Nick Offerman won’t argue with costar Dennis Quaid over Trump

Nick Offerman is reflecting on his time working with Dennis Quaid while being on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The Parks & Recreation star, who is an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump and the current Republican Party establishment, discussed working with Quaid, who is a vocal Trump supporter, on the thriller Sovereign.

“Dennis Quaid is a fantastic actor whom I’ve looked up to my whole life, and he [is] better in this film than almost anything I’ve seen him in,” Offerman said in a lengthy response to a Reddit comment asking about how he engages with Trump supporters like Quaid.

He elaborated, “We didn’t have a lot of time together on set, so the context wasn’t really conducive to [digging] into settling the world’s problems, or even just those of America. ‘Good morning, Dennis. How about those Epstein files? Anyway, want to run our lines?'”

Offerman suggested that the most important political battle is between everyday citizens and the wealthy elite that influence politicians and campaigns, not between voters on opposite sides of the aisle.

“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,” he argued. “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.”

The Civil War actor explained that as he interacts with Trump voters, he tries to remain conscious of the misinformation that plagues contemporary politics. 

“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 [off] their back,” Offerman wrote. “They are on the receiving end of an absolute firehose of misinformation, so it’s really cognitively dissonant (impossible) to engage in rational discourse.”

Offerman also said that he strives to bring strong values and compassion into his work, since actually arguing over political disagreements seems nearly impossible.

“It feels somewhat futile to attempt to argue any of these points at face value, 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,” he explained.

The Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning actor also acknowledged that American liberals also have a number of flaws, but emphasized his belief that the Democratic Party is better than the alternative.

“I think we’re all wrong about a lot of things, but The reason I lean left is because at the end of the Republican plan is austerity and literal fascism,” he wrote. “At the end of the Democrat plan is health care and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everybody. The whole goddamn things [sic] is rife with flaws and always will be, governing millions upon millions of humans, but if ‘my side’ encouraged me to hate anybody, I’d go looking for another side.”

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Inspired by true events, Sovereign sees Offerman portray Jerry Kane, a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” who engages in a deadly standoff with a chief of police (Quaid). 

The film’s director, Christian Swegal, shared similar sentiments to Offerman’s musings while discussing the January 6 riots with Entertainment Weekly.

“If you can get past the first layer of judgment, a lot of those people came to this from a place of total desperation: poverty, mental illness, not having access to support structures,” the filmmaker said of the mob in Washington, D.C. “I think there’s this sort of knee-jerk reaction for society to want to condemn, and certainly in some cases that’s the right answer. But there should also be a conversation about how this happened. How does somebody end up in that situation?”