‘Romeo & Juliet’ Play Starring Tom Holland and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers Faces ‘Barrage of Racial Abuse,’ Producer Says ‘This Must Stop’

https://lemmy.world/post/13958294

‘Romeo & Juliet’ Play Starring Tom Holland and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers Faces ‘Barrage of Racial Abuse,’ Producer Says ‘This Must Stop’ - Lemmy.World

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 [https://variety.com/t/tom-holland/] as Romeo and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers [https://variety.com/t/francesca-amewaduh-rivers/] (“Sex Education”) as Juliet.  On Friday, the Jamie Lloyd Company issued a statement [https://twitter.com/RomeoJulietLDN/status/1776223269777011049], 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.

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: huffpost.com/…/26-times-white-actors-played-peopl…

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.

25 Times White Actors Played People Of Color And No One Really Gave A S**t

Think blackface and yellowface are a thing of the past? Get ready to cringe.

HuffPost

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.