Jeffrey Wright Refused To Have His Use Of The N-Word Censored; Another Actor dubbed him. “I said, ‘Nah, nah, that’s not happening,’ and I walked out the door to my car,” the actor says of filming ‘Ride with the Devil.’
Jeffrey Wright remembers refusing to remove an explicit word in a line reading for Ride with the Devil.
Wright, 58, appeared in the 1999 western drama as Daniel Holt, a liberated Black man fighting in an irregular Confederate militant squad during the Civil War, opposite Tobey Maguire, Jewel, and Skeet Ulrich.
During a promotional appearance on Entertainment Weekly’s Around the Table series with costars Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, and Erika Alexander, Wright revealed that he was asked to censor the N-word in a pivotal scene while re-recording dialogue for a version of the film intended to play on airplanes.
“In this scene in which he has kind of the apex of his awakening, his need to emancipate himself, he says, ‘Being that man’s friend was no more than being his n—–, and I will never again be anyone’s n—–,'” Wright remembered. “It’s such a self-empowering statement and understanding of the word.”
When Wright said that he had finished “the airplane version of the dialogue,” he was requested to replace the N-word in that section and instead ultimately left the dialogue recording session.
“There were a few curse words, and they [said] the [N-word] here; we’d like to change that to Negro or whatever the choice was,” he remarked. “And I said, ‘Nah, nah, that’s not happening,’ and headed to my car.”
The actor said, “They found some other [actor] to come in and do that one word so that the airplane folk would be comfy and in the darkness of their ignorance of the language of race.”
Ross, 51, and Brown, 47, looked astonished by Wright’s account. “No, they did not!” Ross exclaimed, placing her hand on Wright’s shoulder. Meanwhile, Brown could say, “Wow,” and “Are you serious?”
Ride with the Devil, released about a decade after Wright’s initial foray into Hollywood, failed to make a mark on moviegoers. According to Box Office Mojo, it only ever made $635,096 in its short theatrical debut.
Wright told the anecdote while discussing the topics of America’s connection with race in American Fiction with his co-stars. He said the story is about “understanding the meaning or meanings of the N-word,” as employed in the new film.
In American Fiction, Wright portrays author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who is “a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from ‘Black’ entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes.” To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write his own outrageous ‘Black’ book. This book propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to despise,” the synopsis adds, stating that the film “confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes.”
American Fiction is now in theaters.
