The actor who portrayed a young JD Vance in a movie about his life spoke out after the Republican was picked to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential running mate.
Gyula Owen Asztalos portrayed a young Vance in the 2020 movie Hillbilly Elegy directed by Ron Howard and based on the book of the same name. Vance wrote the book describing his life growing up amid poverty and abuse in Middletown, Ohio.
On Monday, former President Trump, named Vance, a U.S. senator for Ohio, as his running mate in November's election.
Following that announcement, books sales of Hillbilly Elegy surged, putting it back in the best-seller lists. On Netflix, views of the movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams jumped by more than 1,000 percent.
Views increased from 1.5 million minutes to 19.2 million after Trump announced Vance, according to analytics platform Luminate. That jump in viewers made Hillbilly Elegy the sixth most watched movie on Netflix.
Asztalos reacted to the viewing surge on his Instagram stories.
"Did not think this was going to come back," he wrote on a screenshot from an IndieWire article about the news.
In a following story, he wrote, "Don't reach out to me on Instagram, gone for a couple of months," followed by a love-heart hand emoji. The reason for Asztalos' Instagram hiatus is not known.
Newsweek contacted Asztalos' representatives by email for comment.
The movie was nominated for two Oscars, including a Supporting Actress nod for Close and for Hairstyling and Makeup.
Hillbilly Elegy narrates young Vance's life in Appalachia, as he describes, "an Ohio steel town that has been haemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember."
The book was released in 2016, just months before Trump won the presidential election, to mixed reviews.
"You cannot understand what's happening now without first reading JD Vance," wrote Rod Dreher, senior editor of The American Conservative, who added it was the most important book of the year.
But Silas House, Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky said the book was "not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance," in an interview with Politico in 2020.
Vance said he was inspired to write the book after winning a scholarship to Yale University following a period of serving in Iraq as a Marine.
"I was puzzled by the lack of upward mobility for kids like me at elite institutions like Yale," he told the Associated Press in 2016.
"I believed that writing an honest, sometimes painful book would draw attention to these serious issues. A more abstract essay wouldn't have had the same impact."
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