*Despite “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” getting lotsa love from critics via rave reviews, there one black actor who’s not the least bit impressed with Daniels or his film.
Actor Harry Lennix, who’s appeared in a host of films including “The Matrix Trilogy,” “Get On the Bus” and “Man of Steel,” says the filmmaker took White House butler Eugene Allen’s story and essentially “ni**erfies” it. Lennix has basically dismissed the project as “historical porn.”
“I read five pages of this thing and could not go any further. I tried to read more of it, and I’m not a soft spoken guy, but it was such an appalling mis-direction of history in terms of taking an actual guy who worked at the White House,” said Lennix in an interview with Shadow and Act. “But then he “ni**erfies” it. He “ni**ers” it up and he gives people these, stupid, luddite, antediluvian ideas about black people and their roles in the historical span in the White House and it becomes… well… historical porn. I refused.”
Lennix doesn’t say which parts of the movie he felt that way about or if it was just the entire film in general but despite Harry’s take on project, Lee Daniels was able to get some of Hollywood’s elite to take part in it.
“Lee Daniels The Butler” features Forest Whitaker as the lead, and also stars Oprah Winfrey, Robin Williams, Jane Fonda, Lenny Kravitz, Cuba Gooding Jr. and John Cusack, just to name a few.
Still, Lennix could give a crap.
“While any sort of aberrant behavior happens in any community, it has become normative in black cinema that we are these bestial, deprived people, and I refuse to play with that,” he said.
SOURCE: EURweb.com
Article and Picture Courtesy of EUR Web
