‘It blew my mind’: Woody Harrelson describes ‘brutal’ dinner with Donald and Melania Trump
‘I came up through Hollywood, so I’ve seen narcissists – this guy was beyond,’ said the actor
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Your support makes all the difference.Woody Harrelson has recounted a “brutal” dinner with Donald Trump, describing it as “so bad” he had to “go outside and burn one”.
The dinner in question took place in 2002, some 15 years before Trump became president, and his wife Melania and former pro wrestler and ex-governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura, a friend of Harrelson’s, were also present.
“So Jesse Ventura is a buddy of mine,” explained the Zombieland 2 actor, “and he called me up – and this is in, oh, 2002 – and said, ‘Donald Trump is going to try to convince me to be his running mate for the Democratic ticket in 2004. Will you be my date?’ I said, ‘Yeah, man.’”
He told Esquire: “So we all met at Trump Tower, sat down. Melania was there, only she wasn’t his wife yet. And it was, let me tell you, a brutal dinner. Two and a half hours.
“The fun part was watching Jesse’s moves. It would look like Trump had him pinned, was going to get him to say yes, and then Jesse would slip out at the last second.
“Now, at a fair table with four people, each person is entitled to 25 percent of the conversation, right? I’d say Melania got about 0.1 percent, maybe. I got about 1 percent. And the governor, Jesse, he got about 3 percent. Trump took the rest. It got so bad I had to go outside and burn one before returning to the monologue monopoly.”
Harrelson added that he “came up through Hollywood” so he’s “seen narcissists” but that Trump was “beyond”.
“It blew my mind,” he said. “He did say one thing that was interesting, though. He said, ‘You know, I’m worth four billion dollars,’ or maybe he said five billion dollars – one of those numbers, I forget. Anyway, he said, ‘I’m worth however many billion dollars. But when I die, no matter how much it is, I know my kids are going to fight over it.’
“That was the one true statement he made that night, and I thought, Okay, yeah, that’s pretty cool.”
Harrelson can next be seen in Zombieland: Double Tap, released in UK cinemas on 18 October 2019
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