Love is just love in Hollywood
New films portray interracial romance as no big deal
Working on the young adult love story Everything, Everything, director Stella Meghie would at times be struck with wonder by the coupling of her young actors, Amandla Stenberg, 18, who is biracial, and Nick Robinson, 22, who is white.
Onscreen, the couple deal with Stenberg ’s character’s immune deficiency, which has kept the teen sequestered at home her entire life. But the two don’t deal with any issues arising from their differing races. They are simply a young couple in love.
“Me and Amandla would be on set and just like, ‘Is this really happening? Are we scamming the studio into making an interracial love story that doesn’t talk about race?’ ” says Meghie, who was being faithful to Nicola Yoon’s bestselling young adult novel. “We were clear, we were not scamming them and (the studio) was also very clear they liked the book and they wanted to make it a movie.” Everything, Everything is quietly breaking ground with the prominence of the coupling: It’s a major studio film aimed at a teen audience and earned $12 million at the weekend box office on 2,800 screens nationwide, according to comScore. But the film isn’t alone in its depiction. Fifty years after Sidney Poitier challenged attitudes as an African-American man
dining at his white fiancée’s home in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner, movies are increasingly showing interracial couples with less emphasis on race and more on the concept of “This is who I love.”
“It’s great to see Hollywood shattering the glass ceiling that Sidney Poitier cracked. Films are tackling the issue of interracial romances as a non-issue. As a black man, it’s an old, uncomfortable idea we have to move past,” says Chris Witherspoon, correspondent for Fandango.com. “So many people don’t see love as a color. They see love just as love.”
The Pew Research Center released a study Thursday based on U.S. Census data showing that one in 10 married people in 2015 — about 11 million people — had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity.
Russell Boast, who heads the Casting Society of America’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, says film is catching up to depictions already common on television — where Kerry Washington’s
Scandal affair with Tony Goldwyn heated up the screen, Sandra Oh and Isaiah Washington fell for each other on Grey’s Anatomy, and Mindy Kaling had a four-season relationship with Chris Messina on The Mindy Project.
“People use the term ‘colorblind casting,’ but this kind of coupling is just more accepted and not a plot point anymore. It’s more about two people getting through the day,” says Boast, who credits the change to the natural evolution of society. “For casting directors, it’s about finding the right actor for the role, not focusing on the race. And then the viewer sees a story that’s just about a couple.”
Interracial couples are at the heart of the civil rights story Lov
ing, which earned accolades (and an Oscar nomination for Ruth Negga) for its depiction of reallife couple Richard and Mildred Loving, and Jordan Peele’s Get
Out, which made a powerful social statement earlier this year about the horrors of racism. In the most recent movies, race isn’t a central plot point. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Home
coming (July 7) will give a superheroic boost to the trend when Tom Holland’s Peter Parker steps out with Liz (African-American actress Laura Harrier). The Hit
man’s Bodyguard (Aug. 18) features Samuel L. Jackson as an assassin besotted with his Latin wife (Salma Hayek) while assassin-turned-bodyguard Ryan Reynolds is involved with a character played by French-Cambodian actress Elodie Yung.
Thriller Unforgettable showed Rosario Dawson having her life with her new white husband (Geoff Stults) disrupted by the jealous rage of his ex (Katherine Heigl). The live-action Beauty
and the Beast showed two interracial relationships re-emerging from the castle after the spell is broken: Lumière the candelabra and Plumette the feather duster (Ewan McGregor and Gugu Mbatha-Raw), as well as Madame Garderobe and her husband, Maestro Cadenza (Audra McDonald and Stanley Tucci).
“This (portrayal) didn’t have one iota of an impact on the $1 billion Beauty and the Beast earned worldwide,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. “But it’s also incumbent on Hollywood to reflect the real world and evolve along with it.”
In Wonder (Nov. 17), Julia Roberts’ screen daughter (Izabela Vidovic) starts a relationship with a fellow student who is AfricanAmerican (Nadji Jeter). There’s a 2018 remake in the works of
Overboard, with Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez and Anna Faris taking on the roles made famous by Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Next year also brings director Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (March 9), featuring Chris Pine and Mbatha-Raw as the lead character’s scientist parents.
Independent films also highlight interracial couples, notably with Patti Cake$ (Aug. 18), whose aspiring white rapper (Danielle Macdonald) falls for a goth African-American musician (Mamoudou Athie). Fits & Starts, which opened this spring, has Wyatt Cenac as an author dealing with jealousy of his Asian-American wife’s (Greta Lee) success.
Social media-obsessed Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) falls for Dan ( Straight Outta Compton’s O’Shea Jackson Jr.) in the comedy Ingrid
Goes West (Aug. 11). AfricanAmerican comedian Jessica Williams plays a Brooklyn playwright in a rebound relationship with Irish actor Chris O’Dowd’s character in The Incredible Jessica
James (Netflix, July 28). The Pew Report illustrates that how interracial relationships are perceived is especially reflected in a new generation. In 2015, 17% of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, a more than fivefold increase over 3% in 1967. That was the year the Supreme Court ruled marriage across racial lines was legal.
The report cited “shifting societal norms as Americans have become more accepting of marriages involving spouses of different races and ethnicities, even within their own families.”
Now, that acceptance is starting to be reflected onscreen.
“This definitely signifies a change that I’m happy about and ready to see a lot more of,” says Jacqueline Coley, contributing writer at BlackGirlNerds. “The best reason for it is audiences have made it clear they don’t care, interracial couples are everywhere. Hollywood is catching up to that.”