Megyn Kelly was the heroine of a Hollywood movie less than five years ago

The former Fox News host, portrayed by Charlize Theron in the 2019 film 'Bombshell,' has done quite a few things in the past few years that make that movie not age well.

If you want to see a movie that hasn’t aged well, I give you Bombshell, the 2019 drama that dramatized the sexual harassment scandal that led to the downfall of Roger Ailes, the longtime head of Fox News. 

The movie arrived at awards season in 2019, an uncommonly short time after the real-life events; Ailes stepped down from Fox in the summer of 2016 and died in early 2017. 

The film starred Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, the Fox anchor whose lawsuit against Ailes (played in the movie by John Lithgow) triggered the scandal, and Margot Robbie as a composite Fox News employee. 

But Bombshell’s main story was that of Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron. A then-Fox News anchor, Kelly is shown in the film insulted by Donald Trump during and after a presidential debate, after which her bosses at Fox effectively take Trump’s side over that of their own employees. Kelly later reveals that she was herself harassed by Ailes and helps organize other women in the network also victimized by their boss.

Bombshell is no great shakes as a film; it wasn’t a tremendous box office performer, nor did it make much of a splash at the Oscars- while Theron and Robbie were both nominated in the acting categories, its one win was for Best Makeup and Hairstyling (for Kazu Hiro, Anne Morgan, and Vivian Baker.) The Loudest Voice, the Showtime limited series that arrived the previous summer — starring Russell Crowe as Ailes — was a better telling of the same story. 

But what’s so fascinating about Bombshell is that it’s a movie made by Hollywood liberals, aimed at a liberal audience, which depicts the likes of Fox News, Roger Ailes, Donald Trump, and certain Fox employees who came to prominence during the Trump area, like Kimberly Guilfoyle and Jeanine Pirro, as hissible villains. And against them, as the heroine and audience surrogate, it positions… Megyn Kelly.