I was sold on The Harder They Fall as soon as I saw the trailer. I didn’t completely understand what it would be about, but I saw Regina King and I saw a western full of Black people. That was enough for me. When I looked up more information about the film, I learned that the characters were based on real people. It wasn’t a biopic or a historical account, but the actors in the movie were playing characters based on real Black people from the Old West. Zazie Beetz was playing Stagecoach Mary, who I’d never heard of, so I looked her up.
Do casting directors have to cast for accuracy? No, not really. There are plenty of movies about real people where the actor in the role looked nothing like the character in real life.
Is it the responsibility of actors to turn down roles offered to them when the role should have gone to an actor from a more marginalized segment of society? Not necessarily. They have free will to accept any role that interests them. The public in turn has free will to criticize them for it, and that actor has to accept that the consequences of their actions may be some public backlash.
So I was not surprised to see Zazie Beetz cast as Stagecoach Mary. I was annoyed, but not surprised. I am however surprised to see that Zazie has gone on record about her privilege and about colorism in the press.
Last month the website Jezebel published a piece on Hollywood’s colourism problem, citing Beetz as an example.
— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) November 10, 2021
“This is something that I think about a lot and consider when contemplating any role that I take." pic.twitter.com/DfCqlDiSp5
It’s on your mind and you just…don’t care? It’s on your mind and you have decided to acknowledge it exists but do nothing to improve the situation or change the narrative?
Zazie Beetz is a bi-racial woman with a German father and a Black American mother who moved to the US from Germany as a tot because the homogeneity of Germany wasn’t the best place to raise a little brown girl. She has said — like many other bi-racial Black folks with a white parent — that she sometimes doesn’t feel Black enough. And I hear that. This is not me questioning her Blackness.
But Zazie can’t say that she considers colorism in the roles she takes, and then take this one where the director had the opportunity to give us a full figured dark skinned love interest and we got the typical thin beige lady. It feels so obvious in the movie that the director felt we wouldn’t believe the chemistry and attraction between Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) and Stagecoach Mary unless she was a skinny light-skinned woman. She’s the only light-skinned actor in the entire film, and she happens to be the love interest.
I’m just irked by the fact that there are more than enough roles specifically written for the Zazie Beetzes and Zoe Kravtizes of Hollywood. Most of the leading roles in Hollywood are written for White Women. Most of the leading love interests written for Black Women have someone in mind who looks like Tessa Thompson. Roles for dark skinned women who aren’t a size 2 are few and far between. Stagecoach Mary was the perfect opportunity to cast someone who isn’t even invited to audition for most of the other roles written for women. The source material was a rarity, and if Zazie truly had colorism in mind, she would have turned it down.
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