- Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance is openly feuding with actress Jennifer Lawrence.
- Last week, Lawrence called Vance a “rich twat” and accused him of faking his “hillbilly” persona.
- Vance said she “should leave politics to the people who actually vote and try to run in elections.”
Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance is openly feuding with Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence.
In a Vogue interview published September 6, Lawrence said she was disgusted by the idea of Vance running in Ohio.
In the same interview, she said she used to think she was a Republican but later became solidly anti-Trump, and that she had recurring nightmares about Fox News host Tucker Carlson after the Supreme Court gutted Roe.
“He’s not a hillbilly if he wrote a huge book. Rich twat,” Lawrence said of Vance. “I mean, I’m a rich twat, but I’m not running for office pretending that I’m not.”
Lawrence, who grew up in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, was referring to Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” The best-selling memoir about Vance’s life in the rust belt, published in 2016, was picked up by Netflix, which said in 2019 that it was spending $45 million to turn it into a movie.
Lawrence told Vogue she felt compelled to speak up about politics: “You have to be political. It’s too dire. Politics are killing people.”
On Saturday, Vance made an appearance on Fox News, where host Brian Kilmeade asked him if Lawrence was implying that “people in rural America can’t read.” Vance said he thought Lawrence’s comments were a “classic example of Hollywood getting involved in politics.”
“That’s sort of the implication is that those of us who actually do buy books and read out here in the heartland are somehow not representative. I think that’s ridiculous,” Vance said. “I know a lot of people, a lot of friends and family who do like to read books, including mine.”
He added that he thought people have “tuned out the politics of Hollywood.”
“They’re there for entertainment,” Vance said of Hollywood figures like Lawrence. “I think when they do it well, great, but at the end of the day, they should leave politics to the people who actually vote and try to run in elections in this country.”
Vance, once known to be anti-Trump, is now a supporter of the former president. In 2016, Vance suggested to a law school friend that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” By 2022, he had switched allegiances, telling Vanity Fair he was “wrong about Trump” in the past. For his part, Trump has acknowledged that Vance used to disapprove of him, but said he has “put that aside.”
In April, Ohio Republicans urged Trump not to back Vance for the Senate, asking that he pick a less risky candidate to endorse. However, Trump persisted in backing Vance and announced his endorsement on April 15. Vance won his primary in May and is now narrowly ahead of Democratic candidate Tim Ryan.
According to reporting from Insider’s Madison Hall, the Yale-educated Vance made $347,752 in royalties in 2020 from “Hillbilly Elegy.” In 2021, his earnings from the book grew to $475,380. Vance, a venture capitalist, also made $327,083 from his job at Narya Capital Management in Ohio in 2021.
Representatives for Lawrence and Vance did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
