Gael García Bernal used his time at the Oscars to reject President Trump’s proposed border wall.
The Mexican actor took the stage to present the award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday night. The star, who has long been a critic of Trump, compared actors to migrant workers and shared his stance on the plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Flesh and blood actors are migrant workers; we travel all over the world, we build families, we construct stories, we build life that cannot be divided,” García Bernal said on stage. “As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that wants to separate us.”
Shortly after Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, García Bernal explained why he didn’t view the candidate’s controversial rhetoric as harmless.
“I mean, he called Mexicans rapists and drug dealers,” the actor told The Guardian. “How closed-minded and f**king ignorant is that? At first, you don’t listen, but then it reaches a point where you go, OK, now he’s created exactly what he maybe wanted to, which is that people are angry. I’m upset. I’m upset if I listen to anybody talk like that. We started to give Donald Trump so much space, and we started to validate his opinion, as if it’s like, ‘You know, it’s a valid opinion.’ No, it’s not valid. It’s hate discourse, and what follows next is genocide or civil war. I mean, that’s how it begins.”
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