‘Romeo & Juliet’ Play Starring Tom Holland and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers Faces ‘Barrage of Racial Abuse,’ Producer Says ‘This Must Stop’
variety.com
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.”
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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.
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.
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.
I try not to assign a motive to opinions either, so I’ll try to explain further to ensure you can fully understand my viewpoint.
My requirement that a character’s qualities have sufficient justification applies to white characters as well, hence my Wakanda example. As you said, that would be incongruous change, and the thing that makes it incongruous is the fact that you’re dealing with an exception. It’s important to note that, in many works that take place in a version of the real world, especially modern America, white people are assumed, even by non-white viewers, to have an inbuilt justification for existing in a story by virtue of being considered the ethnic majority - not saying that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, just that that assumption exists. Since that is not the case in the context of a cloistered Sub-Saharan African nation, any white characters that appear therefore require more specific explanations for their presence. This is, needless to say, why every white character in Black Panther is a foreigner.
Thinking about it, though, I also realize now that Annie is perhaps a bad example, since the original story also takes place in the United States iirc, and any story set in an American city can automatically be reasonably assumed to have people from all walks of life living there, so no explanations are really needed. Even if you were to also make Daddy Warbucks black, and set it in a time period where a wealthy black man would be considered an unusual or exceptional thing, all you would have to do is have some visual indication of how he got his money (such as a framed business degree, for example), and suddenly his status not only makes sense, it also subtly establishes something about his character (“He defied the odds through hard work and intelligence!”) that can be built upon as the story progresses. In fact, ideally, you want that level of characterization for every character, regardless of whether they’re a minority.
Really, it’s in the more fantastical examples that things start to become muddled, since in-built justifications can’t exist in a world that is not like our own. But that also means that you can be looser with your explanations, since in fantasy settings, internal consistency is more important than realism. In my Little Mermaid example, you probably didn’t question the idea of mermaids looking like humans from the same part of the world, despite the fact that if merfolk were real, they would live underwater and thus have no need to evolve different skin pigmentations. Consistency is the reason for this. But in The Lord of the Rings, which is implied to be set in our own world’s mystical past, dark-skinned humans already exist, and since they come from a far-off continent, their complexion can be reasonably assumed to be way it is for the same reason as in real life: An adaptation to an equatorial climate. So when Rings of Power introduces black elves, and then does NOT have them also come from another part of the world, that consistency is broken unless an alternative explanation is given.
Hopefully I’ve expressed my perspective clearly and concisely. Any type of person can exist in any setting and any story, so long as any concerns about potential inconsistencies are acknowledged and addressed. At the other end of the scale, you can even dismiss those concerns entirely and deliberately tell a story with zero regard for historical accuracy. What matters is that it’s a conscious design decision and that the audience is aware of what to expect going in. Knowing those expectations is a big part of the balancing act of being a writer.
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 only dislike it when historical shows or movies race swap, cause it kinda ignores the racism of that community at that point in time. Like a black woman playing queen Elizabeth wouldn't make sense. Or Cleopatra for that matter
I’ve been watching white guys play samurai and pharaohs and Jesus my whole life. It’s not that hard to get used to someone with historically inaccurate pigment playing a role. But for some strange reason, it’s only a political choice when the actor with the “wrong” skin color is dark.
No it's always been weird with white guys too. John Wayne playing Asian us fucked up, so is all the blackface throughout Hollywood's history. I don't expect them to go find an Aramaic Jewish actor from the middle east for a Jesus movie, but don't make him Korean and act like it's accurate or something
I guess what I’m getting at is that, when you watch John Wayne playing an Asian guy, do you spend the whole movie wondering why the other characters aren’t constantly asking about his skin color and facial features? Probably not, since we can easily accept that while the actor is white, the character is still Asian.
But when a black actor plays a white character in a historical piece, you want to know why everyone isn’t constantly asking about their skin color and facial features. The answer is exactly the same: the character hasn’t changed. The other characters in the film don’t see the actor, they see the character.
Ok but by that logic why can't we get Cyllian Murphy to play Martin Luther King? Or hell, forget gender too, maybe we can get Allison Brie to play Pancho Villa, and it won't be distracting cause all the other character in the movie are gonna act like it's normal
Well, why not indeed? Both of those could be interesting films, depending on who was involved in making them, and what they were trying to say.
wait a minute. are you saying everyone accepts white washing? just because you do doesn't mean we should all just get used to it. people are tired of their classic ethnic stories being played by a bunch of white dudes or changed to a full white cast for the sake of palpability for the west. nobody aside from white people want that shit...
I find it a little interesting the effect of casting women and people of color as Imperials in the Star Wars universe. The Empire is explicitly supposed to be a fascist racist organization. The casting of all lily-white poncy British-accented dudes in the original trilogy is supposed to read to the audience as "These are the bad guys; see how colonialist they look?", while it's the rebels and outsiders who are ethnically and gender diverse. The existence of Thrawn and Isard in the expanded universe was supposed to highlight just how brutal and talented they were, that they were able to succeed in such a racist and sexist Empire, even given their backgrounds.
I understand the idea of wanting more diverse casting in modern Star Wars, but making the Empire diverse seems to confuse the visual metaphor just a tad. I suppose that they're keeping the "Empire is racist but only in the sense of it's human-supremacist," but it still seems a little odd.
Yeah I agree with that too, as a kid, racism was an obvious trait of the empire, even how they refer to aliens like chewy "where are you taking this... Thing?"
Suddenly the Empire is racially diverse and even has aliens and people of color in command.
The Empire is speciesist, not racist. It's similar in the Witcher universe: There's plenty of elves and monsters around for humans to hate so why hate on other humans.
a lot of people don't understand that racism was different back then too. For example people in the Roman empire may not have understood the differences in skin color being that important, but would over index on tribe, religion or birth right
You would hate "The Great". It's semi historical but humorous and they cast all sorts to play what would be 99% just Russians and it is fantastic.
If it's historical fiction it doesn't bother me really
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.