‘Sopranos’ Star Responds to Celebrity Endorsements: ‘Why Do People Care?’

Drea de Matteo doesn’t understand why people care about celebrity endorsements.

“I used to understand the value of it,” “The Sopranos” star told The Daily Wire in a wide-ranging interview Thursday. “There was a rock ‘n’ roll aspect to it, you know, you had all these musicians, there was a celebration of the country. I know now there’s no celebration of this country, and there’s no patriotism.”

Consider Robert De Niro, who held a press conference outside former President Donald Trump’s trial in New York City in March. De Matteo called it “one of the worst acting jobs” the “Goodfellas” star has “ever done.”

“I was like, do they have s*** on him? Because I don’t believe him right now. Even if he’s sincere and he really means what he says — why would people care?”

De Niro was one of many Italian-American celebrities who took part in the “Paisans for Kamala” virtual event this past weekend, the latest in a series of celebrity ethnically oriented Zoom calls hosted by the Harris-Walz campaign.

It was that event that inspired De Matteo to speak out about the absurdity of celebrity endorsements.

“Look who became MADE men (and) women in the Corporate Mafia today,” she wrote on Instagram. “Congrats Paisans, Mussolini would be proud.”

De Matteo finds it hard to believe that an American, celebrity or not, would tie his fate to Kamala Harris. But she is especially shocked to find such support in Hollywood “Paisans.”

Michael Imperioli and Drea de Matteo in “The Sopranos” (Photo by HBO)

“What is interesting is that Italians are generally known to be conservative, she says. “They fought the Sopranos, they took to the streets, they hated us, because they don’t want to be associated with such corruption, because they have a subculture, which is the mafia.”

But “we are now dominated by… a kind of mafia government,” which “pressurizes us and rules us like a mafia does in a neighborhood,” she told The Daily Wire.

“I was making a sarcastic joke, but it’s the truth, right?”

Snark and the truth. That’s pretty much what you get from Matteo, a self-described “hardcore liberal” who in recent years has joined a growing number of Americans disaffected with, and distrustful of, both U.S. political parties.

It started for her, as it did for so many, during the COVID pandemic, when Americans found themselves “with nothing to do but ask questions.”

“I don’t know what people were doing at home, other than baking bread. But I… I really wanted to know what the hell was going on.”

“I feel like a lot of these celebrities are either tone deaf, and they don’t know what’s going on,” de Matteo says. And, like most “well-meaning liberals,” if celebrities understood the stakes of our current political moment, de Matteo is certain they would “jump ship.”

That’s what she did: she left the Democratic Party after casting her first-ever vote for President Joe Biden in 2020.

“I had Trump Derangement Syndrome,” she admits. “I believed the hype. I listened to the Real news! I have not done my own research.”

Drea de Matteo (Photo by Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)

But once she did, she realized that the Democratic Party she knew had changed. It wasn’t the working-class party of her youth, which earned the support and respect of her family, including her mother, who campaigned for Geraldine Ferraro. It had become, she says, “the party of the rich.”

But wealth isn’t the reason De Matteo thinks so many celebrities support Democrats. For her, it’s simply a matter of groupthink.

“I feel like a lot of these celebrities are tone deaf and don’t know what’s going on,” she says, adding that these celebrities, like most “well-meaning liberals,” would “abandon ship” if they understood what was going on.

“It feels sad to see how misinformed (celebrities) are,” she says. “If they’re not misinformed, then I question their integrity as human beings and why they would want to hurt people on that level,” by supporting Harris.

“We’ve seen them try to dismantle everything from God to country to human sovereignty,” she says. “So I feel like the celebrity aspect is a clown show this time around.”

(Photo by M. Caulfield/WireImage)

De Matteo, for her part, is trying to make Americans realize that there is an alternative to this “clown show.” She supported the third-party candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and is now calling attention to Rescue The Republic, a political unity movement featuring heterodox political figures such as Kennedy, Russell Brand, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

At Rescue The Republic, which is holding a major rally in Washington DC on September 29, De Matteo found the kind of old-fashioned patriotism that has inspired her all her life.

“If you asked me what my favorite colors were when I was little, I’d say ‘red, white and blue!’ Everything is American flags,” she told The Daily Wire. “I think in another life I would have been Betsy Ross.”

For De Matteo, it seems that both sides have lost sight of what that flag represents: a radical, unprecedented freedom that goes beyond the petty partisan squabbles that define contemporary Washington and the party system. Freedom, for her, is rock ‘n’ roll — it’s “psychedelic.”

She’s tried to capture that spirit in Ultrafree, a streetwear line she launched in 2023 to “make freedom cool again.” She’s quick to note that Ultrafree isn’t a brand aimed at conservatives, but at every American who feels like she does: directionless, frustrated, but still hopeful for what this country can be.

“The pronoun for the whole movement is ‘we the people,’” she says. “It’s not red, it’s not blue, no more labels… Ultrafree is really about critical thinking and not allowing your mind to be hijacked.”

In any case, De Matteo hopes to involve her fellow ‘hardcore liberals’ in the struggle for freedom by making them realise that it is not a party political issue.

“This is not just a conservative movement,” she says. “This is a movement of hippies and wild cards and crazy people like us. We want to be free.”