Barack Obama turned down an offer to appear on Netflix’s 3 Body Problem

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss thought they could do whatever they wanted with their first project after Game Of Thrones, even though it had that ending and we still can’t bring it up without thinking about the ending, and while they quickly realized that there were limits to the freedom that success had afforded them, they still decided to take a big swing with their adaptation of Liu Cixi’s novel Three-Body Problem. And we’re not just talking about the perils of adapting such a big and twisty sci-fi saga—wherein humanity has hundreds of years to figure out how to respond to an incoming alien invasion—but also the fact that they apparently thought they could get Barack Obama to make a cameo appearance in the show.

Do they not know how busy that man is? He has podcasts to make, he has movies to produce, he has a third thing to do that we can’t think of (not drone strikes, that was something he used to do, but surely he has a third hobby). Apparently Obama was a big fan of the original novel, though, telling The New York Times in 2017 that reading it during his presidency made his “day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty” and that the “immense” scope made it “fun to read.”

So, when they finally got to work on their adaptation—which is coming to Netflix on March 21—Benioff and Weiss thought they would call up the book’s most famous fan and offer Obama a chance to appear in the show. Unfortunately, he had to turn down the offer, but (according to an interview Benioff and Weiss did with USA Today), he offered a very Obama-y explanation for why in a nice note he sent to the creators: “It was to the effect of, ‘In case there ever is a real alien invasion, I think I should probably save myself for that crisis.’”

A little funny, right? It has shades of Joe Biden not realizing that AI was a genuine threat to humanity until he watched Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, like Obama was so rattled by the book that he decided he should stay on his toes in case real aliens ever invade, but it is weird for that to be his objection (even as a joke) when that’s not really his job anymore. They never call on former presidents for help in alien invasion movies, do they? That’s why it’s important to vote, people!