Glenn Close on J.D. Vance Flip-Flopping on Trump: ‘You Only Hope That People in Our Government Have a Moral Backbone’
Glenn Close has fond memories of J.D. Vance visiting the set of Ron Howard’s film adaptation of his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” She earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Mamaw, Vance’s grandmother, opposite Amy Adams as the vice-presidential candidate’s mother, in the 2020 Netflix drama.
“He brought his wife and his kid. He helped [Gabriel Basso], the actor who was playing him,” Close told me Wednesday night at the Los Angeles premiere of her new Netflix horror movie, Lee Daniels’ “The Deliverance.” “Other members of the family came. At one point I think one Mamaw’s grandsons came and when he saw me, he burst into tears because they said, ‘There’s Mamaw.’”
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But now, Close isn’t feeling so nostalgic about Vance. “You only hope that people in our government have a moral backbone and that they don’t say one thing and then say something that’s 150 degrees different,” she said, seemingly referencing Vance flip-flopping from an outspoken Trump critic to becoming his running mate.
Close’s comment comes a couple of weeks after she took Vance to task for his “childless cat ladies” remarks.
“Eve would have left a bleeding mouse head in the bed of anyone who criticized any kind of lady with a CAT!” Close captioned a phots of herself and her cat, Eve, on Instagram.
I asked Close what she might say to Vance if she had the opportunity to talk with him today. “I wouldn’t sit down with him,” she said. “What good would it do?”
Shortly after Vance won his Ohia senator seat, Howard told Variety he was surprised by the up-and-coming politician’s embrace of Trump and the GOP’s conservative ideology.
“To be honest, I was surprised,” Howard said in November 2022. “When I was getting to know J.D., we didn’t talk politics because I wasn’t interested in that about his life. I was interested in his childhood and navigating the particulars of his family and his culture so that’s what we focused on in our conversation. To me, he struck me as a very moderate center-right kind of guy.”
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