Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya has responded to criticisms made by Samuel L Jackson over the casting of black British actors in roles about US race relations, saying that he resented having “to prove that I’m black”.
In an interview last week Jackson questioned the casting of Kaluuya in Get Out, a horror film centred on an interracial relationship between a black American man and his white partner. “I tend to wonder what that movie would have been with an American brother who really feels that,” he told radio station Hot 97.1, adding. “Some things are universal, but [not everything].”
Kaluuya addressed Jackson’s comments in an interview with GQ published on Tuesday.
“Big up Samuel L Jackson, because here’s a guy who has broken down doors. He has done a lot so that we can do what we can do,” Kaluuya said.
“Here’s the thing about that critique, though. I’m dark-skinned. When I’m around black people I’m made to feel ‘other’ because I’m dark-skinned. I’ve had to wrestle with that, with people going ‘You’re too black.’ Then I come to America and they say, ‘You’re not black enough.’”
Kaluuya cited the treatment of black people in Brixton and Tottenham as evidence that black people in Britain had also experienced racism and segregation, but said that, because those experiences were not widely publicised, “people get an idea of what they might think the experience is”. Jackson had previously claimed that Kaluuya “grew up in a country where they’ve been interracial dating for a hundred years”.
Kaluuya expressed his frustration that, “in order to prove that I can play this role, I have to open up about the trauma that I’ve experienced as a black person. I have to show off my struggle so that people accept that I’m black.
“I resent that I have to prove that I’m black. I don’t know what that is. I’m still processing it.”
He added that he didn’t want the controversy over Jackson’s to overshadow “the message of the film. There’s a black writer and director [Jordan Peele] that has written a film that is critically acclaimed, and now is commercially profitable. Yet we’re trying to separate ourselves again? There’s enough to deal with,” he added.
Kaluuya isn’t the only black British actor to have criticised Jackson for his remarks. Last week Star Wars actor John Boyega wrote on Twitter that the controversy was “a stupid ass conflict we don’t have time for.”
In an opinion column in today’s Guardian, Homeland actor David Harewood addressed the debate, arguing that American producers hire so many British actors “because we’re damn good”. He also suggested that Britons may be better suited to some parts because they weren’t as burdened by “what’s in the history books”.
“Perhaps it’s precisely because we are not real American brothers that we black British performers have the ability to unshackle ourselves from the burden of racial realities – and simply play what’s on the page, not what’s in the history books,” he wrote.
