There’s casting drama on Twitter again. In response to rumours that Jack Dylan Grazer is in talks to play Hiccup in the live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon, allegations emerged that Grazer physically abused his ex-girlfriends, as well as videos of him using racial slurs. We saw something similar just a couple of weeks ago, when Disney replaced the actor initially reported to✃ play David Kawena in the live-action adaptation of Lilo & Stitch after it was discovered that he used racial slurs in his social media posts.
Of course, in the last month, there have been plenty of actors facing consequences for their actions. Jonathan Majors, F. Murray Abraham, and David Choe have all been the subjects of criticism for their alleged treatme𒁏nt of women. In the case of Majors and Choe, much of that discourse and criticism has been on Twitter. The social media platform has always been a hotb💝ed of armchair investigative journalists, with people happy to dig up and redistribute old eviden💖ce of people acting like assholes, but I find it astonishing that they have to at all.
Are studios casting actors without doing cursory background checks? There are allegedly vetting practices that take place in these studios, and I’d like to qualify that neither of the actors in How To Train Your Dragon or Lilo & Stitch’s live ad🦋aptations෴ were officially cast, but it seems that evidence of a candidate’s racism or abuse gets posted on Twitter far faster than a studio can axe an actor. It makes sense that actors won’t get thoroughly vetted before they’re seriously considered for a role, just for efficiency’s sake, but surely a cursory background check should be conducted before an interview? If Twitter can unearth the use of slurs from a scroll through an Instagram profile, a billion-dollar studio can do the same – and background checks are common in most professions, so why not acting?
There is, of course, the issue of big Hollywood actors getting cast in movies despite already being dogged with controversy. David Choe’s statements about sexually assaulting a woman, for example, were well-known. Steven Yeun, his co-star and executive producer of Beef, was once a guest on that very same podcast (though not the same episode) where Choe told a dark story about forcing a masseuse to perform sexual acts on him, where Yeun laughed at a rape joke that Choe made. Brad Pitt has been accused by his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, of domestic violence, bu🦩t continues to move through the film industry as if nothing has happened while Johnny Depp will be in a French biographical drama film releasing this year.
Lots of people have heard about these issues, but choose to overlook them in the spirit of separating the art and the artist. After all, Roman Polanski may have sexually assaulted multiple women, including a 13-year-old, but you thought The Pianist was really good, and why should you have to care about whether t☂he people who make movies are good people or not? Here’s the kicker – when you don’t care, studios don’t care. They’re there to make money, and if their high-profile actor happens to be abusive, that’s fine with them. The problem only gets worse when nobody is held accountable, by their fans, the law, or the people that hire them.
Twitter is a dark, cursed place where people litigate celebrities’ shortcomings, actions and occasionally, criminal behaviour, through the lens of parasocial relationships with them. I’ve always found it off-putting, but you have to hand it to posters – they’re really good at finding receipts. On the off-chance that studios don’t actually enjoy the bad press they receive for casting potentially very bad people because it keeps them in the news cycle, I think maybe they should put a little more time, effort, and money into making sure their actors aren’t going to immediately get dragged for filth by Twitter. Maybe they could even put a little more thought about what happens when you give abusive people money and clout through a big role, all because they didn’t check whether or not there are videos of 🐭them saying the n-word online.