Many Americans on the leftward end of the political spectrum had trouble mustering up much enthusiasm for the 4th of July this year, given that their country hasn’t given them a lot to be proud of since, oh, November 2016. One of those Americans who spent the day deep in contemplation was apparently, of all people, James Woods’ agent, who the actor/ill-informed conservative wingnut claims dropped him yesterday in a fit of patriotic reflection:
Our question for Kaplan is: What took you so long? It’s not like the unhinged ranting is new. Woods has been pushing right-wing conspiracy theories on Twitter since he joined the platform in 2009, and he was notorious for being unhinged long before that. (Remember his bizarre appearance on The O’Reilly Factor back in 2001, where he claimed to have received confirmation from the FBI that the four men he reported for being “suspicious,” a.k.a. Middle Eastern, on an August 2001 flight were “rehearsing” 9/11? No? Here’s video.) Even the 2009 Deadline report on Kaplan signing Woods as a client tactfully describes him as “quite a handful.”
And although Woods’ fellow right-wing ranterati may claim Kaplan’s actions were motivated by liberal fascism (whatever that is), there’s also a red-blooded capitalist reason to drop Woods: He hasn’t been a money maker for his agency in quite some time. His last live-action role was an appearance as himself on Showtime’s Dice last year, and his last voice role was as Lex Luthor on the DC animated series Justice League Action, whose first season wrapped up earlier this year. In typically slippery style, Woods has variously tried to explain his lack of recent work by claiming that he’s been “blacklisted” by the shadowy liberal cabal that runs Hollywood and that he’s voluntarily retired from acting to focus on his antiquing—by which we assume he means “suing people who call him a cokehead on Twitter, quitting Twitter, then coming back to Twitter to tweet about ‘rubbing out the last vestiges of the stain that was Obama.’”