Hollywood star Ben Stiller just refused to back down to the radical Left, which has been calling on him to erase Donald and Melania Trump’s cameo out of his 2001 movie “Zoolander.” He also spoke out to blast political correctness, saying that it has made comedy much harder.
While appearing on “The New Abnormal” podcast, Stiller explained that Trump and Melania were only included in the movie because of where it was being filmed.
“We were shooting at the now defunct VH1 Fashion Awards, and as people were coming up the red carpet, we pulled them aside and asked them to talk about Derek Zoolander, and so Trump and Melania did that,” Stiller said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOs_A-nzesA&feature=emb_title
Though Stiller is not a fan of Trump politically, he has no intention of backing down to leftists who want him to be erased from the movie.
“I’ve had people who reached out to me and said, like, ‘You should edit Donald Trump out of Zoolander,’ and all that,” Stiller said, going on to add, “But at the end of the day, it’s kind of like, again, that was a time when that exists and that happened.”
Stiller also discussed the negative impact political correctness has had on both comedy and filmmaking.
“Honestly, I don’t know if it’s the politics as much as just the atmosphere of the political correctness now and everybody being afraid to say something that’s offensive,” Stiller said. “Comedically, it’s definitely challenging. I think it’s much tougher now, and when I think about movies that I’ve worked on in the past, and I look at them now, definitely there are jokes and scenes and that I go, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we could have gotten away with that today, at all.'”
Stiller specifically referenced his 2008 movie “Tropic Thunder,” which featured Robert Downey Jr. playing an actor who was wearing blackface to portray a black man. It also starred Stiller as a character who was mentally challenged, and he said a film like that could never be made today.
“But at the time— that’s the thing to me that’s so complicated about how we approach what’s appropriate and what’s not in terms of the timeframe that it was made,” Stiller said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that anything was more appropriate at another time but you have to look at the context and realize that that’s what was happening.”
Stiller’s interview (below) begins at the 17:50 mark:
This piece was written by PopZette Staff on July 10, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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