William H. Macy Finds One Kind Of Hollywood Movie Offensive - 'It's Just Porn'

William H. Macy is a Hollywood legend — but there's one modern trend he really hates.

During an interview with "Ted Lasso" veteran Brett Goldstein on his podcast "Films to Be Buried With," Macy (per The Hollywood Reporter) went off on quite a tangent about violence in movies and how he feels that it's negatively impacting our society. "I think at the end of the day, one thing any story has to be is true," Macy began, speaking to Goldstein. "It's got to be true to the human experience. And I think the test is if you put it out there and a couple of million people see it, that most of them recognize the issue and it moves them."

So where does his stance on violence come in? Well, Macy kept going: "I guess the most obvious example — and I can see the will to live just fade from people when I get on this kick — but I think Hollywood is doing a lot of damage to the world with our portrayal of violence. It's not true, and it's not a good place to be lying when it comes to our portrayal of violence."

After saying that this stance has actually led to him losing work in the past — though he didn't specify — and he also mentioned an unnamed Western movie where he asked that the violence be dialed back quite a bit. "When I first started off, there were nine bodies on page four, and I lobbied for us to go back to the real West and not to Westerns," Macy said, before concluding, "Don't imitate films."

Beyond his concerns about the prominence of extreme violence in Hollywood — which can be seen in major movies like the "John Wick" films or on the small screen in shows like "House of the Dragon" — William H. Macy proposed an incredibly realistic television series that would follow the victim of on-screen violence. "I wanna do a thing where, you take three episodes to have you fall in love with one of the major characters and then shoot him," Macy suggested, saying he wanted to show the full aftermath of what happens when someone is shot on television. "But don't write him off the show. And every week, you can see what a bullet does to a human body. You can see how it wrecks his marriage. You can see how he gets infections. You can see how he has to learn to walk again or use his hands again. You can see the deep, dark depressions."

"Let's tell the truth about it, because I swear to God, you kill one person, there's nothing more dramatic than that," Macy continued, somewhat reasonably. "You kill 18 people, it's just porn. The only thing you can do to make that more dramatic is kill 18 more." Honestly, he's not wrong, but it doesn't seem like Macy will get his wish any time soon. That does sound like a pretty intense pitch for some sort of miniseries, though.

His worries about on-screen violence aside, William H. Macy has had a pretty incredible career in Hollywood — and he shows no signs of slowing down. The Miami native met David Mamet, with whom he would collaborate for years, at Goddard College in Vermont, and the two ultimately got their start together in theater projects like "American Buffalo" in Chicago. Ironically, it was his role in the Coen Brothers' 1996 masterpiece "Fargo," a notably violent film in which a human is fed through a woodchipper, that launched Macy into the stratosphere; after that, he appeared in big projects like "Boogie Nights," "Air Force One," "Pleasantville," "Magnolia," "Seabiscuit," "Jurassic Park III," and more. 

These days, fans likely know Macy best for his role as patriarch and main villain Frank Gallagher in the Showtime original series "Shameless," which chronicles the ups and downs (well, mostly downs) of the troubled Gallagher family in Chicago. Flanked by Emmy Rossum, a young Jeremy Allen White, and other talented players, Macy brought Frank, a troubled and selfish man, to life ... and created a truly iconic television dad in the process (though not a great one). Frank would probably love a seriously bloody movie, but as far as Macy is concerned, he's not a fan.