Paul Laverty closed Tuesday's opening press conference of the 79th Festival de Cannes by naming three American actors — Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo — and accusing Hollywood of having blacklisted them for their public statements opposing Israel's war in Gaza. [1] The Cannes-winning Scottish-Irish screenwriter, who took the open jury seat after Ken Loach declined the invitation, said: "Isn't it fascinating to see some of them like Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo blacklisted because of their views in opposing the murder of women and children in Gaza. Shame on Hollywood people who do that." The remark received applause. It also did something the festival's jury politics had not previously done in this cycle: it converted a generalized accusation about industry political pressure into a named-actor allegation that the studios and agencies who would have done the blacklisting now decline to dispute on the record.

The paper's Wednesday account framed Park Chan-wook as a taste governor running the festival as a court. The Laverty intervention turned that court briefly into a tribunal. Park's response was characteristically careful: "I don't think politics and art should be divided. It's a strange concept to think they're in conflict with each other. Just because a work of art has a political statement, it should not be considered an enemy of art." [2] Demi Moore answered a related Variety question by saying that "if we start censoring ourselves then we shut down the core of our creativity, which is where we can discover truth and answers." The remarks were temperate. Laverty's were not. He also quipped, in closing, that he hoped Cannes itself "doesn't get bombed now, because we've got this poster" — a reference to the Sarandon-as-Thelma image the festival had selected weeks earlier as its 2026 visual.

Sarandon's claim that her agency dropped her in February 2026, at the Goya Awards in Madrid, is the documentary thread Laverty was pulling at. "I was fired by my agency," she said in Spain ahead of receiving the International Goya for career achievement, "specifically for marching and speaking out about Gaza, for asking for a ceasefire. It became impossible for me to even be on television. I don't know lately if it's changed. I couldn't do any major film or anything connected with Hollywood. I found agents ultimately in England and in Italy, and I work there. I just did a film in Italy, and I did a play at the Old Vic for a number of months. I know this Italian director that just hired me — he was told not to hire me, so that's still recently. He didn't listen, but they had that conversation." [3] No major American studio or talent agency has responded publicly to her account. No equivalent on-record claim has been issued by Bardem or Ruffalo. The naming is on Laverty's authority alone, and at a Cannes press conference, that authority converts into a specific industry accusation that the Federal Communications Commission's foreign-ownership thread and the Disney–FCC license cliff have so far approached only by inference.

There is a Hitchens essay one could write here about the productive friction between dissent and decorum, but the more honest thing to say is that Cannes has been hosting this kind of intervention since André Bazin set the rules. The festival's identity has been roughly the same since 1946: a venue where filmmakers can say what their studios will not. What is new in 2026 is the deflationary backdrop. Hollywood barely showed up to the Croisette this year — no Paramount, no Disney, no Warner Bros titles in Competition, eleven American films in the official selection by Iris Knobloch's count, which is fewer than last year and far fewer than two years ago. [4] The studios are mid-consolidation, mid-strike-recovery, and mid-streaming-reset. The major American studio chief executives who would normally have read Laverty's remarks at a Cannes opening press conference and offered a calibrated three-paragraph internal memo to their talent relations leads are, in 2026, mostly not in Cannes to read them.

The structural problem the Laverty intervention exposes is not blacklisting in the McCarthy-era sense. It is the absence of any institutional channel — labor union, studio counsel, agency representative council — willing to put on the record whether the named actors are, in fact, having access to American studio film and television projects systematically denied because of their Gaza-related public statements. SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union, has not commented. The two major American talent agencies that have represented Sarandon, Bardem and Ruffalo over their careers — UTA, CAA — have not commented. Disney has not commented. The Paramount-Warner Bros. merger announcement two weeks ago has not produced a statement. The silence is the artifact. Laverty named three. The named institutions did not name back.

What this leaves with the festival is a particular kind of award-season pressure. The jury Park is leading has nine members, two of whom — Laverty and Chilean director Diego Céspedes — were openly described in Tuesday's press by IndieWire as having "strong humanist leanings." [5] The Palme d'Or this year will be awarded on May 23. The jury's deliberations are private. But the three named actors are not in Cannes, and the films in Competition are largely European, Latin American, and Asian. The Palme cannot be a referendum on the question Laverty has put on the table. It can be, and likely will be, a verdict on what kind of cinema this jury thinks deserves the highest annual honor a film festival in the world can confer. Frémaux defended Berlin's Wim Wenders, also in the cycle's discourse, in the same press window. Cannes is not in a position to police its peers. It is in a position to give a prize.

The award will be smaller than the accusation. That is the structure of a festival. Laverty's "shame on Hollywood" was not a programming choice. It was a name. The accused names — Disney, Paramount, the agencies, the unions — have until the closing ceremony on May 23 to enter a counter-claim. If they do not, Cannes 2026 will be remembered as the festival where the jury named what the studios did not.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London