Netflix’s The Night Agent star Gabriel Basso says he has no regrets about portraying Vice President JD Vance in the 2020 film, Hillbilly Elegy, based on Vance’s 2016 memoir. “He’s a cool dude,” the actor said.
“Did you ever imagine when you were playing [Vance] that he’d be in the White House?” the Associated Press asked Basso during a Wednesday interview, to which the actor replied, “No. No, it’s crazy.”
“And it is wild to think that I’ll be forever associated with his pipeline [to becoming Vice President],” he added.
The Hillbilly Elegy star went on to point out that now whenever people type in “vice president,” they will see “portrayed by Gabriel Basso.”
“That’s a wild historical thing that I’ve now done,” Basso laughed, to which the Associated Press asked, “Any regrets?”
“No,” the actor replied. “I mean, at the time, he wasn’t even in politics.”
“It’d be like like asking somebody, ‘Do you regret being a friend to whoever in middle school?’ It’s like, you just knew them, and you worked with them and you were a part of their life and everything,” he added.
Basso echoed his sentiments in another recent interview, telling Variety, “It’s kind of weird to be included in that timeline. When he’s thinking about his life — they made a movie of his book, and my name will always be in the description.”
The actor added that he and Vance had “talked a little bit” before the film was shot.
“He’s a cool dude,” Basso said. “We’re both from the Midwest. We just talked about life — about growing up in the woods.”
Netflix’s 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of Vance’s hardscrabble upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, and follows his journey breaking out of poverty and eventually landing himself in Yale Law School — with the help of his maternal grandparents, “Papaw” and “Mamaw.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
