The Jamie Lloyd Company has hit back after its production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” has been the subject of what they call a “barrage of deplorable racial abuse” aimed at an unnamed cast member.
The play, directed by Jamie Lloyd (“Sunset Boulevard”), stars “Spider-Man: No Way Home” star Tom Holland as Romeo and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers (“Sex Education”) as Juliet.
On Friday, the Jamie Lloyd Company issued a statement, saying: “Following the announcement of our ‘Romeo & Juliet’ cast, there has been a barrage of deplorable racial abuse online directed towards a member of our company. This must stop.”
Unless a characters race or gender or ethnicity or (dis)ability is a key component of either their arc or the story as whole (e.g. the plot depends on it), who the fuck cares who’s playing who? I saw the same thing happen when the Dune movie had the Liet-Kynes character portrayed by a black woman. It makes absolutely zero difference to the story what gender or race Liet-Kynes was and she was really good anyway.
Even if race is an important component, we don’t have to repeat everything exactly. Let an artist twist it and see what happens.
As long as it is white -> something else since we have way too many decades of minority characters being played by white people because of racism.
Edit: not really surprised by how many people are ignorant of racist casting in Hollywood.
It goes both ways, you can’t pretend to take the higher path by neglecting a group of people because people in that group have neglected others
But we have make up so the race of the actor doesn’t have to match the character they are portraying
Care to name any examples? Because redhead characters being played by black actors is so prevalent it has its own hashtag, so if there are really decades of it, I feel like I should know.
Also, because I feel it might be necessary, this is a reminder to anyone reading this that A) racism is not solved with more racism, and B) you can, in fact, be racist against white people. Patricia Bidol-Padva’s personal opinion does not control the English language, and discrimination does not become okay just because it’s against a group you personally don’t like.
Two I could think of off the top of my head were the racist Chinese character played by a white guy in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and what’s her name from Aliens 2 that was a Hispanic character played by a white lady. Here’s a longer list that also includes more recent movies too: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/26-times-white-actors-played-people-of-color-and-no-one-really-gave-a-sht_n_56cf57e2e4b0bf0dab313ffc
Choosing redhead characters to be switched to another race is actually just switching a character that stands out as ‘different’ for a different race. Bit of a lazy choice to be honest.
One big thing to keep in mind is that because of racism most stories are already focused on white characters, so switching from the vast majority is a positive while switching from a minority of characters to the majority cast race is not. That is why switching from the overrepresented white characters is fine, but the reverse is not. One specific stereotype from movies is that cowboys are white because that was the characters written when cowboy books and movies were popular, despite a large portion of cowboys being black and/or Hispanic.
Okay, that Breakfast at Tiffany’s example is definitely in bad taste. Thankfully, as far as I’m aware, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in movies anymore.
That being said, to say it’s “a positive” to outright replace white people in movies is also in bad taste. More specifically, it runs counter to your message, as it not only implies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory to be true (thus causing racists to feel vindicated), it also reads as racist toward non-white people by implying that the best they can hope for is white actors’ sloppy seconds instead of their own stories. Media is not a zero-sum game. There don’t need to be fewer white cowboys for there to be more black ones.
Here’s the issue though, as I see it. If we assume that Hollywood was racist for many years in the past, then most actors would be white. So now if you say you can’t change the characters race, you’re perpetuating past racism by locking down characters as white in stories that don’t require it.
I don’t care if Annie or the Little Mermaid is black, make the story intriguing. Pull me into the plot with believable and relatable characters and I’ll never question why they’re the race/gender/sexual orientation they are.
That’s the right attitude to have about it. 👍 Audiences love closure and they love verisimilitude. If I’m watching a movie and I’m shown how (or can reasonably assume from context that) a character having certain traits makes sense, it doesn’t strain suspension of disbelief at all and can turn a great movie into an outstanding one. And I think that’s something that screenwriters need to pay heavy attention to, because there are no bad ideas, there’s only bad execution.
In fact, just for fun, let’s take the two movies you mentioned as examples. I haven’t watched either of them and know little about them. If you were to tell me “write scripts for adaptations of these two stories where the main characters are black”, it would be lazy, disrespectful to the viewer, and arguably even racist to just do that without giving it any forethought - they’d be as out of place as a white man in Wakanda. But if you put down, for example, “this adaptation of Annie takes place in the cultural melting pot of modern-day New York City” or “Ariel and her sisters are all different races because Triton has taken many wives from all over the world”, and then make that clear through context clues, now the idea of them being black no longer feels like an afterthought, it feels like it was a conscious decision and that time and attention was given to making them feel like they belong. And while it would frankly be better for studios to knock it off with the constant rehashing and write new stories (not everyone likes Jordan Peele’s stuff, but few would call it derivative), a remake done with care and respect is better than one done without them.
I don’t know if it is intentional or not, I try not to assign a motive to opinions, but your viewpoint seems to require that black characters have a justification for being black in a way that you don’t for white characters. I think there’s a difference between mere change, such as Annie or Little Mermaid, and incongruous change, such as whitewashing Wakanda, since it is intended to be a cloistered black nation in sub-Saharan Africa.
When remaking a popular movie that originally had an all white cast it is. Why should minorities be excluded from remakes of all of the older movies that had all white casts because of racism?
On that point we are in perfect agreement. If it makes sense for the story and the actors are being picked based on merit, diversity will only serve to improve the end product. I personally would prefer more original films and fewer remakes, but I doubt I’m alone in that statement. 🤷♂️
I hate to break it to you but Spaniards are European.
Why do you think her character was a Spaniard and not Hispanic?
Even if you meant Latino and not Hispanic there’s still plenty of European-looking people there. Making this an issue in the first place is terminally American. She got the role among other reasons because she speaks Spanish, which she picked up hanging out with Latinos in her gym rat days, which frankly speaking is miles above Hollywood standards when it comes to casting e.g. roles supposed to be German (“Jaja Weißkrautbrötchen!”): It’s much more important to get someone who can portray a culture well, than to get someone with the right surname or blood quantum or similar BS.
Also since when is Vasquez not from Spain. You could argue by linguistic analysis, she uses “pandejo” which is chiefly used in Latin American Spanish, OTOH as an immigrant to the US from Spain you’d pick it up quickly.
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I’m actually like 1% miffed about how the Dune films dealt with race, there’s three skin colours mentioned in the book: Olive, light olive, and dark olive. Paul happens to be dark olive.
Dune is set 20000 years in the future, humanity had plenty of time to mix it’s all shades of olive.
There’s people who think, unless a character’s race or gender or what-have-you is a key component of their story, they should be male and caucasian. Like that’s the default and characters need a reason to be different.
Fuck those people :)
Sideways.