John Leguizamo is still dragging The Super Mario Bros. Movie over diversity
John Leguizamo doubles down on his assertion that The Super Mario Bros. Movie should have a Latino lead
Aux News John Leguizamo
John Leguizamo has been very vocal about The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s lack of diversity. On the one hand, Mario and Luigi, as two famously Italian characters, aren’t exactly being whitewashed. On the other hand, it is accurate to say that the new film falls behind 1993’s Super Mario Bros. in casting a Latino in a lead role, and that is where Leguizamo is drawing a line.
“No I will not [be watching]. They could’ve included a Latin character,” he recently told TMZ. “Like, I was groundbreaking and then they stopped the groundbreaking. They messed up the inclusion. They dis-included. Just cast some Latin folk! We’re 20% of the population. The largest people of color group and we are underrepresented.”
The cast of The Super Mario Bros. Movie does include Anya Taylor-Joy, who was raised in Argentina and has Argentinian heritage, though most have agreed she would not be classified as a person of color. Leguizamo has actually taken issue with the term “POC” itself, arguing on his recent Daily Show hosting stint that the term is exclusionary to Latinx people.
In any case, Leguizamo may not be counting Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach as one of the “leads,” like he was in the 1993 film. “The directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man, and they [the studio] didn’t want me to be the lead,” he previously said. “They fought really hard, and it was such a breakthrough. For them to go backwards and not cast another [actor of color] kind of sucks.”
Leguizamo further argued that he was “the only one who knows how to make this movie work script-wise,” a bold but certainly intriguing claim. In our B review, The A.V. Club admits that “there’s not much new or fresh in the way of story or animation” in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. One wonders what Leguizamo’s take on the material would have been!
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What
First of all, Latinos don’t like to be called latinx. For real, they studied it.Secondly, Fuck John. He culturally appropriated an Italian in the live action movie, taking work away from Frank Stallone, perhaps. Or–OR–cultural appropriation is bullshit and we’re supposed to share cultures and any actor can play anything. So eat some more sour grapes, John. Nobody misses you.
I love how the article uses Latin, Latino, and Latinx to describe a group of people just to cover all of their bases.
Leguizamo is way off base here, but playing a Japanese video game character based on an Italian stereotype in a movie is hardly “cultural appropriation.”
It was a joke. I don’t even believe in cultural appropriation. We’re supposed to share cultures.
That’s easy to say when the only people ‘borrowing’ from cultures are the people without one. Aka white people🤔
No culture? No English language that you’re speaking? No Shakespeare? No Mozart? No film noir? No Beatles? No architecture in all our major cities? GTFOIf Grandmaster Flash hadn’t sampled Liquid Liquid (white guys) for White Lines, there’d be no hip hop. So you’re welcome. Bigot.
I forgot some stuff: Kurt Vonnegut. Charles Bukowski. Hemingway. Electricity. Open heart surgery. Brain surgery. Indoor plumbing. Hollywood. Harry Potter. Sanitary products for women. The pill. The sexual revolution. The beat poets. The Godfather and Scarface. Ghostbusters. Saturday Night Live. Central air and heat. Stanley Kubrick. Goodfellas. Modern dentistry. Baseball. Lifting a billion people out of poverty in the last 30 years. I could go on, but you get the hint. There’s no place you’d rather live than in the West. So say thank you, and shut the fuck up.
I forgot!!! Democracy. Air travel. Space flight. OBGYNs. Agatha Christie. Mark Twain. Marlon Brando. The Constitution. Penicillin. X-Rays. Hot air balloons. Sonic Youth. The scientific method. Star Wars. Star Trek. Stephen Sondheim. The National Parks. The National (band). The Socratic method. Skyscrapers. Curing polio. The internet. Cell phones. Hermann Hesse. Motorcycles. Bicycles. Mr. Rogers. The Muppets. Nuclear energy. Defeating Fascism and Communism. The Tenderloin District. Nicolas Cage! Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Iceman Cometh. Allan Alcorn (founder of Atari and creator of Pong). Wet T-Shirt contests. You getting the picture yet, bigot?
I’m nearly always amenable to the idea that a majority white cast should be more diverse. But the idea that Luigi, a canonically Italian character, must be voiced by a person of Latin origin simply because Leguizamo played him in a very poorly received and best forgotten live-action adaptation 30 years ago is pretty ridiculous.
Yeah love Johnny Legz but but feel like he’s a bit off on this one.
I’d go further and say Mario and Luigi are really Japanese video game characters based on Italian stereotypes. It doesn’t really matter the race or ethnic background of the people voicing these characters. But to Leguizamo’s point, in general it’s good to have a diverse representation.
Yeah, pretty much. I’m all for the goal of more diversity, and he’s right that Latin people are often left out of the diversity conversation and are underrepresented in films. This particular one seems like an ill-conceived hill to die on, though,
They are left out because a lot of them don’t speak English. In big cities like Miami there are Latinos that have lived there for decades and barely speak English. He is not the first person to point out that there are a lot of Latinos in the US, but what is the biggest hit that there has been showing that this is a group that will come out to the theaters. Saying nothing of the fact that he should have never been cast in a Mario movie to begin with as Luigi
The way I read him, it’s less ‘because’, and more “These guys really went to bat for me for an effing live-action version, where the hurdles of inclusion are much greater. If they made that happen, why can’t a voice-only cast have somebody latin?” Which is absolutely fair. Nobody is coming to this movie for Crisp Rat, after all.
I mean the guy who created Mario wanted Chris Pratt.
And according to the guy who invented the format, it’s pronounced “jif”.
Agree. And I loved the live action version.
Though as pointed out, the beautiful and perfect in every way Anya Taylor Joy is Argentinian and speaks fluent spanish.
Japan’s idea of diversity is the ethnic stereotypes in Punch-Out!
And uncomfortable amounts of black and brown face
[Street Fighter games have entered the chat]
Great comment/avatar synergy.
[facepalm]
When is Babysitters II coming out?
THNAK YOU! I’ve been waiting for years for that news!!
Was he running his yap like this when Bob Hoskins – decidedly not a person of color – was playing Mario?
The cast of The Super Mario Bros. Movie does include Anya Taylor-Joy, who was raised in Argentina and has Argentinian heritage, though most have agreed she would not be classified as a person of color.“Most have agreed?” It’s not a matter of opinion, and frankly not that hard to figure out:1. Race and ethnic background are two different things. For example, you can be White, Asian, or Black (racial classification) and still be Latin (ethnic background) if you were raised in a Latin country and/or culture. 2. The definition of person of color is quite literally “not White.” 3. Taylor-Joy is both White (Scottish ancestry) and Latin (raised by an Argentine family), but not a person of color.
How about Jewish people? Plenty of Ashkenazi Jews pass for white but often have distinctive features not usually found in other European populations. Sephardic and Israeli Jews are often identified as one of a number of different Middle Eastern ethnicities.
Great question! Jewish is a religious and ethnic classification, not a race.You can also be Latin and Jewish, like a considerable portion of the population in Argentina.
AsSorry if I wasn’t clear, I meant to ask if you think any of the varieties of Jewish people would qualify as people of color along with why or why not. I’m aware that Jewish people aren’t considered a race but I’m also aware that race is a completely artificial construct with no roots in history like ethnicity.Also I should have said misidentified rather than identified in my previous comment but the edit window had passed before I realized my error.
Again, Jewish people can be of any race. I don’t know enough about the racial breakdown of the different Jewish populations around the world (Israel or elsewhere), but I suspect is heavily linked to the area where they live or originate from. For example, Jews people with origins in Eastern Europe could mostly be considered White, but that’s not always the case with those who originate from the Middle East.
4. I love Anya Taylor Joy and want her to marry me.
…says the guy who’s not Italian. There’s seems to be a decent amount of representation in the cast after performing a grueling IMDB search.
John Leguizamo talks about discrimination against Latin people as if that’s the only thing that held his career back. Maybe if he mostly spoke about the plight of the people who grow our food and are treated as livestock by farmers rather than complaining about all the calls he’s not getting it wouldn’t come off as self-centered and performative. But he doesn’t and it does, to me at least. Bitterness can be a soil where comedy can live but I think his might be a little too acidic for anything to thrive.
How much ground should we expect him to cover? He’s an actor, after all, discussing the performance business. Sure, it would be great if he were here to denounce the treatment of migrant farm workers. Maybe that’s another hill for him on another day.
I was going to make a joke about The Pest but fuck that. The guys filmography is pretty full. Sure he’s not lead in most things but he’s getting work
A joke about The Pest will illicit more laughter than a joke in The Pest, so fire away.
The “largest people of color group” comment feels like it’s gotta be racist.
It should have been Pedro Pascal. As soon as I saw the SNL parody commercial I lost all interest in this movie. That is the Mario movie that I want to see.
In another context, he probably has a point. In this particular context, I don’t think so.
It sounds like he’s bitter or jealous? The movie doesn’t have asian and muslim actors voicing characters either. I’m all for diversity but I don’t think the people in charge of casting went out of their way to not cast a latino actor. They mostly went with star power and they happen to be white and one black person. There’s nothing sinister here, John. You’re reaching.
I enjoy Jack Black’s work, but I thought this was another live action movie. Not interested in an animated version, whoever is playing the lead. Oh well.
Maybe he can just take the movie, take the script, get a bunch of people and dub over the characters. Then they can secretly leak it online, there’s now two versions of the movie available. One that must be paid for, and the other for free, and then claim he didn’t dub shit. Those are AI generated voices. Then months later you’re going to see a whole bunch of animated movies, both CGI, and Anime being re-released with whole new dubbing by anyone and everyone, all claiming….AI generated voices.
his own genealogy (from 2022 PBS episode Finding Your Roots) showing absolutely zero trace of Italian, Boricua, or French (à la Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge). Colombian 💯 (affirmed in 2011 via estranged father).- – – – – -Research by the genealogy show Finding Your Roots indicated that Leguizamo does not have Puerto Rican, Italian, and Lebanese ancestry, as he has sometimes stated. His family is Colombian, and a DNA test found that his genetic ancestry includes European (mostly Spanish).- – – – – -According to Leguizamo’s 2006 autobiography:“My dad’s father, a rich part Italian part Puerto Rican who lived in Colombia, left my dad’s mother when my dad was a baby. Every Friday as a boy my dad went to meet with his father at the stock exchange, La Bolsa de Valores de Bogotá, and his father gave him money for his living expenses. …My dad was twenty-one when he got back to Bogotá. That’s where he met my mom. She was an exotic beauty, with a mix of bloodlines that supposedly included Native American, Arabic, Spanish, Lebanese, and maybe some Jewish and African as well. Like his mom and dad, hers had broken up—my Lebanese grandfather had left my grandmother—and my mom was forced to choose between them. She chose her mom. So my mom and dad had that in common.”Excerpt From: Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends by John Leguizamo. Pp. 9