Like, for a while, on my previous flight, we would, once a week, get together and watch a movie. The U.S. support team on the ground was really good about coordinating with movie directors who were excited about sharing their movie with us. Even before it came out in theaters, we’d get this latest blockbuster and watch it all together. A lot of action movies. And I realized at one point that all the bad guys were Russians.
This previous flight was in 2017.
Was that awkward?
Yeah. It kind of gives me chills even thinking about it because at one point, I looked at my cosmonaut crewmates and said, “How does that make you feel?” And they said, “It’s kind of scary when we see that everybody in the United States, the mass media in the United States, is portraying Russians as the bad guys.” And so we shifted to instead of us just getting the latest movie, everybody got a turn to pick a movie they’d seen and wanted to share with everybody else. It became much more like a film festival type of thing and much more pleasant and less awkward because of that.
Looking into the interview, it's hard to say.
This previous flight was in 2017.