Actor Tim Robbins likened President Donald Trump to a “petulant, overgrown child monster” as he accepted an award at an Eastern European film award ceremony on Friday.
Standing on stage at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, held in Karlovy Vary, in the Czech Republic, Robbins launched into a long exposition on how Biff Tannen, the antagonistic character in the 1980s film Back to the Future, is somehow just like President Trump, The Wrap reported.
Robbins said Trump is like a “child abuser” and lamented that “Somehow we have… willingly chosen to go backwards to a world full of ignorance and distrust.”
As he accepted the 2018 Crystal Globe award for impact on world cinema, the Shawshank Redemption star reflected on his failed audition for the role of Biff Tannen back in 1983 and said that the movie was an apt description of our president and the time in which we live.
Robbins said he auditioned for the film hoping to get the Tannen role, a character who he described as “The arrogant, childish bully. The petulant, overgrown child monster.”
Explaining why he was thinking of that movie, Robbins continued saying, “It occurred to me the other day that we are living through a Marty McFly moment. ” Robbins added that the film was about going back in time to the 1950s, but what the lead character found wasn’t so wonderful. “What he found … wasn’t a romantic, nostalgic time but an Oedipal nightmare. A time of bullying, a time of intolerance and ignorance.”
“Despite our freedom and liberation from intolerance we somehow, through the cynical use and manipulation of advancement in technology — and not a DeLorean car but a device we can hold in our hand — have traveled back in time,” Robbins insisted. “We have not gone back to the future, we have gone back to the 1950s.”
Robbins said that through the use of our iPhones and computers we have become “puppets of propaganda that appeals to our spiritual weakness and our jealousy of others.”
“Bullies have no power without fear, so at this Marty McFly moment, we artists … have to figure out how to get back to the future. Fix this broken DeLorean car and get back to the world of progress,” the Oscar-winner piously opined.
He concluded, exclaiming that significant change won’t happen on our cell phones because “those that have taken us back to the ’50s have already controlled the programming and algorithm that delivered us to the child abuser in the White House and [to] gigantic tax breaks for the wealthy.”
Robbins ended with an appeal, “This new revolution has to come from our hearts.”
The Mystic River star was a big supporter of failed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election and even appeared at rallies for the self-proclaimed socialist from Vermont. He has also been a virulent Trump detractor.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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