Top 5: Actors We Trust

In the Age of the Hollywood Sucker Punch, betting your time and dollars on movies and TV is more perilous than ever.

As often as not, you can expect to fork over $20-$40 at the theater expecting to laugh, cry, and be entertained. . .

. . . only to find yourself trapped in a widescreen, 3D, surround sound, stadium-seated liberal indoctrination chamber.

With TV, you can dedicate months and years to becoming a dedicated fan of a series. . .

. . . only to suddenly start getting lectured on what creeps you and your family are by dint of your politics/religion/gender/race/fill-in-the-blank.

Closing in on two years patrolling the mean streets, Big Hollywood already has dozens of posts that document these lies, cheap shots, and propaganda in grim detail. Amidst the cultural carnage conservatives step ever more gingerly, sifting through the rubble for scraps worth investing in.

One way most of us navigate this minefield is by discerning which actors — big, well-known, picture-opening actors — are worth trusting on name alone. No one has a perfect record, but the best gain our confidence by routinely choosing projects that hew to some modicum of quality, decency, and fair play. You may not agree with the underlying message or political slant of their movies, but that’s not the point — it’s completely possible for conservatives to love great liberal movies and vice versa. Rather, these actors convince us over the course of their careers that they aren’t likely to sucker punch their fans, or to embarrass their country, profession, or family by allowing politics and prejudices to tarnish their public reputations and filmed entertainments.

Often, as famous as they are, we know little about their lives off the screen, as it should be. Largely free from the constant scandal that runs through Tinseltown like a river of raw sewage, their usually leftist personal politics matter little. It’s their class, humility, humanity, and self-deprecating humor — along with their choice of projects in which to display them — that count.

How many such actors are out there, living and working today? People whose name on a marquee or DVD cover not only doesn’t raise your hackles, but palpably makes you relax, secure in the knowledge that — with their name attached — you are unlikely to be ideologically jumped and browbeaten in exchange for giving them some of your precious time and money? Actors that you may not agree with, but whom you nevertheless trust, both with your money and your cinematic hopes and dreams?

Here’s my own highly subjective Top 5, from youngest to oldest:

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Denzel Washington (b. 1954)

Our modern Brando, the guy who can infuse every role with the gravitas of Shakespeare. He’s also, by far, our most versatile A-list thespian, playing military men, slaves, detectives, convicts, lawyers, loving fathers, gangster kingpins, and angels with equal force, panache, and believability. Time and again his performances address hot-button debates without alienating half of his audience with shallow, dehumanizing propaganda. Conservatives, liberals, white, black, young, old, Christian, Muslim — by turns he’s done right by all of them.

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Jeff Bridges (b. 1949)

He could so easily have been the spoiled brat 90210 son of a semi-famous actor, but in project after project he’s refused to sell out to the ego-driven temptations of stardom. An actor who doesn’t put on the pose so many do of never watching his own movies or caring overmuch about them, and a liberal who is laid back and worldly enough to not shove his deeply-felt personal politics down his audience’s collective throat. Bridges has memorably played everything from a hippie slacker to a small-town Texas teenager to an sinister comic book mogul to a sensitive alien to a washed-up country music star to the President of the United States, without me ever thinking that he was acting for only his side of the political aisle at my side’s expense.

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Morgan Freeman (b. 1937)

Dignity is the word that pops into mind. What actor is better at taking lazy parts that in lesser hands almost always end up as crude, politically correct Hollywood stereotypes — pimps, chauffeurs, slaves, and “magic minority wise man” characters among them — and imbuing them with contradictions, surprises, and thus humanity? And how many are then capable of running off to play God, or the President of the United States, or the benevolent head of a large corporation without missing a step? Freeman’s the kind of guy who is capable of being outspoken against the Iraq War even as he plays a key role in The Dark Knight.

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Robert Duvall (b. 1931)

Bob Duvall played the hapless Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, the napalm-sniffing, village-incinerating Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and the tormented and abusive career marine/father in The Great Santini. So why don’t we condemn him as a habitual slimer of our military as we would with so many others? Because this lifelong Republican, Christian and (like Freeman) veteran isn’t holding them (or through them, us) up for ridicule, he’s playing characters who harbor traits that are heroic and noble as well as outrageous and crude. They’re flawed human beings, not cardboard caricatures or straw men, and that’s what we come to the theater to see.

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Clint Eastwood (b. 1930)

I’ve grown increasingly leery about Eastwood as a director, but I still trust him implicitly as an actor. Over a long and storied career, his roles have represented what, when boiled down, is the only thing we really ask of Hollywood: to let characters on screen that filmmakers disagree with politically do right by their own standards even as the filmmakers criticize them using their own. From role to role Clint’s veered left and he’s veered right, but you never get the feeling that he’s taking cheap shots against anyone — in his next film he’s just as likely to be sympathetically portraying someone on the other side of the political/cultural divide. Directing a few Paul Haggis scripts isn’t yet enough to make me give up on the guy who played The Man With No Name, Dirty Harry Callahan, Josey Wales, Philo Beddoe, Sgt. Highway, Will Munny, and so many others.

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Twenty years ago, there would have been names like Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, and many, many others in the running. Alas, to various degrees, based on the projects they’ve chosen combined with the mouthing off they’ve done off-screen, they’ve all lost my trust.

Let me know your own Top 5 in the comments below. Remember, they have to be living, working actors (Sean Connery and Gene Hackman are for all intents and purposes retired).