As cancel culture continues to rage, one Hollywood star, Ben Stiller, is refusing to bend to the whims of the progressive left.
The 54-year-old entertainer said this week he is not interested in removing President Donald Trump’s cameo from his popular 2001 comedy “Zoolander.”
Recalling the former reality TV star’s impromptu shoot during an appearance on The Daily Beast’s “The New Abnormal” podcast, Stiller said it was a last-minute decision at the VH1 Fashion Awards red carpet pre-show.
“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,” the actor said. “I’ve had people reach out to me and say, ‘You should edit Donald Trump out of ‘Zoolander,’’ but at the end of the day, that was a time when that exists and that happened.”
“There were so many movies [back then] that had a silly cameo from Donald Trump,” he continued, later adding, “He represented a certain thing.”
“Zoolander” was just one of a handful of movies in which the now-president made cameo appearances. Trump was also featured in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” in 1992 and “Two Weeks Notice” in 2002. The real estate mogul also showed up on TV shows like “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Sex and the City,” and “Spin City.”
Speaking to the Toronto Sun, the “Meet the Parents” star recounted a story told to him by MSNBC host Chris Matthews.
“He was interviewing Trump during the [2016] campaign and there was a commercial break,” Stiller said. “‘Zoolander 2’ had come out and … was a big bomb, didn’t do well. And they’d been talking about nuclear arms or something and what [Trump’s] stance would be with the Russians, and then … Trump brought up ‘Zoolander 2’ and started talking about Why he thought the movie didn’t do well.”
“And he started going into detail, [saying,] ‘It’s just that in the culture, people don’t care about male models anymore,’” he continued. “And Chris found it so interesting that he was so fascinated about why ‘Zoolander 2’ didn’t do well as opposed to what to do with the Russians and nuclear arms proliferation.”