The rise and fall of Jon Voight, the 1970s countercultural icon who became Trump’s biggest supporter in Hollywood

The announcement that Donald Trump will impose 100% tariffs on film productions from outside the United States has shaken the industry. And the person instigating the aggressive taxes is none other than one of its legends, Jon Voight. A key figure of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s and star of classics such as Midnight Cowboy (1969), the 86-year-old actor confirmed in a video on his official X account that he had met with the president over the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago mansion to present him with a “plan to rescue Hollywood.”

Posing solemnly with a U.S. flag behind him, Voight explains in the video that Trump “wants to see Hollywood thrive and make films bigger and greater than ever before.” His message is limited to job losses in the U.S. industry due to international filming; although the president has stated that he based his decision on the fact that foreign films are “propaganda” and “a threat to national security.”

Along with Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone, two other fervent supporters of the Republican, Voight was appointed by Trump in January as a “special ambassador” to the entertainment industry. “These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest,” declared the president.

Since his first term in office, Voight has been particularly supportive of Trump. He has called him “the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln” and a gift from heaven: at his inauguration in 2016, he proclaimed that God had answered his prayers. In 2020, he also fueled the conspiracy narrative of electoral fraud to justify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, going so far as to say that the United States was in its “greatest battle since the civil war, the battle of righteousness versus Satan.”

Ironically, Voight’s two upcoming films, The Last Gunfight and Man With No Past, were not filmed in the United States, but in Bulgaria, one of the countries with the most generous tax incentives. Whether for tax reasons, through co-productions with foreign capital, or, obviously, location requirements, it is very common for American movies to be filmed abroad.

To cite recent successes, A Minecraft Movie (2025) was shot in New Zealand and Canada, while Gladiator II (2024) was filmed between Morocco, Malta, and the United Kingdom. The new Avengers movie is currently being filmed in London, while the gigantic complex where James Cameron has been developing Avatar installments for decades (with the third on the way this Christmas) is located in New Zealand. In the film world, there is complete confusion, as Trump’s message conflates outsourcing with strictly foreign films. The president has also not detailed how he will implement these tariffs.

From rebel to “patriot”

The closeness between Voight and the president is hardly surprising to anyone who has followed the actor’s career and public statements in recent years. His most recent films include the hagiographic Reagan (2024), the anti-abortion propaganda drama Roe v. Wade (2020), and the Christian sports drama Woodlawn (2015).

However, Voight became a recognizable face when he represented very different values. He was one of the most important figures of the so-called New Hollywood, the movement that modernized U.S. cinema, deconstructed and reformulated genres such as noir and western, and incorporated influences from Italian neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague. Midnight Cowboy, a questioning of American mythology in which Voight played a young Texan who traveled to New York to prostitute himself, earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor and was released with an X rating due to its sexual content.

Deliverance (1972), a violent survival adventure that explored the fear of deep America with vestiges of the Confederate era, immediately became another classic. Voight earned his first and only Oscar for his moving portrayal of a disabled Vietnam veteran in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), a moving anti-war statement. His character ended the film by launching a furious attack on American patriotic values and the Vietnam War before a group of students; a critical ideology that Voight himself publicly endorsed at the time. Along with his co-star in that film, Jane Fonda, and figures such as musician Leonard Bernstein, he actively participated in anti-war movements and expressed solidarity with the Chilean left in the face of Pinochet’s coup d’état.

However, in 2008, during Barack Obama’s first election campaign, Voight surprised audiences by publishing an op-ed in The Washington Times in which he renounced his youthful ideas. He claimed that his pacifist stances, as well as those of his generation, had been a product of the Marxist influence of the time. He described Obama as a radical who was leading the United States toward socialism. By then, Voight had already begun shifting between roles in Christian television films and supporting parts in major Hollywood productions. He worked with director Michael Mann on Heat (1995) and Ali (2001) — the latter earning him another Oscar nomination — and appeared in blockbusters like Mission: Impossible (1996), Enemy of the State (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), and Transformers (2007).

Dishonorable surname

Voight’s two children, Angelina Jolie and retired actor James Haven, legally dropped their father’s surname in the first decade of the 21st century, when they both publicly disowned him. Jolie and Haven hadn’t forgiven him for being unfaithful to their mother, Marcheline Bertrand, from whom he separated in 1976. Voight, who starred alongside his daughter in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), said in 2002 that Jolie had “serious mental problems” and even asked his fans to encourage her to seek help. In recent years, their relationship has been on and off. The actress has allowed Voight to act as a grandfather to her six children, and he has publicly praised her maternal qualities.

At the same time, they have experienced strong political clashes, most recently over the war in Gaza. Jolie, who is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, called for an Israeli ceasefire and referred in a letter to the loss of innocent lives in Palestine, to which Voight responded by saying that she had been exposed to antisemitic propaganda, that she didn’t understand “God’s truth,” and that he was disappointed. Father and daughter recently became estranged again after Voight, in an interview, encouraged Jolie, for the sake of the children’s “stability,” to make peace with Brad Pitt and end their long divorce battle. The actress has accused Pitt of domestic violence. Several of their shared children have also dropped Pitt‘s surname.

“Angelina finds her dad’s politics hard to stomach, but she really draws the line when he talks about her kids as though he has some inside scoop. Considering Jon was such an absent parent she finds it ironic that he’s now so concerned about her kids,” a source close to the actress told In Touch.

Jolie does appear to have a close relationship with her brother, after he was “born again” as a Christian in 2009, in a spiritual awakening similar to the one Voight himself claimed to experience in the late 1980s. The octogenarian actor told the famous far-right hoaxer Tucker Carlson in an interview that he listened to God after — desperate because of the rough patch his career was going through — he prayed to Him and heard a voice say, “It must be hard.” Although the actor did not remarry after his divorce from Marcheline Bertrand, he has had a large number of partners, including Rebecca de Mornay, Barbra Streisand, Nastassja Kinski, and Diana Ross.

In 2024, Voight won the Razzie for Worst Actor for the thriller Mercy (2023), in which he faked an Irish accent. A regular at these awards since the panning of Anaconda (1997), Voight, not known for his fear of what people might say, didn’t hesitate last year to defend the artistic courage of his friend Francis Ford Coppola, in whose passionate, expensive, and ruinous Megalopolis he enthusiastically participated. The film, which was a commercial disaster, revived that New Hollywood-esque desire to reflect on the American imagination, depicting the country as a kind of modern, decadent Roman Empire. Coppola, a vocal critic of Trump and with progressive leanings, admitted to having chosen actors from both sides of the political spectrum to serve the film’s humanistic reflection.

At the Cannes presentation, the filmmaker forced Voight into a debate. “There is a trend toward the more neo-right, even fascist division, which is frightening. Anyone who was alive during World War II saw the horrors that took place, and we don’t want a repeat of that. Jon, you have different political opinions than me…”

Voight, though visibly uncomfortable, was conciliatory: “Where are we going? I think we’re all at this moment asking that question of ourselves. I agree with this film, Francis’ vision that human beings are capable of solving every problem we get ourselves into. We can do it; that’s what the last moments of the film that Adam is saying. We can do it. We must bond together, we must help each other, we must listen to each other and we must take this on and make a better world.”

Refuting isolationist theses in favor of a new and grandiose American cinema, the ambitious Megalopolis, independently financed by the Coppola wine fortune, initially failed to find a release date in its home country. It was European distributors who took an interest in the film and supported it.

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