Susan Sarandon and her Monarch co-star Trace Adkins ‘stayed away’ from politics on set

Susan Sarandon and Trace Adkins, two stars with opposing political views, had a trick for getting along well on set – they didn’t discuss politics.

The pair star together in the new Fox drama Monarch, which features Adkins as a fictional, iconic country performer Albie Roman, and Sarandon as his wife, a singer called Dottie Cantrell.

On HBO’s Real Time on Friday (16 September), host Bill Maher wanted to know how Adkins, a country singer who performed at the 2020 Republican National Convention, got along with Sarandon, who is vocal about her progressive, left-wing views and is an activist.

He asked Adkins whether they became “fast friends”, to which he responded: “We did, I think. There were no issues. We went to work, and we did our work, and we stayed away from everything else.”

He continued: “A couple of times maybe a current event or something would happen that morning, and she’d be watching the news, and she’d say something to me about it. But it was very brief, and we just didn’t go there. We just stayed away from it. What’s the point?”

Maher said he found this approach inspiring, and gave him hope that others may be able to move forward in such a polarising climate.

Adkins agreed, saying: “Grievance junkies, though, they have to do that. They have to have something to whine about. I don’t get up in the morning looking for something to whine about.”

In a 2020 interview with The Independent, Sarandon talked about her activism, saying: “I’ve been travelling around the country campaigning for Bernie Sanders, and there are all kinds of young people of different colours and ages who have been knocking on doors trying to connect with people. That has blown my mind.

“Bernie says, ‘I want you to look out and find the person that doesn’t look like you, that you don’t know, and tell that person that you will fight as hard for them as you will fight for yourself.’ I think that’s the moment we have to be in right now, in order to stand up against the normalisation of hatred and racism and Islamophobia and all the phobias that are happening.”