*John Boyega has spoken out about the treatment of Black characters in the latest Star Wars trilogy, accusing Disney of wanting to profit off ethnic actors before pushing them to the sideline.
“You get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything,” he told British GQ magazine. “[But] what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.”
Critics have also slammed the studio for ignoring Boyega’s Finn character in “The Rise of Skywalker.”
“Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver. You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all,” he said. “They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”
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“It’s sometimes the ignorance of people that think that what you see in the media of any actor or footballer represents the entirety of their experience.”
Actor and activist @JohnBoyega speaks to @Jimfam about #StarWars and being a black man in Hollywood: https://t.co/klRRrK5wR8 pic.twitter.com/qfUzu8cEQr— British GQ (@BritishGQ) September 2, 2020
Boyega went on to note that he was the only “Star Wars” cast member to have “their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race.”
“Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it],” he said. “Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”
Boyega channeled some of that frustration during an impassioned speech at a June Black Lives Matter protest in London that went viral. The actor says he and his sister originally planned to “protest quietly” at the event.
“I feel like, especially as celebrities, we have to talk through this filter of professionalism and emotional intelligence,” Boyega said in an interview with GQ published Wednesday. “Sometimes you just need to be mad. You need to lay down what it is that’s on your mind. Sometimes you don’t have enough time to play the game.”
Read the full interview here.
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