Laura Benanti – Celebrity About

Embed from Getty Images

This past summer, Zachary Levi officially came out as a Trump supporter and has been showing his ass all over Twitter. He’s made it known for a while now that he’s hardcore Evangelical and anti-vaxx, but this latest embrace of all things MAGA has been super cringe to watch, particularly because he’s mixed his sh-tty opinions with a large dose of self-pity. You know how it goes with his type. His career is struggling and his showbiz friends supposedly don’t want to talk to him anymore because of his political beliefs. It has nothing to do with his less-than-charming personality.

Back in 2016, Zachary co-starred in the revival of the Broadway musical She Loves Me with beloved B-way actors Laura Benanti and Gavin Creel. Sadly, Gavin passed away from a rare, aggressive form of cancer in late September at 48 years young. It really shook the Broadway community because Gavin was a huge talent who was liked and respected by all of his peers. As people like him are wont to do, Zachary jumped on the “my friend died” bandwagon…only he took it one step further. He made an Instagram post that blamed the Covid vaccine for Gavin’s cancer. People were rightfully outraged. Last week, Laura appeared on Eric Williams’ “That’s a Gay Ass Podcast.” During her appearance, not only did Laura tell everyone just how much she hated working with Zachary, she also basically told him to eat sh-t, belting out “F-ck you forever” with her whole diaphragm.

Laura Benanti may have led the Broadway revival of “She Loves Me” with Zachary Levi in 2016, but the actress certainly doesn’t share the sentiment of the title. Benanti opened up about the ill feelings she maintains about her former co-star this week on the That’s a Gay Ass Podcast, hosted by Eric Williams.

“I never liked him. Everyone was like, ‘He’s so great!’ And I was like, ‘No, he’s not. He’s sucking up all the f-cking energy in this room. He wants to mansplain everybody’s part to them,’” Benanti said. “He really sucked everybody in with his dance party energy, like, ‘We’re doing a dance party at half-hour.’ I was like, ‘Good luck, have fun.’”

Benanti’s criticism of Levi reached an emotional peak when the conversation touched on their “She Loves Me” co-star Gavin Creel, who died in September at the age of 48. The Tony Award winner, whose Broadway credits also included “Hair,” “Hello, Dolly” and “Into the Woods,” died of a metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma. Speaking about Creel’s death on Instagram in October, Levi floated an unscientific theory tied to COVID vaccinations.

“I know that this is going to offend some people and make some people mad, and I wish it didn’t. A few weeks ago, my friend Gavin Creel died. He was 48 years old, and he was one of the healthiest people I knew. … You better believe that, with everything in me, I believe that if these COVID vaccinations were not forced on the American public…” Levi said before trailing off.

Benanti blasted Levi for using the topic of Creel’s death to spread vaccine misinformation: “For him to use Gavin’s memory — a person he was not friends with — to use his memory for his political agenda and to watch him try to make himself cry until he had one single tear, which he did not wipe away, I was like, ‘F—k you forever.’”

[From Variety]

Whew, go off, Laura. Say it louder for those in the back. She is clearly a disciple of the Patti LuPone School of Not Giving a F-ck. I mean, there’s nothing like a mad woman, #amirite? What Zachary said was so inappropriate and out-of-line that I remember thinking at the time that this was a real turning point for him in terms of letting his R flag fly. There was no going back after that because in the name of his terrible views, he invoked an actor whose death left deep holes in his community. Meh.

It’s a bummer that Chuck ended up being such a massive douche bag because I loved that show while it was airing. They also had the *best* Comic-Con panels. Oh, well, this is why we can’t have nice things. Also, WTF is this dance party thing for grown-ass adults who are doing their jobs and not participating in a high school production? Ugh, how annoying. I also would have been over it after the first time.

Embed from Getty Images

Photos credit: Getty, IMAGO/Barbara Hine/Avalon and Robin Platzer/Twin Images/Avalon

Laura Benanti is one of the lucky Broadway actors who is able to sustain her theater work with steady TV & film gigs. Most recently that screen time included a supporting part in No Hard Feelings with Jennifer Lawrence. Dipping back into theater, Benanti just performed a one-woman show in New York over the weekend called Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares. One of the topics she discusses in the piece that (historically) nobody (in charge) has cared about is perimenopause, that rip-roaring prequel to menopause that I’d honestly never heard of until Naomi Watts started the conversation, and Halle Berry and Gillian Anderson kept it going. Benanti is in the thick of it now, and she doesn’t mince words when she says it’s “been f–king horrible.” I’m sorry for her pain, truly, but she was still absolutely hilarious when talking to People Mag about it to hype her show:

Nobody Cares: Laura Benanti’s new solo show, Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, finds the Tony-winning actress taking a self-deprecating look at fame, friendships, romance, pregnancy, motherhood and a bevy of other things she says she’s come to learn as a self-titled “recovering ingénue.” But there’s one lesson that’s been a bit more difficult to find out than others. “I talk about perimenopause, which has just been f–king horrible,” Benanti tells PEOPLE when discussing the show… “It’s one of the many things we’re told to just shut up about as mothers because people are like, ‘Eww, gross, lady bodies!’”

Surprise! The 44-year-old star says she had no idea what was happening to her when she first started experiencing perimenopause, the often years-long transition prior to menopause when hormones fluctuate. … “It was a total mystery to me because in all the years of being a functioning woman, it was never explained to me once,” Benanti says. “Menopause, they’re like, ‘Okay, we got to acknowledge this is real.’ But perimenopause is just a surprise party! And I don’t know why. So I call it ‘the menopause appetizer that nobody tells you about,’” she jokes. “It’s ‘the amuse-bouche to an old cooch.’”

‘You’re fine’: “Can you imagine if this happened to men?” she teases to PEOPLE. “In perimenopause, our hormones are changing as rapidly as they were when we were in middle school. If men experienced that, scientists would be like, ‘To the Galapagos we go! Find every endangered plant and animal and use them to make it into man medicine!’ And meanwhile, women are over here with a swarm of bees in our uterus and our skin falling off. And everyone’s like, ‘You’re fine.’” They say, ‘Mothers are strong,’” Benanti adds. “F–k you! Yeah, we are. But also, we could use some help once in a while.”

The advantages of recording a live show: It will stream at a later date on Audible, for those unable to make it there in person — something that drew Benanti to the project when she was first approached by the audio streamer to create a show for them. “The thing I love about theater is that it’s ephemeral and there’s a magic to that, but that’s also the thing that makes it sort of sad because it’s so temporary,” Benanti says. “So I’m really excited about people being able to listen to it. And who knows, maybe we’ll be able to turn this into a TV special one day. You gotta dream big.”

[From People]

She had me at “the amuse-bouche to an old cooch.” Poetry. Part of me feels like an imposter weighing in on a perimenopause story, since I am pre peri. At worst I’m two years away, or at significantly-less-worse, 20 years away from meeting Ms. Peri myself. But I can relate to the symptom of being hot. All. The. Time. I have a theory that this stems from my having a winter birthday: my parents bundled me up as a baby so I wouldn’t be cold. But they noticed that as soon as I was coordinated enough, I would strip off everything I could manage. Then they got the message. And here I am now, what Benanti would call “a functioning woman,” and I still feel like I’m at least ten degrees warmer than everyone else. Given this is my baseline, I am in sheer terror of what my perimenopause will be. No really, I have visions of myself flopping around, clad in a fig leaf, making increasingly paranoid pleas to Boreas — Greek god of the north wind and winter — to pay a visit to the American east coast. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for Benanti’s show to drop on Audible so I can learn what else I have to look forward to. And yeah, she’s right about how different things would be if men went through perimenopause, but I’m already too hot and bothered to get into that now.

Embed from Getty Images

photos via Instagram and credit: Robin Platzer / Twin Images / Avalon and Getty