(AFP) Chilean-American actor Pedro Pascal urged Hollywood to “fuck the people that try to make you scared” on Saturday while admitting it was “scary” to speak out against US President Donald Trump.
Asked about Trump’s hardline immigration policies, the “The Last of Us” and “Narcos” star told reporters: “It’s very scary for an actor participating in a movie to sort of speak to issues like this.”
“I’m an immigrant. My parents are refugees from Chile. We fled a dictatorship, and I was privileged enough to grow up in the US after asylum in Denmark… I stand by those protections,” the 50-year-old told a news conference in Cannes.
He stars in new film “Eddington” alongside Joaquin Phoenix, an intense and darkly satirical examination of America’s toxic politics set in New Mexico during the Covid pandemic.
Directed by horror specialist Ari Aster, it premiered at the Cannes film festival on Friday.
Echoing a message from Robert De Niro on the opening night of Cannes, Pascal insisted that the film industry needed to find the courage to resist political pressure.
“So keep telling the stories, keep expressing yourself and keep fighting to be who you are,” he said. “Fuck the people that try to make you scared. And fight back.
“This is the perfect way to do so in telling stories. And don’t let them win.”
De Niro, who accepted a Cannes lifetime achievement award on Tuesday, urged the audience of A-list directors and actors to resist “America’s philistine president”.
Aster parodies everyone in his film from gun-loving southern US conservatives to virtue-signalling white anti-racism activists.
Emma Stone (“La La Land” and “Poor Things”) plays Phoenix’s wife who gets sucked into a world of paedophile-obsessed right-wing conspiracy theorists.
Aster admitted to worrying about America’s direction and set out to dramatise it in his film, whose early satire gradually gives way to much darker material.
Asked Friday if America’s polarised politics and the breakdown in trust in the media could be setting the country on a path to mass violence, he said, “That is certainly something I’m afraid of.
“It feels like nothing is being done to temper the furies right now,” he added.
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