A scene from 2001's "Zoolander" that features Donald Trump will not find its way to the cutting room floor, despite calls for it to be nixed.
In a new interview, Ben Stiller, who directed and starred in the film, detailed how then-private citizen Trump scored a cameo in the movie in the first place, and why the film will continue to include him.
"We were shooting at the now defunct VH1 Fashion Awards," Ben told the Daily Beast podcast "The New Abnormal," "and as people were coming up the red carpet, we pulled them aside and asked them to talk about Derek Zoolander, and so Trump and Melania did that."
Over the years, there have been calls to erase Trump from the comedy, but Ben has balked.
"I've had people reach out to me and say, 'You should edit Donald Trump out of Zoolander,' but at the end of the day, that was a time when that exists and that happened," Ben said.
Ben, who has donated to many democratic political campaigns over the years, noted the other films that the POTUS made appearances in.
"There were so many movies [back then] that had a silly cameo from Donald Trump," Ben said. "He represented a certain thing."
Trump has been briefly featured in a menagerie of TV shows and movies, including "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" and "Two Weeks Notice."
In 2017, Matt Damon said Trump required cameos in order for films to be shot inside his hotels, hence the reason he's in so many movies, particularly in the '90s.
"The deal was that if you wanted to shoot in one of his buildings, you had to write him in a part," Matt told The Hollywood Reporter. "Martin Brest had to write something in Scent of a Woman — and the whole crew was in on it. You have to waste an hour of your day with a [expletive] shot: Donald Trump walks in and Al Pacino's like, 'Hello, Mr. Trump!' — you had to call him by name — and then he exits."
"You waste a little time so that you can get the permit, and then you can cut the scene out," he added. "But I guess in 'Home Alone 2′ they left it in."
Chris O'Donnell, who starred in "Scent of a Woman," made similar statements in recalling the 1992 movie.
"We got new pages given to us one day when we were filming [at] the Plaza Hotel — which I guess Trump owned at the time — and it said we're doing a scene with Donald Trump," Chris told Conan O'Brien in 2017. "It explained to us in that in order for us to film at the Plaza we had a little walk-on part for Donald and [ex-wife] Marla [Maples]."
The scene didn't make the final cut, nor was it a speaking role.
"It was we pull up in a limo and [Al] Pacino and I left and another car pulled up," Chris said, "and it was Donald Trump and Marla Maples walked out and went in."