Laura Benanti shared the stage with Zachary Levi and the beloved late Gavin Creel in the 2016 Broadway production of She Loves Me — though her experiences with her co-stars couldn’t have been more different.
During her recent appearance on That’s a Gay Ass Podcast this Wednesday (Dec. 04, 2024), the Tony Award winner spoke with remarkable honesty, expressing how she “never liked” the Chuck actor, particularly given the recent controversies surrounding his political views.
“Yeah, 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 fucking energy in this room and he wants to mansplain everybody’s parts to them,’” Benanti recalled. “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.’”
The tension between them wasn’t just about clashing personalities, as podcast host Eric Williams pointed out. The situation intensified when the Harold and the Purple Crayon star paid tribute to their former castmate Creel after his passing from cancer at 48 last September… by suggesting that COVID-19 vaccines might have triggered “turbo cancer” in him.
“I know that this is going to offend some people and make some people mad, and I wish it didn’t,” Levi said in an October Instagram Live video. “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…” he then trailed off.
Responding to Levi’s stance on Wednesday, Benanti didn’t hold back: “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, ‘Fuck you forever.’”
She also observed how Levi’s embrace of conservative values might actually boost his career, contrary to what some might expect.
“And everyone’s like, ‘It’s career suicide.’ But it’s not career suicide, because Christian, faith-based TV and film is huge. He’s going to be a huge fucking star in that realm. He’s going to make more money than he ever has,” Benanti said. “It makes me nauseous, but also a little bit, like, ‘I told you, motherfuckers.’”
Interestingly, despite their apparent friction, Benanti and Levi collaborated again after their musical ended, working together on Tangled: Before Ever After in 2017 and appearing in two episodes of Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure.
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