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
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
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…
I understand what you’re going for, but it was likely played by a male because women weren’t allowed to perform.
I understand what you’re going for, but it was likely played by a male because women weren’t allowed to perform.
You’re almost there. Keep going!
To quote another Shakespeare play (The Tempest): “What’s past is prologue”.
The reason the black actor for Juliet is receiving threats is because they don’t want her to be allowed to perform. So those historically that were so intolerant of a woman performing on stage that we see as silly and backwards are equally silly and backwards as today’s racists threatening this modern day actor for the part of Juliet.
to be honest, I think you’re incorrect here and your comparison isn’t accurate here. a true comparison to men playing an Italian Juliet would be the black actors in questions playing italian people that are specifically written in the source material… which is weird and color washing. no ambiguous “they’re a fairy tale people” stuff. if they plan on keeping to the feel and historical context of the play (which I can’t tell from their marketing materials), then it’s honestly super weird for black actors to play white people. are they going to use Italian accents? are they all Moores now? or is canon thrown out the window? if so, why not just make a Lion King type production where it’s based on the Shakespeare story instead of just play itself? why can’t production companies create original, creative roles for bipoc actors that are memorable and put them in a spotlight in a positive way instead of doing this played out controversial marketing shit that companies KNOW will stir up trouble to generate interest on their productions.
to be honest, I think you’re incorrect here and your comparison isn’t accurate here. a true comparison to men playing an Italian Juliet would be the black actors in questions playing italian people that are specifically written in the source material…
You’re welcome to your opinion of course. I think you’re trying very hard to make the “Italian” part relevant, for Romeo and Juliet, but it feels like thats an argument grasping at straws. Yes, the story is about Italians, but the original actor in 1597, Robert Goffe, wasn’t Italian either he was English source. No one, except you, has trying to make any actors playing this role across the last 450 years contingent on being Italian.
then it’s honestly super weird for black actors to play white people.
Oh? I think you should really employ some self reflection why you arrived at that statement. Why does that make you so uncomfortable? These are actors standing on a stage, wearing costumes, speaking monologues to an audience, and some characters pretending to fight and stab each other to death. The sets are made from cardboard, plywood, and the cheapest paint they can buy. Why is it you can suspend disbelief around all those other things that don’t match reality, but when it comes to the skin color of an actor, its a bridge too far?
When the actor Leslie Lloyd Odom Jr, a black actor, played the role of the actual historical figure Aaron Burr in the original Broadway production of Hamilton, were you equally uncomfortable? Were you broken out of the story of Hamilton’s life and unable immerse yourself in history because a black man was acting the part of a historically white charactor? If so, I would have figured it would have been the awesome hip-hop numbers that weren’t quite period correct, not the color of skin of an actor.
why can’t production companies create original, creative roles for bipoc actors that are memorable and put them in a spotlight in a positive way
That’s is already happening.
instead of doing this played out controversial marketing shit that companies KNOW will stir up trouble to generate interest on their productions.
I don’t think they’re only casting these actors to stir up controversy. Lloyd Odom Jr was amazing in Hamilton! Nothing about the color of his skin subtracted from my enjoyment of the play. He’s a powerhouse of an actor that absolutely nailed that role.
Why do you feel we, as a society, should be gatekeeping the last 500+ years of western storytelling to only white actors? You would stand before a room of 100 actors, perhaps 40 of them non-white and proclaim proudly “these hundreds of years of script are off limits to you, because you’re not white”?
To your first point, English play, English actors. Europeans playing Europeans. not weird. very basic concept.
Why does that make you so uncomfortable?
because if it were the other way around for any other race, it would make me uncomfortable also. I don’t want Europeans to be casted as Asian characters in a classic Asian story. or Europeans playing Africans in a classic African play. this would largely be considered white washing and is largely frowned upon.
Leslie Lloyd Odom Jr
You largely ignored my crucial statement that if the medium wants to keep the FEEL and historical context, then casting consideration is appropriate. if you make a historical rap musical, then the rules are different. clearly LMM was not trying to capture the FEEL of that historical period.
Even if you don’t think this is controversial marketing, it still is. it’s causing a stir and we’re talking about it. when it comes out, well both at least check it out probably in some form or another.
You would stand before a room of 100 actors, perhaps 40 of them non-white and proclaim proudly “these hundreds of years of script are off limits to you, because you’re not white”?
yes, if I’m a casting director trying to cast actors for authentic white characters.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.)
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.
Do black people lose their pigmentation completely if they stay indoors?
Existing circumstancial evidence suggests that if you give them somewhat around forty to eighty thousand years they might lose at least some of it, depending on how much exposure to solar radiation they get… though interbreeding with Neanderthals and/or Denisovans might also help, too.
I mean given enough time and generations, yes.
The “underwater therefore white” doesn’t hold much water, in my opinion.
What about all those dark-colored creatures? Tuna, whales, squids?
Fish colors have nothing to do with melanin which determines human skin tone.
So what?
Bro, we’re talking about a fictional creature.
Plus “fish color” is just one attribute. I also mentioned whales and squids.
And we don’t even know how humans would evolve to live underwater.
Why do mermaids have to follow human skin tone rules instead of other aquatic mammals? Even if they’re humans who evolved a fish tail, they’ve been underwater long enough for melanin to not be the deciding color…
Lol didn’t they even try casting James Bond as a black woman
No? You’re thinking of No Time To Die where they replace Bond with someone else (who happens to be a black woman) in the movie. She’s not Bond, but she’s the new 007.
Or you could be thinking of when they were considering recasting the role with Idris Elba?
Either way you’re wrong.
They should at least have used a pretty person though, that would make it more realistic.
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.
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.
The place has been called Italia since at least 49BC
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.
More like saying Pocahontas was a Native American. Which in most settings would be an appropriate description.
How did you get down votes for that?
You can get down votes for anything. Because they’re free.
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
Should have cast a male to play Juliet like the original. Wonder what the response would have been then?
Or a 13 year old girl to play Juliet and a grown ass man to play Romeo
The lineup for tickets would be around the block.
“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…
“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.
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.
It adds up to me. It doesn’t matter which cast member it is; it’s deplorable regardless.
It also doesn’t matter what kind of abuse it is, all abuse is deplorable regardless.
But they made a point of saying it was racial abuse. And they also made a point of not naming the one being abused, which is basically unheard of in an article like this.
Come on. It’s weird.
Naming abuse victims enables further abuse.
Not naming them was the correct thing to do, unless it is your goal to get them abused even more.
Naming abuse victims enables further abuse.
So…like…you think racists are reading this article chomping at the bit to find out who is black so they can attack them but since there is no name that has kept them safe? The people who WOULD have attacked based on this article don’t bother to just google the cast?
The people who WOULD have attacked based on this article don’t bother to just google the cast?
Why bother? Every single article I’ve seen after some quick googling, 4 out of 4, has a huge pic of Holland and Amewaduh-Rivers front and center on the page.
Even the densest racist can glean the information, it’s being handed to them, lol.
I’m not talking about whether you should or shouldn’t, just noticing that every single other time there’s a situation like this, the victim IS named. This is definitely a pretty unique circumstance.
But the point stands–if indeed their aim was to keep attention off the abused, why even put out a public statement about it at all, given the fact that this cast has a headlining member that is very conspicuously of a different race than what the average schmoe would expect? Isn’t that antithetical to that goal, then?
‘We don’t want to bring any negative attention to this victim of racial abuse by naming them–this victim of racial abuse in this run of Romeo & Juliet where Juliet is played by a black woman.’
I mean, come on, lol.
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!
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 👋
Spoiler alert, Tom Holland is actually playing Juliet.
tbf he’s pretty cute
They’re trying to minimise the additional abuse she will get because of this story.
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.
