The actor accuses President Nicolás Maduro of stealing his re-election and "forcibly" detaining protesters and other opposition activists
Édgar Ramírez on the parallels between US and Venezuelan politics
Editor-in-Chief, Culture and Events
Édgar Ramírez has not returned to Venezuela for about seven years.
"I can't do it because I'm very much against Maduro and the government," the actor told me Tuesday at the "Borderlands" premiere in Hollywood, just minutes after he posed on the red carpet with the Venezuelan flag. "It hurts. The death penalty for the ancient Greeks wasn't death — it was exile. You become an emotional zombie in a way. The pain of having to leave your country, not because you want to, but because you're forced to. That's why the immigration issue is so delicate, because nobody — nobody! — wants to leave their home. You want to see the world, but nobody wants to leave the world they know."
