Harry Potter and How to Get Away with Murder star Alfred Enoch is joining the “Diversity in Hollywood” conversation and he has some great things to say. Listen up.
Enoch, currently performing in King Lear, gave a lengthy interview with the UK's Metro on the importance of black and minority ethnic (BAME) actors taking on a wide variety of roles.
“You can do Shakespeare with black actors without it having to be set in Africa,” he told them. “There”s not a framing mechanism to justify that the characters are black, because there doesn”t have to be.”
Although he admits he's still fairly new to Hollywood, he did discuss the broader diversity issues at play there telling Metro:
“'My thought is is that we need to get a wider array of roles for black and minority actors, so they”re represented across the board and not just pockets of story telling,” the actor said. 'We need BAME actors in non-racially specific roles that normally go to white actors. We need to get to where in a piece of storytelling race doesn”t matter. We need to explore different perspectives. How many times have we seen a black Mr Darcy? The vital thing is flexibility – why shouldn”t there be a black Darcy? Is it really going to grind things to a halt if there is?'”
The actor, who played Dean Thomas in seven of the eight Harry Potter films, also touched on the needlessly controversial Harry Potter and the Cursed Child casting of black actor Noma Dumezweni as Hermione.
“The exciting thing about this new movie and the play is that the world is expanding and diversifying and different people are playing the parts that we know,” he said, “and that”s a good thing.”