When multi-award-winning Hollywood star James Franco was cast to play Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Alina of Cuba, Latino actors were up in arms for casting a white man in the coveted role.
Among the loudest and most passionate voices was from Latino Super Mario Bros actor John Leguizamo, who took to Instagram asking ‘‘How is this still going on?’’
‘‘How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?
‘‘No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! … Seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandisement, which would be wrong!
‘‘I don’t got a problem with Franco, but he ain’t Latino,’’ wrote Lequizamo, who most recently voiced Bruno in Disney’s Encanto.
Latino actor Jeff Torres added: ‘‘I’m auditioning for another generic Latin-American drug dealer and James Franco is dead ass playing Fidel Castro. Latinos gettin’ done dirty af out here and everywhere.’’
The film’s producer, Texan Latino John Martinez O’Felan, angrily hit back, calling the comments ‘‘culturally uneducated’’, receiving support from Republican Texas politician Ted Cruz.
And over the weekend, Franco, 44, whose father has Portuguese and Swedish ancestry while his mother is from a family of Russian Jewish descent, found the strongest supporter in none other than the former revolutionary’s daughter, Alina Fernández.
Fernández, who will be a biographical and historical consultant on Alina of Cuba, told Deadline “James Franco has an obvious physical resemblance with Fidel Castro, besides his skills and charisma’’.
Franco – who was nominated for an Oscar in 2011 for his role in 127 Hours, won a Golden Globe in 2017 for The Disaster Artist and starred with good mate Seth Rogan about rogue North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in The Interview – has yet to respond publicly to the outcry.
The film is ‘almost entirely Latino’
The independent feature-length biopic, which is set to start filming in Colombia on August 15, follows the true story of Cuban exile-turned-social advocate Fernandez, now 66, who fled her country in 1993.
The daughter of Fidel Castro and Cuban socialite Natalia ‘Naty’ Revuelta (after a passionate love affair), Fernandez points out ‘‘the project is almost entirely Latino, both in front and behind the camera’’.
Ana Villafañe plays Fernandez, Mía Maestro has been cast to play Revuelta, it’s directed by Miguel Bardem and scripted by Oscar-nominated scribe Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries) and Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz.
‘‘Casting Ana and Mia were no-brainers because, besides the trajectory of their past work, one represents modern Cuban-America and the other Argentina,’’ O’Felan says.
Rounding out the supporting cast are Alanna de la Rosa, Maria Cecilia Botero (Encanto), Harding Junior, and Cuban-born actors Sian Chiong and Rafael Ernesto Hernandez.
The film storyline goes that ‘‘Revuelta sacrificed her and her physician husband’s personal belongings and finances to help fund the start of the Communist revolution,’’ writes Deadline, which broke the story on August 5.
‘‘Fernández learned that she was Fidel Castro’s daughter at the age of 10 when, after years of secret visits to her home, her mother finally revealed that ‘El Comandante’ was her biological father.
‘‘Alina grew to become one of Castro’s most outspoken critics, arrested on more than one occasion for trying to leave, and was classified as a dissident forbidden to travel outside of Cuba.’’
Fernandez defected to Spain in 1993, an event that drew headlines from every major news network around the world, before she made Miami her permanent home.
“The rest of the cast is going to be a wonderful surprise for all audiences,” Fernández says.
“The filmmakers worked a lot and I can’t be more grateful to them for their overall inclusive selection.
“To me, the most important thing about this movie is that the conversation about Cuba is alive … personally, the experience is so far too unexpected but more than anything, humbling.”
Tweet from @tedcruz
‘Woke Hollywood is absurd’
Producer O’Felan and Lequizamo continued to publicly squabble over the controversial Franco choice over the weekend, even as O’Felan went to great lengths to explain how they picked out Franco as their choice for his ‘‘piece of modern Hispanic history’’.
They needed to find someone who had a close physical resemblance to the real Castro, telling Deadline they ‘‘combed through the entire ranks of actors with Latin roots in Hollywood’’.
‘‘In executing a close search into our hopefuls through the eye of Spanish and Portuguese genealogy which the Galicians held, we found that James, by far, had the closest facial likeness of our industry’s leading actors, meaning that the focus would be to build out his character accent,’’ he said.
After Lequizamo’s comments, O’Felon issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, saying that while he has always admired Lequizamo ‘‘as a fellow underdog’’, his comments were ‘‘culturally uneducated and a blind attack with zero substance related to this project’’.
Leguizamo’s “note is a great talking point because they represent the same confusion and identity crisis in Hollywood right now within the Hispanic community in America”.
“I think he should move past himself and also acknowledge that this story is about a Latin female immigrant living in America who is of historical importance, led by a Latin woman and I’m just an underdog who is making it.’’
Lequizamo wanted the last word, responding in a video clip on Instagram on Sunday night, saying that despite Latinos being the oldest ethnic group in the United States, very few were getting cast in Hollywood.
‘‘We are 30 per cent of the box office. I want 30 per cent of the roles. So out of every 10 movies, three should be Latin movies and out of 10 actors in your Marvel movies, three of those should be Latin actors.
‘‘Latin people don’t get a shot … I love Franco, James Franco is cool but he’s not Latin … Let’s grow up.’’
