CULTURE

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt Really Want You to Vote

See their new PSA.


Brad and Leo
Now This

With just three days before the midterm elections, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are here to remind you to vote. In a four-minute-long PSA from Now This released Friday, the actors take turns explaining why midterms are just as important as presidential-term elections: “The House of Representatives, the Senate, to dozens of governors’ races,” Pitt says.

“So much is at stake, from gun-safety laws to immigration policy, clean water, and air,” DiCaprio says—an issue particularly dear to the premier Jane Goodall fanboy—“and whether or not millions of people have access to health care.” The two urge viewers to go vote, acknowledging the already record-breaking early voting turnout; by the end of October, more than 24 million had already submitted early absentee ballots, compared with nearly 13 million in 2014. (This year’s early votes also actually surpass the total voter turnout during the previous midterm elections, according to NBC.)

Pitt also describes the benefits of Get Out the Vote efforts—a little meta moment before the video pulls away from the two actors to describe where, and how, voting is especially crucial and what issues are currently up for debate on various issues.

“We, voters, have the power to decide all of this,” DiCaprio says at the close. “And it starts now,” Pitt adds. The pair speak in the same measured tone, looking somber in their brown T-shirts (for Pitt, layered over an army-green shirt, extremely ’90s)—definitely not the retro ’60s garb in which they’ve been photographed while shooting the upcoming Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. They play an actor and his stunt double in the movie, (their first time coheadlining, a battle of the leading men), which centers on the Sharon Tate murders in Hollywood in 1969.

Pitt and DiCaprio’s combined star power might not measure up to, say, that of last week’s Jodie Foster–directed PSA, which featured everyone from Julianne Moore to Marlee Matlin to Zosia Mamet, Laverne Cox, Ellen Pompeo, and even Cher—but as they all say, every vote counts.

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©Amanda Louis 2016

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