Tessa Thompson‘s star has been on the rise ever since she turned heads as Bianca in 2015’s Creed. Since then, she’s been earning praise in critically acclaimed movies like Sorry to Bother You and Annihilation while balancing it with roles in blockbusters, most prominently playing Valkryie in Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Endgame and the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder.
But right now she’s receiving criticism online for comments made in 2018 while promoting Creed II. In an interview with The Independent, she said:
“I don’t want to show up on set and just see a bunch of white people, no offence. And I don’t want to work in the company of a bunch of men. No offence.
I want to see work that really looks like the world in which we live. There are lots of people of colour, look around. It’s also really exciting not just what we put on screen, but also to work on productions that are inclusive. I want to show up on set and have it look like the world I walk around in every day, which is full of women, and people of colour, and folk with disabilities. I want to make content that feels like that both on camera and off it.”
She later went to express the hope that we’re on a positive trajectory when it comes to roles for women, saying:
“I hope we get to a space where there is so much content where women are just what we are which is multifaceted and dynamic so it’s not noteworthy when one appears in a film.”
Seems like bog-standard progressive stuff to me, but parts of the internet are going crazy over it, saying things like “You Don’t like white people Eh?!?! Bye, you just lost another fan along with thousands of others. Racist,” “So you don’t wanna work with men or white people huh? God did you just screw yourself,” and “But the money must be nice though….”
Honestly, this all seems like a bit of an overreaction for a basic call for diversity. Tessa Thompson has spent years arguing that Hollywood should be more inclusive, and anyone who fights for diversity is by definition pushing back against the existence of workplaces populated entirely by white people or men. That’s literally the point of the argument.
And to counter some of the more deranged screeching on Twitter, she didn’t say that she didn’t want to work with white people. She said she doesn’t want to see only white people on a set because the real world is diverse and cinema should reflect that. Pretty straightforward, right?
