Actors and the Climate Crisis | Tim Guinee

What role does an actor have in fighting the climate crisis? Shakespeare said:

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For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. - William Shakespeare [Hamlet]

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Historically the theatre was the force that progressed social, economic, and political movements. Now is the time to include environmental. The American film industry generated $43.4 billion in revenue last year according to Medium.com. Americans turn to Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon, CBS, NBC, PBS, and countless other streaming sites and TV stations to unwind. We count on actors telling stories to connect us with the outside world. The actor has a wild amount of responsibility in working to combat the current climate crisis as they connect with people around the world. 

I spoke with Tim Guinee, an actor who has been seen on over 250 films and television shows including Iron Man, Bones, Blue Bloods, and many more. He works closely with Vice President Al Gore in the Climate Reality Project and recently sat down with activist Greta Thunberg. I interviewed Mr. Guinee for an upcoming podcast. 

Darrell: Where should actor/environmentalists go? 
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Mr. Guinee: Anywhere they can I guess would be my first answer. Climate Actors Project, which just started up witch has a lot of people like Ed Harris, Ed Begley Jr., Sinthia Viro, Mandy Patinkin, and Danny Glover. All of these big actors have formed behind this thing. We're just starting up so we will be developing a webpage and beginning to hold training events but look for a webpage within the coming months. 

Darrell: Who are some things that actors can be doing to combat the climate crisis?

Mr. Guinee: Part of my work is with Al Gore's Climate reality project, I give talks and I've given them all over the world about what's going on. One of the former heads of the National Endowments for the Arts, Jane Alexander, heard my talk and said that somebody needs to do this work for the acting community. In thinking about it I realized that many actors have this outside soapbox. They have a real platform to express their opinions and that people rightly gets bullied by people when actors are expressing their opinions and don't know what they're talking about. So it's imperative that we use that soapbox and they know exactly what they're talking about and then I also think that given the desperate state that we're in, I want people in every walk of life to be talking about this and recognizing certain things about actors that would be really important audience for me to speak and one that I thought I could be impactful in speaking to. The one big thing that comes to my mind is that the arts, all of the arts work with human emotion and empathy for that emotion and in that way the arts are universal. But also because of that one of my biggest concerns about the environmental movement and one of the biggest failures of the environmental movement is that we tend to speak within the environmental bubble. We tend to talk to people who are like minded. And there is a big problem in this country, not just with the environment but with all kinds of issues that everybody gets siloed into just talking to people who agree with their position. Social Media has been a disaster in this area and I think one of the things that artists/actors can bring to this through empathy is an ability to show up and care about different kinds of audiences. So in the work I do, I work very very hard to not speak to just environmentalists but I talk to Houston oil industry executives, I've talked to coal miners, I've spend three-and-a-half months in Northern Africa this year and spent some time doing climate talks in some of the slums in North Africa... The crisis is in such a terrible state, we need everybody's involvement... We need everyone to get involved if we're going to divert real catastrophe... This is some of the work that I do and I think actors can be incredibly helpful in that work. 

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To learn more about Tim Guinee or the upcoming Climate Actors Project check back here often as we will be sharing that URL as soon as it is live.  

To hear the entire interview, subscribe to Highway Walkers Podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, and anywhere else you stream.