In his more than 35 years as an actor, John Leguizamo has seen (and done) everything from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to ‘Trapped in the Past’ to ‘Super Mario Bros’. But getting there was not easy: His family moved from Bogotá to New York and had to deal with systemic racism in the United States. So when he found out this week that James Franco would play Fidel Castro got angry… And in what way.
it’s not latin
Adding an image with a Deadline headline (“James Franco will play Fidel Castro in ‘Alina of Cuba'”), Leguizamo has retaliated at ease on Instagram, where he has around 22,000 likes: usually, his reflections on racism in Hollywood they have much more pull than the rest of your posts.
How does this keep happening? How does Hollywood exclude us but also steal our narratives? No more hijacking by Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This is bullshit! It is also a difficult story to tell without falling into aggrandizement, which would be wrong! I have no problem with Franco, but he is not Latino!
The next day, Leguizamo tried to lower the smoke and the tone of the speech with a more or less appeasing video in which he explained his anger the day before: “I grew up in a time where Latino people couldn’t play Latino people on film. (…) We couldn’t do our own roles. There were people painting their faces brown to look Latina in ‘West Side Story,’ or Eli Wallach in ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ That’s the time I grew up in. The time when they told you that you had to change your namebeing out of the sun, that only Latinos with white skin would get jobs”
John Martínez O’Felan, producer of ‘Alina of Cuba’, who will follow the life of Castro’s daughter, has answered. Calling him on the phone and solving his problems privately? Of course not: in the pages of The Hollywood Reporter.
A guy like John Leguizamo has historically been seen by Hispanics as one of the first Latino-descended actors in America and I’ve always looked up to him as an underappreciated partner. But his comments are culturally uneducated and a blind attack with zero substance on this project. The reality of ignorance falls away when he suggests that it is his personal view of being ‘Latino’, because a land mass or area in which to live does not determine a person’s blood or genetic history.
James Franco, oblivious to the controversy, has claimed that he is working on Castro’s accent, something that has made the Latino community feel bad because, well, they have it as standard. For example, Jeff Torres has said on Twitter “I’m auditioning for another Latin American trafficker and James Franco is going to play Fidel Castro.” The controversy is served.