Dennis Quaid is calling out the “double standard” in Hollywood when it comes to support for President Donald Trump.
“There’s either ‘F Trump’ from the other side or ‘I love Trump’ from a few of us who speak about it,” he told Fox News Digital.
He continued, “Of course, there’s a double standard, but there’s a double standard on everything. You’ve got common sense, and then you’ve got like some kind of whipped-up scenario where, you know, it might be true, you know, that I could compete in women’s sports or, you know, that I could, whatever, vote twice or whatever it is.”
Quaid said he had been speaking to the president recently about his new movie, “War Machine,” which was released exclusively on Netflix earlier this month. Alan Ritchson costars in the action/sci-fi film.
“He said, ‘What do you got coming out?’ I said, ‘War Machine.’ He went, ‘Oh yeah, I can’t wait to see that. We need that kind of movie. What’s it about?’ I said, ‘It’s aliens versus humans.’ He said, ‘You know I’m going to release the file,’” he laughed. “So, we may have a prequel by the time he does it, you never know.”
Quaid called flying with Trump on Air Force One “fantasy camp.”
“It was pretty amazing,” he said. “There’s everything you really kind of thought it would be.”
The 71-year-old said the president’s plane has a room similar to what’s depicted in every action movie: “With the, you know, the military guys, they’re at their radar screens or whatever. The nuclear football’s just sitting there, and it was something else.”
“The Parent Trap” star said that he was with the president before the US launched coordinated strikes against Iran late last month, complimenting his “poker face.”
He said the president was talking about, “‘What are we going to do about Iran, you know?’ He didn’t want to do it. And you could tell that it weighed heavy on his heart, because he knew sending any of our service people into harm’s way, it’s probably the biggest, hardest decision that I think the President of the United States could make. And it weighed heavy on him, but, you know, he had quite a poker face at the same time because he wasn’t really giving anything away, but you could feel his heart. That’s what it was.”
Riding on the plane felt like going back to the 1990s, Quaid said.
“Everything is exactly the same,” he revealed. Bush One got the plane, I think, for a month and Clinton used it. I mean, you could remember the classic photographs even from back then, like [former President George W.] Bush being on the plane from, you know, when 9/11 happened. And everything is perfectly well taken care of, but that plane is old.”
He added, “We’ve got to get him a new one. Not for, just for Trump, but for, you know, the next one, because it’s 30 years old. Seemed like my Bonanza had better avionics than it did, more up to date. I’m sure they have a few hidden things in there, but you know.”
The royal family of Qatar is gifting the US government a luxury Boeing 747 that Trump plans to use as Air Force One, but after he leaves office, it will transfer to his presidential library.
Turning to his new movie, “War Machine,” Quaid said he was drawn to the story because “it felt like a really kind of old-time movie, you know, like ‘Rambo’ and the really classic, really great kind of movies of the ‘80s.”
“We needed a movie like this to come along, and it really does deliver. It really does,” he said.
He was also drawn to the film because of Alan Ritchson.
“He’s a great star, you know, you like to watch him, he’s in great shape, and he can do all that action stuff, and you believe it,” Quaid said. “Patrick Hughes, who plays the helicopter pilot at the end, by the way, he was a great director, and he was like a kid in a candy store doing this movie. Made it really a lot of fun.”
Quaid said he was “very grateful” that he got to play a general who never got his uniform dirty while Ritchson was in the trenches.
“I’ve been there before,” he explained. “There was a period of my time where, you know, it’d be like three o’clock in the morning, and I’m up to my neck in mud in Slovakia, you know, acting to three tennis balls on a stick that’s supposed to be the dragon that’s flying in to like fire me up.”
When telling military stories, Quaid said it’s important to “get it right.”
“At least I want it to feel right, and, you know, I was never in the service, and I really respect those who were,” he said. “When I turned 18, that was like the year they went to the volunteer army. . . . But I really have a lot of respect for our military and what they do for all of us. You know, it’s amazing what they do.”
Quaid said he wanted to make a movie that service members would want to watch.
“The older you get, the more you don’t take things for granted so much, I think, about how good we really have it here,” Quaid said about patriotism. “Also, the older I get, the more I’ve traveled, the more I know, and stuff, how rare what we have here in the United States is. It’s such a good thing. It is the wonder of the world what we’ve got here.”
Quaid added that he loves his career more now than he did in his 20s and 30s, “because I’m not trying to like, you know, be somebody or, you know, get awards or this or that … I’m doing things because I really love to do them. And that makes it so much fun. And especially when you have fire in your belly to do it, you know, it’s just a blast.”
He said at this point, he continues to act for his “own enjoyment, not for something that I’m going to achieve or whatever. I love acting, and I love it more than ever and the older you get, the kind of really kind of better the parts to tell you the truth.”
In a podcast interview earlier this month, Quaid talked about how 1998’s “The Parent Trap” with Lindsay Lohan gave him a “whole other career.”
“I was playing bad boys and stuff like that,” he said, until the ‘90s when he went to rehab, which he jokingly referred to as “cocaine school.”
“Then I had kids of my own,” he added. “Then along comes ‘Parent Trap’ and, you know, it just kind of changed everything.”
He told the “Out of Order” podcast that he loves acting more now than he did then.
“I love to come in and like make something out of nothing because that’s what you’re doing every day is you’re, you know, you’ve got these words on a page and stuff like that, but you’re trying to do what they call ‘magic’ or whatever, but, just, you know, trying to convey something that you don’t really even fully realize what it is. You know, you’re all there trying to create something out of nothing. At the end of the day, maybe you kind of got a piece of it.”
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