Nick Offerman Explains Why He Wouldn’t ‘Pick an Argument’ With Trump-Supporter Co-Star Dennis Quaid: ‘Something I Try to Handle With Nuance’
Nick Offerman is a publicly vocal critic of Donald Trump, but he’s not going out of his way to get into fights with Trump’s supporters, and that very much includes coworkers — such as his recent co-star, Dennis Quaid.
The actors appear together in the thriller “Sovereign,” which tells the story of the 2010 West Memphis police shootings. Offerman plays Jerry Kane, the member of the fringe right wing “Sovereign Citizen” movement who along with his 16-year-old son attacked and then killed two police officers and wounded two others before being killed themselves in a later shootout. Quaid plays a local police chief overseeing the manhunt to catch them.
In a Reddit AMA on Friday, Offerman was asked by one user how he interacts with Trump-supporting colleagues like Quaid in particular. Admitting the issue is “tricky,” Offerman explained at length how much he respects Quaid as an actor and as an influence, and how he prefers to approach political interactions with “nuance,” and lean in on a “message of empathy and true patriotism into the work that I do.”
Quaid, Offerman began, is “a fantastic actor whom I’ve looked up to my whole life,” and is “better in this film than almost anything I’ve seen him in.” The two didn’t share many scenes together, Offerman continued, which meant there wouldn’t have been much opportunity to get into politics, something the actor joked would have sounded like, “Good morning, Dennis. How about those Epstein files? Anyway, want to run our lines?”
“Dealing with Trump supporters in the world is something I try to handle with nuance, because I know many others around the states who are very good people and citizens and would give you the shirt of their back,” Offerman explained. “They are on the receiving end of an absolute firehose of misinformation, so it’s really cognitively dissonant (impossible) to engage in rational discourse.”
The “Parks and Rec” star continued that Trump supporters as a result “readily voted for and support an adjudicated rapist and felon (and crook and creep and fraudster and liar and on and on) and are able to dismiss these national embarrassments and humiliations because their news channels tell them that the decisions of actual juries of their peers are a hoax or somehow false.”
As a result, the actor continued, attempting to argue over that stuff “feels somewhat futile… and so instead of engaging with the wild amount of hatred that comes my way in the form of homophobia and toxic masculinity and so forth, I try to simply pump that message of empathy and true patriotism into the work I do.”
Offerman also emphasized that in his view, Trump supporters and their opponents face a much bigger shared problem, namely that “we are all being fed the information that the billionaires and the corporations want us to be fed, they are profiting rapaciously from us all shaking our fists at each other and hollering about what latest science Joe Rogan’s expertise has blessed us with, when it requires all of us to make this country great.”
“I think we’re all wrong about a lot of things,” he added, “but the reason I lean left is because at the end of the Republican plan is austerity and literal fascism, sad military muscle parades and mounted troops in the [sic] LA, the coolest city in the world, and all the rest of the current bed-sh—tings, and at the end of the Democrat plan is health care and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everybody.”
Governing so many people is rife with flaws and always will be,” Offerman went on, “but if ‘my side’ encouraged me to hate anybody, I’d go looking for another side. No matter who we voted for, it requires all of us (including an overwhelming number of immigrants) to make the great bounty this country produces, and is then so disproportionately pocketed by the ultra-wealthy, so I am not going to pick an argument with Dennis Quaid over our political leanings because I’m going to shake his hand and try to make a great film.”
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