The US election—or rather, America’s utter apathy about the electoral process—has lured Joss Whedon back to the internet.
The Avengers director and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator made a point of deleting his Twitter last year to get away from angry masses and focus on his creative work—but he’s finally back online, and with an entirely new kind of project.
Whedon’s new endeavor, Save the Day, is a star-studded, bizarrely self-aware video campaign that pleads with Americans to vote in November—and in a twist, promising that Mark Ruffalo will make it worth their while in an unexpected way.
“On Tuesday, November 8, this country will make one of the most important decisions in its history. You have a chance—an obligation—to be a part of that decision,” intones the rotating clump of 27 celebrities featured in the video.“The only way we can prove that to you is by having lots of famous people—lots of famous people, a shit ton of famous people—repeating how important it is.”
One lesser-known actor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Tom Lenk, pipes in: “Some of us aren’t as famous, but still pretty famous.”
“Like, you’ve seen us somewhere,” an actress who does indeed look familiar adds.
In order of recognizability, the list of celebrities involved in Whedon’s project goes something like this:
- Robert Downey, Jr.
- Scarlett Johansson
- Neil Patrick Harris
- Mark Ruffalo
- Martin Sheen
- Julianne Moore
- James Franco
- Don Cheadle
- Keegan-Michael Key
- … and a bunch of faces you sort-of-vaguely associate with Community, Grey’s Anatomy, Orange is the New Black, and other television shows.
Whedon told BuzzFeed News the point of the campaign is to shock people who “have been anesthetized out of voting” into actually caring about the upcoming US election. To cast the video, he said, he simply asked celebrity friends to partake in a ”voting PSA to help get out the vote and stop orange Muppet Hitler.” (His video, while never expressly backing Trump or Clinton, makes its partisan views pretty known.)
Yet the Hollywood icon also knows better than to take himself—or politics for that matter—too seriously.