Mandy Moore: Accidental Global Therapist for a World on the Brink
Mandy Moore, the former teen-pop apparition turned respected actress, has become an unlikely barometer of planetary anxiety. While she tours talk-show sofas to promote the final season of This Is Us, foreign-policy think tanks in Brussels quietly monitor her interviews for any stray remark about multilateralism. Why? Because if even America’s sweetheart starts fretting aloud about NATO cohesion, we may safely assume the alliance has already flat-lined. Such is the grim arithmetic of 2023: when the woman who once sang “Candy” begins sounding like the IMF, you know the adults have truly left the room.
Moore’s international footprint has never been especially large; her albums charted respectably in Japan, she once filmed a shampoo commercial in Buenos Aires, and a pirated DVD of A Walk to Remember still circulates in Moldovan minivans. Yet in an era when culture is the last export the United States hasn’t slapped tariffs on, her low-stakes ubiquity has become geopolitically useful. State Department interns now slip her name into #SoftPower briefings the way Cold War spies used jazz LPs: proof that America can still produce something that doesn’t explode on impact. Never mind that Moore’s biggest explosion lately is a carefully curated Instagram post about sustainable toddler snacks—on the ledger of national branding, it counts.
Overseas audiences, battered by inflation and the creeping suspicion that their own governments are being run by sentient Excel sheets, find Moore’s trajectory oddly reassuring. Here is a woman who survived the Y2K pop apocalypse, navigated the tabloid blood sport of the 2000s, and emerged with her eyebrows still symmetrical. In Berlin clubs, DJs remix her saccharine hits into ironic techno anthems; in Lagos Uber rides, drivers stream her podcast interviews to learn how to pronounce “resilience” without sounding bitter. It is comfort by proxy: if she can metabolize two decades of American absurdity without turning into a NFT-shilling wellness cultist, perhaps there’s hope for the rest of us.
Of course, the darker joke is that Moore’s latest role—as matriarch Rebecca Pearson, dispenser of tear-jerking monologues on This Is Us—functions as a nightly sedative for an audience sleepwalking toward democratic collapse. Canadians watch her soothe fictional family trauma and momentarily forget that their own real-life premier is flirting with authoritarian cosplay. Australians binge an episode and ignore the fact that their coral reef is now basically fish jerky. Moore’s face, softly lit and reassuringly symmetrical, beams into living rooms like a humanitarian air-drop of emotional Xanax. The world burns, but first, let’s watch Rebecca remember a crock-pot fire from 1998.
Meanwhile, Moore’s philanthropic side hustle—advocacy for maternal health in sub-Saharan Africa—illustrates the exquisite contradictions of celebrity activism. She raises funds to combat obstetric fistula while the Supreme Court back home reenacts The Handmaid’s Tale for sport. African health ministers, ever polite, thank her on Zoom calls, privately wondering whether American benevolence always arrives wrapped in a morality play they didn’t audition for. Moore, to her credit, seems aware of the optics; she recently joked on a panel in Geneva that her nonprofit’s acronym might as well stand for “My Apologies for Trump.” The audience laughed the brittle laugh of people who know the apology tour will outlast the apocalypse.
When the final This Is Us episode airs this spring, expect satellite dishes from Reykjavík to Riyadh to tune in for the group cry. It won’t move the needle on carbon emissions or debt ceilings, but for two commercial-studded hours the planet will synchronize its sobs—a small, pitiful form of unity in a fractured century. Afterward, Moore will tuck her toddler into a sustainably sourced crib and perhaps wonder, like the rest of us, whether she’s just narrated the elegy for a superpower. The credits will roll, the Wi-Fi will buffer, and somewhere a Norwegian teenager will queue up “Candy” on Spotify, mistaking nostalgia for strategy. Because in the end, that’s what we export now: reruns of feelings we can no longer afford in real time.
