Diversity has been a strong point of recent Hollywood movies and series. Jonathan Majors feels nothing but pride in portraying Kang the Conqueror in the upcoming Marvel projects especially when the people gave him no backlash.
Talking about Moses Ingram, who had the unfortunate circumstance of getting racially abused for a character in the Star Wars Universe, Majors did not get the bad reception he was prepared for. The actor instead, was complimented by Marvel fans for portraying that Kang and Kang alone (a person of color) is enough to take on the forces of the MCU.
Jonathan Majors Feels Powerful By Portraying Kang
Making her debut as Reva in Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi, Moses Ingram revealed that many racial messages and abuses piled on her. Putting on a brave face, people appreciated Ingram for her role and rushed to stop the racial abuses hurled by the Star Wars fans.
Jonathan Majors was shocked when a similar situation did not happen to him. According to the actor, he was mentally prepared for an intense backlash by portraying Kang in the MCU. Much to the actor’s shock and delight, the racial abuse never came. Majors further praised the fact that Kang, the big baddie, was played by a POC and that he needed no help from any other character showcasing an individual’s power.
“Nothing is more diverse than the fact that the ‘big bad’ of the MCU is a young Black boy from Texas. That’s nuts! And there’s no help. There’s no allies. It’s [just] big bad, and he’s a member of the African diaspora. [You see that in his] lips, nose, cheekbones, everything. That’s him; it’s us.”
The actor further talked about when he felt the racial abuse would come anytime soon but it never came.
“Well, it’s not too late. Yeah, I thought it would’ve come by now, but we’ll see. People are crazy. Why do I not think it’s happened? I don’t know. I feel blessed. I was thinking about my sister Moses Ingram [from ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’], who was also attacked. Perhaps the ‘Star Wars’ camp is different. I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ve gotten it much in the Marvel world.”
Jonathan Majors revealed that he had quite some experiences with racial profiling himself when he studied at Yale School of Drama back in 2016.
Jonathan Majors Talked About Racial Profiling At Yale
Being a person of color, it wasn’t easy for Jonathan Majors to study the art of acting peacefully during his learning years. In an interview with Indiewire, Majors described what it was like over at Yale and the racial profiling that seemed brutal.
“As much as I want to go to Yale, nothing in Yale was gonna guarantee access to parts of the industry or to parts of myself. I think the arts, chiefly cinema, is a kind of democracy. Because they can do whatever they want to do, in whatever building they want to do it in, but when we put it in a movie theater, they’re gonna have problems.”
The actor graduated with a degree of MFA in 2016 and has numerous accolades to his name. Starring opposite Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is slated for a release date of 17th February 2023 in theaters across the U.S.
Source: Ebony Magazine
