Gabriel Basso said he doesn’t have any regrets about portraying Vice President JD Vance in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2020 film based on Vance’s 2016 memoir of the same name.
“At the time, he wasn’t even in politics,” Basso told The Associated Press in a clip posted to TikTok on Wednesday. “It’d be 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.”
Basso, who now stars in “The Night Agent” on Netflix, told the AP that it’s “wild” to think he will forever be associated with Vance’s “pipeline” to the White House.
“That’s a wild historical thing that I’ve now done,” Basso said.
Basso also told Variety that he and Vance “talked a little bit” before Basso filmed the movie.
“He’s a cool dude,” Basso said. “We’re both from the Midwest. We just talked about life — about growing up in the woods.”
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“Hillbilly Elegy,” directed by Ron Howard, tells the story of Vance growing up poor in Ohio while he was raised by his maternal grandparents and his mother, who misused substances. Glenn Close plays Vance’s grandmother in the film, while Amy Adams plays his mother.
The memoir and movie were released before Vance had entered politics. In 2016, years before he became Donald Trump’s running mate and eventually vice president, Vance called himself a “never-Trump guy.”
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