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Drea de Matteo never was particularly political. Her only partisan statement came via a 2010 music video she directed for Shooter Jenning’s “Summer of Rage” — a not-so-subtle jab at the Bush-Cheney administration’s ever-churning war machine. In 2020, she voted for the first time in her life in the presidential election, casting her ballot for Joe Biden in his bid to replace Donald Trump in the White House. Then, as the COVID pandemic entered its second year, everything came crashing down for “The Sopranos” actress whose Adriana La Cerva provided the sole conscience in a sea of moral removed.
“I’m a hippie. I didn’t want to get the vaccine. I wanted to wait it out to see what the outcome was,” she says.
Her family shunned her for being anti-vax. She became persona non grata among the Hollywood set. And her agent, who she considered a friend, dropped her.
“Without a phone call or an email. Just told me through my manager, and that was that. I couldn’t work anymore,” she adds. “To be demonized over a medical choice when they keep screaming, ‘Pro choice,’ I’m like, ‘Do you guys hear yourselves?’”
Facing financial ruin, the single mother of two launched an OnlyFans page “just to save my home” and began to reevaluate her politics, or lack thereof. “I was by myself. And then I started to make new friends who felt the same way,” she continues. Thus began a metamorphosis that now finds de Matteo among a small group of Hollywood’s vocal Trump supporters — a faction that includes Dennis Quaid, Rob Schneider and Zachary Levi. And she isn’t the only Emmy-winning actresses to back the polarizing 45th president, with Rosanne Barr also being proudly MAGA.
On this fall afternoon, on eve of a presidential election that is too close to call, the Queens native is bracing for civil unrest regardless of the outcome.
“I have people coming to measure my house for gates. For the apocalypse,” she explains as she rocks back and forth back in a swivel chair in her Laurel Canyon home. She’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with a machine gun from her Ultrafree streetwear line, which she launched earlier this year with boyfriend Robby Staebler, drummer for UVWAYS (formerly All Them Witches). She adjusts a pair of oversized rose-tinted glasses and prepares to go scorched earth with Hollywood’s Trump-is-a-fascist crowd.
“I’m sorry, but is Sean Penn a CIA asset at this point?” she asks, noting the actor’s eyebrow-raising interview with El Chapo for a 2016 Rolling Stone article that was followed by the Mexican drug lord’s capture days later. “I am so disappointed in him. I don’t even know that I can watch him as an actor anymore. When he brought that Oscar to [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in Ukraine, I was mortified. Zelenskyy is aligned with the Azov Battalion, and everyone’s crying about racism and this and that. It’s like, ‘Wake up America.’” (The Azov Brigade has drawn criticism for its neo-Nazi ideology and use of controversial symbols linked to Nazism.)
She’s just warming up as she moves on to Hollywood’s Kamala Harris supporters who represent both ends of the age spectrum.
“You have like Billie Eilish saying, ‘I feel safer with Kamala as president.’ But why? Because you have six security guards around you every day when you walk down the street,” she scoffs. “My daughter has nobody walking around with her when she walks down the street in New York City. Because I see what’s going on. Or even here in California, my kids are not allowed to go anywhere because of how bad crime is right now.”
Then she moves on to one of the entertainment industry’s most reliable Democratic Party voices.
“I’m looking at Bette Midler talking about reproductive rights ad nauseam,” she says. “They’re worried about this issue. When we’re on the brink of world war, you want to talk about your daughters? What about the boys? What about our sons that are going to have to go off to war at some point. And they want to take your daughters, too.”
Despite her support for a president who appointed three Supreme Court justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade, de Matteo says she is pro-choice.
“My great-grandmother was the only abortionist in 1950s Harlem. I’m someone who’s had two abortions. I’m still pro-choice,” she notes. “But things have gone so far in the pro-choice direction that it became sort of an aberration of the rights that women have fought for, where those rights no longer even seem like human rights. It seems like an agenda and an ideology that doesn’t work in anybody’s favor.”
If de Matteo’s politics are confusing, she is quick to point out that so are the views of her Hollywood brethren who once reviled Dick Cheney. The former vice president endorsed Harris in September, prompting the Democratic candidate to say she was “honored” to get Cheney’s backing.
“Every time a celebrity endorses her, I reiterate that they stand with Dick Cheney,” she notes.
De Matteo knows that voicing these views is an act of self-immolation when it comes to her future film and TV prospects. Men may get a pass. After all, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight still work plenty. Quaid probably will continue to find himself in demand. There’s not as clear a path for return for MAGA women. But de Matteo doesn’t care.
Even before COVID, she was pulling away from the industry. After working on arguably the greatest TV series of all time, de Matteo couldn’t top that experience. And though she continued to work on such shows as “Sons of Anarchy” and “Desperate Housewives,” she became more selective, especially if a project meant she would have to leave home for extended periods.
“I was offered some Marvel thing, and I turned that down because my son was crying every time I’d go to Canada to just guest star on something,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m not gonna do it. I have enough money to get us through the winter.’ I don’t want to be this Hermes-toting, Gucci shoe-wearing person. I just didn’t give a shit. I mean, I wear sweatpants and T-shirts all day.”
Her fall from grace in Hollywood coincides with a new career path in fashion. She started Ultrafree to promote free speech and take a swipe at a status quo she loathes. The T-shirts feature phrases like “War Machine” and “thank you for remembering the intimate details of my locations and conversations big tech.” She’s also founded a jewelry collection called Tombstone that leans into the mob wife aesthetic that she pioneered on “The Sopranos.” Either way, she’s making enough money to afford a savvy publicist and is willing to be seen at the Trump rally in Coachella (she applauds the Republican candidate’s “anti-establishment” strain) or the Rescue the Republic gathering in Washington, D.C., where two of her favorites — Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — took the stage. And like Penn, who went on Fox News to make his Ukraine case on Sean Hannity’s show, de Matteo sparked headlines when she joined “Jesse Waters Primetime” to come out as pro-Trump.
“I tried not to be outspoken. I tried to be under the radar. But I joined OnlyFans to save my fucking house. And it was kind of, in a weird way, a political statement. Like a big ‘fuck it.’ Get comfortable being uncomfortable. That was my statement,” she says.
And in a surprise twist, her family has come around, at least on the subject of her OnlyFans foray (she remains on the subscription service where content creators can reap big paydays for sexy or explicit content).
“[During the pandemic], my brother was like, ‘You know, you’re risking everyone in your home’s life right now [by not being vaccinated].’ And then years later, when I ended up having to open up an OnlyFans page just to save my home, because nobody would help me at that time because I didn’t ‘do the right thing,’ he was like, ‘Your body, your choice. I’m with you all the way,’” she says and rolls her eyes.
As her appointment with the gate installation team nears, she stresses one final point: Even in a solid blue industry like Hollywood, she insists that she is not an outlier because of her views. She is an outlier because she will express them out loud.
“The people I’m around, a lot of liberals are voting for Trump. I think half of Hollywood is actually voting for Trump,” she says. “I know that I’ve gotten plenty of messages in my Inbox: ‘Thank you for saying things I can’t say.’”
