We live in times that, frankly, could stand to be a little more precedented. Nary a week passes without some ridiculous new thing happening, and it’s hard not to be numb to it all. “Yep, seems about right” has become my default response to each and every barrage of horrors that regularly screams from my screen. But occasionally, a sequence of events will pierce my solid-steel Koopa shell of disaffection and make me go “Huh.” This is one of those moments.
During an appearance on the Tintoria podcast as part of the press tour for the newly released, notably kid-friendly Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Charlie Day was asked his “favorite Luigi in recent American history.”
“Well, me, first of all,” Day replied. And then, without missing a beat: “Luigi Mangione, number two.” His costars, Anya Taylor-Joy and Keegan-Michael Key—giants in the field of hyphenated names—both laughed, the former awkwardly and the latter gleefully.
The hosts then hurried things along to another question about Luigi, the video game character, but let’s linger on what happened in that split second for a bit longer: Day, acting as an emissary of the Mushroom Kingdom, where Mario lives, shouted out the accused (though, I should note, very alleged) real-life killer of a United Healthcare CEO. And he did this to promote a movie that—at least based on what I’ve heard—truly is for kids in almost every sense.
A few takeaways: 1) You’ve gotta respect it. 2) Nobody misses that CEO—not a soul. 3) This kind of thing simply couldn’t have happened five or ten years ago, but now all bets are off. People are willing to just say shit, in part because they’re fed up and in part because it will all be washed away by tomorrow’s algorithmic tide. Nothing is sacred. Everyone is nihilistic. The right wanted to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr; instead he’s a meme.
Day, of course, also benefits from being insulated by wealth and fame, but one of his Mario movie costars, noted coward Jack Black, disavowed Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass back in 2024 over a joke about how Trump’s would-be assassin shouldn’t have missed. How far we’ve come, even since then.
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Riley MacLeod
