Actor Joseph Fiennes has reportedly signed on to appear in the role of Michael Jackson in a forthcoming new road trip drama involving the pop icon. The one-off Sky Arts film will recount the details of a bizarre road trip the King of Pop once took with fellow legends Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.
The unbelievable trip took place in September of 2001 after Jackson invited both Taylor and Brando to attend one of his concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The pair had initially planned to fly in to New York and then back again but were then forced to rent a car after post-9/11 airport security became too tight for their liking.
Brando and Taylor elected instead to rent a car for their return trip to Los Angeles and Jackson elected to ride with them back across the country. The trio drove from New York to Ohio, where Taylor and Brando then caught a flight. They were spotted at various times throughout the trip stopping at unassuming locations like KFC and Burger King.
SOURCE: RTT News
I hope this entire ill-advised project sinks without trace. No proof it ever happened, and the three principles are all deceased.
So in a world that is too small for a black actor to play a FICTIONAL character ( James Bond, Star wars ) and leaked Sony emails show their CEOs view on black actors, it is acceptable for a white actor to play the REAL , most legendary artist AND black man who ever traded the planet ? Why even in death they keep making a caricature of the man.
Imagine a black actor play Elvis.
Gross, insensitive, disrespectful miscasting is yet another example of why this misbegotten project should never see the light of day on the screen. Clearly the casting team doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) that Black people — including a large pool of Black actors — come in all skin tones. That Michael Jackson’s pigmentation was destroyed by vitiligo, leaving him ghostly pale, is no excuse for taking the path of least resistence and hiring a white actor rather than making the effort to find a Black actor who could meet the requirements. Even so, the entire project reeks of exploitation and quickie profits. May it sink without trace.
September 2011? So the trip took place after both he and Brando were dead? Would explain the ludicrous casting.
Sorry for the typo! 2001 it was! LOL
What some obviously don’t seem to know is that Michael Jackson was very good friends with Frank Casico. whose parents live in New Jersey. He was like family to them. No doubt at all in my mind where he stayed for a day or so after the 9-11-2001 attacks on NYC.
Despite every legitimate objection we may have to racial miscasting, the choice of Fiennes to play MJ—in 2001—is not a bad one: at least, for verisimilitude on a purely visual level. Jackson, perhaps in most people’s eyes, looked like a light-skinned person by that time. In general, we need to stop conflating race with color.
Actually, the basic idea for this movie sounds very much like a story Zadie Smith wrote for the New Yorker magazine, which was published earlier this year in their Summer Fiction Issue (June 8, 2015). Here’s a link to an interview about the story that Smith did with Cressida Leyshon, published on the magazine’s blog:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-zadie-smith-2015-06-08
In my view, its time for all the hypervigilance on Michael’s “behalf”—the readiness to take offense at nearly ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that doesn’t jive with many fans’ yearning for Michael’s apotheosis as a modern saint—to come to a natural and graceful end. There are many, many ways Michael’s legacy may be playfully, fruitfully (and respectfully) represented.
There are many, many problems in the world that warrant our serious attention, including an end to racism on MULTIPLE fronts. When it comes to MJ, I recommend we fans lighten up.
So they have white dude play Michael Jackson not cool