NEW YORK — Whoopi Goldberg has called out a film critic who targeted the Oscar winner for the way she looks onscreen in Chinonye Chukwu’s film, “Till,” which premiered Saturday at the New York Film Festival.
“There was a young lady who writes for one of the magazines,” Goldberg, 66, said on Monday’s episode of “The View.” “And she was distracted by my fat suit in her review. And I’m just gonna say this, I don’t really care how you felt about the movie. But you should know that was not a fat suit.”
Rather, said Goldberg, “That was me. Yeah. That was steroids. Remember last year?
“I assume you don’t watch the show or you would’ve known that that was not a fat suit,” she continued.
Goldberg said she takes no issue with someone disliking the movie, but she encouraged the critic to “leave people’s looks out. So just comment on the acting and if you have a question, ask somebody, because I’m sure you didn’t mean to be demeaning.”
“We will hope that she just didn’t know and now she’ll know the next time you go to talk about somebody, you can talk about them as an actor,” she continued. “If you’re not sure if that’s them in there, don’t make blanket statements because it makes you not sound like you know what you’re doing.”
Goldberg encouraged families to see “Till,” in which she stars as Emmett Till’s grandmother, Alma Carthan. Emmett was a 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi after being accused of flirting with a white woman in 1955. The film sees the murdered teen’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, trying to get justice for her son.
“It grabs a lot of people and a lot of folks are being erased from history books now,” Goldberg said. “And that is what systemic racism leads to. Emmett Till is the beginning of telling people that it is not OK for people to decide that because they think you whistled, it’s OK to kill you. If you’re a mother, this could be your child. And we’re ... 67 years ago, this happened and we’re still in the midst of it.”
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