John Boyega was open about tokenization, and he’s not about to let anyone get away with exploiting him to their advantage. Not even one of the biggest movie studios in the world.
In a new interview with British GQ, the actor and producer took Disney to task for the way two movies in the Star Wars franchise — The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker — used his character, Finn, as a bait-and-switch before establishing Daisy Ridley’s Rey as the continuation of the mythic Force. While John conceded that “you get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything,” he took particular umbrage with the way his character was used as a push for representation in name only.
“What I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are, and then have them pushed to the side,” he said. “It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.”
The actor pointed out that the same kind of sidelining happened to the characters played by Kelly-Marie Tran and Oscar Isaac, and that it isn’t a coincidence that actors from underrepresented communities bore the brunt of this treatment in a majority-white franchise. “You guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver. You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know f\*ck all,” he said. “So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience.”
John added that the people behind the latest Star Wars films “gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley,” and that both of his costars are aware of this. “Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything,” he added.
This is far from the first time that Disney has been held accountable for what viewers see is meager representation that doesn’t fully commit. In 2018, actor Anika Noni Rose, who voiced Princess Tiana in The Princess and the Frog, met with Disney to urge them to fix the character’s cameo in Ralph Breaks the Internet so her skin tone and nose were consistent with the way she had originally been drawn. And earlier this year, fans expressed understandable concern with the fact that Disney hired a majority non-Asian crew for the live-action Mulan remake.
But the mistreatment extended beyond the script and the screen. “Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it],” he pointed out, calling out the way racist Star Wars fans tried to weaponize anti-Black boycott campaigns against him and the movies. “Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and Black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”
John also concedes that “during the press of [The Force Awakens] I went along with it,” because behind-the-scenes he was contending with a stylist who openly disagreed with his fashion choices and a hairstylist who did not know how to style natural hair. “Obviously at the time I was very genuinely happy to be a part of it. But my dad always tells me one thing: ‘Don’t overpay with respect.’ You can pay respect, but sometimes you’ll be overpaying and selling yourself short.”
“It makes you angry with a process like that,” he added. “It makes you much more militant; it changes you. Because you realise, ‘I got given this opportunity but I’m in an industry that wasn’t even ready for me.’”
So now, he’s using his power and his voice to make room for the kinds of stories he wants to tell, and which he hopes will contribute to an uprising by Black storytellers and other storytellers of color who are telling the stories themselves. In March, he signed a major deal with Netflix to make “a slate of non-English language feature films focused on African stories,” according to his official statement. He’s also reuniting with filmmakers like Steve McQueen to tell stories he could really “relate to.”
“It reminded me of my happiest days at drama school,” he said of working with the director on the upcoming BBC miniseries Small Axe. “Being on set was like I’d been given the chance to breathe.”
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