Actor Woody Harrelson recalled in a new interview that he had to smoke weed in order to get through a “brutal dinner” with Donald Trump, Melania and Jesse Ventura in 2002.

In an interview for Esquire’s September cover, Mr. Harrelson said he was invited to the dinner in New York City as guest of Mr. Ventura, then-governor of Minnesota, who told Mr. Harrelson that he expected Mr. Trump to try to convince him to be his running mate for the 2004 Democratic presidential primary.

“‘Donald Trump is going to try to convince me to be his running mate for the Democratic ticket in 2004. Will you be my date?’” Mr. Harrelson recalled Mr. Ventura as saying. “I said, ‘Yeah, man.’”

“So we all met at Trump Tower, sat down,” he continued. “Melania was there, only she wasn’t his wife yet. And it was, let me tell you, a brutal dinner. Two and a half hours. The fun part was watching Jesse’s moves. It would look like Trump had him pinned, was going to get him to say yes, and then Jesse would slip out at the last second. “

Mr. Harrelson claimed that Mr. Trump completely hijacked the conversation and gave everyone else at the table very little chance to speak.

“It got so bad I had to go outside and burn one before returning to the monologue monopoly,” the actor said. “Listen, I came up through Hollywood, so I’ve seen narcissists. This guy was beyond.”

Mr. Harrelson revealed that also has a history with Vice President Mike Pence, who he went to college with at Hanover College in Indiana in the early 1980s.

“As a freshman, I gave a sermon to a youth group, and Mike was the guy running the show. He was a junior, I think,” Mr. Harrelson said. “He struck me as a nice guy, very sincere. I don’t know how well we’d get along now, but we got along OK then.”

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