Ben Stiller Says Donald Trump Cameo Will Not Be Edited Out of Zoolander
Actor and director Ben Stiller made it clear the Donald Trump cameo in Zoolander will not be edited out of the film.
Stiller appeared on The New Abnormal podcast with The Last Laugh podcast host Matt Wilstein and the Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson, where he discussed Donald Trump and Melania Trump’s cameo in Zoolander.
As you can see below, Donald Trump’s cameo sees him telling a reporter, “Look, without Derek Zoolander, male modeling wouldn’t be what it is today.”
https://youtu.be/KOs_A-nzesA
Stiller detailed that the cameo will not be edited out and provided some background about the cameo explaining that it was taped at the VH1 Fashion Awards.
But before Stiller got to talking about the Donald Trump cameo in Zoolander, he was asked by Jong-Fast, “Do you think it is harder to make art in a time of preposterous politics?”
Stiller responded, “Well, honestly, I don’t know if its the politics as much as just the atmosphere of the political correctness now and everybody being afraid to say something that’s offensive and rightfully so in most cases. But comedically, I think it’s definitely challenging.”
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He added, “I haven’t been out there really doing it for awhile in terms of movies or sketch comedy, or anything like that. So, I think it’s much tougher now.”
Stiller then detailed that movies he worked on the past more than likely would not have been able to get away with what they did at the time.
He explained, “And when I think of movies that I worked on the past and I look at them now definitely there are jokes and scenes and things that I go, ‘Oh I don’t know if we could have gotten away with that today at all.”
Later in the podcast Stiller would be asked about Trump’s cameo in Zoolander and what he remembered from it.
He responded, “Well, we were shooting at the now defunct VH1 Fashion Awards and that’s where that scene took place. And so we shot at the real fashion awards and basically as people were coming up the red carpet we pulled them aside to talk about Derek Zoolander and so Trump and Melania did that.”
He went on to detail how Trump was in a number of cameos back then like Home Alone. He explained, “There were so many movies that had a silly cameo from Donald Trump and that he became sort of like a thing. Donald Trump, he represented a certain thing.”
Finally, Stiller details that he’s had a number of people request that Trump be edited out of the film, but he said he doesn’t plan on doing that.
Stiller stated, “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.”
Stiller then went on to recount a story about President Trump’s interest in Zoolander.
He detailed, “There was a funny story that Chris Matthews told though about… He was interviewing Trump during the campaign. He told him a few times that he was interviewing Trump during the campaign and there was a commercial break. And Zoolander 2 had come out and Zoolander 2 was a big bomb and didn’t do well.”
He continued, “And Trump started talking to him during the commercial break, they were talking about like nuclear arms or something or what his stance would be with the Russians and then they got to the commercial break and Trump brought up Zoolander 2 to Chris during the break.”
“And started talking about why he thought the movie didn’t do well and he started going into detail with him about you know it’s the movie wasn’t that funny it’s just that in the culture people don’t care about male models anymore and so the audience is changing. And Chris found it so interesting that he found it fascinating as opposed to what to do with the Russians and nuclear arms proliferation,” Stiller concluded.
Stiller then details that Matthews told the story a number of times on the air before he sent him an email asking him to stop talking about how bad Zoolander 2 did.
What do you make of Stiller’s comments regarding Trump’s cameo in Zoolander?
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