And we thought the celebrity in the Pennsylvania Senate race was Dr. Oz. It turns out the real actor was John Fetterman. Fetterman and his wife, Gisele, will appear in a cameo role in a Netflix movie to be released next month, “The Pale Blue Eye.” Some things we can’t make up.

The movie is a 19th-century crime drama featuring Christian Bale. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Bale “plays a New York City detective quietly investigating a grisly murder at West Point, where he’s assisted by a young cadet at the military academy named Edgar Allan Poe.”

The film, directed by Scott Cooper, is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Princeton grad Louis Bayard. The cast features a number of notable performers, including Academy Award-winner Robert Duvall and former X-Files star Gillian Anderson. Poe is played by Harry Melling, best known as Dudley Dursley in five of the Harry Potter films.

Appearing with Fetterman in the film is his wife, Gisele, who acted as the main spokesperson during the campaign after he suffered a stroke in May, just days before the Pennsylvania primary.

It me + G + Christian Bale circa 1830 pic.twitter.com/4NXMuUQ5j5

— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) December 9, 2022

Much of the movie was filmed in Western Pennsylvania on the campus of Westminster College in New Wilmington. It took place in December 2021 before Fetterman’s stroke or his senatorial campaign. How did Fetterman get the cameo role? As it turns out, he already knew Bale and the director, Scott Cooper. Bale liked Fetterman’s face. No, really.

“John’s got this fantastic face, hulking figure,” Bale said during a screening of the film last month. “So I said to Scott, ‘We’ve got to have him in the tavern. … That’s a face that fits in the 1830s.’”

Bale and Cooper got to know Fetterman while making their 2013 revenge drama Out of the Furnace, which was filmed in Braddock, Pa., a former industrial town where Fetterman was mayor for 13 years. Bale plays a steel mill worker, and in an ode to Fetterman sports a 15104 tattoo — Braddock’s zip code — on his neck in the film.

“That’s a face that fits in the 1830s.” Is that a compliment?

If you are interested in Out of he Furnace, it is streaming on Paramount+ and Amazon Prime Video. Others in the movie are Woody Harrelson and Casey Affleck.

We are in an age of celebrity politicians. There has been the occasional well-known public figure or celebrity in public office through the years but there seems to be a fixation on it today. Dr. Oz was a good example in the Pennsylvania race. Trump even said that he recruited Oz because Melania liked his television show. Trump himself used his celebrity to run for president. J.D. Vance is a celebrated author. Senator Mark Kelly was an astronaut and has the jacket to prove it. John Glenn and Bill Nelson both were astronauts before they were senators. For those who aren’t already celebrities, the media put them in celebrity status. Look at how Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke has been treated by the press. He’s a three-time loser but I guarantee if he runs again for office, he’ll be the subject of the same puff pieces and adoration he has garnered ever since he ran against Ted Cruz in 2018. Beto believes his own publicity and parlayed it into a presidential run, encouraged heavily by Oprah. This is what we do now.

So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Fetterman and Gisele are ready for their close-ups. The movie will be in some theaters Dec. 23 and will stream on Netflix Jan. 6.

At it is, some are ready for him to run for president. MSNBC host Katy Tur speculated about that possibility last week.

Tur floated the viability of, “Fetterman, as a nominee at some point for president,” before later going on to say that his record for surpassing President Biden and former President Trump’s vote share in the state.

MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell declared that she had extensive experience with Pennsylvania, and praised Fetterman for making so much progress with voters.

“I spent a lot of time covering this race, and with Pennsylvania politics, going back some decades, and I started my career there, but the fact that John Fetterman did, first of all, so much better with White non-college-educated voters. Better than Biden, better than Trump, so he ran ahead of both of them, but he also, you know, did fairly well in the cities and in the [unintelligible] counties.”

That’s quite a future campaign to ponder, eh? Gisele is probably mapping it out now.