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.”
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.”
I’m guessing the racist jerks complaining about the casting would be really upset if they knew that Juliet was played by a dude named Robert Goffe in the very first performance of the play in 1597. source These bigots are so busy complaining about a replacement in race for the actor playing Juliet that they’re not even consistent asking for Juliet to be played the original gender of the actor in the first performance. Where is your consistency, bigots?
Also observe how those “replacement in race” people are completely silent on the 3 body problem show that made pretty much all of the Chinese characters from the book into westerners
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Tom Cruise wasn’t the last Samurai.
Ken Watanabe was the last Samurai. Or maybe the group of Samurai, since it can be singular or plural. Either way it wasn’t Middle Tooth Cruise.
The official translation to Spanish made it clear it’s singular (El último samurái)
Similar thing happened with “the last Jedi”, some even freaked out that out counted as a spoiler.
Middle tooth cruise >.<
He’s not a samurai, but Japan needed a white guy to tell them that samurai were an important part of their historical tradition, otherwise they might have forgotten.
Just to clarify to anyone who hasn’t watched it, his character was NOT Japanese, he was an American soldier brought to Japan to train Japanese recruits before being captured by the samurai and slowly learning their ways. I shouldn’t even NEED to say that, but we apparently live in a world where characters having their ethnicities swapped with no explanation or forethought or deeper meaning is just a matter of course now.
I haven’t watched the Netflix show. Do they actually cast western actors in the roles during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (purge)?
Ye Wenjie is the only asian main characters that are completely true to the books and casted accordingly.
Jin Cheng and Da Shi (replaces Cheng Xin) are the other Asian casted main characters. The rest of the main. Cast ist European/American
Da Shi was not British in the book lmao wtf
Sorry - moved him to the “Asian cast but changed character” part of my comment.
Overlooked that part since his casting was literally perfect imho
Yes. That part is set in Nebraska now.
Their version has a communist driven purge mass murdering artists and academics in Nebraska ?!
No. That person is messing with you.
The China stuff in the past still happens in China.
The present day stuff is a bunch of diff races now, not just Chinese.
who said everybody is completely silent? nobody in the states aside from sci Fi nerds knew about 3 body until now. and for all the Chinese people I’ve asked, myself included, who read the book before the show came out are pissed they replaced the Chinese hero characters with not Chinese people and made all the Chinese people the bad guys. it’s fucked and not a correct comparison here…
Thanks for the historical context - I knew most of it personally but not the name of the actor who played Juliet first.
It’s nice to know that kind of information has survived so far. History is weird like that.
Hey! Robby was white! That’s the most important part. Whatever, the right is fucking stupid.
Well done with the historical reference.
So are they saying that Romeo and Juliet can’t be together? Ironic.
This is one case where I feel like choosing to make them an interracial couple actually adds to the tension and makes it relatable. The feudal politics of who marries whom? I couldn’t be more disconnected. Petty folks getting upset about a white guy and a black lady getting hitched? Now I’m getting fired up.
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.
Care to name any examples?
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.
That being said, to say it’s “a positive” to outright replace white people in movies is also in bad taste.
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.
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.
There don’t need to be fewer white cowboys for there to be more black ones.
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. 🤷♂️
Hispanic character played by a white lady
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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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.
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.
Romeo and Juliet is the stupidest target for this when all of Shakespeare has been interpreted in wildly diverging ways, skin color would be the smallest of which (and where was it stated that Juliet was white?)
The story says she’s from a noble family in North Italy. Most likely she has olive skin tone.
i hope she’s extra virgin tho
How did you get down votes for that?
You can get down votes for anything. Because they’re free.
Went for the dad joke.
Probably some Northern Italians taking offense at the incorrect generalism about their skin tone?
Well that explains why everyone was so up in arms like this over historical skin tone accuracy when Romeo and Juliet were played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. /s
Yeah, that movie was made before anyone knew what woke meant. In fact, most people still don’t know what it means, but that hasn’t stopped anybody using it.
Don’t even funking try to tell me Mercutio wasn’t woke in that version of R&J. He was glorious!
Not that the skin tone matters much but you’ve obviously never been to northern Italy.
Italy is quite diverse like Spain in terms of skin tone. There are plenty of white skinned and olive skinned Mediterraneans.
You know that she was portrayed by a non-Italian for the first few hundred years, right?
Of course. Italy didn’t exist yet when the play was written.
Wait, do you think that there were no Italians before the state of Italy was established?
They were not “Italians” though, they were part of the Venetian republic, which now is part of Italy.
This is like saying Pocahontas was from the US just because she was born where is now the state of Virginia.
They were. The place was called Italia before Romans set foot on British soil.
More like saying Pocahontas was a Native American. Which in most settings would be an appropriate description.
Wait, do you think that there were Italians before the state of Italy was established?
Funfact: when Garibaldi’s troops reached Sicily, chanting “Viva Garibaldi, viva l’Italia!”, many locals assumed Garibaldi’s wife is named Talia.
The place has been called Italia since at least 49BC
It’s been a lot of years since high school English, but Juliet Capulet was of the Italian family Capulet in the 1590s.
There is some detail in the references of the Capulet family to real world factions of the time. But both those arguing for and against this casting don’t care about any of that.
yeah… people actually don’t care about the canon when they can use social issues and division as marketing
Honestly, we do see a lot of this casting in the 21st century. A familiar character becomes black, whether it’s Annie or The Little Mermaid, and it leaves me ambivalent. However, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, it actually makes sense to have a racial component injected into the story. They are from warring families, correct? Race could be another point of conflict for them.
(Besides, Shakespeare has been famously open to interpretation. Is Shylock a villain, comic relief, or a tragic victim of prejudice in his own time? That’s up to the director of the play, or the film.)
You are thinking way too hard about this. The character isn’t becoming black. The characters the same, she’s just played by a black actress. That doesn’t change the character. That’s why we call it acting. She’s just playing a role. Tom Holland isn’t Italian, but I noticed you didn’t bring up him changing the character.
Honestly, I think the play would gain if they added racism as additional reason for the enmity between the 2 families. I’d be astonished if this hasn’t happened before.
That’s just West Side Story.
I’d be astonished if this hasn’t happened before.
I’d be even more astonished if that was the only piece inspired by Romeo & Juliet.
Also I would be totally floored if the story of Romeo & Juliet was inspired by an older predecessor or predecessors going back at least to Ancient Greece.
The little mermaid one didn’t make sense to me, they’re under water probably 95% of their lives getting no sun. They all were definitely pale.
They weren’t “definitely” anything. They’re fictional creatures.
they’re under water probably 95% of their lives getting no sun. They all were definitely pale.
You’re applying scientific principles to human skin and UV exposure response with regards to evolution and calling into question the scientific accuracy of the portrayal in the mermaid, and that leads you to disagreeing with the skin color of the actor.
With your scientific explanation you missed a couple key points if your goal is accuracy to the biological world:
- Why does she have a full head of hair? Scientifically, hair’s purpose is thermal regulation. There would be no need for hair when the entire mermaid body is immersed in water all the time.
- How the hell is Ariel breathing underwater? Fish do this by having gills for the gas exchange in the water. Whales and dolphins are air breathers, but have to go to the surface to get a breath. We don’t see Ariel going to the surface to do this.
You didn’t call either of these out as scientifically inaccurate.
Can I ask why your scientific explanation of the mermaid was only skin color?
Do black people lose their pigmentation completely if they stay indoors?
I mean given enough time and generations, yes.
Nice job Vanity Fair. There are some racists who are whining about interracial Romeo and Juliet. Fuck them for sure. But not only is this rag trying to turn it into a scandal that it’s not, they can’t even get Francesca’s acting credit right. Sex Education and Bad Education are incredibly different shows. There are black female actors in Sex Education but Vanity Fair sure can’t tell the difference between them and her.
Article written by AI and not edited? Thats my bingo guess
“Unnamed cast member”? Is it that they think we’re really stupid, or that it’s actually not people complaining about the black Juliet, and they want to make it look like it is?
How bizarre…
Spoiler alert, Tom Holland is actually playing Juliet.
tbf he’s pretty cute
“towards a member of our company”
This is the actual quote, not from Variety.
I know, the “they” in my comment is the Jamie Lloyd Company. Super weird to be willing to say the nature/motivation of the abuse is racism, but then be unwilling to name which cast member it is, if it is in fact Amewaduh-Rivers.
Something is not adding up.
No, this is how you properly show solidarity.
An attack against a single cast member is an attack against the entire company.
They are saying “it doesn’t matter who they attacked. Racism against our cast member is racism against us all because we are a family that stands with a single purpose, speaks with a single voice.”
And if it only redirects 1% of the aggression away from the intended target and towards the white cast members instead, then it is worth it.
That’s how you be a good ally
No, this is how you properly show solidarity.
An attack against a single cast member is an attack against the entire company.
This would hold water if they didn’t go out of their way to say it was race-motivated abuse.
They did, so it doesn’t.
if it only redirects 1% of the aggression away from the intended target and towards the white cast members instead, then it is worth it.
lmao, this sentiment is the exact opposite of solidarity, and invokes the fundamentally-racist ‘white savior’ trope, to boot.
white savior trope
I and other white allies literally stood in front of police with crowd control weapons when my black friends yelled ‘white shield’ during the BLM protests in Seattle but tell me more 🤣 I’m nobody’s savior but I do know how to use my privilege for the benefit of others
This would hold water if they didn’t go out of their way to say it was race-motivated abuse.
So the options are “don’t reference the racism at all” or “name the victim”? Fuck outta here with that shit.
I and other white allies literally stood in front of police with crowd control weapons when my black friends yelled ‘white shield’ during the BLM protests in Seattle but tell me more
Apparently, I do need to tell you more, since you clearly don’t understand that the fact that your black friends were literally verbally encouraging you, makes the above the literal opposite of “white savior”.
So the options are “don’t reference the racism at all” or “name the victim”?
No, the point is that those are effectively identical (since she is the only known black cast member), so why would you do one and not the other? Either do both, or neither. They also went out of their way to say there was exactly one victim. Why? Why do that, if their goal is not to clearly identify the one and only person who fits all of the criteria they put out?
That’s weird, bottom line. If you asked me what 2 + 2 is and I was willing to tell you it was “the number that’s half of 8”, but I refused to say “4”, wouldn’t you think that was weird of me?
Your mental gymnastics are astounding. Done with you. Waste of my time 👋
This would hold water if they didn’t go out of their way to say it was race-motivated abuse.
Why would they ignore what it is? I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.
Maybe someone is Scottish, and Scottish people are made at him for beign Scottish.
“You Scots sure are a contentious people.”
YOU JUST MADE AN ENEMY FOR LIFE!
Why does she have to be highlighted when you already know who it is?
They already DID highlight her! That’s my point–they put a massive spotlight on her, by both going out of their way to specify the particular type of abuse, and also going out of their way to say that one and only one cast member was receiving the abuse. They’ve directly contradicted their own ridiculous pretense of ‘not naming names’ by doing literally everything they can to clearly identify her as the victim, and then bizarrely refusing to plainly say she’s the victim.
All of the people in this chain saying “why does she have to be named”: why aren’t any of you asking “why does the fact that it’s exactly one victim need to be specified” or “why does the fact that the online abuse was racially motivated”? None of these three DON’T act to identify the victim. You clearly don’t mind if the victim is identified since you don’t have a problem with those other two. So why are people biting my head off simply for pointing out it’s weird that they did the latter two and not the former?
It’s like if someone asked how many of something you have, and your answer is “the amount is an odd integer between 4 and 6” instead of “5”. It’d be perfectly reasonable to ask in response “why the hell didn’t you just say 5?”
lol
You are focused on entirely the wrong point. Why are you attempting to distract from the issue?
If you read an article about a guy who murdered his wife that had a timeline, and it read ‘he woke up, took a shower, ate 23 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and then he shot his wife’–would it be “distracting from the issue” to comment about the obvious bizarre element there? To comment on that is not equivalent to trivializing the murder. Weird thing sticks out, someone who noticed points it out. That’s all, it ain’t that deep.
I’m not trying to distract from anything, holy shit. All I did was point out a strange element I identified in the article. The top level comment in this chain is mine, so you can’t even accuse me of derailing someone else’s, lol. If you don’t want to talk about this particular bit, post your own top-level comment and move on. Don’t whine at me here about it.
I’m the one whining after you wrote yet more paragraphs about everything but the issue? I said distracting, not derailing.
They’re trying to minimise the additional abuse she will get because of this story.
Not really a big deal but it’s funny that this variety article and all the other people reporting on this are using the same line of Francesca being from sex education when she’s not lol. She’s from bad education. It seems like so many websites are just copying from the same source and so they all have the same mistake
A story about a grown man loving a little girl? That’s fine. Make one of them have a different skin color than me and hoo boy do we have a problem (/s)
I thought Romeo was a teenager too? I mean, the difference in age should be around 3 years they are supposed to be 13 and 16, although the age of Romeo is really never specified, I wouldn’t say it’s that problematic.
I find Anakin and Padme, or Bella and Edward more problematic, and there’s not much outrage for those.
I took the time to google the claim and it’s bullshit.
One of the source materials of Shakespeare mentions his soft skin and lack of facial hair which would mean he’s younger than 15.
I would stick with the original play: Shakespeare died not mention his age but he is acting less mature than Juliet.
They’re both young. Aa for his acting, it is the one of a lovesick person, it doesn’t mean lack of maturity.
This thread is about the literary Romeo, not a specific actor.
By the way, I have seen this eternal love story portrayed ny gnomes (Gnomeo and Juliet or something like this - good movie BTW) so as far as the roles are respected, we could have this portrayed by ants.
Sounds about right for conservatives.
Do you have any source whatsoever backing your claim Shakespeares Romeo was not of similar age as Juliet?
Romeo+Juliet is the perfect story for a mixed-race couple, given that the story is about the original is about how their relationship isn’t accepted by their families. Also for any other kind of relationship dipshit assclowns hate.
I dont have a problem with this. Its a play. Its up to thw director and the actors to interpret the script in their owns ways. I do have a problem with the disney mermaid thing but only because those are movies. Movies are a one off thing. Stop remaking the same movies with race swapped characters and instead make new movies that are inclusive.
It was a book, interpreted by Disney. There’s no reason the characters had to be one race.
Well yes but at the same time the original little mermaid is Danish and from like the 15th century or something.
So all the characters, including the fictional creatures, should be Danish? And speak Danish. And… Well, you get the idea.
Never said that. It jus tmakes no sense to call the new movie a remake if you change stuff around
Change what around? It was originally a book.
The new remake of their cartoon The Little Mermaid. I know it was originaly a book and the mermaid dies at the end.
If it was remade, it would have been a cartoon.
Ugh right?! Nothing at all like this Shakespeare guy from 16th century England!
I hate to break it to you but mermaids aren’t actually humans and their Vitamin D biology is probably completely different.
The actual crimes committed in the live-action remake is the atrocious colour grading and the script.
And the cgi animals and the fact that the king probably sleeps around as each of his daughters is so different from the others.
Maybe it would help a little to stop fucking remaking shit so much.
It’s a bit fucking different with theatre mate.
Performances are done live for starters, it’d be fucking stupid if each play only ever performed once on one night.
It’s hundreds of years old. We haven’t had a big “remake” (it’s an adaptation, since it was a play originally) since the Leo version decades ago.
Gnomeo and Juliet changed a name and they weren’t even human!
Disgusting. Giving roles to other species is taking work away from homo sapiens.
Warm Bodies did it and Romeo was dead the entire time!
It was reverse because he came back from the dead!
And mercutio was the best part of that.
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The fuck?
Maybe, the cast member was unnamed
Italians tend to be darker than the English
Ok sure. But is it a lot of people, or is it some randoms on Twitter? And they use it as publicity.
Honestly. Who gives a fuck about a new Romeo and Juliet play anyways?
My bet is this is a publicity campaign to boost the interest for the film.
Boost interest for what film?
Ok w/e. Didn’t know if it was a film of the play or only a play. Doesn’t matter really.
I highly doubt many people have strong feelings about it. Maybe a couple of ass hats.
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Romeo and Juliet is one of the most iconic love stories
Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy, not a love story.
No it’s beautiful and love filled when 13 year old girls and 16 year old boys commit suicide.
Are they mutually exclusive though? Plenty of love stories are tragedies, just to mention a few: Titanic, Anna Karenina, The Notebook, Love Story…
I would even say, most tragedies are love stories.
