Ahead of his second inauguration, Donald Trump is recruiting a team of elderly white men to save Hollywood. (From what? We’ll see!)On Truth Social, t
Ahead of his second inauguration, Donald Trump is recruiting a team of elderly white men to save Hollywood. (From what? We’ll see!)
On Truth Social, the president-elect announced that he has asked Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson to serve as “special ambassadors” during his next administration. “It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” Trump wrote. “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”
Gibson, Voight and Stallone have all become vocal Trump supporters in recent years. In an interview with TMZ ahead of the election, Gibson—a onetime Hollywood pariah, thanks to his antisemitic and misogynistic comments, who bounced back with a best director Oscar nomination for 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge—said that he believed Vice President Kamala Harris had “the IQ of a fence post” and “a miserable track record,” and implied that he would vote for Trump. Voight, who is also Angelina Jolie‘s estranged father, has been beating the Trump drum since 2016; in October, he tweeted that “we’re now in a time of the darkest plague ever” and maintained that Trump was “the only one who will save our country.” Stallone, meanwhile, hid his support for Trump until after the election, then introduced the president-elect at a gala—calling him the “second George Washington” and adding, “Nobody in the world could’ve pulled off what he pulled off.”
These three senior citizens have remained semi-active in the entertainment industry in recent years. Most recently, the 69-year-old Gibson directed Flight Risk, an action thriller starring Mark Wahlberg that hits theaters on January 24th. Stallone was Oscar-nominated for Creed in 2016. (He lost to Bridge of Spies actor Mark Rylance.) Since then, the 78-year-old has starred in the Paramount+ drama Tulsa King, co-wrote and produced the upcoming Jason Statham action movie Working Man, and anchored a reality television series about his family called The Family Stallone, also for Paramount+. 86-year-old Voight appeared in two films in 2024: Francis Ford Coppola’s flop Megalopolis, and the biopic Reagan, starring his fellow Trump fan Dennis Quaid as the 40th president.
The three actors have been appointed at a particularly tough time for Hollywood. The recent California wildfires have ravaged Los Angeles, claiming at least 24 lives, destroying thousands of properties, and throwing the entertainment industry into chaos. Even before the fires, the industry was under siege: Variety reports that the domestic box office in 2024 was down from the previous year, as Hollywood is still recovering from the recent writers and actors strikes as well as the pandemic. Per Variety, 2024’s revenues were $8.7 billion, down 3.3% from 2023 and a whopping 23.5% from 2019—the year before the pandemic, when they reached $11.3 billion.
If you’re to believe Trump, a task force comprised of three men with an average age of 77 is precisely what Hollywood needs to reclaim its glory days. In a page right out Wicked‘s playbook, Trump ended his Truth Social post by saying that this triumvirate will be an extension of himself, taking tabs on the entertainment industry and reporting back to the wizard the president. “These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest,” he wrote. “It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”
Vanity Fair reached out to Stallone, Voigt, and Gibson, and Trump’s team for further comment.
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