Zoe Saldana gave a heartfelt apology for portraying Nina Simone in the 2016 film “Nina.”

Talk about political correctness.

Saldana is a black Latina. Simone was a darker-skinned black woman, so Saldana wore make-up to make her look more like Simone. So now she is apologizing for wearing “blackface.”

Scoop’s new laws:

(1) From now on, nobody can play a non-fictional role unless they look exactly like the person they are playing.
(2) While make-up and prosthetics are not allowed to enhance the illusion, surgical alteration is permissible. (If you are willing to make yourself look exactly like Bob Dylan in real life, you can play him in a movie.)
(3) Unless the actor’s skin is darker than the skin of the person they are playing, ala “Hamilton.”

20 thoughts on “Zoe Saldana gave a heartfelt apology for portraying Nina Simone in the 2016 film “Nina.”

  1. I was thinking now that having Eddie Murphy cast as Mushu, a Chinese dragon, was racist. They should’ve employed an Asian American voice actor for the part.

    Also, having America Ferrara cast as Astrid is also politically incorrect, as the part should have been voiced by a woman of Scandinavian descent.

    And for diversity’s sake, Eve from Wall-E should have been voiced by a woman of color. Doesn’t matter what color, as long as it’s not white (which by definition, is the combination of all color, whereas black is the absence of all color).

  2. Harry Shearer commented on this whole type of thing a few days ago. Of course he just does voice acting now, but still. He pointed out he’s not actually an evil owner of a nuclear power plant, but nobody seems to have problems with him playing one. His point is: this is what actors do. They play things they aren’t.

    There seem to be two issues here:
    1.An economic argument: I can sympathize that racialized actors are underemployed relative to white actors (at least I assume that’s the case) so, it’s important for their livelihoods of racialized actors to at least get roles of racialized characters. The broader conclusion though, as Scoopy was pointing out, was if only black actors can play blacks, then it must also be the case that only white actors can play whites. In which case, Alexander Hamilton must be played by a white person. Given that a disproportionate number of roles are written for whites (leading to the relatively higher unemployment rate for racialized actors), then the logical conclusion of this is that racialized actors will likely be in a worse place than they are now.

    2.A social argument: only blacks can understand the experiences of blacks, only men can understand the experiences of men, only women….

    Something like that is an old debate in philosophy fine. My personal view is that while nobody can ever fully understand any other person (not to get too close to Jordan Peterson’s argument which stretches this to the point of dishonesty) most people have shared experiences with others and most people have at least some empathy.

    To take all this to its even more logical extreme, it’s not good enough even for a person who looks like Abraham Lincoln to play Abraham Lincoln, only President Abraham Lincoln can play President Abraham Lincoln, as only he had his experiences.

    So, ultimately I agree with Shearer but I can understand why racialized actors would want to at least get all the roles written for their communities.

    I think it is acting and I think part of the job of fiction is to try out things and re-imagine them: a female Bond, a female Ghostbusters team.

    I choose those intentionally of course, because when the shoe was on the other foot in those cases, all sorts of butt hurt whiny men were arguing that Bond must be a man and the Ghostbusters must be men as well. There are people on both sides who use the same logic at different times.

    1. Oddly though, it’s considered P.C by those who like to throw out that term for only racialized actors to play racialized characters, but they also considered the female Ghostbusters movie itself as an example of P.C (women wanting to take on roles meant for men.)

      This obvious inconsistency is why the term ‘P.C’ is now meaningless and used only for political purposes to attempt to shut down debate.

      1. Political Correctness is such a bullshit term and invention that really ties into something called ‘Corporate Correctness.’

        You know, never question authority, never question profit, so let me invent these bullshit controversies to dog whistle to everyone to make something a big deal that isn’t.

        Nina Simone’s family thought the portrayal wasn’t honorable. That’s it. Saldana even was indignant at the time and making equivalencies to Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra in the dinosaur age, as if that is the standard now.

        You know how simple this stuff is to not think about? You’re not in her families shoes, so why do people even question why if this or that person should or should not be offended. I’m using “you” in a general term here to those who make these kind of statements BTW.

        OK great, you wouldn’t be offended by it. Shut the hell up, and move on, and don’t spend timeshare in your mind on it, its as simple as that. Jury duty for public opinion isn’t mandatory. Its weird the only people who seem to complain about political correctness are the ones that insist they have the answers to everything with very little research or education.

        And the ones that do have that have enough sense to keep their mouth shut and live and let live in the first place.

    2. When you think about it, what is more important to a genuine compelling performance of a character: the understanding of the actor? Or the understanding of the author/screenwriter? It seems to me both are important, but perhaps one with a good understanding can lead to a great performance. If a white man is fundamentally incapable of understanding and empathizing with a black man or a woman of any race, does that mean that a white male author can only have white male characters? I do think that there are author’s that do a great job of empathizing with people of different genders and ethnicities and I see no reason why actors can’t do the same. But I agree that for the sake of inclusion, efforts must be made to cast minority actors as minority characters. I for one cringe when I see a white actor playing an Asian role, especially when that actor was Mickey Rooney.

      1. 1.I left that part out about the roles being written in what I said previously because I didn’t want to expand my comment out further.

        But, since, according to Shearer, the writers and producers aren’t diverse, that’s part of my point: ultimately white male authors can only write white male characters and so on. Taken to that extreme, it’s especially reasonable to conclude that the roles for racialized actors will decrease, since, after all racialized actors can only play similarly racialized characters.

        2.This is what Harry Shearer said:
        He went to explain, “That’s the job description. There’s a conflation between representation, which is important… people from all backgrounds should be represented in the writing and producing ends of the business so they decide what stories to tell and with what knowledge… and performance.”

        “In performance, as I say, the job is playing the part of someone you’re not,” Shearer continued. “I’m not a rich nuclear plant owner. I’m not a Bible believing Christian who lives next door to Homer. I’m not any of those people.”

        3.The philosopher I referred to previously is David Hume who argued that a person’s knowledge is limited to their experiences and other philosophers of the 1700s adopted that point of view.

        Immanuel Kant in the 1800s argued that judgement could give people knowledge and understanding of things they have not personally experienced and, up until now, this has been generally assumed to be true.

        I don’t know how widespread this ‘only personal experiences’ view is becoming because the media tends to sensationalize things, but it does seem we may be backsliding away from the notion of the value of knowledge and understanding.

  3. So, Scoop, by your law, Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder is aces. However, RDJr employed black face in Tropic Thunder, thereby breaking the law, but he did so in order to portray someone who was conducting himself in accordance with your law. What’s the ruling?

    1. I give them both a pass, but not Sean Penn, because “you never go full retard.” Seriously, neither is a historical character, so I don’t care.

      Actually, my verdict is that every single actor in history must apologize if they played a historical character. Except Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

      As I wrote in my review: “61 year old Kate Hepburn played 61 year old Eleanor of Aquitaine to perfection, and won a Best Actress Oscar for it. In fact, Hepburn is actually a direct descendant of Eleanor from two different lines, both Eleanor’s French children and her English children, so she was literally born to play this role at age 61.”

      So she gets a pass.

      The rest of you – start begging for forgiveness. And it’s not just blackface you have to apologize for. It also includes all of you youngsters who wore aging make-up instead of giving work to deserving senior citizens, and all of you American Streeps who spoke with Polish accents when they could have hired a real Polish woman with a natural accent.

      Also I am all in with Samuel L as John Wayne. I love that idea!

  4. Does anybody know if Raquel Welch has apologized for playing the role of Myra Breckinridge when Raquel was not a trans woman? I am pretty sure she never became one either. Though if gender is fluid and capable of changing, can a biological female that identifies as male but later identifies as female then identify as a trans woman? Would it have been OK for Zoe Saldana to have played Nina Simone if she had identified as an African American instead of as a Black Latina, sort of a darker skinned Rachel Dolezal?

    Those aren’t serious questions but the PC world we live in today is truly ridiculous. The reason that black face is so offensive is because white entertainers would apply black shoe polish levels of makeup in order to mock African Americans. They didn’t apply makeup to subtly darken their skin in order to play a famous character they greatly admired. I honestly doubt if most of the people complaining about Zoe Saldana’s makeup on social media really understand why black face is offensive. People just scour the Internet looking for things they can be offended by whether it was an offensive joke on twitter or a celebrity’s wedding photos.

    A few days ago Tulane University cancelled a virtual discussion by
    National Book Award Winner Edward Ball about his new acclaimed anti racism themed book “Life of a Klansman: A Family History of White Supremacy.” In the book he discusses his racist great grandfather who was a member of the KKK. Students at Tulane felt the discussion would have been “not only inappropriate but violent towards the experience of Black people in the Tulane community and our country.” The student government VP wrote in part “An apology is the first step in undoing the harm you have caused many members of the community, but is in no way the last. In the current political atmosphere, it is imperative that we are all actively anti-racist, and endorsing speakers like these is antithetical to the anti-racist work being done by students, faculty, and staff on our campus.” I suppose I can understand a person might decide they don’t have any interest in listening to the descendant of a racist discuss racism even if he condemns it. But a demand the discussion be cancelled and the university apologize for scheduling it in the first place because such a discussion would have been an act of violence against minority students seems like something that belongs in a dystopian science fiction novel in the vein of 1984 or Fahrenheit 451.

  5. I agree that this is all going a bit far — pendulums tend to swing far to each side before reaching a consistent middle — but frankly, given how far the pendulum has been on the other side for so long, I think we can all survive something towards the other extreme .

    1. To give a real-life example, dark-haired, Jewish Idina Menzel (aka the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem) played the white-haired, nearly-albino Scandinavian Elsa in Frozen, a portrayal generally considered to be one of the greatest in the history of musical films. Nobody objected.

      But what if it had been the other way around? What if an extremely Nordic-looking actress-singer played a dark-haired Jew, and did so as brilliantly as Menzel. Would that also draw no objections?

      As somebody else pointed out in this thread, that’s what actors do. They pretend to be who they are not. If my life is ever made into a film, i give my full permission to cast somebody who is not a blonde, 6’2″ Polish-American. You can cast Danny Fuckin’ Devito for all I care, as long as you get the attitude and humor right.

      (In fact, I think the actor who would do the best job as “old” me would be Jon Voight, an excellent actor who does look like me, but is not Polish, and is ultra-conservative – but he has the right swagger.)

      On the other hand, I would be absolutely thrilled to have Uncle Scoopy re-imagined as a black man and played Samuel L Jackson. In fact I would be in heaven! He is a great actor and has EXACTLY the right attitude.

  6. “ Saying “oh they’re all just black, whats the big deal!” Well, one is from Dominican and Puerto Rican parents, the other grew up in discrimination and the civil rights movement. ”

    What an odd endorsement of Joe Biden’s Latino vs African American comment.

  7. Pretty sure it was about casting someone with the same heritage as the person they’re playing and not just about blackface.

    Saying “oh they’re all just black, whats the big deal!” Well, one is from Dominican and Puerto Rican parents, the other grew up in discrimination and the civil rights movement. Then you would get the Hollywood-ized ‘bravery’ comments from the actress in the role.

    How difficult is it to just cast to the role instead of doing these dime store imitations of someone just to avoid giving someone with the right background a shot? Guessing if Samuel L Jackson played John Wayne in a biopic, it would be gravy for all the boomers who grew up watching him.

    1. Both Dominican and Puerto Ricans are descended from slaves. I don’t see the big deal. I guess British Black people shouldn’t be able to play American historical figures.

      1. Why is this even about who should or shouldn’t? It’s about doing the right thing and giving an opportunity to someone else who fits the role better – or at the very least consulting with the family of the person who is to be portrayed, which never happened in this case.

        Always the conservative angle, to warp how some other group of people feel into political correctness and only see it from ignorant angle of ‘thats being taken away and I can’t do/say it!’

        You can make your own documentary, biopic, or movie and do and say whatever the hell you want, but conservatives seem to confuse freedom of speech as freedom from criticism. You want to portray a historical figure by ignoring the people that knew the person best, then you’re not immune from criticism, plain and simple.

    2. Nothing to do with anything, but I would be all over Samuel L. as The Duke. I would LOVE to have him deliver a line like “You better believe it pilgrim, or you’re dead where you stand”. You could throw a fucking rap soundtrack over it, I’d still go.
      But no, we’re gonna get a reboot of something where two robots fight.

      1. Check out The Hateful Eight, he does a pretty good job as a Western bounty hunter in it.

    3. How does this differ from casting a young person in aging make-up rather than a real senior citizen. Why is this not disrespect and discrimination against the aged in the same sense that blackface is offensive to black people.

      Should we now ban all high school and college plays because they have to rely on heavy make-up to make them seem older?

  8. Why do you think they call it acting? Ian McKellan, a man with no magical powers, played a wizard in LoTR. Are they coming for him next?

    1. I am always reminded by the comments of the playwright Brian Friel. His play, Dancing at Lughnasa, was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and a bunch of Irish actresses. When asked if he thought it appropriate to cast an American in the part, he pointed out that Streep was the only one who got the accent right. The play is about a specific part of Ireland with a distinctive accent, and Streep (and she alone) went to the trouble of learning it.

      So could they have filled the role with a mediocre Irish actress instead of the great Streep?

      Absolutely

      But it would have sucked.

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