![]() People who are suffering through creative burnouts or cyber bullying or toxic fandom. So, what I’m really happy about is, now that there is a name for this, they could point to my history of dealing with it and people going through it now can get help. These things are finally being taken extremely seriously now that most of our lives are online, especially now during a global pandemic. No one knew how to deal with it because it had never existed before. It was the first time something like that – which we now have a name for, toxic fandom – hit big. Everyone has an idea of how Star Wars should go. It happens now with the sequels and I think this is the thing about Star Wars that we have to learn: it’s very personal. The hardest part came after, when my performance was being judged by people who had different ideas of what the movies were supposed to be. During the making of it, it was incredibly joyful. The pain wasn’t Star Wars, it was everything else. I think I’m constantly healing – from everything in my life. Everybody talks about how the backlash affected me – it did, and it was profound –, but it was really about how the industry as a whole shut down an entire group of people from a transformative new way of making movies. And the hardest part about being a main character in a big Hollywood movie that was CGI and Black is there hasn’t been a Black man since who’s done what I’ve done. It’s like an open wound and there are a lot of things from that time that I’m still finding out to this day: how it affected me and how it affected the industry as a whole. I have to admit it’s still in me to want to hide from it. It was very liberating, telling that story. But then I realized I have to tell this story because I’m not the only one going through this. So, it was really hard for me to actually tell that story. There’s this myth around men – and specifically Black men in America – of us being these human beings that can take all the pressure and just let it flow off. I had no idea it was going to get that type of reaction. ![]() I was thinking about this the other day: I should have way more money. Lonny Brooks, I’m a teacher at the School of Dramatic Arts at the University of California and every once in a while, people ask me to act and I still do that, which is fantastic. I have a podcast called The Afrofuturist Podcast with my partner Dr. I never thought I’d be designing the game but here I am. It’s great because I’m trained as a narrator and storyteller for theater, as a writer, as a director, and this puts all of that together. We just played with Google, with the Stanford Design school and we’re going to be playing with Harvard later on this month. Also, I have a company called Afro-Rithms Futures Group and we do future forecasting as well as having designed a card game to abolish white supremacy through gamifying diversity, equity and inclusion. Right now, I am writing a show with the National Academy of Sciences that we hope to bring to screens everywhere. What seemed like a unique opportunity turned into a hell that many of us only acknowledged quite recently. But it was in January 2019 when he opened up even more about his experience through an emotional video where he recounted the hopes he had placed in that role and the impact that the ruthless criticism from toxic fans and the media – “from a racially motivated point of view”, as Best explains – had on him. In July 2018, Best tweeted about the media backlash he faced after filming Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and it caused a big stir. He is also a writer, director, producer, musician, host, futurist, devoted father and human being. Best known for portraying the first CGI lead character in a motion picture starring as Jar Jar Binks in all three films of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and Jedi Master Kelleran Beq in the game show Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge, Ahmed has co-designed a game called Afro-Rithms from the Future, that uses multiverse storytelling and future forecasting to imagine a world with complete equality, environmental priority and a democratized future.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |