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Jeffrey Wright has revealed that another actor was introduced in to overdub him after he refused to censor his personal use of the n-word in Ang Lee’s revisionist Civil War western Ride with the Devil.
Wright was reminded of the incident from 1999 whereas studying the opening scene of his new literature satire American Fiction.
“I’ll tell you something related specifically to that first scene [in American Fiction] and understanding the meaning, or meanings, of the n-word,” Wright informed his co-stars Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling Ok Brown, and Erika Alexander as a part of an Entertainment Weekly roundtable dialogue.
“I did a movie called Ride with the Devil, and it was a film about the Civil War where I was playing a freedman, or actually a former slave working to free himself, but doing that on the side of the Confederacy, based on historical figures,” defined Wright. “This took place in the Kansas-Missouri Border War, outside of the regular army.
“In this scene in which he has this, kind of the apex of his awakening and his need to emancipate himself, he says, ‘Being that man’s friend was no more than being his n*****. And I will never again be anyone’s n*****.’ It’s such a self-empowering statement and understanding of the word.
“The studio at the time was so conflicted about ‘How do we market it?’ Ultimately they decided, we don’t need to market this at all.”
“Further, we’ll make it available for video, but take that character, Jeffrey Wright, off the poster to keep it a little more palatable for whoever their target audience is in Iowa, or wherever, at least in their mind.”
“Then they had me come do the airplane version of dialogue. There were a few curse words and this and that, and then with the word n***** they said: ‘We’d like to change that to negro,’ or whatever the choice was. And I said, ‘Nah. That’s not happening.’
“I headed out the door to my car. And they found some other actor to come in and do that one word, apparently, so that the airplane folk would be comfy in the darkness of their own ignorance around the language of race. It was so crazy.”
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American Fiction, which is predicated on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, explores points round racial language and stereotypes. Wright stars as Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, an writer who writes a novel stuffed with dangerous tropes as a joke, solely to see it turn into a bestseller.
The movie is the characteristic directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, who received an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for his work on 2019’s Watchmen.
American Fiction is in cinemas now.
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