Laura Benanti shared her strong dislike for former co-star Zachary Levi during an appearance on Eric Williams’ ‘That’s Gay A** Podcast’ last week.
“I never liked him,” she admitted. “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.’ 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 especially criticized Levi for his remarks about their ‘She Loves Me’ co-star Gavin Creel, who passed away earlier this year.
Creel died at 48 from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma. Levi shared comments on Instagram suggesting an unproven theory linking this to COVID vaccinations.
Benanti said, “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*ck you forever.’”
“I know that this is going to offend some people and make some people mad, and I wish it didn’t,” read the comment from the actor, who’s known to be a Conservative. “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’s anti-vaccine opinions also caused trouble during the promo of ‘Shazam: Fury of the Gods,’ which underperformed commercially and critically. The actor also received negative reactions from some for supporting Donald Trump at the 2024 elections.
