Benedict Cumberbatch Joins Green Rider Movement as Hollywood Becomes a Force at Climate Week

Held in partnership with the United Nations General Assembly, New York’s Climate Week is a massive, decentralized festival that this year ballooned to 900 events taking place all across the city from Sept. 22 to 29. This year, Hollywood names — from Matt Damon and Benedict Cumberbatch to heads of sustainability at Netflix, NBCUniversal and Paramount Global — took a prominent role, taking part in panel discussions, speeches, film screenings and even a vegan hot dog truck (thanks Rainn Wilson). 

The confab also saw the debut of the inaugural Climate Film Festival, where 59 films — including such titles as Ecocide, Farming While Black, Hot & Toxic, and The Wild Robot — unspooled over 72 hours, along with a keynote speech by wildlife filmmaker James Honeyborne.

“Climate Week is the nexus of so many things. It’s always a place to learn what’s going on,” René Jones, chief of social impact at UTA, tells The Hollywood Reporter. She’s been coming to the event since its inception. In the last year or two, adds Jones, “we’ve just noticed such an uptick in involvement” at Climate Week by the entertainment industry.

THR was on the circuit, hitting the parties and the talks, chatting with the Hollywood players, and keeping up with the latest phraseology around addressing climate change.

Monday, Sept. 23

Quote of the Day: “One day around 2019 I realized that I cared desperately about climate and what was happening but all that I was doing was sending out an occasional angry tweet.” — Rainn Wilson

Celebrity Sighting: Three-time Emmy nominee Wilson — one of the stars of 2023’s Lessons in Chemistry — was a guest at the packed Climate Week kick-off cocktails hosted by UTA and its foundation head René Jones at All & Sundry bar and bistro. The actor and activist recently co-founded a new nonprofit, Climate Basecamp, that he describes as a “climate communications group” looking to reach the “movable middle.” 

“There are tens of millions of voters who are young and confused. They are overwhelmed. They are apathetic. They feel like change isn’t possible. So we want to reach them with activations — in person, on social media, video content, using humor, using the arts — to try and activate that movable middle. We want to use storytelling to normalize climate science and just make it part of the national conversation,” said Wilson. Earlier that day, he’d been the headliner at a food-truck activation giving out free vegan hot dogs with names like “Oil companies have known about climate change and its disastrous effects since the 1970s.” Explained Wilson, “in order to get a hot dog you had to order it by its full name.”

Climate Basecamp — which counts sustainability professor Dr. Gail Whiteman of the group Arctic Basecamp as a founding director — also recently launched an awareness campaign called Save The Flavors, which calls attention to the way that the planet-remaking climate emergency is putting such beloved crops as coffee, chocolate and vanilla at risk. “A lot of people don’t give a shit about climate but they give a shit about chocolate and vanilla and pistachio and mango and coffee,” said Wilson.

Phrase of the Day: “Information Pollution.” That’s how journalist Amy Westervelt of Drilled — a popular true-crime-style podcast about the creation of climate-change denialism — described efforts by the fossil fuel industry to muddy the news waters in its quest to continue releasing planet-harming carbon emissions into the atmosphere unabated. Westervelt led a hilarious and lively discussion at the DGA New York Theater titled “The Mad Men of Big Oil,” which looked at the ways that the various industries have used publicity and misinformation campaigns to further their economic aims. She was joined at the event, sponsored by Hollywood Climate Summit, by writer Josh Gondelman (Desus & Mero, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), comedian Yamaneika Saunders and journalist Juan Manuel Benitez. “There’s a lot of climate denial still — climate delay, pushing false solutions, pretending it’s not that big of a problem,” said Westervelt. “It’s a very warped and very polluted information eco system.”

THR also stopped in at Meta’s New York offices, where the company hosted a series of Climate Week kick-off panel discussions, with an audience that included Dan Bragg and James Levitt, execs from TV network EarthxTV. Among the speakers was John Osborn, managing director of Ad Net Zero (a group helping companies in the advertising world reach sustainability goals), and Blair Swedeen, Meta’s director of net zero and sustainability who talked about how the company has used AI to model concrete mixes that have greater strength but lower carbon emissions. The concrete has been used at Meta’s data center campus in DeKalb, Illinois.

Tuesday, Sept. 24

Quote of the Day: “My hope is that our children’s children won’t just say ‘We’re free at last, free at last.’ One day years from now [they’ll say] ‘We are fossil free at last.’” — climate activist and Hip Hop Caucus president and CEO Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., channeling Martin Luther King Jr. for the climate era at the Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit.

Celebrity Sightings: Benedict Cumberbatch appeared at the Plaza Hotel at an event hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies to announce the 15 finalists for the Earthshot Prize, co-founded by Prince William and Sir David Attenborough, which awards grants to individuals developing solutions for pressing environmental problems. Taking the stage with his wife, theater director and playwright Sophie Hunter — who recently debuted a new performance installation, Salt of the Earth, that calls attention to the disappearance of salt marsh habitat around the planet — Cumberbatch announced his support for the U.K.’s Green Rider campaign. “By adding a green clause to our contracts,” he explained, “actors can insure climate action is prioritized on set and on screen at every stage of the production process. So, working with our agents, working with sustainability experts, we can help isolate the areas of most importance and impact and develop smart, scalable solutions and kick-start systemic progress across our industry, from the studios, to the guilds, unions and academies.”

Actor and philanthropist Matt Damon also took the stage at the Plaza, appearing with his Water.org co-founder Gary White to discuss the success the nonprofit has had in bringing clean water to populations around the world via microloans. “As of right now we’ve reached 69 million people,” said Damon, who also spoke later about Water.org at the Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit. Damon highlighted too that the recipients of Water.org’s loans pay them back at a rate of more than 98 percent. “It’s emotional for us … it’s really philosophically about looking at people rather than as charity cases needing to be solved but as human beings and as customers and as citizens. It’s about proving that if you just nudge the market towards them and get out of the way people want to solve their own problems,” said Damon.

Phrase of the Day: “Nature-Based Carbon Credits.” These are a specific type of carbon credits, which Netflix (among other companies) is leaning into as a way of supplementing its decarbonization goal of halving emissions by 2030. As the streamer’s sustainability officer Emma Stewart explained in an interview at Solutions House (one of many events hubs that popped up around NYC during Climate Week), Netflix’s sustainability plan favors nature-based carbon credits because they “protect and restore nature, which I like to think of as the original climate tech. It’s been stabilizing the climate for us for millennia and often for free,” said Stewart. “At this point we have invested quite a bit of money and tonnage — tonnage of carbon credit — either in restoring natural ecosystems in the U.S., in Brazil, in Chile, in India in the Sundarbans regions and often in places where you have quite vulnerable communities who otherwise would be forced into exploiting that land either for firewood or for logging or just converting it to ranch land or to agriculture and these carbon revenues through the carbon markets allow them to sustain that land. It essentially pays them to be stewards of the land.”

At Solutions House, Stewart joined a discussion, moderated by Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, titled “Sustainable Film and TV Production” which focused on the ways that entertainment companies are lowering their carbon emissions while shooting content, including the year-old joint Netflix and Disney initiative to work with supply companies on replacing diesel generators with cleaner energy alternatives. The panel also included True Detective: Night Country executive producer Mari-Jo Winkler (who spoke about that series’ high-level sustainability standards), Audrey Vinant-Tang, senior director, sustainability strategy at NBCUniversal (which aims to be carbon neutral by 2035 and which has reduced its carbon emissions by 30 percent since 2019) and Caroline Winslow of climate tech accelerator Third Derivative. Additional panels focused on environmental storytelling as part of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance’s recently announced expanded focus on supporting climate storylines and engagement across the industry.

Later at Solutions House, James Honeyborne presented a sneak peek at his long-awaited new documentary Our Oceans, which premieres on Netflix in November and is narrated by Barack Obama.

The five-part series, explained Honeyborne in an interview, “was over five years in the making, with a team of 700 people around the world. We spent around 4,000 hours underwater and filmed 1,000 different species. We filmed at both poles in the deep ocean and then we have over 20 scientific papers being written on what we discovered.” He hopes that the series, through immersive filmmaking, will help audiences “connect with and care about the underwater world.”

Wednesday, Sept. 25

Quote of the Day: “You’ll hear a lot of people say natural disasters. And we think that language matters and nothing about this is natural” — Chris Kocher, co-founder of a new nonprofit, Extreme Weather Survivors, which shines a spotlight on the human toll of climate change. During Climate Week, the group convened a panel of people who had survived or who had lost loved ones to events like extreme heat and floods.

Celebrity Sighting: Adam Met of the music trio AJR, an environmental advocate who teaches climate campaigning at Columbia University, spoke at the New York Times’ Climate Forward conference about the environment-focused efforts the band has taken along its concert tour. “At every single stop on the summer part of this tour,” said Met, founder of the nonprofit Planet Reimagined, “we had opportunities for fans to engage in climate action. it was real direct civic and political action at every stop. We had opportunities, by partnering with local organizations, for people to register to vote, check their voter registration, sign petitions around a local issue and actually phone bank on site.”

Phrase of the Day: “Green Amendment.” At an Earth Law Colloquium in TriBeCa, Kevin Schneider, counsel with the Earth Law Center and former executive director of the Nonhuman Rights Project, and Maya van Rossum, leader of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, discussed legal avenues for securing protection for nature (from apes and elephants to rivers) and people. Von Rossum, who’s also the author of the 2017 book The Green Amendment: Securing our Right to Healthy Environment, argued her case for pursuing more green amendments, also known as environmental rights amendments, around the country, a cause supported by actor Mark Ruffalo. To date, three states have such amendments, including Pennsylvania (passed in 1971), Montana (1972) and New York (which in in 2022, added to its constitution that “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment”).

Thursday, Sept. 26

Quote of the Day: “Change really happens through culture and there is no change without cultural change and the way to do that is through stories. … One of the great things is that it turned out you really only need to get 25 percent of any given group or audience to buy into whatever you are trying to shift and they will take it from there.” — Jennifer Strachan, CEO of nonprofit story incubator Cinereach, speaking at The Impact Lounge at the United Nations.

Celebrity Sightings: While they weren’t there in person, such names as actor Forest Whitaker, media personality Van Jones, Maggie Baird, founder of the nonprofit Support + Feed (who is also Billie Eilish’s mom), and model and entrepreneur Sabrina Dhowre Elba (the wife of Idris Elba) all appeared in a teaser trailer shown at The Impact Lounge for a new series, Turning Point, highlighting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — including no poverty, responsible consumption and production, and gender equality — of the United Nations. “It’s really finding the right people and telling those people’s stories so that the audience doesn’t feel preached to or finger-wagged. … The idea is that the audience can see themselves in these films and take actions themselves,” said the filmmaker behind the series, Peter Glatzer, co-founder (with Adrian Grenier) of SHFT. Speakers who appeared at The Impact Lounge — a pop-up events hub dedicated to bringing together changemakers and content creators, which also has a presence at Sundance — also included political scientist Ian Bremmer of Ground Zero Media (who was interviewed by Film at Lincoln Center president Lesli Klainberg) and Boaz Paldi, chief creative officer at the United Nations Development Programme.

Later that evening, at Civic Hall downtown, Wilson — as part of a week-long series of events promoting his new Climate Basecamp storytelling nonprofit — appeared at the evening program of Reassembly; a day-long confab put on by Regeneration VC, a climate-tech focused venture capital firm investing which counts Leonardo DiCaprio as an investor, that brought together nonprofit leaders, investors and activists. Summing up the scope of Climate Week, Wilson said to the crowd, “Some of you here are working on carbon sequestration, some of you are working on bacteria that eat plastic, some of you are working on renewable resources, some of you are seeking to pass legislation, some of you are working with the UN or run a nonprofit or a company, some of you are in voter registration — and this topic is so enormous. It’s so all encompassing and there’s so many facets to it, it’s staggering and they are all incredibly important.”