Michelle Yeoh and Neil Patrick Harris are among the stars who have shied away from making overt political statements at the Berlin Film Festival, but musician-turned-director Tom Morello is showing no such hesitation.
At the press conference for his Berlinale world premiere documentary The Ballad of Judas Priest on Sunday, a journalist for a Spanish radio outlet asked Morello about political content in cinema.
“What a time to be alive where you can both make a documentary about one of your favorite bands and fight fascism at the same time,” Morello declared. He went on to say of Judas Priest, the British heavy metal group, “The band’s existence is very political.”
Judas Priest
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The documentary, directed by Morello and Sam Dunn, examines the rise of the band in the late 1960s in Birmingham, England, lead singer Rob Halford’s decision to come out as gay, and the civil trial in Nevada in 1990 that saw the group sued for allegedly delivering subliminal Satanic messages through their songs that convinced two youths to kill themselves. A judge eventually dismissed that case.
“When I’ve seen Judas Priest over the course of the last decade or so in Los Angeles, the audiences may be more than 50 percent Latino,” said Morello, the guitarist, singer and songwriter known for his work with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. “It’s a lot of gay couples, sort of nothing that has anything to do with the stereotypical [metal fans] — and yes, there are some older dudes like myself in leather jackets proudly bringing their kids to the show as well — but that community and the unity and the harmony that exists at a Judas Priest show is in some ways a model for how we might all do better.”
(L-R) Sam Dunn, Rob Halford and Tom Morello pose at the ‘The Ballad Of Judas Priest’ photocall at the 76th Berlin Film Festival Berlin on February 15, 2026.
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Halford joined Morello and Dunn at the Berlinale press conference and noted he doesn’t steer clear of politics in his music.
“It’s been impossible for me as a lyricist to not avoid seeing things in the world that affect me, that get me pissed off and thinking, is there a way I can put this into a song? And I’ve been doing that forever… I really have to temper myself because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten angrier with the world,” he said, adding an apparent reference to the LGBTQ community. “I’ve gotten angrier with the injustice, particularly for my own people who are still suffering, are not given the human rights that they absolutely deserve. I’m not talking about Germany, I’m talking about Saudi Arabia, Iran, other parts of the world where people like myself are just used and abused in horrible ways. So, I try my best to avoid that type of explicit message, but it’s there. It’s there, and that gives me some comfort that I’m not letting myself down consciously on subjects that mean a lot to me and piss me off.”
The film festival program says of the documentary, “[T]he film captures how Judas Priest defined the sound and look of metal, and also made it more inclusive. Sexuality, censorship, community – The Ballad of Judas Priest speaks directly to our current moment.”
The late Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Run-DMC, and Smashing Pumpkins co-founder Billy Corgan are among the prominent recording artists who appear in the documentary. So does Jack Black, the actor and musician.
“Jack Black, who I play Dungeons & Dragons with every week, is [in the movie], he’s spectacular,” Morello noted. “He’s a scene steeler — surprise, surprise.”
Morello commented, “There are two goals in making this film. One was to deliver the goods for Judas Priest fans. Judas Priest fans love and are committed to this band, and we wanted to give them a movie that was going to check every single box for them. The other goal was that if you’ve never heard a note of Judas Priest music, maybe you sort of vaguely have heard the name once or twice, the narrative themes in this, the human stories are so compelling that it doesn’t matter if you [don’t] like heavy metal music, don’t like Judas Priest music at all, that the stories of these people and their 50 years together and the ways that they’ve shaped and changed culture in and of itself is a great enough story to tell, even if they were not one of the greatest heavy metal bands of all time.”