John Oliver Jokes About the Confusion Over What ‘Emilia Pérez’ Is Actually About on ‘Last Week Tonight’
John Oliver returned with his Season 12 premiere of Last Week Tonight on Sunday night, where he took aim at Donald Trump and Elon Musk for their dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development.
Last week, the Trump Administration instituted a funding freeze of USAID, which oversees humanitarian aid and development work around the world, and reportedly put more than 8,000 employees on leave and shut down all overseas missions. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the administration to temporarily lift that funding freeze.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Oliver spent most of Sunday’s episode of his HBO show talking about Trump, noting that USAID’s work helps stop disease prevention overseas and makes diplomacy easier by earning goodwill in other countries.
“But if you listened to Trump’s press secretary, you’d think that all we were doing with USAID money was complete nonsense,” he said, showing a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaking on C-SPAN.
“If you look at the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years,” she said, “these are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on: $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap, and I know the American people don’t either.”
Opined Oliver: “If that sounds like mostly bullshit and spin to you, it’s because it is, though I will say, ‘a DEI musical in Ireland, a transgender opera in Colombia and a transgender comic book in Peru’ all sound like her best guesses for what Emilia Pérez is.”
Emilia Pérez leads the Oscar nominations with a total of 13, setting a record for a non-English-language film. The Spanish-language musical thriller from French director Jacques Audiard defies traditonal genre labels. It stars trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón as a male drug kingpin in Mexico who enlists Zoe Salda?a’s lawyer to help him transition to a woman; Selena Gomez plays her wife.
Gascón, the Netflix film’s Spain-born star, was nominated for best actress, making her the first openly transgender performer to be so honored. However, since the noms were announced, years-old offensive social media posts made by Gascón surfaced. Those posts included racially charged comments about Black people, immigrants and Islam. Gascón has apologized.
Regarding Leavitt’s quotes about USAID, Oliver continued in reference to her comments: “But the thing is, not only is she wildly mischaracterizing some of those projects, the last three that she listed weren’t even funded by USAID, but by grants from the State Department. Again and again, the Trump administration and Elon Musk have boosted misinformation about where USAID money has gone.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
