‘Sopranos’ Star Sounds Off On Celebrity Endorsements: ‘Why Do People Care?’

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

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

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

“I really was like, do they have s*** on him? Because I don’t believe him right now. Even if he’s genuine and he really does mean what he is saying — why do people care?”

De Niro was one of many Italian-American celebrities who joined last weekend’s virtual  “Paisans for Kamala” event, the latest in a string of celebrity-studded, ethnically-focused Zoom calls hosted by the Harris-Walz campaign.

It was that event that inspired de Matteo to speak on 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 any American, celebrity or not, would cast their lot with Kamala Harris. But she’s particularly shocked to find such support in Hollywood “Paisans.”

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

“What’s interesting is Italians are generally known as being conservative,” she says. “They fought against the Sopranos, they picketed, they hated us, because they don’t like being associated with such corruption like that because they have a subculture, which is the mafia.”

But “we are now being dominated by…a sort of mafia government,” who “shake us down and govern like a mafia does in a neighborhood,” she told The Daily Wire.

“I made a snarky joke, but I mean, it is the truth, right?”

Snark and the truth. That’s pretty much what you get from de Matteo, a self-proclaimed  “hardcore liberal” who in recent years has found herself joining an increasingly large number of Americans dissatisfied with, and suspicious of, both American political parties.

It began for her, as it did so many others, during the COVID pandemic, when Americans found themselves with “nothing but time on our hands but to ask questions.”

“I don’t know what people were doing at home aside from baking bread. But for me…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-intentioned liberals,” if celebrities only understood the stakes of our current political moment, de Matteo is sure they would “abandon ship.”

That’s what she did, abandoning the Democratic Party after casting her first ever presidential 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 didn’t do 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 was not the working class party of her childhood, which earned the support and respect of her family, including her mother, who canvassed for Geraldine Ferraro. It has become, she says, “the party of the wealthy.”

But wealth isn’t why de Matteo thinks so many celebrities support Democrats. To her, it’s really just a matter of groupthink.

“I feel like a lot of these celebrities are either tone deaf, and they don’t know what’s going on,” she says, adding that, like most “well-intentioned liberals,” these celebrities 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 it makes me question their integrity as a human being and why they would want to hurt people on that level,” by endorsing Harris.

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

(Photo by M. Caulfield/WireImage)

For her part, de Matteo is trying to make Americans realize there’s an alternative to this “clown show.” She endorsed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party candidacy, and is now raising awareness for Rescue The Republic, a movement for political unity that features heterodox political figures like Kennedy, Russell Brand, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

In Rescue The Republic — which is holding a massive Washington, D.C., rally on September 29 — de Matteo found the kind of old school patriotism that has animated her throughout her life.

“Since I was a little kid, if you asked me what my favorite colors are and I was like ‘red, white and blue!’ Everything is American flags,” she told The Daily Wire. “I think I might have been Betsy Ross in another life.”

To de Matteo, it seems like both parties have lost sight of what that flag represents: a radical, unprecedented freedom that goes above and beyond the petty partisan squabbles that define contemporary Washington and the party system. Freedom to her is rock and roll — it’s “psychedelic.”

She’s tried to recapture this spirit in Ultrafree, a streetwear line she launched in 2023 to “make freedom cool again.” She’s quick to note that Ultrafree is not another brand geared at conservatives, but rather any American who feels as she does: adrift, frustrated, but still hopeful about 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.”

If anything, de Matteo hopes to bring her fellow “hardcore liberals” into the fight for freedom by making them realize it isn’t a partisan issue.

“This isn’t just a conservative movement,” she says. “This is a movement by hippies and wild cards and lunatics like us as well. We wanna be free.”