Jamie Foxx is a determined man. During a recent talk at the Toronto International Film Festival alongside Michael B. Jordan, Foxx revealed he did everything in his power to land the role of Django in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 Django Unchained. When he received word that Idris Elba was one of the actors considered for the role, he made it a point to tell him he should look the other way.
According to Foxx, his management informed him that he wasn’t on the short list of actors that were considered for the film. At the time, Elba had all eyes on him. When Foxx randomly bumped into Elba, he brought up the topic of Django Unchained and told him he was too good looking for the character
“Your beautiful black a** riding up on a horse, there’s going to be some problems for everyone,” he said.
Ultimately, the decision was made to nix Elba from the role because Tarantino thought it wouldn’t make sense to cast a British actor for an American story.
“Yeah, Idris is British and this is an American story,” Tarantino told The Sun. “I think a problem with a lot of movies that deal with this issue is they cast British actors to play the Southerners and it goes a long way to distancing the movie. They put on their gargoyle masks and they do their accents and you are not telling an American story anymore.”
In a 2012 interview with VIBE, Kerry Washington discussed the turbulent history Foxx helped bring to life about slavery in the film. “This is not a doc. This is a Quentin Tarantino film,” Washington said. “But I remember there was this one moment in the script where Jamie’s character was put in an awful crazy medieval metal mask. I said, ‘’That’s some sick thing Quentin thought up.'”
“And when I went to the production office to meet about my wardrobe, I saw into the research office,” she continued. “Twenty photos of real masks like that. It made me sad. I realized as much as my degrees and everything I’ve read on slave narratives [should have informed me], I didn’t even know that they wore masks like that, that people did that to us. It took a Tarantino movie for me to know that that’s not some crazy thing out of his imagination. That’s how it went down.”
Foxx and Jordan star in Just Mercy, a film about civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson (Jordan) who’s on a quest to release an inmate on death row. The movie debuts on Dec. 25.
This is about all of us. Based on a true story, #JustMercy arrives in theaters this December. pic.twitter.com/sx9OpmIMJU
— Just Mercy (@JustMercyFilm) September 4, 2019