‘Those Friends people make $100m a year! I’m getting six-cent cheques! It’s not OK!’: Billy Porter on race, recognition and the Middle East https://t.co/HJXIdmeuGv
— The Guardian (@guardian) March 15, 2024
highly recommend everyone to read the whole interview, it’s a lot
– Porter is working on a James Baldwin biopic rn. James Baldwin was an outspoken advocate for Palestine. Porter doesn’t know much about Palestine or seems to care:
“I’ve been getting a lot of bullshit online about it – I’m like, ‘I don’t know, y’all!’ The man’s been dead since 1987, please!”
– the interviewer inquired more on this:
“There’s nothing to navigate – I’m not James Baldwin, he’s a character, so I have to be true to the character. I don’t know what he was talking about in the 40s, 50s, 60s – it’s 2024 now. I don’t have the history to even know what the version of the Israel-Palestine conflict was when he was around. It’s not a part of the script – his civil rights work in America is what we’re focused on, more than what he thought about the crisis in the Middle East.””
– Porter doesn’t think it’s fair the Friends cast makes more in residuals than he does
– Porter doesn’t think it’s fair he had to sell his house after getting divorced and the strikes impacted his income
– Porter name drops Viola Davis three times:
“She played every crack mother, every mother of a drug addict, every stereotypical dark-skinned Black woman role they threw at her, and she imbued those characters with dignity. I was like, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do.”
