Not black enough

When the producers of the upcoming film King Richard chose megastar Will Smith to play Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, they thought they would be hiring Hollywood gold. Smith, after all, is as safe a bet as you could wish for. But no. Big miscalculation. The black community has come out strong on the subject of ‘coloring’ and the consensus among them is that Will isn’t ‘black enough’. It is fair to say he isn’t as black as the real-life character his is meant to portray. But they want someone darker; Mahershala Ali, say, or even Brit heart throb Idris Elba. Hang on, he’s British, so how can it be right for him to portray a yank? Whatever, man...

Where is all this going, Pelagius is asking himself. True, we have come a long way since Larry Olivier blacked up to play Othello, or we witnessed the patronizing Black and White Minstrel Show on our TV screens. I have previously blogged about the ludicrous pass things have reached in America, where trans lobby groups are demanding only trans actors play trans roles, only gays play gays and so on. Now you have to be the right shade of black to play a black person. How long before a redhead must play a redhead, no hair-dye allowed, or finding an actor with an enormous conk to play Cyrano de Bergerac?

When are these people going to realise that cinema is a piece of artifice? Like literature, it reflects life but is larger than life. And therefore (almost) anything goes in the way a piece of writing is brought to life on the screen. In The Favourite, all sorts of liberties were taken with the dialogue to produce a work they thought a 21st century audience would accept. But apart from of few pedants like myself, no one batted an eyelid. Hey man, the producers would doubtless have responded to my comments, this is cinema, don’t you get that? Pelagius says it’s about time a few other people in the PC lobby get it too.