Straight Outta Compton might be a smash hit at the box office, taking $56 million over its opening weekend, but the excitement was tempered last month by revelations about the female casting call.
The SAG or non-union casting call out for females of all ethnicities, aged 18 – 30 and living in the LA area was split into four categories: A Girls, B Girls, C Girls and D Girls. In the description, A Girls should be “Models. MUST have real hair – no extensions, very classy looking, great bodies. You can be black, white, asian, hispanic, mid eastern, or mixed race too,” which isn’t the absolute worst. But B Girls are expected to be “light skinned” with a note that “Beyonce is a prototype here.” C Girls are “African American girls, medium to light skinned with a weave.”
The category that has understandably caused the greatest offense, however, is the D Girls. “D GIRLS: These are African American girls. Poor, not in good shape. Medium to dark skin tone. Character types,” the description reads. Despite the A Girls category not specifying a skin color, the following categories clearly prize light skin over dark and are judgemental about body size and black hairstyles — a shockingly discriminatory hierarchy that perhaps is even more surprising when employed for casting a film about legendary black musicians.
Women’s issue website Hello Beautiful recently interviewed the stars of Straight Outta Compton: O’Shea Jackson Jr. (who plays Ice Cube and is his real life son), Jason Mitchell (Eazy-E) and Corey Hawkins (Dr Dre). In the clip embedded above, the trio try to explain what went wrong.
“I highly doubt that casting company meant anything by it,” Jason Mitchell pontificates. “When you’re not really sure how to describe somebody, or not really sure how to put it in lame terms [sic] — for lack of a better expression, I guess — those types of thing you can make mistakes, because if you don’t exactly know how to gage that in words, you could possibly say the wrong thing, you know,” he continues, adding that, “It’s easy to be racist! Soon as you slide, you racist.”
Hawkins concedes that, “Yeah, they messed that up a little bit,” but qualifies their position by saying, “I don’t think they had anything to do with what we were looking for on the movie, so you know, they couldn’t really speak for us, because I know that Gary [director F. Gary Gray] wasn’t about that, Universal wasn’t about that.”
“I don’t think they had a specific breakdown,” Mitchell adds, explaining that, “they weren’t sure how to articulate what they were trying to get across”. “Right,” Hawkins agrees, grinning, “Because we know our women come in all beautiful shapes, sizes, colors and everything.” “You know, you gotta cut em some slack,” Jason Mitchell concludes. Not sure we’re with you there Jason, but good to know that your personal appreciation of female beauty is a little less discriminatory.