How Hollywood Is — And Isn’t — Handling COVID-19 Vaccines On Film And TV Sets

CM:I do, as someone who believes in science and has the vaccine and wants every single person to get vaccinated as soon as possible, wish personally that these people would be more careful with their platforms. I do understand that it's a free country. You can say whatever you want to say, but you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.

I would say in Letitia Wright's case, she apparently parted ways with her entire team, quietly over the past year after sharing anti-vax rhetoric and anti-vax sort of sentiment on her social media, which I'm sure wasn't a great thing to happen for her career. So, yeah, it's hard because part of me is like, "I do want to know who among us, especially in Hollywood, is not taking the vaccine, and does not believe in protecting the greater good and taking the jab." But also, it's dismaying and it's alarming because so many people look up to and idolize Letitia Wright, and I guess Rob Schneider? I guess we can say that.

They wield influence and they wield power. Whether or not it directly affects us — it could be someone down the street. It could be our little cousin. It could be our brother or sister, who is to say so? Yeah, it is definitely playing fast and loose and irresponsible with the concept of free speech, and the right to have your thoughts and opinions and spew them wherever you want. But it doesn't sit totally right with me.

CM:My own bias aside, Sean Penn walking off a set — that also does cost the studio a ton of money, right? Because also things are not happening that should be happening at the same rate. I will say in Sean Penn's case, he did end up compromising and came back to set once all of Zone A, which is the actors and the people who are most present on set and most in contact with each other, were all vaccinated.

I will say, for that pro-vaccination side, or the militancy of the vaccine, if you even want to call it that, there's way more wiggle room in terms of getting things done. Right. If everybody gets COVID on set because you didn't wanna get the vaccine and the whole production shut down for three weeks, there's not much anyone can do about that because everyone is sick. But if you're Sean Penn and you're like, "OK, I really want everyone to get vaccinated. Let's get 80% or 75% or however many we need to get the show running." Clearly, I feel like that's a better option than a lot of people potentially getting this absolutely terrible disease.

CM:Well, I think it comes back to, as sad as this is to say, there are a lot of, I think, secret skeptics of the vaccine in Hollywood that we don't even know about. I mean, if we look back at the Met Gala, which happened in September, a lot of people's favorite stars didn't show up. And while Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid — who did then say that she got the vaccine, she did prove it — but Kylie and Hailey Bieber, there are a lot of stars who just did not show up, and that was a vaccine-mandated event.

But that's the thing with these vaccines. Unless you're standing in the room and you see someone or they have their vaccine card — which we can't even trust anymore because we're hearing reports that some Hollywood stars are faking vaccine cards to be able to attend events — it's a hard thing to trust, you know? So I do think this upper echelon of celebrities are so protected from the rest of the population, to the point where they probably feel a certain distance from the vaccine, given that they're sitting in their mansions, they have their team, they're not walking on the street and they're not taking the subway to work. With a lot of these people, I think we sort of undercut that, which is kind of the really messed up thing about it: that not everyone is at risk in the same way, given how they live their day-to-day lives.

So I do think there's a higher amount of vaccine skeptics in Hollywood, and we're seeing it in sports and in Kyrie Irving. We're seeing it across this upper echelon of people who can afford to be skeptical of the vaccine. And guess what? I can't afford to be skeptical of the vaccine, the way the vast majority of us aren't and can't. So I do think it's sort of an unknown and untouched-upon aspect of this entire thing that is sort of difficult to talk about because it sucks.