Nina Simone Documentary Director Slams "Ugly and Inaccurate" Zoe Saldana Biopic

Nina Simone Documentary Director Slams "Ugly and Inaccurate" Zoe Saldana Biopic

Last year, two documentaries about Nina Simone were released: Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated Netflix film What Happened, Miss Simone? and Jeff L. Lieberman’s The Amazing Nina Simone. This year, Nina will be released—a biopic starring Zoe Saldana as Simone. The film has already drawn fire from Simone’s estate, including an aggressive tweet to Saldana from Simone’s verified Twitter account. After Robert L. Johnson—the BET founder whose company RLJ Entertainment are releasing Nina—dismissed critics of Saldana’s casting in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Lieberman responded with an essay decrying the biopic’s “ugly and inaccurate” portrayal of Simone.

Johnson addressed people who criticized the filmmakers for casting a light-skinned actress to play Simone.

“It’s unfortunate that African-Americans are talking about this in a way that hearkens back to how we were treated when we were slaves. … The slave masters separated light-skinned blacks from dark-skinned blacks, and some of that social DNA still exists today among many black people.” 

Johnson also compared criticisms to the discriminatory “brown paper bag tests.”

“That’s where some of this comes from, when you hear people saying that a light-skinned woman can’t play a dark-skinned woman when they’re both clearly of African descent. … To say that if I’m gonna cast a movie, I’ve gotta hold a brown paper bag up to the actresses and say, ‘Oh sorry, you can’t play her.’ Who’s to decide when you’re black enough?”

Lieberman responded to Johnson’s arguments:

For Mr. Johnson to now claim that this is black people against black people is outrageous, and a desperate distraction. People of all colors are angered because Hollywood has a long history of casting lighter-skinned actors, and even today with a black president in the Oval Office, the Oscars overlooking black actors, and the Black Lives Matter movement at its tipping point, dark-skinned people are still passed over, even for the role of a woman whose story is defined by her proud blackness. “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and “Four Women” are all songs that Nina Simone proudly stood for. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said in his recent essay in The Atlantic, “A young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic.”

Lieberman also took issue with the film’s script by Cynthia Mort (who also directed the film), which focuses on Simone’s life in the 1990s.

The trailer for Nina reveals Ms. Saldana as Nina brandishing a gun, being strapped down in a hospital and throwing champagne bottles. Where there wasn’t truth, they invented it – turning Ms. Simone’s assistant, Clifton Henderson (played by David Oyelowo), into a love interest, despite the fact that he was an out gay man – and either willfully or ignorantly opted not to show Ms. Simone as she truly was, a woman in her 60s who had gained significant weight. Ms. Saldana in the film appears middle-aged and thin.

In a previous interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mort said, “Zoe gave an amazingly courageous and great performance. I think that’s all that should matter.” 

Read “Why the Color of Nina Simone’s Skin Is as Important as the Sound of Her Voice” on the Pitch.

Comments are closed.