Do we like James Woods?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A decorated actor and a loyal friend, but a run of his own posts that hit the wrong people leaves him near the bottom.
Woods is an Army intelligence officer's son who moved around as a kid and ended up in Rhode Island. He won a scholarship to MIT for political science, then walked away months before graduating to chase acting in New York. The Onion Field in 1979 made his name as the intense, fast-talking, often scary bloke, and Salvador earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
The thing that stands out lately is how he handled Rob Reiner's death in December 2025. Woods said Reiner had helped revive his career, called him “a great patriot”, and called the insults aimed at him “infuriating and distasteful”. That came hours after Trump mocked Reiner, so it was not a free kick for his own side.
Politically he's still firmly where he was. In March 2026 he posted that he was “done with the Republican Party” and switching to Independent, citing the Senate's refusal to pass the SAVE Act and railing at what he called “uniparty traitors”. It reads as a fight over how hard the party backs Trump, not a move to the left.
Now the harm check. In 2017 he shared a photo of a boy whose parents held signs supporting him, with a caption that LGBTQ outlets like PinkNews slammed as transphobic. In 2018 Twitter locked him out over a meme urging men not to vote, saying the tweet could be “misleading in a way that could impact an election”. He refused to delete it and called it free speech.
Another stoush: in 2017 he posted a photo of a woman giving a Nazi salute at a Trump rally next to a photo of an Ohio activist, asking if she was a Bernie Sanders operative. The woman in the first photo wasn't the activist. She sued for defamation, but a federal judge tossed it in 2018 because the tweet was phrased as a question, so he didn't lose in court, though the post itself was wrong. We found no recent film work to check his company against, so the harm call rests on his own posts.
The old allegation is the one that keeps coming back. In 2017 Tamblyn alleged that Woods approached her and a friend at a restaurant and offered a trip to Vegas, and that “Even better” was his reply when she said she was 16. Woods called the claim “a lie” and denied it, and no court has ruled on it. It resurfaced in July 2026 when he locked his account.