Popular animated comedies, including The Simpsons and Family Guy, will be diversifying their casts to represent the characters within the shows more accurately.
Amid a reckoning on race and a push for more diversity in Hollywood, the two shows joined other animated sitcoms that will recast characters of color that were voiced by white actors.
“Moving forward, The Simpsons will no longer have White actors voice non-White characters,” the show said in a statement Friday.
Hank Azaria, a white actor who portrayed Apu, an Indian immigrant, on the show, said in January that he would no longer voice the character after coming to the conclusion that the character perpetuated stereotypes that were hurtful to Indian viewers.
Mike Henry, a white voice actor on Family Guy who plays Cleveland Brown, a black character, will step down this week from his role on the show.
“It’s been an honor to play Cleveland on ‘Family Guy’ for 20 years,” Henry wrote in a tweet. “I love this character, but persons of color should play characters of color. Therefore, I will be stepping down from the role.”
Brown has been a main character on the show for 19 seasons, having appeared in 333 of the 349 episodes. The character also became the main character in a spinoff show, The Cleveland Show, which aired for four seasons from 2009 to 2013.
Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell, two white actresses, said last week they would stop playing biracial characters on other animated shows.
Slate, who is the voice for the character Missy on Netflix’s Big Mouth, wrote in a statement that she was “engaging in an act of erasure of Black people” by playing the role.
“At the start of the show, I reasoned with myself that it was permissible for me to play ‘Missy’ because her mom is Jewish and White — as am I,” she said. “But ‘Missy’ is also Black, and Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people. I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed, that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy, and that in me playing ‘Missy,’ I was engaging in an act of erasure of Black people.”
Bell, who voices the character Molly on Apple TV Plus’s Central Park, wrote in her separate announcement that the character would be recast but that she would remain with the show in a different role because casting “a mixed race character with a white actress” had undermined “the specificity of the mixed race and Black American experience.”
