Night Agent star Gabriel Basso reflects on playing ‘cool dude’ JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy

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Gabriel Basso has offered a more measured view on JD Vance than his Hillbilly Elegy co-stars.

Before becoming Donald Trump’s vice president, Vance was known for writing the popular memoir, which was later adapted into a Netflix film starring The Night Agent actor Basso, Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

In the run-up to the election, which led to Vance successfully becoming America’s VP, the film’s director Ron Howard said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the writer-turned-politician amid controversial comments he made on the campaign trail.

Basso, who can currently be seen in season two of hit Netflix series The Night Agent, is the latest Hillbilly Elegy actor to comment on Vance – and he’s called him “a cool guy”.

“It’s kind of weird to be included in that timeline,” Basso said, telling Variety: “They made a movie of his book and my name will always be in the description.”

He continued: “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 was more measured in his words on Vance than Howard as well as Close, who was Oscar nominated for her role as Vance’s grandmother in the film.

When Howard was accused of “unleashing” the “polarising, volatile conservative” via the film, the director told Deadline: “Well, we didn’t talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie because I was interested in his upbringing and that survival tale. That’s what we mostly focused on.

“However, based on the conversations that we had during that time, I just have to say I’m very surprised and disappointed by much of the rhetoric that I’m reading and hearing. People do change, and I assume that’s the case. Well, it’s on record.”

Howard continued: “When we spoke around the time that I knew him, he was not involved in politics or claimed to be particularly interested. So that was then.”

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Meanwhile, Close suggested the “change” in. Vance’s personality over the last five years might have stemmed from “power”, calling it “probably the biggest aphrodisiac for a human being”.

Before Vance was a couple of steps away from the most powerful position in the world, he was just a self-proclaimed “hillbilly” raised in the Appalachian mountains, living in poverty, despair and dysfunction. His journey to Yale Law School was documented in the memoir, which was published in 2017.

In the introduction to the book, he said: “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that could justify a complete stranger spending money to read about. I am not a senator, a governor, or a cabinet secretary.”

The film was described by The Independent’s critic Clarisse Loughrey as “a sickeningly irresponsible parade of death and despair”.