A lesson Hollywood has yet to learn: One can never be too woke for the woke crowd.
Disney announced earlier this month that it would be filming a new live-action Snow White with two diverse female leads: Rachel Zegle, a Latina, and Gal Gadot, who is Israeli. But that’s not nearly enough, according to actor Peter Dinklage, who is perhaps best known for his role in the TV series Game of Thrones.
“There’s a lot of hypocrisy going on,” Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, said in a recent interview. “Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. But you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me.”
Dinklage went on to argue that the Snow White story’s depiction of the dwarves was the central problem.
“You’re progressive in one way, but then, you’re still making that f***ing backwards story about seven dwarves living in a cave together — what the f*** are you doing, man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough,” he said.
Dinklage did not specify what, exactly, he found so troubling about the dwarves’ lives in Snow White. Perhaps he didn’t like their names. To be fair, I wouldn’t want to be referred to as Grumpy or Dopey either.
But this isn’t the first time a Hollywood studio has come under fire for staying true to the Snow White storyline. In fact, when Universal Pictures released Snow White and the Huntsman in 2012, an advocacy group called Little People of America, which claims to “represent people of small stature and their families,” blasted the studio for casting full-sized actors and shrinking them using digital manipulation instead of casting actual dwarves.
“This is akin to blackface,” actor Danny Woodburn said at the time. “If they were casting little people as the doctor on ER or the lawyer on The Good Wife, if it worked both ways, then I wouldn’t have a beef with this. But it doesn’t work that way.”
So, there you have it: You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. But that’s exactly how woke culture works. There’s no appeasing woke activists; they’ll always find something to be offended by. If Hollywood was smart, it would just stop listening.
