Gabriel Basso says it was ‘kind of weird’ to play ‘cool dude’ J.D. Vance

Gabriel Basso is reflecting on the small part he’s played in American political history.

“It’s kind of weird to be included in that timeline” the actor told Variety in a recent interview while discussing his role as J.D. Vance in the 2020 adaptation of the newly-inaugurated vice president’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

“When he’s thinking about his life — they made a movie of his book, and my name will always be in the description,” Basso said. “We talked a little bit. He’s a cool dude. We’re both from the Midwest. We just talked about life — about growing up in the woods.”

Basso, who hails from St. Louis, Mo., received one of the biggest breaks in his career when he was cast in Ron Howard‘s cinematic retelling of Vance’s upbringing between Ohio and Kentucky.

When Howard’s production company Imagine Entertainment won the rights to adapt the book in a 2017 auction, Vance was a Yale law graduate and newly published memoirist with no stated political aspirations. He was also vocally critical of then-President Donald Trump. “My god what an idiot,” he tweeted in reference to Trump in 2016, and the same year described himself as a “never Trump guy” in an interview with Charlie Rose.

After realigning himself with Trump during his 2021 senatorial campaign, Vance was tapped by the former president as the official vice presidential candidate for his 2024 election bid. On Monday, Trump and Vance were sworn into office, after defeating Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the November election.

Basso has been largely silent on the subject of his role as Vance in the 2020 film, even as costars like Glenn Close have taken public jabs at the politician in response to controversial statements on subjects like IVF.

Howard defended the film upon its release as “a truthful family drama” and “a bridge to understanding that we’re more alike than we are different,” but this past September admitted that he was “surprised and concerned by a lot of the rhetoric coming out of that campaign.”

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Basso most recently appeared in a supporting part in Clint Eastwood’s procedural thriller Juror #2, and currently stars in the series adaptation of Matthew Quirk’s The Night Agent on Netflix, which debuts the series’ second season on Thursday, Jan. 23.

Vance has not waded back into the waters of the entertainment industry since Howard gave his memoir the big-screen treatment, but in the days leading up to his inauguration, Trump did announce the appointment of Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, and Jon Voight as “ambassadors” to Hollywood. He explained in a Jan. 16 Truth Social post, “These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest.”