Hollywood has made many political pronouncements in the last ten or so years about American politics. They are obviously just as alarmed as the rest of us by what seem to be constant and unstoppable moves toward both national and international dictatorship.
Giancarlo Esposito, however, was the most direct about it when he stood on his soapbox at the Sundance Film Festival and said, “This is time for a revolution—and they don’t even know that’s what they’re starting.”
Esposito, promoting his latest Jon Turturro film, The Only Living Pickpocket, during the festival, drew clear comparisons between the governments in Russia, Iran, and the United States in his remarks to Variety in New York, without holding back or implying that he was using figurative phrases.
He added, “We have to stand up to it. They can’t take us all down. If the whole world showed up on Putin’s doorstep or the Iranians’ doorstep or in Washington, they’d kill 500 or 50 million or however [many], but the rest of us would survive with a new [world].”
At Sundance, Esposito was one of numerous celebrities sporting “ICE Out” pins, which alluded to the general dissatisfaction with the second Trump administration’s statewide expansion of Immigration and Enforcement, as well as the more focused violence that has been occurring in Minneapolis over the past few weeks.
“Some very rich old white men are exerting their power to suppress our own people,” Esposito concluded. “Thus creating a feeling of civil war in the streets, preparing the haters to hate, teaching them how to shoot. This is all a preparation for a very insidious problem that’s happening in our world. And for me, I have to speak out. We will not be ICE’d out. This is not going to happen.”