‘Sopranos’ Favorite Details Shocking Hollywood Cancellation
Drea de Matteo shares how tolerant, feminist industry ended her acting career
Hollywood is all about tolerance, empathy and free speech.
Believe that, and there’s a Nigerian prince with a deal just for you.
For all the big talk about progressive values, the industry too often ignores those qualities. The Blacklist 2.0 is the ultimate example.
Hollywood’s blacklist against conservatives has nuthin’ on the music industry’s versionhttps://t.co/9vZIcM8cNR @ksorbs @RealJamesWoods
— Christian Toto (@HollywoodInToto) May 29, 2026
Vote the wrong way, or even think the wrong way, and you’ll be scrambling for work.
That’s assuming you get any. Just ask Chery Hines, who got punished for marrying the wrong person by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness”).
Drea de Matteo learned this lesson the hard way.
The veteran actress, best known for her iconic turn on “The Sopranos,” disagreed with Hollywood’s draconian COVID-19 policies. That all but crushed her acting career.
Sharing time with right-leaning venues put the final nail in her career coffin. She said as much on “The Adam Carolla Show” this week.
“I can’t really act anymore … those days are over,” de Matteo told the podcast host. Carolla asked what led to her blacklisting. It started, she said, when she disagreed with the Hollywood COVID-19 policies. That included vaccination for everyone.
No exceptions.
It didn’t help that she joined OnlyFans to raise money to save her home, she says, although that didn’t damage her reputation enough.
She says coming on “The Adam Carolla Show” in 2023 helped seal her Hollywood fate.
“It was the first time I had spoken out about anything,” she said, although it wasn’t as if she wore a red MAGA hat during their interview. “I never cared about either political party at all.”
“Because I started speaking out so much about everything, and I didn’t f***ing stop,” she said. “I became the go-to [person] to bash on Hollywood, that’s where I ended up. Then I started talking about the corporations and the monopolies, going farther than a regular actor would have gone … that blacklisted me more than the vaccine.”
Carolla quickly jumped in to note the hypocrisy.
“The folks that hate McCarthyism love McCarthyism as long as they’re taking someone who they think may have voted for Trump or doesn’t like Fauci and blackballing them,” Carolla said. Consider recent projects like “Trumbo,” starring Bryan Cranston as the blacklisted screenwriter.
“They never stop bitching about McCarthyism, but they would like to cancel anybody from their means of earning an income if they disagree with them in any number of ways. There can be 10 subjects, and if you disagree with one of them, and you will be canceled and you’ll be unable to pay your mortgage. That’s how they preach.”
That’s why stars like de Matteo end up appearing on right-leaning shows, Carolla noted, comparing her situation to a series of tents in a desert.
“You no longer can make an income in their biosphere … you get pushed out of a giant tent that says Hollywood progressive Democrat … you see another tent over in the distance. ‘Oh, that looks like shelter,'” he said. “That tent says, MAGA, Fox, Trump on it … this isn’t really my tent … they go, ‘well, come on in!”
“Then, the p***ies in your [old] tent go, do you see what tent she’s in?” he added.
Hollywood talks a good game about free speech … when it comes to a progressive like Jimmy Kimmel. No one will have de Matteo’s back.
Just like no one had M.I.A.’s back when she got booted from a music tour for sharing right-leaning views on stage.
De Matteo does have one screen credit coming up. “That’s Amore,” directed by Nick Vallelonga and starring John Travolta, Mira Sorvino, D.B. Sweeney and Robert Davi. The release date has yet to be determined, but much of the production was wrapped a while back.