Source: splash / Splash News
We often discuss discrimination amongst African Americans, and the disparities in how Hollywood tends to portray us. But I think that it’s important to take a look at how our Latin brothers and sisters are being affected by that same level of discrimination. Recently, John Leguizamo opened up about being fired from a film because the film already had a ‘Latin’ person in it, and it could not have more than one.
John Leguizamo says he was once fired from a movie for being Latino.
In a conversation with the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences new video series Seen, Leguizamo discussed his career, noting he “had to fight to get here and I’ve earned the scars and the wounds.”
Leguizamo recounted one of his major struggles: being allegedly fired from a film by a director who told him they couldn’t “have two Latin people in the movie.”
“I was in a movie for a week,” Leguizamo, who voices Bruno in Disney’s Encanto, said. “And I got a call from the director going, ‘Oh, John, I’m sorry, I can’t have you in the movie. We cast this Latin actress and we can’t have two Latin people in the movie because it becomes a Latin movie. You know what I mean, right?'”
