Sarah Silverman claims that she was fired from a recent movie for wearing blackface in a 2007 episode of her Emmy-nominated Comedy Central show, The Sarah Silverman Program. The comedian made the claim on the Bill Simmons Podcast, saying, “I recently was going to do a movie, a sweet part, then at 11 p.m. the night before they fired me because they saw a picture of me in blackface from that episode,” referring to season two’s “Face Wars” (the plot description: “Sarah wagers that it’s easier to be a black person in America than a Jewish person, and attempts to prove it by ‘becoming black’ for a day with the help of a makeup artist”). “I didn’t fight it,” Silverman added:
“They hired someone else who is wonderful but who has never stuck their neck out. It was so disheartening. It just made me real, real sad, because I really kind of devoted my life to making it right.”
Silverman, who previously condemned the episode, also discussed so-called “cancel culture” (like what happened with James Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 before Disney eventually re-hired him). She called it “scary and it’s a very odd thing that it’s invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it… It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone. It’s so odd. It’s a perversion.”
Silverman, who recently shared a video of a pastor calling for “God to break her teeth out and she dies” (hence her “scary” concerns), did not name the film she was fired from, but she’s set to appear in Marry Me, about a “pop superstar [who] is jilted by her rock-star fiancé moments before their wedding at Madison Square Garden, so she marries a random guy from the crowd instead.”
(Via Bill Simmons Podcast and Guardian)
