Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx made his directorial debut in 2016 with All-Star Weekend. “Wait,” you might be wondering, “why have I never heard of All-Star Weekend? Follow-up question: why is there a photo of Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder above these words? One more: do you validate?”
I’ll answer these in order:
1. You haven’t heard of All-Star Weekend, which follows two friends (Foxx and Jeremy Piven) who attend the NBA All-Star Game, because it was never released;
2. The comedy also stars the very rich Downey Jr., who played an egotistical Australian method actor who gets “pigmentation alteration” surgery to portray a Black character in the critically-acclaimed 2008 Hollywood satire, as a Mexican man;
3. No. Sorry.
“It’s been tough with the lay of the land when it comes to comedy,” Foxx told CinemaBlend about whether All-Star Weekend will ever be released. “We’re trying to break open the sensitive corners where people go back to laughing again… We hope to keep them laughing and run them right into All-Star Weekend because we were definitely going for it.” In 2017, Foxx explained how he got Downey Jr. to agree to the role. “I called Robert, I said, ‘I need you to play a Mexican.’ I said, ‘Sh*t, you played the black dude and you killed that sh*t.’ We got to be able to do characters,” he said.
After 14 years of being in basically nothing but Marvel movies, Sherlock Holmes, and, uh, Dolittle, it would be nice to see Robert Downey Jr. do anything different. But does that include playing a Mexican man? As long as All-Star Weekend sits on the same never-seen shelf at Batgirl and I Love You, Daddy, I guess we’ll never find out.
(Via Variety)
