• Ed Begley Jr.

  

  Long before Hollywood smugly drove Priuses, the Emmy-nominated eco author was puttering around in a Taylor-Dunn electric car, composting leftovers, toasting muffins on bicycle-powered appliances, and living in a solar- and wind-powered house. The 76-year-old vegan has since taken his green message to TikTok with the help of his daughter, Hayden. At the 2023 EMA Impact Summit, the St. Elsewhere actor credited his Oscar-winning father with shaping his approach to activism: “Don’t just talk about stuff …What are you for? What are you doing to make a difference?”

• Quinta Brunson

  

  On Abbott Elementary, Brunson plays a second-grade teacher. Off it, she’s educating a much larger class. The Emmy-winning creator weaves recycling, school gardens and climate justice into the show’s storylines, and partnered with NBCUniversal’s GreenerLight initiative to reduce the series’ carbon footprint, landing her an EMA Futures Award in the process. “We all have to do what we can,” she said while accepting the honor.

• James Cameron, Suzy Amis Cameron

  

  James has dived nearly 7 miles to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the name of ocean exploration and conservation, and as a National Geographic explorer in residence he has turned the ocean floor into his personal laboratory. Suzy, meanwhile, has spent years pushing for greener red carpet fashion and plant-based eating, and recently launched Inside Out, an organization helping companies build more sustainable business models. Together, the Hollywood vegans run a regenerative farm, plant-based café and market in New Zealand — where the menu extends from organic vegetables and olive oil to beeswax lip balms.

  

• Don Cheadle

  

  As a UNEP goodwill ambassador, the Oscar nominee lobbies for green infrastructure on Capitol Hill and meets with world leaders at UN Climate Summits — a level of policy engagement that goes well beyond the average celebrity cause. He co-founded The Solutions Project alongside fellow Avenger Mark Ruffalo, a climate justice nonprofit building equitable clean energy in underserved communities, and landed on NatGeo’s 33 changemakers list in 2025.

• Auli’i Cravalho

  

  How far will she go? The Moana star has partnered with Sheba Hope Grows (yes, the cat food brand) on a documentary and short film series diving into coral reef conservation and ocean restoration in her native Hawaii. The 25-year-old Mean Girls star advocated for the rights of small island developing states at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference and works with National Geographic on eco-awareness campaigns.

• Benedict Cumberbatch

  

  The 49-year-old Sherlock star is one of the driving forces behind Green Rider, the U.K. nonprofit pushing for greener film sets (“He’s working really hard to convene other people in the industry to take action,” says co-founder Will Attenborough). The Emmy winner recently lent his profile to Coral Gardeners as part of Prada’s 2026 Re-Nylon campaign with National Geographic. And he keeps his expectations refreshingly realistic: “It is better that 99 imperfect people do something than one angel do everything,” he told a Dublin audience last year. “None of us are living perfectly pure lives inside this very imperfect system.”

• Matt Damon

  

  The Oscar winner once boycotted his own toilet and urged millennials to drink more beer — all in the name of clean water access. The campaigns were for water.org, the nonprofit he co-founded in 2009 after witnessing the lack of clean water and sanitation in Zambia while producing Running the Sahara. At Davos, he revealed the organization has now reached 88 million people across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

• Leonardo DiCaprio

  

  At 24 and fresh off Titanic, he sat down with Vice President Al Gore at the White House to talk global warming — and apparently took notes. Since 1998, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has awarded more than $100 million in grants to projects on every continent, supporting reforestation, Indigenous rights, ocean conservation and animal welfare. He has produced a string of climate documentaries — The 11th Hour, A Plastic Ocean, Before the Flood and Netflix’s A Gorilla Story, narrated by David Attenborough — with a Jane Goodall doc in the works.

• Billie Eilish

  

  The 10-time Grammy winner has made green touring a nonnegotiable: Her Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour, produced in partnership with Reverb and Live Nation, banned single-use plastics, ran on biofuel trucks, composted food waste and added educational “Green Rooms” — all while raising $11.5 million for climate causes. The 24-year-old vegan also produced the 2021 UN and Oxfam documentary Overheated, attends UN Climate Summits regularly and has pushed fashion collaborators — Nike, Oscar de la Renta, Gucci — to commit to sustainable and animal-free materials.

• Hannah Einbender

  

  Fresh off the fifth and final season of Hacks, the 30-year-old isn’t done talking. Her 2024 HBO Max stand-up special, Everything Must Go, put climate change in the punchline rotation; her Critics Choice Awards acceptance speech went after Big Oil and corporate polluters; and she stopped by Sammy Roth’s Boiling Point podcast to push for fossil fuel divestment in Hollywood and make the case that mushrooms — the legal kind — will save us all.

• Idris Elba

  

  The newly knighted actor and his wife, Sabrina, co-founded the Elba Hope Foundation, which spearheads long-term community development in Sierra Leone through clean water access, climate-resilient agriculture, renewable energy and conservation. The Golden Globe winner is also a UN goodwill ambassador for the International Fund for Agricultural Development and a Global Citizen advocate.

• Jane Fonda

  

  The 88-year-old has been getting herself arrested for her beliefs for 56 years — since that iconic fisted mugshot snapped at a Cleveland jail during an anti-Vietnam War protest in 1970 — and she’s only getting better at it. During her Fire Drill Fridays climate change campaign in the fall of 2019, she was hauled away from the Capitol steps in plastic zip ties so many times it became a weekly ritual. The two-time Oscar winner has since launched the Jane Fonda Climate PAC to keep the pressure on.

• Harrison Ford

  

  The Indiana Jones icon has spent decades crusading for forests and oceans as vice chair of Conservation International — long enough that scientists have started naming creatures after him, particularly those on the creepy-crawly end of the spectrum, including a rare snake. “It’s always the ones that terrify children,” he once said of the honor.

• Morgan Freeman

  

  The Oscar winner has spent decades deploying his voice in service of the planet — narrating Greenpeace documentaries, speaking at UN Summits and lending his baritone to Netflix’s Life on Our Planet, March of the Penguins and National Geographic’s One Strange Rock. The 88-year-old is also a UN Messenger of Peace, a NatGeo explorer and a Global Greengrants Fund supporter. But the most Morgan Freeman thing he does: He converted his 124-acre Mississippi ranch into a sanctuary for bees, which he tends himself. He’s also an advocate for sharks, presumably from a safer distance.

• Daryl Hannah

  

  The Kill Bill actress has chained herself to a South L.A. walnut tree for three weeks, blocked access to a West Virginia coal plant and stood in front of construction equipment to protest the Keystone XL pipeline — racking up arrests each time. She has also ridden Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s anti-whaling vessel in the Arctic, serves as a Greenpeace ambassador and UNEP Champion of the Earth, and exec produced Greedy Lying Bastards, a 2012 documentary exposing the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial campaign. After losing their Malibu home in the Woolsey Fire, she and husband, Neil Young, decamped to off-grid homesteads in Colorado and Canada.

• Woody Harrelson

  

  The Oscar nominee has been arrested in Kentucky for planting hemp seeds in protest of the state’s marijuana laws and scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to protest redwood logging (though he later apologized for the all-day traffic jam that bit of activism caused). The Surfer, Dude actor and L.A. pot shop owner is a longtime advocate for cannabis legalization and an investor in industrial hemp as a sustainable paper alternative.

• Michael B. Jordan

  

  When Jordan picked up his first Oscar this year, he did it in a Pharrell Williams-designed Louis Vuitton suit featuring vegetable-tanned leather and recycled polyester — a style statement that really says something. The Sinners actor channels his Outlier Society production company toward projects highlighting intersectional environmentalism, narrated NatGeo’s climate-focused miniseries America the Beautiful and co-founded Moss, a plastic-free organic sea moss drink company.

• Jason Momoa

  

  Turns out Aquaman has been moonlighting as a real-life ocean protector. As a UNEP Advocate for Life Below Water, Momoa has been pushing for plastic pollution reform and championing his aluminum-bottled water brand Mananalu — presented to the UN as a plastic-free case study. But he’s not limiting himself to the water: on land, he advocates for indigenous rights and biodiversity protection in Hawaii, co-founded EarthEcho International and serves as a 1% for the Planet global ambassador. He also sells what he preaches — a product line that includes wood pulp boxer briefs, shoes with algae-based foam and backpacks made from recycled ocean plastics.

• Nikki Reed, Ian Somerhalder

  

  The Vampire Diaries co-stars — and real-life couple — have made regenerative farming their shared mission, as they make clear in their documentaries Kiss the Ground and its 2023 follow-up Common Ground. They’ve also built eco ventures around the cause: Reed’s BaYou with Love line upcycles Dell computer chips into jewelry, Somerhalder’s Brother’s Bond Bourbon supports sustainable agriculture, and together they run the Ian Somerhalder Foundation backing environmental conservation. “We are in a concrete jungle right now, but I’m looking at an entire urban garden,” Reed told THR at a recent L.A. lunch hosted by eco-fashion label Cleobella at Little City Farm.

• Mark Ruffalo

  

  Green onscreen and off, the Hulk actor co-founded Water Defense and The Solutions Project — nonprofits fighting for clean water and renewable energy — and took on Big Oil and the Obama administration directly in the 2016 documentary Dear President Obama: The Clean Energy Revolution Is Now. He is also a longtime spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council, making him perhaps the most credentialed superhero in Hollywood.

• Martin Sheen

  

  The 83-year-old West Wing actor has been arrested 66 times for civil disobedience — by his own count — including alongside Jane Fonda and Joaquin Phoenix in front of the Capitol to demand climate action. “While acting is what I do for a living,” the Emmy winner said at We Day Vancouver in 2010, “activism is what I do to stay alive.”

• Alicia Silverstone

  

  The longtime PETA collaborator and vegan cookbook author advocates for animal-free fashion on the red carpet and in campaigns, and exec produced the 2024 British documentary Could Never Go Vegan — oh, and she was recently seen in Yorgos Lanthimos’ climate thriller Bugonia. “Almost half the problem is animal agriculture, so if we want that to change, we have to do it with our forks,” she told THR at the 2023 Green Carpet Fashion Awards. “The more you pick plant-based, the better.”

• Emma Watson

  

  The UN women goodwill ambassador has made sustainability a fixture of her public life — from wearing a Calvin Klein gown spun from recycled plastic bottles at the 2016 Met Gala to a set of fully sustainable Belle costumes for Beauty and the Beast, made from upcycled vintage wool, organic linen and natural dyes in collaboration with Eco-Age and Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran. A vocal advocate of the sustainability ratings app Good on You, she previously chaired Kering’s Sustainability Committee and is a face of Prada’s Re-Nylon line.

• Rainn Wilson

  

  The Office star legally changed his name to Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson — a move that helped him win the 2025 Time Earth Award for raising climate awareness through comedy. “[The idea that] Hollywood celebrities should just shut the fuck up and not have opinions about climate change — that’s bullshit,” the 60-year-old told THR. “We really should be focusing our energies on talking about climate in unique ways that isn’t lecturing or talking down but is still filled with urgency.”

• Shailene Woodley

  

  The Emmy-nominated Greenpeace supporter bristles at the “environmental activist” label, which is a little hard to square with her 2016 arrest while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. The 34-year-old is a certified diver, a Conservation International board member, the narrator of PBS’ Hope in the Water and one of NatGeo’s 33 changemakers of 2026 — all of which suggests the label fits whether she likes it or not. “I had so much anger for so long that we weren’t moving as quickly as I thought we should be moving, and that no one seemed to be listening,” she said at Uber’s 2024 Go-Get Zero event in London.

  This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Sustainability Issue. Click here to read more.
  

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