Richard Dreyfuss Ripped Over Startlingly Bizarre Take On Blackface

Ed Mazza
Updated ·5 min read
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Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss is getting roasted on social media after offering a defense of blackface, lamenting that he may never get to play a Black man, and saying diversity standards make him want to puke.

“Firing Line” host Margaret Hoover asked Dreyfuss about new standards in which films under consideration for the Best Picture Oscar will have to meet certain benchmarks for diversity and inclusion among cast or crew.

“They make me vomit,” he said, calling film an “art” and saying “no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is. And what are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. And you have to let life be life.”

Dreyfuss, the star of “Jaws” and “What About Bob?” went even further. He not only defended blackface, but complained that he can’t act in blackface.

“You know, Laurence Olivier was the last white actor to play Othello, and he did it in 1965, and he did it in blackface, and he played a Black man brilliantly,” he said. “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black man?”

Dreyfuss, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in 1977′s “The Goodbye Girl,” called it patronizing.

“Are we crazy?” he said. “Do we not know that art is art?”

Watch the full interview here.

Dreyfuss has faced allegations of groping and other forms of sexual harassment.

He denied wrongdoing, but told Vulture in 2017 that he had been an “asshole” and a “flirt.”

After his latest comments, his critics seemed to agree with at least half of that assessment: