Dan Aykroyd has said he wouldn’t “get away” with Blackface as he did in the film Trading Places now.
Speaking to The Daily Beast, Aykroyd recently reflected on the John Landis-directed film in which he starred in with Eddie Murphy back in 1983. In one scene, his character appears in Blackface and adopts a Caribbean accent.
“I was in Blackface in that film, and I probably couldn’t get away with it now,” Aykroyd told the publication. “Eddie and I were improvising there. Eddie is a Black man and his entourage were all Black people, and I don’t think they batted an eye. There was no objection then; nobody said anything. It was just a good comic beat that was truthful to the story.”
“I probably wouldn’t choose to do a Blackface part, nor would I be allowed to do it,” Aykroyd continued. “I probably wouldn’t be allowed to do a Jamaican accent, white face or Black. In these days we’re living in, all that’s out the window. I would be hard-pressed to do an English accent and get away with it. They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re not English, you can’t do it.’”
His comments come at a time when cinema and television is reckoning with its past controversial use of Blackface in cinema.
Previously, Robert Downey Jr. addressed the issue of Blackface in Tropic Thunder on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2020, when he argued the role is about “how wrong [blackface] is”.
“[Ben Stiller] knew exactly what the vision for this was, he executed it, it was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie,” Downey Jr. said. “And 90 per cent of my Black friends were like, ‘Dude, that was great.’ I can’t disagree with [the other 10 per cent], but I know where my heart lies. I think that it’s never an excuse to do something that’s out of place and out of its time, but to me it blasted the cap on [the issue].
“I think having a moral psychology is job one. Sometimes, you just gotta go, ‘Yeah I effed up.’ In my defense, Tropic Thunder is about how wrong [blackface] is, so I take exception.”
Previously, episodes of The Office and Community altered episodes following Blackface controversies and Back in 2020, episodes of Little Britain, Come Fly With Me, The Mighty Boosh and four of Chris Lilley’s programs – were pulled from the internet due to perceived racial insensitivities.