The audience you may need someday

Actress Tatiana Maslany recently called Tom Selleck and Michael Jordan “cowardly” for keeping politics out of much of their work.

Some readers may ask: Who?

If all art is political, as Maslany says, then let the art speak. Give us a performance powerful enough to make us listen.

Maslany won an Emmy for “Orphan Black” and starred in Marvel’s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” That is a career many actors would envy. Selleck and Jordan, however, are household names whose audiences have stayed with them for decades.

I wonder whether Maslany has thought much about why.

On Mehdi Hasan’s show, Maslany argued that all entertainment is political. Selleck had explained that he saw little sense in alienating half the country when his job was to entertain it. Jordan’s famous line about Republicans buying sneakers made much the same point. Maslany called that kind of restraint cowardly.

Fame and money can make anyone feel invulnerable. At the height of their fame, Selleck and Jordan could have told audiences what to think at every opportunity. Instead, they showed enough judgment to consider what they might lose by doing so — and whether politics was necessary to the work in the first place.

They built careers that lasted longer than the moment when everybody wanted an autograph.

I have seen this kind of signaling on a much smaller and more personal level. At one teaching hospital where my wife received extensive treatment, some young residents wore pronouns on their badges. None of the attending surgeons who treated Gracie did. I could choose the attending surgeon; the residents came with the package.

Let me be blunt. If you make pronouns part of your professional presentation, I notice. To me, putting them front and center signals concerns I do not want inserted into a relationship built on competence and trust. I could not choose the residents assigned to Gracie’s care. When the choice is mine, however, I make it.

Were the attending surgeons cowards for leaving pronouns off their badges? I have no idea what each of them believed. I know that when Gracie faced another surgery, their personal lives and politics never entered the room or gave me reason to question their judgment.

That becomes rather important when you are standing at an operating room door.

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An entertainer’s public choices work much the same way. Maslany can impugn Selleck and Jordan. She can say whatever she pleases. And I can decline to spend a dime or a minute on her work.

I cannot watch a Robert De Niro movie now without hearing his political rants instead of his character. When football players began kneeling during the national anthem, I stopped watching. Nearly a decade later, I still have not returned. The NFL went on without me, and I went on without it.

Gillette lost me the same way. When the company aired its commercial about “toxic masculinity,” I stopped buying its products. I never announced a boycott. I simply bought another razor. My eyebrows went up when I later heard Dana Perino say on “The Five” that her husband, Peter, had done the same.

How many other customers quietly made that decision?

Nobody has to organize a boycott. People can simply find another razor, another movie, or something else to do on Sunday afternoon. The business may never learn why the customer disappeared.

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Maslany recently turned 41. She is no newcomer waiting for her first break. She knows how much talent and luck it takes to land a role people remember, and she cannot know how many more will come.

Perhaps she will gain admirers for what she said. Perhaps she will never miss a role or a paycheck. Or perhaps some people she hopes will watch her next performance will quietly walk away. Others whose livelihoods depend on her work may absorb some of the cost.

That is the part of celebrity political speech people often miss. The audience does not owe the performer its continued attention.

If all art is political, as Maslany says, then let the art speak. Give us a performance powerful enough to make us listen. Calling two men cowards is easier than producing work people will still want to see decades from now.

Selleck and Jordan understood something about fame while they had plenty of it: An audience does not belong to you.

Maslany is free to speak her mind. The rest of us are just as free to decide whether we want to hear any more.