The Celebrity Sasquatch: Tracking the Hollow Threat of Leaving America
If you’ve ever spent a lazy Sunday afternoon watching a show like Finding Bigfoot, you understand the specific brand of deluded optimism it requires. Grown adults, armed with night-vision cameras and an alarming seriousness, venture into the woods. They point at blurry thermal images, get excited over ambiguous howls, and gasp at broken twigs, all in pursuit of a legend everyone knows they will never actually find. The thrill isn’t in the discovery; it’s in the performance of the search itself.
This, dear reader, is the exact same energy we must now apply to one of Hollywood’s oldest and most tired rituals: the celebrity threat to leave the country after an election.
For decades, whenever a Republican finds his way to the Oval Office, a predictable sound echoes through the canyons of Beverly Hills. It’s not the cry of a mountain lion. It’s the sound of a A-lister’s publicist dialing a reporter at Variety to whisper, on deep background, that their client is “seriously considering” a move to Canada, or New Zealand, or a charmingly rustic (but still with full fiber-optic internet) villa in Tuscany.
These threats are the Sasquatches of the cultural landscape. Often discussed, occasionally “sighted” in blurry tabloid photos, but ultimately, a myth. They are a performance—a bizarre form of geopolitical method acting where the star briefly convinces themselves they are the protagonist in a movie about a brave dissident, rather than a extremely wealthy person briefly inconvenienced by democracy.
A Storied History of Staying Put
To believe this is a new phenomenon is to forget Hollywood’s history. The modern tradition arguably began in 1964, with Barry Goldwater’s candidacy. The fear was palpable. The legendary composer Leonard Bernstein was among a coterie of artists who genuinely discussed fleeing to Europe or Australia if the Arizona conservative won. He didn’t. Lyndon B. Johnson won in a landslide, and Bernstein remained to compose on American soil.
In 1972, a young Barbra Streisand upped the ante, telling The Hollywood Reporter that if Richard Nixon were re-elected, she would “find another country to live in.” Nixon won one of the most colossal victories in American history, carrying 49 states. Streisand, presumably, found her way to her local grocery store in California instead.
The 1980s brought the Reagan Revolution and a new wave of artistic despair. Even the smooth, easy-listening crooner Lionel Richie caught the bug, reportedly eyeing Switzerland as a potential new home. He ultimately decided that his career trajectory—and presumably the convenience of Los Angeles recording studios—was more important, and stayed.
The pattern was set. The threat became a rote, post-election press line, as scripted and empty as an acceptance speech at the Kids’ Choice Awards. It’s a grand gesture meant to signal deep moral anguish, but it’s all gesture. No baggage is ever actually packed.
The “Actually Went” Club: The Exceptions That Prove the Rule
Now, in the interest of fairness, a tiny, tiny fraction—the Bigfoots who supposedly left a footprint—have indeed followed through. But their stories almost always reveal the hollow core of the broader trend.
Take Richard Gere. He did, in fact, move to a farm in Spain for several years during the 2010s. While he was a vocal critic of the Bush administration, the move was overwhelmingly reported as a lifestyle and family choice. He moved to be closer to his then-wife Carey Lowell’s family. This isn’t political exile; it’s a personal decision with a convenient political scapegoat handy for interviews.
Then you have the truly honest emigrants, those who leave not for a headline, but for a bottom line. Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook, famously renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2012 ahead of the company’s massive IPO. This move had nothing to do with a presidential administration and everything to do with the tax man. It saved him an estimated $700 million. Now that’s a reason to move I can understand! It’s not a political statement; it’s a financial calculation, devoid of the performative anguish.
These rare cases only highlight the absurdity of the empty threats. The people who actually go are running toward something concrete: family, financial gain, a quieter life. The ones who just threaten are simply running their mouths.
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