Amandla Stenberg is opening up about her experiences with “cancel culture,” and how it’s impacting fiction.
The actor, who uses she/they pronouns, spoke with their Bodies, Bodies, Bodies co-star, Hunter Schafer, in a piece for The Cut promoting the movie. A24’s latest foray into horror (and comedy) is a satirical slasher centered around a group of privileged Gen Zers that are all rather terrible in their own ways.
The film has been well-received by critics and audiences alike, but the cast of characters prompted Stenberg to comment on the way internet criticism has shifted, in some instances, towards writing off fictional characters with toxic traits or a slew of bad decisions behind them as characters that shouldn’t even exist.
“This funny thing happened with the birth of cancel culture in which we started canceling characters,” she said. “I actually feel that is detrimental to what film is supposed to be about, which is putting terrible people on screens and laughing at them sometimes when necessary. That’s a very healthy way for us to expel our demons.
“If we can take our demons and splash them across the silver screen and take a good look at them, maybe we can be more aware of them, and maybe we can laugh while we do it, and then the ego death comes a little easier.”
The Hunger Games actor also touched on their own personal experience with “cancel culture,” noting that people on both extremes of the political aisle have found reason to pronounce them canceled over the years.
“I like to speak openly about the person that I am, and that invites some canceling from the far right,” she said. “Then there are folks on the far left who think that I have done things that have not been inclusive, or that I have unfairly taken up space within media, or that I’m in cahoots with the entertainment industry when it comes to representation of Blackness.”
Stenberg added that they aren’t living with “some perverse, distorted Catholic guilt” regarding the reasons they’ve allegedly been canceled, and instead opts to focus on whether they are “moving responsibly and ethically and with radical care in my immediate community.”
“These are all things that I cannot control and also that don’t have much to do with me. If we lived in a culture in which people read or listened, then I think I would care a lot more,” she admitted.
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