Comedy star Ricky Gervais has hit upon a new take on Donald Trump- he’s a toddler in a 1980s comedy.
The writer-actor-director, renowned for mercilessly skewering celebrities at award ceremonies, didn’t hold back to Heat Street about the Republican Presidential front-runner at the premiere of his new Netflix comedy film Special Correspondents at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival.
“It’s now so bizarre that I quite like the idea of him being President,” Gervais said of Trump, ‘ It’s like an 80s film when a toddler gets involved in a body swap.
‘They go, ‘What does this button do?’ ‘No, don’t touch that, Donald. Don’t touch the red button, the blue button is for pizza.'”
Gervais added of satirizing Trump: “It’s almost too easy. I can just say, ‘Trump!’ and get a laugh. When he first said he was running for President, I thought he was joking.
“I thought, ‘He’s going to spend some money, be abit more famous and he’ll be happy with that. He couldn’t have believed what has happened. The more crazy things he says, the more people go, ‘Yeah!’ It’s like, ‘I love the uneducated!’ Of course you do, Donald.”
Gervais said a comedic high point of Trump’s campaign was the announcement that he would build a wall along the Mexican border: “My favorite moment was when he said, ‘We’re going to build a wall! I love the idea of him building it and then the wall getting ten feet higher. That was great, like a cartoon.”
Hosting this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, Gervais joked that Trump would deport actresses America Ferrera and Eva Longoria if elected President. Gervais quipped of his comments on Trump: “He’s probably going to have me killed!”
Gervais might have had several 80s films in mind when he made his comments on the Donald:
There’s Look Who’s Talking from 1989 starring John Travolta and Kirstie Alley- who is herself a Trump supporter- in which a talking baby voiced by Bruce Willis wisecracks about his mother’s dating life in New York City:
Or was Gervais thinking of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) in which an eccentric man-child, played by Paul Reubens, sets off on a wacky journey around the US on his bike:
How about Big (1988)? The most successful of the era’s body swap films saw Tom Hanks play a 12-year-old boy who gets his wish to magically be transformed into a 30-year-old man and become a business executive at a Manhattan toy company:
Don’t rule out Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) in which Rick Moranis’ wacky inventor miniaturizes his family by accident.
In Special Correspondents, which Gervais wrote and directed in addition to acting in, he cast Eric Bana to star alongside him as radio journalists who report from a revolution in Ecuador from a New York apartment when they accidentally throw away their passports en route to the airport.
Bana is more known for roles in films such as “The Incredible Hulk” but Gervais added he cast him because, “he’s an idiot like me.”
