Sacha Baron Cohen says the Ironheart team sat him down before offering him the role of Mephisto to check that casting a Jewish actor as the devil would not be offensive, according to Variety.
At a Wednesday conversation at New York's 92nd Street Y, he described the pitch from an "almost entirely Black producing and directing team." They wanted to give him Mephisto, but they were "aware of the negative association of Jews historically with the devil," so they wanted to make sure he was not insulted. His response: "Yeah, I'm good." The pitch meeting for the devil had a sensitivity check on the agenda.
Here is the mechanism, and it is a good one. The character is a demon who trades in souls. The studio's worry was that the audience might read the casting as a slur, so the fix was a courtesy call to the actor who would be the target of the slur. The compliance loop is now one level deeper than the source material. The Brandeis Center has a fact sheet on the whole Jewish-devil trope, and Marvel's pitch notes apparently cite it.
He was at the Y to promote his directorial debut Ali G: Who Iz I?, which is doing its own press run, and this anecdote is clearly the one doing the work. A devil with a sensitivity review is the most Marvel story of the year and it is not even a movie. In the series finale, Riri Williams strikes a deal with his Mephisto to bring back a dead friend. In real life, the deal was a casting call asking, "you okay with this?"
YOUR TURN: does the devil need a sensitivity reader, or a new agent?
PAPER TRAIL
- The quote: Variety
- The talk he was at: 92nd Street Y event
- The character: Mephisto in Ironheart
- The trope, on the record: Brandeis Center fact sheet
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