Idris Elba Responds To Samuel L Jackson’s Accusation “Black British Actors Take African American Actors Jobs”
A few months ago Samuel L. Jackson started a buzz after commenting on the box office smash”Get Out” and the fact that they used a British Black actor instead of an African American actor.
Via The Shade Room:
“I know the young brother who’s in the movie, and he’s British,” Jackson said about Daniel Kaluuya. “There are a lot of black British actors that work in this country. All the time. I tend to wonder what would that movie have been with an American brother who really understands that in a way.”
“some things are universal, but everything ain’t” as away to suggest that an African-American actor should have played that part since there’s no way that a black British man could wholly identify with the racial nuances that African-American would experience. He also said that British actors “think they’re better-trained, for some reason, than we are because they’re classically trained” and that he didn’t know “what the love affair is with all that.”
Idris Elba has definitely been one of the most well known and featured Black British actors, and after months of silence has finally responded the the comments, and did so with class.
Via The Shade Room:
“I was really disappointed in those comments,” Elba told #TheRoot. “We are dissected as a people; why dissect us any further as a comment that’s as stupid as that?”
He continued, “Black actors all over the world look at Samuel L. Jackson as a great actor that happens to black. The idea that he can dissect us into English actors that are black, stealing roles from American actors, is really ignorant and made of things that divide us instead of pulling us together.”
