Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
Actor Jesse Williams says he sees BET’s documentary premiering Thursday on the Black Lives Matter movement as a time capsule capturing the conditions that led to the group’s formation. Williams, of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, is an executive producer and is interviewed in the film Stay Woke: the Black Lives Matter Movement. Starting with a recording of the call to police that led to Trayvon Martin’s death in Florida, the film describes that and the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray — cases that led to the formation and growth of the protest movement. It traces the group to a frustrated tweet that first used the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. “We wanted to give them a voice in telling their own story rather than hearing people talk about them,” Williams said. Williams, who said he became involved in the documentary directed by Laurens Grant at BET’s request, praised the movement for giving voice to young people angered about deaths of people in police custody, but Williams said he didn’t believe that Black Lives Matter activists need to take a role in changing the conditions about which they’re protesting. “It’s unfair for the ones who sound the alarm to be burdened with the responsibility for coming up with a complete solution.”
British actor Ian McKellen has criticized India’s use of a British colonial law to crack down on homosexuals, saying in an interview with a Mumbai newspaper published Tuesday that “India needs to grow up.” The 76-year-old actor is in the west coast Indian city this week to promote the British Film Industry’s Shakespeare on Film series coinciding with the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. McKellen also dined with Bollywood stars and was planning to open the regional LGBT-themed Kashish Film Festival today. In an interview, the openly gay actor spoke candidly about Britain’s social and political evolution toward equal rights for members of the gay, bisexual and transgender community, saying that “India is going through what the U.K. went through 30 years ago.” He took issue with a colonial-era law — Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — that makes sex between people of the same sex punishable by up to 10 years in prison. While actual criminal prosecutions are rare, the law is frequently used to harass people. “It is appalling and ironical that India would use a colonial law to oppress its homosexuals,” McKellen said in the interview. “India needs to grow up. India needs to realize that it doesn’t need to follow British laws anymore.”