Jesse Williams Quotes

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

I think that for the most part, black people specifically have sort of been used as props in TV shows as a way to move story along or as a way to make things more entertaining.

People are tired of mainstream media's limited and confined portrayal of people of color.

There are still plenty of movie people peddling black stereotypes. I guess Tyler Perry's probably the most massively successful.

I played Othello at RADA - blacked up. I didn't know it was going to be offensive now!

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

If you're going to make black movies only about black people, that's as bad as white movies only about white people.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don't have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

Fashion week is not an episode of 'Girls' or 'Friends,' where I'm OK that there is not a black person in sight because I honestly believe these characters don't come into contact with - therefore don't have - any black friends. No, in the case of Fashion week, it feels wrong.

I think that show will go down in history... people will scratch their heads and say 'How did this ever get on the air?' I mean, they finally have a planet that's populated with a black race and then they present them as savage warriors, and the men want the white girl!

I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.

You know, I'm an African-American quarterback. That may scare a lot of people because they - they haven't seen nothing that they can compare me to.

I have a theory. An audience doesn't need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn't have to be about race just because there's a Negro in it.

I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story - by the people as a whole - and not by the little things.

When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like 'Bird,' I use 90% black people.

I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like 'Midnight in Paris.' Nostalgia isn't so enticing.

You know it's going to hell when the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.

I look forward to the day when indigenous actors can play Hamlet and Ophelia and not just Othello and Desdemona.

When you go back to 'Friends,' and you look at that as New York, there's no black people. That's not real. You're in New York City, and there's no black people at all. That's a little funny.

If you are going to call a film a 'black film' then you have to make a film that represents everyone that's black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called 'films.'

Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question.

I'm black and white, so either, sometimes, you're not considered by the breakdown of the script: you're not 'black enough' for this role. Or you're not 'white enough' for this role. Or, like, looking up to people, who do I identify with? And not seeing Barbies that maybe look like me.

I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.