As The Daily Wire has chronicled, James Woods is one of the few conservative voices left in Hollywood who’s willing to push back against the progressive agenda promoted in lock-step by his colleagues. After decades of duking it out with his fellow celebrities, the 70-year-old actor appeared to have announced on Friday that he was officially retiring from the film industry — just a few weeks after saying that he’d accepted that he had been “blacklisted” in Hollywood because of his openly conservative views. However, after sitting back and watching the story go viral, Woods revealed on Saturday that the news of his retirement had been “greatly exaggerated.”
Woods relayed to The Washington Post this weekend the funny story about how the false retirement announcement came to be.
Reports that Woods was officially retiring from acting came via his real estate agent Allen Gammons’ press release on Friday stating that the actor was retiring from Hollywood to spend more time with his passions and was selling his $1.39 million house in Exeter to help “simplify his life.” The Providence Journal reported:
Woods, a graduate of Pilgrim High School in Warwick, is retiring from the entertainment industry and hopes to “simplify his life” by selling “his many real estate holdings on both coasts,” Gammons said in a news release.
He says the actor’s brother and mother recently died, and he hopes to spend more time on passions including photography, antiquing and Texas Hold ’em poker.
But Woods told the Post on Saturday that he was not done yet and gave them a humorous play-by-play of how the whole false announcement happened.
“My career is not going to end in a real estate announcement,” he said. “It’s just funny. My agent said, ‘Are you retired?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, am I?'”
Woods said that after he decided to put one of his many houses in Rhode Island on the market, his real estate agent called him while he was driving to figure out the marketing pitch for the $1.39 million listing.
“We did a little interview,” said Woods. “You said you want to simplify by having less property as you go toward retirement,” said Gammons. “Yeah, exactly,” Woods responded, so Gammons quickly wrote up a press release, which began:
Longtime Rhode Island resident and Warwick Pilgrim High School graduate James Woods, Veteran of nearly 150 movies and television shows, has announced today that his recent retirement from the entertainment field has prompted him to simplify his life.
Gammons read the draft of the release to Woods, but the actor simply didn’t notice the whole “retirement from the entertainment field” line.
“I was not paying attention. I somehow didn’t hear ‘retirement,'” said Woods.
When the mistaken “retirement” announcement began to go viral, Woods sat on it for a while just to see what would happen.
“Who would care if I were?” Woods said he wondered, watching in amusement as people responded to the fake announcement online. “I’m the world’s biggest tease on Twitter. I do not remotely take myself seriously in any way. Why do you think I’m on ‘Family Guy’?”
But finally on Saturday he cleared things up with the Post.
“No actor retires from the film business,” he said. “In my 30s, I could play a sharp young lawyer. In my 40s, I could play an accomplished family man under attack.”
Woods said he’d be glad to act again and, in fact, he hopes to play a role as a gay protagonist in a film about the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.
After playing some huge roles in films in the ’90s, Woods found it increasingly more difficult to land big roles, something he attributes to his dramatic political shift near the end of that decade. In a series of tweets in late August, Woods said he’d accepted that he’d been “blacklisted,” like something straight out of the 1950s. Though other conservatives are afraid to openly discuss it, Woods has said “the blacklist against conservatives in Hollywood is very real.”
“The only reason I express my views is that I have accepted the fact that I’m blacklisted. Also I bought Apple stock in the 80’s,” tweeted Woods on August 21. “While #Liberals scream about the 50’s blacklist, my #Repubactor friends are terrified of losing their ability to provide for their families.”
His personal political turning point was Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Having been a Democrat all his life, Woods’ perspective on the party darkened when he watched “every single Democrat without exception” stand behind a “convicted perjurer.”
“I was for years, until #Clinton was impeached. Every single #Democrat without exception stood behind a convicted perjurer. That was the end,” Woods tweeted in August.
Woods suggests that his political transformation is the reason he saw his professional career taper off dramatically over the last decade, despite having been nominated for two Academy Awards and winning three Emmys in his heyday.
More from The Daily Wire on Woods:
Man Threatens To Smash Actor James Woods Over The Head — Gets Totally Obliterated
Actor James Woods Chides Celebrity Knee-Takers: ‘Here’s Who You’re Doing It With’
H/T HotAir