Laura Benanti has slammed her former Broadway co-star Zachary Levi over comments he made about the recent death of their late colleague, Gavin Creel.
Benanti, 45, and the Shazam! star, 44, co-led the wildly successful revival of the musical She Loves Me in 2016 alongside Creel, who died in September at the age of 48 from cancer.
Benanti spoke about her feelings towards Levi during this week’s episode of That’s a Gay Ass Podcast, hosted by Eric Williams.
“I never liked [Levi]. Everyone was like, ‘He’s so great!’ And I was like, ‘No, he’s not. He’s sucking up all the f***ing 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.’”
During a pro-Donald Trump rant on Instagram Live in October, Levi baselessly suggested that Creel’s death may have been tied to Covid vaccinations.
The Tony Award winner’s death was caused by a metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a type of nerve cancer that the actor learned he had in July.
“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.
The American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute have both debunked theories that the Covid vaccine causes cancer.
Speaking about Levi spreading the misinformation, an emotional Benanti told Williams: “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*** you forever.’”
Levi was widely criticized by other Broadway stars at the time. Wicked alum Jenna Leigh Green wrote in the comments of Levi’s post: “Gavin deserved better. What has happened to you to have flown so far from decency and sanity? It’s just so sad.”
“So incredibly disappointed you would politicize Gavin’s death,” wrote two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz. “Really tried to give you the benefit here. Made it halfway through, which was hard as hell. But was utterly heartbroken, as he would have been, that you felt the need to use his life and legacy to promote this awful platform.”
In September, Levi endorsed Trump for president after his first choice, anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr., dropped out of the race.
Appearing at the Republican’s rally in Michigan, the DC actor said: “We’re here to make sure that we are going to take back this country, we are going to make it great again, we are going to make it healthy again. And so, I stand with Bobby, and I stand with Tulsi, and I stand with everyone else who is standing with President Trump. Because I do believe, of the two choices that we have, and we only have two, Donald Trump, President Trump is the man that can get us there. And he’s gonna get us there because he’s gonna have the backing and the support and the wisdom and the knowledge and the fight that exists in Robert Kennedy Jr and former representative Tulsi Gabbard.”
In January 2023, two months before the release of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Levi shocked fans with his response to a tweet asking if Covid-19 vaccine maker Pfizer was “a real danger to the world.”
“Hardcore agree,” he wrote.
While the first Shazam! (2019) film was warmly received, the second was such a critical and financial bomb that the film’s director David F Sandberg vowed to leave the world of superheroes behind.
Levi subsequently made a number of public statements decrying the treatment Fury of the Gods received from critics.