Viola Davis, the film star who appears in the anti-union, pro-charter movie “Won’t Back Down,” recently appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show.

Davis is a graduate of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. This is the school that was targeted for closure in 2010, where there was a pitched battle between the district/state leadership and the teachers in the school. When Davis won an Academy Award in 2010, she gave a shout-out to her alma mater, Central Falls High School, and that gave the teachers there a big boost.

So now she is a star in a movie that encourages parents and teachers to “seize control” of their public school and turn it into a privately managed charter school. This is known as the “parent trigger” and is advocated by the rightwing group ALEC, which developed model legislation to encourage privatization of public schools.

When she appeared with Ellen, she was fund-raising for the Segue Institute, a charter school in Central Falls, not for the high school that educated her. Ellen gave her a check for $10,000 for the charter school.

The film will be shown in Central Falls, cosponsored by the charter school and the Central Falls Drama Club, to benefit the charter school.

One more irony: Ellen, who is openly gay, is promoting a film produced by Walden Media, owned by Philip Anschutz, an evangelical and fervent conservative, who funded anti-gay campaigns in Colorado and California.

So many ironies.