Last month, Shadow and Act spoke with Netflix’s Jingle Jangle star Anika Noni Rose, who spoke about the importance of Chloe Bailey and Yara Shahidi being young Black women portraying iconic Disney characters Ariel and Tinkerbell on-screen soon.
Actor Regé-Jean Page (who can be seen this month in Amazon Studios’ Sylvie’s Love and his starring role in Netflix’s Bridgerton) tweeted our chat with Rose, adding, “Miss @AnikaNoniRose just said EVERYTHING. Again.”
“I am a firm proponent of the fact that children need to see themselves in fantasy. They need to know that they exist in the whimsical, that they exist in magic. That they are worthy of the crown,”
Miss @AnikaNoniRose just said EVERYTHING. Again. ????????????????????????https://t.co/v9wnm98OYq
— Regé-Jean Page (@regejean) November 19, 2020
We had to ask Page about this when we interviewed him for Bridgerton, noting that fans have said for some time now that he would be a perfect Prince Naveen if Disney ever did a live-action version of the movie. “Louder, louder for people in the back!” he explained.
Since Bridgerton is the closest thing right now to seeing Page in a period love story, we asked his feelings about portraying a Black character in a diverse show like this, especially considering colorblind casting can go very wrong sometimes.
“I think this was the sense of a lot of my early conversations about this show and about getting involved in this project,” said Page. “And a lot of the early conversations around not being colorblind, it was about the importance of putting brown skin on-screen, but also putting brown people on screen to inhabit that skin. You could be both human and Black…that you can live, love, be glamorous, be rich, attractive, and ambitious, and admirable and Black all at the same time. It doesn’t matter what time period you’re in rich, attractive, admirable…Black people have existed, will exist, do exist, and it takes absolutely no effort or imagination to include those people in your stories. And so we did basically.
View our full interview with Page, as well as stars Phoebe Dynevor, Jonathan Bailey, Nicola Coughlan and Claudia Jessie, below:
