On why he hasn’t been cancelled yet
They’re trying. Let me just first express my disappointment that artists aren’t counter-culture. Artists should be the moral, ethical barometers of our culture. They should be questioning it all the time. They shouldn’t be swimming with the flow of things, and yet they are; they’re part of the establishment now.
The Twitter mob especially has tried to cancel me. I’ve had three successive waves of intensive relational aggression. That culminated in a change.org petition to get me fired from all of my jobs and my convention circuit. Luckily all the people I work for and on every level know that I’m not any of the things that these people attempted to paint me as, and so personally told me that there would be no cancelling taking place. But it was pretty frightening.
Mark Pellegrino talking on Unsafe Space
The petition was cancelled by change.org because it was so toxic, and a counter petition to keep Mark at the conventions received many thousands of times more signatures.
On ideological conformity in Hollywood
I think I’m fortunate in the sense that I’m not in the establishment at all. So, the people on the left who are hardcore left don’t see me as someone on the right, and I think because they can’t define me, they can’t quite cancel me. There’s definitely ideological conformity in Hollywood.
I don’t know that it’s a conscious sort of discrimination. You want to work with the people you want to work with, who make you happy, who you don’t feel you’re going to be in conflict with all the time. So in part, it’s innocent. That idea of Hollywood elitist sort of pushing out competing ideas is half myth, half real. I don’t think it’s quite as organized as everyone would say it is. It’s just people who have the same values wanting to work with people who share their opinions and not wanting to fight too much with people who don’t.
Not that having different opinions would mean I would be in conflict with them 24-7. I have very fruitful and interesting talks with actors on the left, and I think I’m able to do that because I’m not coming at them from a tribe, and I have no interest in upholding a dogma. I’m coming at them from the point of view of a rational individual seeking the truth. So I feel like I make headway with people that way, but maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe they’re all going to come after me soon.
Mark Pellegrino talking on Unsafe Space
