Imagine you’re an actor who was born for a role. Your entire life, you’ve fantasized about playing this role. You’ve waited for decades for some Hollywood director to open up casting opportunities for it and you practice for weeks, maybe even months. You begin to alter your appearance so that you better fit the part when you audition.
Then you learn that you’re automatically disqualified for the role because, in the name of social justice and woke culture, this role is going to be played non-traditionally. This film isn’t about accurate depictions, it’s about inclusivity and diversity. “Representation” is the name of the game.
You and your “dream” of playing this character can go die in a hole.
Earlier today, my colleague Streiff wrote of the upcoming movie about Egyptian Queen Cleopatra and how Israel’s own Wonder Woman actress, Gal Gadot, will be playing the role. This has generated a massive controversy because, according to social justice adherents, Gadot is the wrong race to play the ancient queen.
Which Hollywood dumbass thought it would be a good idea to cast an Israeli actress as Cleopatra (a very bland looking one) instead of a stunning Arab actress like Nadine Njeim?
And shame on you, Gal Gadot. Your country steals Arab land & you’re stealing their movie roles… smh. https://t.co/GY5tYEcl4K pic.twitter.com/JcrnM1RUQq
— sameera khan (@SameeraKhan) October 11, 2020
To be clear, it wouldn’t matter if Gadot were cast into a role where she acts in a movie about her own biography. The left considers Gadot evil due to her Israeli heritage and the fact that she was once a part of the Israeli Defense Force. It’s a service that she’s quite proud of and, as a result, isn’t afraid to call out who the enemies of Israel are.
Luckily, Gadot has secured the part of Cleopatra, at least for now. There’s no telling what kind of bowing and scraping Hollywood’s executive producers and directors will do in the face of the social justice mob and all of their obedient businesses.
But the artists in Hollywood should be absolutely furious with this nonsense. Actors, and really all artists, shouldn’t be handcuffed by the mob, yet they continuously are. They’re either disqualified from roles or forced to exit them because of outrage over-representation or, ironically, inclusivity.
Back in 2018, Scarlette Johansson was forced to exit a role as a transgender man in the movie “Rub & Tug” after the social justice community lost its mind. She initially defended her casting for the role but then when that made the anger toward her from the mob even worse, she caved and said she “mishandled the situation.”
“In hindsight, I mishandled that situation. I was not sensitive, my initial reaction to it,” Johansson said. “I wasn’t totally aware of how the trans community felt about those three actors playing — and how they felt in general about cis actors playing — transgender people. I wasn’t aware of that conversation — I was uneducated.”
“I learned a lot through that process,” she added. “I misjudged that. It was a hard time. It was like a whirlwind. I felt terrible about it. To feel like you’re kind of tone-deaf to something is not a good feeling.”
Johansson had every right to play that role. It was a crime biopic about a gender-bending man, so gender-bending the role would have been fitting. Regardless, the personal politics of the impersonal mob took over and forced the change, effectively taking the job from her.
To make sure that this doesn’t happen, actors and directors should be resisting the mob’s demands at every turn. These people aren’t trying to help a movie improve or be more faithful, such as the angry response to the Sonic the Hedgehog character design. These people are outraged because artists aren’t following a specific set of political rules that must be obeyed or else consequences must be faced.
If Hollywood does continue to cave to social justice warriors, then it can expect its stories to become bland, monotonous, formulaic, and, bottom line, unwatchable.
