Comedian Sarah Silverman once wore blackface for an episode of the "The Sarah Silverman Show" back in 2007. She was hoping Hollywood had forgiven her, but it's cost her her latest film project. As she revealed on "The Bill Simmons Podcast" last week, when the film producers saw a resurfaced photo of her from the skit, they asked her to step away from their set. She did not name the movie.
“I recently was going to do a movie, a sweet part,” Silverman said on the podcast. “Then, at 11 p.m. the night before, they fired me because they saw a picture of me in blackface from that episode. I didn’t fight it. They hired someone else who is wonderful but who has never stuck their neck out. It was so disheartening. It just made me real, real sad because I really kind of devoted my life to making it right.”
In an interview with GQ last year, Silverman said that she was actually "praised" for the skit when it first aired.
“I was praised for it!" she noted. "It made me famous! It was like, I'm playing a character, and I know this is wrong, so I can say it. I'm clearly liberal. That was such liberal-bubble stuff, where I actually thought it was dealing with racism by using racism."
But she now regrets it, and it makes her feel "yucky."
Silverman uses the term "cancel culture" to describe the target that is apparently still on her back.
“It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone," she explained.
This unforgiving culture has "invaded" the left, she regretted.
Silverman may also be thinking of fellow comedian Kevin Hart, whose 10-year-old tweets about homosexuality cost him his Oscars hosting gig. Or "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn, whose old tweets about rape and child pedophilia convinced the Walt Disney Company to fire him from the third installment of the series. Both men had apologized for their old messages, but were shown little mercy.