Nick Offerman is slamming Ben Shapiro for his “rampant homophobia” after the Daily Wire co-founder and political commenter criticized the actor’s gay role in The Last of Us.
During a recent appearance on the Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso podcast, host Sam Fragoso showed Offerman a clip of Shapiro attempting to recap his character’s storyline in HBO’s apocalyptic drama and calling him a “gay Ron Swanson,” referencing Offerman’s iconic Parks and Recreation character.
“So the entire plot of the episode is that Nick Offerman, but he actually plays Ron Swanson, but Ron Swanson who likes to nail dudes. So Ron Swanson, a libertarian who hates the government and lives in his basement and is a prepper, but also is gay,” Shapiro said during an episode of TheBen Shapiro Show. “Ron Swanson during the zombie apocalypse, he’s having himself a grand old time. For some reason, his town is completely not hit by any of the zombies at all. It’s like completely left alone. So he goes out and gets all these resources, and then he builds a nice fence around his place, and he sets up all of these booby traps. So if anybody shows up, whether they’re raiders, whether they’re zombies, they’re going to get killed. And then somehow another dude ends up falling into one of his traps and they meet and they bang and they end up becoming a couple.”
“It’s complete with sex scenes and the whole thing. The entire episode has no zombies, no real threat, and it is about two gay dudes who meet and have a relationship, in which one grows strawberries for the other, and then they die. But not being killed by zombies or under threat,” Shapiro added. “One dies; he gets cancer and he decides to essentially euthanize himself and gay Ron Swanson decides that he is also going to commit suicide at the same time because of Romeo and Juliet, or Romeo and Romeo in this particular case.”
Offerman, clearly shocked, said in response, “Holy shit… that’s crazy.”
“That’s the most Ben Shapiro I’ve ever seen, and there’s a very good reason for that. I mean, I don’t know what to say. I’m embarrassed for his reading comprehension. I think he got eight things wrong in his recap, besides his rampant homophobia,” the Voicemails for Isabelle actor continued. “That was insane.”
“That’s like a Joe Rogan clip or something that’s just so dumb and so wrong. But then it’s really upsetting to understand how powerful that probably is and how many people it’s reached and would be in agreement with it. They’d be like, ‘Oh no, not Ron Swanson,’ or whatever agreement they would have,” Offerman added.
In season one, episode three of The Last of Us, titled “Long, Long Time,” the show paused on the main storyline. Instead, the episode centered on a 20-year romance between Offerman’s character Bill, a paranoid survivalist, and an outsider named Frank (Murray Bartlett).
Offerman later won an Emmy for best guest actor in a drama series for his role in the HBO show.