Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt went viral after criticizing former President Donald Trump's criminality while sitting down for the Unilad podcast with his Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. co-star Kevin Bacon.
He began by asking Bacon the following question:
"What real-life crimes or mysteries have you been fascinated by?"
Bacon responded that he was fascinated by The Jinx, the HBO documentary about convicted murderer Robert Durst, as well as The Staircase, a Netflix miniseries about novelist Michael Peterson, who was initially convicted of murdering his wife, Kathleen, only to be retried years later and submitted an Alford plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter.
But Gordon-Levitt did not hold back:
"I'm going to just go for it right now. Are you ready to go with me? How about when the former president called up an election official in Georgia and said, 'You need to change the votes, 11,000, so I can win and I'm the president and you need to do this'?"
The actor was referring to a now-infamous phone call Trump had with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Secretary of State, in which he ignored any argument that went against his insistence that he won an election that had already been decided for then-candidate Joe Biden. In fact, several recounts—and an audit of the result—determined the election was free and fair.
After Bacon agreed that that is indeed "a real-life crime," Gordon-Levitt addressed the audience:
"That is a real-life crime, yeah. Come at me. Go ahead. I know you're pissed."
"But let's just talk about the fact that the former president is a full-on criminal."
You can hear what he said in the video below.
@unilad Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn't hold back his thoughts on Donald Trump! 👀😮 #UNILAD #Original #donaldtrump #trump #josephgordonlevitt #uselection #republican
The clip of the actor's remarks also went viral on X, formerly Twitter.
Many agreed with his factual assessment.
This isn't the first time Gordon-Levitt has criticized Trump.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2020 ahead of the release of The Trial of the Chicago 7—in which he played a conservative prosecutor of a group of anti-Vietnam war protesters—he referred to Trump as a "complete despot" and “completely in opposition to the liberties that my country was founded on."
Gordon-Levitt, who made his comments while news outlets reported on that year's Democratic National Convention, addressed right-wing criticisms of groups like Black Lives Matter, saying "Trump has leveraged that to his advantage in a way that’s obviously been effective for him, but is infuriating for a leftist like myself.”
@SecretaryBurgum/X
@Doug Ellin/X
@evanrachelwood/Instagram