Actors Adam Brody and Florence Pugh publicly called for a “free Palestine” in separate interviews, with Brody going further to label Israel’s conduct in Gaza a “genocide.”
Pugh told Vanity Fair she has “never” been scared to speak out on the issue, pointing back to comments she made last September at the Together for Palestine event, where she said: “Silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality, it is complicity, and empathy should not be this hard and it should have never been this hard.”
“I don’t know why it took so long for people to start talking and for people to actually feel sympathy,” Pugh told the magazine. “But no, I was never scared of it.”
Pugh also said she struggles with guilt over living a normal life while the war continues.
“It’s still happening, though. Babies are still dying. Mothers are still in pain. It’s really horrible to be watching such pain when so much of our lives just seem to be moving forward. I think that’s what I’ve found so difficult about social media as well: How can I say I’m having a really good time when literally one scroll up, I’m looking at a baby that’s motherless and fatherless?”
Adam Brody, known for his role on The O.C., made his own position clear in an interview with GQ, directly accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
“I’m not trying to plead ignorance — here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory — but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway. Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine. It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago.”
Brody also addressed his decision to stay off social media, drawing a sharp line against X specifically because of its ownership.
“I think being off social media has been the healthiest thing. I’m forced to use a lot of tools and products where I don’t believe in the heads of those companies, but I’m sure as shit not going to be on anything that Elon Musk is a part of. I know people are doing really good work on [X], and I’m really glad about that. But it’s not for me, and I don’t have any guilt about not being on it. Sorry, I feel great about it.”
