user that COVID vaccine manufacturer Pfizer “is a real danger to the world” about two months before Shazam 2 premiered. In implying that costar Gavin Creel somehow got cancer from being vaccinated, the star proves he has learned nothing from earlier failures.
Tragically Perfect Casting
Once upon a time, I would have felt some modicum of sympathy for Zachary Levi. After all, who wouldn’t be sad about having their most ambitious career dreams yanked out from under them? That changed last year when the star appeared on the Storytellers with Andrew Erwin podcast and admitted that he hated projects getting delayed due to COVID because “when the pandemic came, I had no money and I had no income” and he had to rely on friends because money was “real tight.”
Somehow, I can’t help but think that if I had been paid millions of dollars for lucrative acting jobs and licensing deals, I wouldn’t suddenly be flat broke if my income stream was temporarily delayed due to producers trying to save lives. And even if I was flat broke, I wouldn’t channel everything into resentment politics that make me politicize my costar’s tragic death in an obvious bid to win over the people who think vaccination causes cancer.
Because of his antics, though, I have to admit that Zachary Levi was perfectly cast as Shazam. After all, who else in Hollywood could so perfectly embody what it’s like to have a child’s mind in an adult’s body?
Source: People
