John Boyega calls on Hollywood studios to do more to protect actors from racial abuse
- During an interview with Variety, the former "Star Wars" actor called on film studios to play a bigger role in protecting their actors who face online abuse.
- He said: "When one of your actors, especially an actor that's so prominent in the store, is announced as part of your franchise, and then it has a big racial backlash and receives abuse online and that starts to form a shadow on what is supposed to be an amazing gift."
- He added: "It is important for the studios to definitely lend their voice, lend their support to that and to have a sense of solidarity not just in the public eye, but on the ground on set."
- Boyega has been vocal about his experiences and the abuse he faced online while working on the latest "Star Wars" trilogy.
John Boyega has called on Hollywood film studios to play a greater role in protecting their actors who become targets for racist and sexist online abuse.
During an interview with Variety, Boyega said that the big studios must take a public stand against toxic fans and social media accounts who engage in online harassment.
He said: "When one of your actors, especially an actor that's so prominent in the story, is announced as part of your franchise, and then it has a big racial backlash and receives abuse online and that starts to form a shadow on what is supposed to be an amazing gift."
He added: "It is important for the studios to definitely lend their voice, lend their support to that and to have a sense of solidarity not just in the public eye, but on the ground on set."
The 28-year-old British actor who played the role of Finn, one of the few Black characters in the "Star Wars" films, has been vocal about the difficult experience he and Kelly Marie Tran — an Asian American actor — had while filming the new "Star Wars" films.
Earlier this week, Boyega told The Hollywood Reporter that he had an "honest" conversation with a Disney executive following his criticism, shared in a September GQ interview, of how he and Tran's character Rose were sidelined in the last film "The Rise of Skywalker."
Both actors were introduced to the "Star Wars" franchise as leading characters. In 2015's "The Force Awakens" Boyega's Finn had his own lightsaber, but in subsequent films, he became a progressively peripheral character alongside Kelly Marie Tran who emerged as a leading character in the new trilogy's second film but was mostly absent in the third.
"It was a very honest, a very transparent conversation," Boyega told THR. "There was a lot of explaining on their end in terms of the way they saw things. They gave me a chance also to explain what my experience was like."
Boyega added that he felt it was necessary for him to speak up now to hopefully change the environment for Black actors and other actors of color coming up in the industry behind him.
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