Actor Ben Stiller pushed back against critics who have urged him to remove President Trump and first lady Melania Trump’s cameo from one of his films.
Stiller, 54, said in an interview this week that people have asked him to remove Trump’s cameo from his 2001 comedy Zoolander but he has refrained due to his stated belief that different time periods should be respected.,
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“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, who has been a vocal critic of Trump’s presidency, said about the cameo.
“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 continued.
“There were so many movies [back then] that had a silly cameo from Donald Trump,” Stiller said. “He represented a certain thing.”
Stiller also spoke about the rise of “cancel culture” and “political correctness” in the comedy world today.
“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,” he said, adding, “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.'”
