‘Sopranos’ star Drea de Matteo on her Trump support and OnlyFans
Drea de Matteo was never 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 ever-churning war machine of the Bush-Cheney administration. In 2020, she voted in the presidential election for the first time in her life, casting her vote for Joe Biden in his bid to replace Donald Trump in the White House. As the COVID pandemic entered its second year, everything came crashing down for the actress of “The Sopranos,” whose Adriana La Cerva was the only conscience in a sea of moral degenerates.
“I’m a hippie. I didn’t want to get the vaccine. I wanted to wait and see what the outcome would be,” she says.
Her family shunned her because she was anti-vax. She became persona non grata among the Hollywood set. And her agent, whom she considered a friend, dropped her.
“Without a phone call or email. I just told my manager and that was that. I couldn’t work anymore,” she adds. “To be demonized for a medical choice when they keep shouting, ‘Pro-choice,’ I’m like, ‘Do you hear yourselves?'”
Facing financial ruin, the single mother of two launched an OnlyFans page “just to save my house” and began reevaluating her politics, or lack thereof. “I was alone. And then I started making new friends who felt the same way,” she continues. Thus began a metamorphosis that De Matteo now finds among a small group of Hollywood’s vocal Trump supporters — a faction that also includes Dennis Quaid, Rob Schneider and Zachary Levi. And she’s not the only Emmy-winning actress to support the polarizing 45e president, while Rosanne Barr is also proudly MAGA.
On this fall afternoon, on the eve of a presidential election that’s too close to call, the Queens resident is bracing for civil unrest regardless of the outcome.
“People come to measure the gates of my house. For the apocalypse,” she explains as she rocks back and forth 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 of UVWAYS (formerly All Them Witches). She puts on oversized rose-colored glasses and prepares to go scorched earth with the Trump-is-a-fascist crowd in Hollywood.
“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, which was followed just days later by the Mexican drug lord’s arrest. “I’m so disappointed in him. I don’t even know that I can see him as an actor anymore. When he brought that Oscar [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in Ukraine, I was mortified. Zelenskyy joins the Azov Battalion, and everyone cries about racism and this and that. It’s like, ‘Wake up America.’” (The Azov Brigade has been criticized for its neo-Nazi ideology and use of controversial symbols linked to Nazism.)
She’s just getting warmed up as she moves on to Hollywood’s Kamala Harris followers, who represent both ends of the age spectrum.
“Like Billie Eilish, you said, ‘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 mocks. “There is no one around my daughter when she walks down the street in New York City. Because I see what’s going on. Or even here in California, my children are not allowed to go anywhere because of the severity of crime right now.”
She then moves on to become one of the Democratic Party’s most trusted voices in the entertainment industry.
“I watch Bette Midler talk about reproductive rights ad nauseam,” she says. “They are concerned about this problem. If we’re on the brink of a world war, will you talk about your daughters? What about the boys? What about our sons who will have to go 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 who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, De Matteo says she is pro-choice.
“My great-grandmother was the only abortionist in Harlem in the 1950s. I am someone who has had two abortions. I am still pro-choice,” she notes. “But things have gone so far in the direction of choosing rights that it has become something of an aberration of the rights that women have fought for, when those rights don’t even look like human rights anymore. It seems like an agenda and an ideology that doesn’t work in anyone’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 nominee to say she was “honored” by Cheney’s endorsement.
“Every time a celebrity endorses her, I repeat that they are with Dick Cheney,” she noted.
De Matteo knows that expressing these views is an act of self-immolation when it comes to her future film and TV prospects. Men can get a pass. After all, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight are still working hard. Quaid will likely remain in demand. There is no such clear path to return for MAGA women. But De Matteo doesn’t care.
Even before COVID, she retired from the industry. After working on perhaps the greatest TV series of all time, De Matteo couldn’t top that experience. And while she continued to work on shows like “Sons of Anarchy” and “Desperate Housewives,” she became more selective, especially when a project meant leaving the house for an extended period of time.
“I was offered something from Marvel, and I turned it down because my son would cry every time I went to Canada to just guest star in something,” she recalls. “And I thought, ‘Fuck it. I’m not going to do it. I have enough money to get us through the winter.’ I don’t want to be this Hermes-wearing, Gucci shoe-wearing person. I just didn’t care. 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 freedom of expression and take a swipe at a status quo she despises. The T-shirts feature phrases like “War Machine” and “thank you for remembering the intimate details of my locations and conversations about big tech.” She has also founded a jewelry collection called Tombstone, which taps into the mob wife aesthetic she pioneered on “The Sopranos.” Either way, she makes enough money to afford a smart publicist and is willing to be seen at the Trump rally at Coachella (she applauds the Republican candidate’s “anti-establishment” stance) or the Rescue the Republic meeting in Washington, DC, where two of her favorites – Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – took the stage. And like Penn, who made his case about Ukraine on Fox News on Sean Hannity’s show, De Matteo made headlines when she joined “Jesse Waters Primetime” to come out as pro-Trump.
‘I tried not be outspoken. I tried to stay under the radar. But I joined OnlyFans to save my damn house. And it was a political statement in a weird way. Like a big ‘fuck it.’ Make it easy to feel uncomfortable. That was my statement,” she says.
And in a surprising twist, her family has gotten involved, at least as far as her OnlyFans outing is concerned (she remains on the subscription service where content creators can earn big bucks for sexy or explicit content).
“[During the pandemic]My brother said, ‘You know, you’re now risking the lives of everyone in your house [by not being vaccinated].’ And years later, when I finally had to open an OnlyFans page to save my house because no one wanted to help me at the time because I wasn’t “doing the right thing,” he said, “Your body, your choice.” “I’m with you all the time,” she says, rolling her eyes.
As her appointment with the gate installation team approaches, she emphasizes one final point: Even in a solidly blue industry like Hollywood, she insists that her views don’t make her an outlier. She is an outlier because she will say them out loud.
“The people around me, many liberals, are voting for Trump. I think half of Hollywood actually votes for Trump,” she says. “I know I’ve received a lot of messages in my inbox: ‘Thank you for saying things I can’t say.'”
