Exclusive Scene from Hillbilly Elegy: See Glenn Close’s Caring Grandma
Mamaw (Glenn Close) makes sure her grandson JD (Owen Asztalos) is okay in an exclusive clip from the Netflix drama “Hillbilly Elegy.”
USA TODAY
Ron Howard talks about the man behind his film “Hillbilly Elegy” and how Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has changed.
Howard, 70, a child actor and now director, told Variety at the Toronto International Film Festival that he was “surprised and concerned by the rhetoric of this campaign,” referring to Vance’s campaign as the vice presidential candidate for former President Donald Trump.
Howard directed the 2020 Netflix film, based on Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but he seems surprised and shocked by the change in Vance since his experience with him back then.
Since the film, Close has also made comments about JD Vance. Here’s what they had to say about him.
What did Ron Howard say about JD Vance?
“It’s not conceivable that I would vote for Donald Trump as president again, whoever would have been vice president,” Howard said. “But given my experience five or six years ago, I would say I was surprised.”
Howard also addressed the need for people to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
“And look, we have to go out and vote, no matter who,” Howard said. “But be thoughtful. Listen to what the candidates are saying today, that’s what’s really relevant, it’s who they are today. And make a decision, an informed one.”
What did Glenn Close say about JD Vance?
Actress Glenn Close, who played Vance’s Mamaw in “Hillbilly Elegy,” spoke out against his comments about the “childless cat lady” in a social media post of her own last month. She posted a picture of herself and her cat and wrote, “Eve would have left a bleeding mouse head in the bed of anyone who criticizes any lady with a CAT!”
What did Vance say about childless female cats?
In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vance spoke about the direction the country was heading, run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy, too.”
“It’s just a basic fact — look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And what is the point of having given our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
A video of the interview resurfaced on social media after he was chosen as Donald Trump’s Republican vice presidential candidate.
What is “Hillbilly Elegy” about?
“Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” was written by Vance in 2016 and later made into a film.
The filmed story is about Vance growing up between the Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio, and the city of Jackson, Kentucky, his detailed upbringing from “abject poverty” to the middle class, and his graduation from Yale Law School.
It was shaped by his Appalachian values, socioeconomic problems, addiction, and family dynamics.
