Jeremy Boreing Gives First Interview Since The Daily Wire Exit, Talks Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, ‘The Pendragon Cycle’ & Hollywood’s Right Turn

EXCLUSIVE: In his first interview since exiting The Daily Wire almost a year ago, co-founder Jeremy Boreing talks to Deadline about his decade at the company, public bust-ups, right-wing podcasters missing out at the Globes, and his work as a film and TV producer, including the company’s most ambitious project, Arthurian epic The Pendragon Cycle: Rise Of The Merlin, which launches today.

Boreing isn’t the typical Deadline interview subject — there will be many in the entertainment space and beyond who don’t chime with his political views. There are clearly many who do, however.

What’s uncontested is that Boreing played a key role in building the Daily Wire into a lucrative brand and a significant player in conservative media. His sudden exit in March 2025 sparked online speculation about a potential rift with co-founder Ben Shapiro and trouble at the company, two suggestions the latter played down. What we know to be true is that Boreing has never rid himself of the producing bug and that’s one of the main reasons given for his exit from the company: to spend more time on film and TV projects.

Heralding from Slaton, Texas, Boreing started out in local theater as a writer and producer. He moved to LA in the early 2000s to continue in that capacity and in 2006 joined Kurt Schemper, Joel David Moore, and Zachary Levi to form Coattails Entertainment. Credits included feature drama Spiral, starring Moore, Levi and Amber Tamblyn.

After a time in which he questioned the direction of Hollywood and his own place in it, Boreing shifted away from producing to work at conservative website TruthRevolt with Shapiro. In 2015, the duo formed news service The Daily Wire in alliance with Caleb Robinson.

The company’s ascent was precipitous thanks to subscription packages, multiple popular podcasts and outspoken personalities, a busy news site, branded products such as razors and chocolate bars, and an ambitious film and TV division. The label quickly learnt to commodify, and make entertainment of, the culture wars. According to an Axios report, a 2023 capital raise valued the company north of $1BN.

In a wide-ranging discussion, we talked to Boreing about his time at The Daily Wire, the slate of projects he built at the company, and why he wants to build ‘the conservative answer to A24’.

DEADLINE: To start near the beginning, what did you make of LA when you got there around the year 2000?

JEREMY BOREING: When we left in 2020 after two decades in the city, my wife and I drove around to all of our old haunts. I said her, ‘You know, I really, I’m going to miss this place’. And she said, ‘You know, if I’m being honest, I’ve been missing this place for three years already’. The city changed so much and so rapidly. When I got there, it was an overwhelming experience, coming from a fairly small part of Texas to a place with infinite possibility.

But I love LA. One doesn’t accidentally live in LA for 20 years. I love the pace of it. One of the things you discover when you leave LA is the virtue of the place, the fact that everyone’s hustling, everybody’s striving, and how that finds its way into every aspect of your life there; everyone works hard all the time. I think that’s a real virtue of the city.

DEADLINE: Could you feel comfortable there in your own skin, given your strong political convictions?

BOREING: I was too naive or foolish not to feel comfortable in my views. I remember I had a close friend who was a series regular on an ABC sitcom when we were in our early 20s. I went over to the studio one day to play video games or something in their dressing room, and I parked right at the stage door. I had a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on my truck. As I got to the dressing rooms, an actress who was on the show, and who I admired very much, stopped me in the hall and said, ‘Hey, kid, is that your pickup parked outside with the Bush-Cheney bumper sticker?’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am’. She said, ‘Kid, you’ve got balls of steel’. Until she said it, I didn’t even know it. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know that it was controversial.

But of course, as I came to really understand the values of of the industry, politically and otherwise, I did go through a real wilderness period where I began to despair that I couldn’t be who I was and be successful in the mainstream of the industry, nor could I be who I was and be successful in the emerging Christian alternative to the industry. I was too Christian for Hollywood and too heterodox for the emerging Christian Hollywood. That was a really rough time, trying to figure out how to be who I am while still doing the things that I had a passion to do.

DEADLINE: After a while you changed career course and set up The Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro and Caleb Robinson. Are you happy with the journey The Daily Wire has taken?

BOREING: It was an enormous adventure. We fought a lot of battles, and won a lot of victories for our shared values, mine and Ben’s and Caleb’s. We made a lot of content that I’m incredibly proud of. You know, our documentary Am I Racist? was one of the best box office performing documentaries of the decade. So, yeah, I’m very proud of what we built over time. It’s complicated, of course. One makes mistakes on a journey like that. There’s plenty of things that I wish we had done differently, but that’s part of being an entrepreneur. You take big risks. I think we hit a lot more than we missed, and I’m very proud of what we accomplished.

DEADLINE: How would you say your relationship with Ben evolved over the years?

BOREING: Ben and I became fast friends when we first met, and I saw what now seems very obvious to everyone, but, but perhaps wasn’t obvious at the time, which is that Ben could be one of the great conservative media figures of his generation. I say it wasn’t obvious at the time, not because people didn’t recognize that he was one of the smartest guys in every room — certainly he was — or that he had a great set of values within the mainstream of conservative thought, which certainly he did. But Ben was a very fast talking, somewhat socially awkward Harvard attorney. He wasn’t an obvious media figure. He had a lot of ambition for it and was pursuing talk radio aggressively. I thought he had enormous potential, and made it part of my mission to help him realize that potential.

I did similar things for others, like Ted Cruz in those days, where I would send a Hollywood stylist to throw out all their clothes and buy them a new wardrobe, or set up a meeting with a Hollywood performance coach. I was always trying to help my conservative friends understand that there were experts in some of these fields that they could tap into.

Over time, my friendship with Ben grew and his skillset in media really grew and we had a very strong bond. We were in many battles together, and many battles on behalf of one another. Over the years, all partnerships become tricky. For Ben and I it was probably close to 15 years. That’s a long time to keep a band together. We reached a point where our priorities weren’t as aligned as they had been, and so we negotiated a separation that has allowed us each to move forward on our own terms. You reach a point when it’s time to go make some solo albums.

DEADLINE: Was it amicable at the end?

BOREING: I don’t really know how to apply the word amicable. I don’t think either of us wanted this to be the outcome. One doesn’t set about on a journey like this looking forward to a separation or anticipating a separation, but listen, there’s a bond that gets forged in these kinds of battles that doesn’t break. If Ben or Caleb need a kidney, I’ve got two.

DEADLINE: You said you have some regrets. What are the biggest?

BOREING: Well, I did hire Candace Owens, so I probably owe some penance for that…But I don’t regret many of our mistakes. I think that part of being an entrepreneur is being comfortable with the idea that there will be mistakes. Even Hall Of Fame batters don’t hit the majority of their times at bat. I regret the places where my own cynicism informed my decisions disproportionately. I regret places where I failed to remember my priorities, or I prioritized things that weren’t consistent with my values…

DEADLINE: As you reference, the highest profile bust-up during your time seems to have been the falling out with Candace Owens, who left The Daily Wire following a tumultuous, months-long public feud with Shapiro and mounting criticism regarding her commentary on Israel and Jewish people. How toxic did that relationship become?

BOREING: It seems to get more and more toxic all the time. Candace is, I think, probably, the most talented person operating in conservative media. She’s one of the most talented people I’ve ever met in any media, and she has enormous charisma, enormous charm, but she’s sort of like a nuclear energy. If she’s harnessed, she can power a city. If she’s unharnessed, she can level it. When she uses those powers for good, I think she’s enormously effective. I don’t think that she is using them for good now. I had misgivings from the very beginning, and I didn’t trust my misgivings.

DEADLINE: There will be some people reading this, particularly in Hollywood, who won’t have sympathy for you on that score, not only because of your views, but given your association with right-wing firebrands such as Owens, and for compliments you’ve paid Nick Fuentes, who I know you have a complicated relationship with…

BOREING: I do not have a complicated relationship with Nick Fuentes. That’s not a fair assessment at all. There’s nothing complicated about my relationship with Nick Fuentes. I believe that Nick Fuentes is a malevolent force in our culture, and I’ve never equivocated from that. I’ve told Nick Fuentes that I think that he is an enormous talent because Nick Fuentes is an enormous talent. But I’m not sure how saying that Nick Fuentes is an enormous talent in any way implies any sort of complexity in our relationship. I think that there are a lot of enormously talented people who are forces for ill in our world. Hollywood is replete with those sorts of people.

If we’re going to live in a culture where we can’t recognize the talent of people simply because we oppose them or oppose their values, I think that we’re never going to be able to have honest conversations about anything. Nick Fuentes is a formidable advocate for his values, values that I wholly reject.

I find many of Hollywood’s values repugnant, but there’s a difference between believing that people’s values are repugnant and believing that they’re malevolent forces. I think that the left has existed for far too long in a sort of cultural bubble in which they don’t even know how radical they are. They’re able to look with complete disdain at people who have somewhat traditional views, as though they’re completely beyond the pale. That’s a kind of hubris that I think has cost them in this country. It has cost the left enormously at the ballot box, believing that their views are mainstream simply because they’ve created such a great media echo chamber for themselves.

DEADLINE: We’ll come back to the co-mingling of Hollywood and politics a little later. Let’s talk a little about the film and TV slate you built at The Daily Wire. Was that strand lucrative for the company or was it a loss leader?

BOREING: It was enormously lucrative during my tenure. The overwhelming majority of our subscription revenue was tied to entertainment content, and subscription revenue was the overwhelming majority of our revenue. It was ambitious and high-risk, but the risk really came with great reward. We had a lot of advantages. We controlled our distribution. We controlled our marketing. Our subscribers were certainly subscribing for our political content and our brand, but they were also attracted by the entertainment content.

DEADLINE: How hard or easy was it to convince well-known actors to work on projects for The Daily Wire?

BOREING: Very challenging. We’ve gotten our share of no’s, that’s for sure. People don’t want to risk a career for a job. But I think it’s getting easier and easier for conservatives to attract talent to our projects for a variety of reasons. One, over time, we demonstrated that it won’t be a one and done thing. It’s not at the scale that we need to have a healthy, alternative industry, but it’s growing in part because the mainstream part of the industry isn’t doing that well either. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for people, which makes people more comfortable looking outside their comfort zone.

The 2024 election has also created a lot of opportunity for alternative filmmakers, because suddenly big tech isn’t cracking down on conservatives. There isn’t the sort of cancel culture that we saw during the Biden administration. There’s a lot less pressure to avoid conservatives than there has been historically. So I think all of that presents a lot of opportunity, but it’s still an uphill battle, of course.

DEADLINE: Some of the most high-profile actors you worked with on Daily Wire projects include Rainey Qualley, Thomas Jane, Radha Mitchell, Vincent Gallo and Gina Carano…Would you talk politics to those people?

BOREING: It’s funny, I talk politics all day long, and so I don’t usually think about whether or not I’m talking about politics or not. The majority of the time that you’re making a film, you’re engaged in making the film, it’s a pretty all-encompassing process. I can’t say that I ever spoke to Rainey Qualley about politics, and it wasn’t important to me that the people who worked with us agreed with our politics. There’s nothing in projects like Shut In, Terror On The Prairie or The Pendragon Cycle that demands that from a person.

DEADLINE: Would you be happy to work with an actor with very different political views to you? A Mark Ruffalo, say…

BOREING: I don’t know. I’m worried that if I say he’s a talented actor, I’m going to be accused of agreeing with his politics. That’s a dangerous line. Of course, he’s a very talented actor. And of course, as a filmmaker, I want to work with very talented actors. There are many actors on the left who I would find it a real honor to work with. And I’m sure that there are some who have crossed lines that would make it very difficult for me to want to continue.

But my ultimate goal is that we have a common culture again, which is the thing that’s missing in the country. You can’t have a common culture if no one is willing to talk to one another or work with one another. I think part of what’s gotten Hollywood in trouble is it has made a decision not to engage in the creation of common culture, or at least not to represent itself as engaged in creating common culture.

DEADLINE: How fruitful were your discussions with Hollywood studios and streamers during your time at Daily Wire?

BOREING: We were trying to build our own streamer, so it wasn’t part of our model to solicit distribution. The Pendragon Cycle was the first time we considered it. It was a completely different scale to things we had done before so we wanted maximum eyeballs on it. We went out with it and we got a lot of really great feedback from a lot of places that probably don’t care much for our politics. In the end, we weren’t able to make a deal on the show, but having read a lot of the feedback from various streamers, there were a lot of compliments for what we accomplished.

DEADLINE: The Daily Wire found success with a series of ‘anti-woke’ documentaries and made a number of narrative films. The company also announced with some fanfare a $100M investment in kids content. What happened there?

BOREING: We launched multiple shows that spanned multiple seasons, shows that I’m very proud of. We wrote a lot of checks, built a large team and launched various properties that were very well received by our audience. I don’t have visibility on future plans in that space because I haven’t been CEO for almost a year now.

DEADLINE: You seemed to be the main driver of the entertainment strand at the company. Does that slide away now you’re no longer there?

BOREING: I may have been the dominant driver, but not the only driver. It was always part of Ben and Caleb’s vision to be actively involved in creating cultures, as much as criticizing them. I first met Ben and Caleb through film deals. What happens now that I’m gone? I don’t know, but I’m not the only person capable of driving that strand.

DEADLINE: What’s the status of the Atlas Shrugged TV project?

BOREING: I know the company has the rights for a few more years and we had a great set of scripts for a first season, but I can’t speak to the status of it given I haven’t been at the company a while now.

DEADLINE: You also had a Snow White project with Brett Cooper but she quit the company and we didn’t hear any more about the film. What happened there?

BOREING: You’d have to ask Brett why she quit. You help create or grow talent, and then they can just take the value and leave. That’s a challenge for the entire industry as we go forward, both in Hollywood and much more in news, politics and podcasting. What is the value of the network, and how does the network guard that value over time? I think that’s a major problem that has to be solved.

DEADLINE: Let’s come to The Pendragon Cycle, which you co-directed and produced. It’s an ambitious Arthurian legend set in a Roman-occupied Britain where barbarian invaders threaten to lay claim to the island. What kind of budget are we talking?

BOREING: Eight figures. Seven figures per episode. It was easily the most ambitious thing we made.

DEADLINE: Where did you source the money — all internal or external sources, too?

BOREING: I can’t say too much on that but Daily Wire generates more than $200M a year in revenue. We have a lot of resources to deploy in service of our values.

DEADLINE: You went with a cast of relatively unknown actors. Was that a conscious decision?

BOREING: Yes. One of my strong opinions is that you never want to get an actor who’s bigger than your project. One of the few well known actors we went for was Colin Cunningham. I didn’t want to build the show around actors for whom this was not the biggest thing they had ever done, because I wanted people to bring the best they had ever brought. I don’t believe a greater cast of relative unknown actors has ever been assembled. I think God’s hand was on the casting of the show.

DEADLINE: I’ve seen some concerns online that the show will celebrate nativist values and beliefs. What would you say to that?

BOREING: I disagree with that. I think that it’s a very good thing to celebrate cultures. The story is based on one of the most enduring stories in the Western canon because it celebrates things that deserve to be celebrated about our shared culture, and particularly about the culture of Britain. I think no good comes from trying to deconstruct our own cultures out of existence. I oppose tearing down statues of historical figures, and in the same way, I oppose reinventing them as modern figures.

DEADLINE: There’s probably a perception from the outside that this wants to be a Christian or right-wing Game of Thrones?

BOREING: I’m hoping it’ll be a mainstream Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones was subversive when it was released, particularly because of its innate nihilism. I believe that Pendragon is subversive in the moment of its release, particularly because of its rejection of nihilism.

DEADLINE: Will there be a second season?

BOREING: When I started this project, I had a lot of influence over whether or not there would be a second season, and now I’m like every filmmaker, just hoping that our show is successful, and hoping that it creates the financial incentives for Daily Wire to want to take a bite a second bite at the apple. I believe people there would like to see the story continue. It’s their show now, so they’ll decide.

DEADLINE: Are there certain creatives you’re keen to work with going forward?

BOREING: I have people who inspire me. I doubt that I would have the opportunity to work with many of them, in part because of politics, in part because of stature, and in part because of the realities of time. I’ve had the opportunity to know Clint Eastward a little bit casually over the years, which has been a real honor. I’ve never met Martin Scorsese, but no filmmaker alive would not want the opportunity to collaborate with someone like that.

I will confess that there is a bit of a bunker mentality the people on my side of the cultural divide have to operate within, and it does limit our vision in some ways. You know, it has never really occurred to me that it was possible to work with the people who’ve had the most impact on my own personal creative journey, or creative sensibilities, and the fact that I don’t have a ready answer to that question actually strikes me as as something of a personal tragedy. I’m going to take the question as a rebuke, and I’m going to come up with my own sort of dream list of people who I’d still like to collaborate with and go try to make it possible.

DEADLINE: Have you spoken much to the guys at Angel Studios?

BOREING: Yes, I have. I do know the Harmon brothers, and we’ve collaborated, not in the creative process, but on the release of their film Sound of Hope during my tenure at Daily Wire. I’ve had cigars and steaks with them over the years. As an entrepreneur in an adjacent space, I know how difficult a thing that was to achieve, and it’s incredibly impressive.

The Christian film world is inspiring to me; one, because I am a Christian; and two, because I think that they did a very good job of identifying an underserved audience and building over the last two decades to answer that inefficiency. It’s not the space that I want to operate in. I think The Pendragon Cycle is probably the most Christian piece of mainstream entertainment since Braveheart, but it is not a piece of Christian entertainment. I’d say it’s replete with my values, but it’s not didactic. It possesses my Christianity and it possesses my politics, but it’s not defined by those things.

I often say the most important Christian film of my lifetime is Braveheart. Note that I don’t say The Passion of the Christ from the same filmmaker. Passion of the Christ is a beautiful work, and it is truly a passion play made by Mel Gibson. But I think that Braveheart is a is a far more effective vehicle for ensuring that our value, that the culture of Christians, is part of the common culture.

DEADLINE: Has your faith helped forge bonds with executives in Hollywood?

BOREING: I spent half a decade as the executive director of Friends of Abe, which was the not so secret conclave of Hollywood conservatives. That role allowed me to forge some of those relationships based around politics or religion. But in the ten years since then, I’ve been so focused on building our own media company, and with a sort of bunker mentality, I wasn’t trying to build collaborations with the industry in the same way. Dallas Sonnier [Bone Tomahawk] is probably the person we haven’t spoken about yet but who has played a huge role in shaping our entertainment offering. He has produced most of our movies. Ben [Shapiro] was the first person in the company to speak to Dallas, just to reinforce that entertainment was always part of the wider mission at Daily Wire, not only mine.

DEADLINE: What’s your appetite for launching a new media company?

BOREING: I’m exploring exactly where I think I can make the most impact. Those values that have animated all of my work continue to animate me: that we fight for freedom and build the future, and that we engage more energy in creating culture than criticizing culture. I want to continue to have a voice in the cultural and political issues of our time, both directly and through art, and over time, I’ll build whatever mechanisms are necessary to effectuate that. I’ll be producing podcasts and movies in the not too distant future, but it won’t only be single project producing. There will likely be a company to act as a vehicle for my passions.

DEADLINE: I’ve heard you might be interested in launching ‘a conservative alternative to A24’. Is that something you think is needed?

BOREING: Yes, and yes. There’s a huge disruption happening in the industry right now, and it’s a bit of an indictment on conservatives that we’ve done such a poor job over the last couple of decades of taking advantage of moments of disruption in cultural institutions to create cultural institutions of our own. I’ve always tried to do that, whether it was The Daily Wire, the Bentkey kids app, Jeremy’s Razors, or going back to something like Friends Of Abe.

DEADLINE: Do you look at a company like A24 and think of them as inherently liberal?

BOREING: I think that everything that isn’t decidedly conservative becomes liberal over time. It’s not that Hollywood never makes content that has crossover appeal. What Hollywood doesn’t do is treat the conservatives in its audience with any sort of respect. It treats them as though they’re anathema. It takes them for granted. Long term, I’d like to see the great institutions of our culture restore themselves to thinking about common culture.

I think it is a far better outcome long term to have Disney make movies for everyone, instead of only making movies, or at least framing themselves as though they only make movies, for one side of the political divide and not the other. I think we need a common culture if we’re going to have a common nation. But as a short-term tactical question of, how do we get back to common culture? I think Hollywood has to continue to lose because of its hubris.

DEADLINE: You say that, but isn’t this the most conservative-friendly Hollywood in a long time? In no small part due to Trump…

BOREING: My reaction to that is, ‘You’re winning, so stop’ is not a compelling stance for me. If Hollywood is more conservative than it has been in a long time, it’s because of the work of brands like The Daily Wire, and others. Obviously, the Academy as a body is overwhelmingly progressive and out of step with the mainstream. I think that that is still true throughout the industry. Are things better than they’ve been? Yes, so we should keep the pressure up.

But, I don’t think Hollywood and big tech suddenly decided to channel their inner right wingers. I think that they recognize that political power has shifted and shifted in a way that they hadn’t foreseen, and they altered their behavior. I have no doubt that behavior will alter just as rapidly back to its default position the next time Republicans lose the White House.

DEADLINE: How do you feel about Ben Shapiro and others on the right not getting any Golden Globe podcasting nominations despite extensive campaigning and spend?

BOREING: I think Matt Walsh not getting a single nomination for Am I Racist? was evidence of a lot of problems within the industry. We made one of the most successful box office documentaries of the decade and received absolutely no accolades for it. I think that that was a huge mistake by Hollywood. But by the way, it didn’t hurt us.

DEADLINE: Presumably, if you strongly disagree with the bent of organizations like the Academy and the Golden Globes, it would be hypocritical for you to care about getting their awards?

BOREING: Well, everybody likes to be told that they look nice. We all grew up with the same movies and in a world where those awards were incredibly meaningful. I think they were far more meaningful than they are currently. But of course they loom large in our imagination. How could they not? Is there some hypocrisy in it? I’m sure there is, but I’m sure you’ll excuse us for wishing that the institutions of our culture would allow us to participate.

DEADLINE: So why was it that those podcasts didn’t get any nominations, do you think?

BOREING: The Academy is largely comprised of the political left, and Hollywood has lived within that bubble for a long time. It doesn’t know that it’s radical. It doesn’t know that it’s so out of touch, or it thinks that being out of touch is a virtue. Conservatives will get Golden Globes before they get Academy Awards…

DEADLINE: Plenty of conservatives have won awards…

BOREING: Some have, sure. The arts attract more liberal people. That’s just a natural fact of of the universe. But that’s not true of the audience. None of the voters were going to vote for Matt Walsh within the Academy or the Golden Globes, but including him on the list would at least have been good politics for Hollywood.

DEADLINE: Are you happy with the direction of the country under Trump?

BOREING: I haven’t been happy with the direction of the country for a long time. I’m glad that Donald Trump won the election. I’m glad Kamala Harris isn’t our President. I think that there have been some great accomplishments in the second term, which is only a year in.

Donald Trump is not my kind of conservative leader. But I’m glad that Donald Trump is the President given the set of options that we had in 2024. I’m a Tea Party conservative. I’m a Reagan conservative. I always have been in my political values. I didn’t support Donald Trump in 2016, I did support him in 2020, and in 2024 I said very publicly that I didn’t think he should be our nominee. I thought that his handling of Covid alone during his first term should disqualify him. But it didn’t disqualify him, and he was our nominee, and to the extent that he was our nominee, I was very happy to support him. I’m very happy with his foreign policy in the second term so far — the reality of it, not the bluster.

The funny thing about Donald Trump is that he talks like a radical, but governs much more moderately than his rhetoric. Barack Obama spoke like a moderate and governed much more radically than his rhetoric. People continue not to understand that a decade into Trump’s ascendancy.

This article has been condensed and edited for length.