MovieChat Forums > Batman (1989) Discussion > Did Billy Dee Williams ever get any seri...

Did Billy Dee Williams ever get any serious flack for playing Harvey Dent?


Since he was playing a character who was race-switched. There wasn't any social media back then so it was harder to gouge people's reactions to the changes that were going to be made and whom was in the movie (we all know about the initial controversy over Michael Keaton's casting as Batman).

I do recall on the special edition DVD, Billy Dee Williams did bring up the race issue. He said that something along the lines that if he could play the character to the best of his abilities (he said that he tried to model his interpretation of Harvey Dent on Adam Clayton Powell) then hopefully people would overlook his ethnicity. I don't think that people complained that much about Laurence Fishburne playing Perry White in Man of Steel since Fishburne is such a great actor with a commanding presence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6SB7BH3W4

I think that Marion Dougherty was really influential in casting Williams as Harvey Dent. She had also worked with Danny Glover on Lethal Weapon and she I believe, had to convince the director, Richard Donner that he was capable of playing Roger Murtaugh, even though the character was originally envisioned as a white guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwB_5yxhsWk

And to be fair, Harvey Dent really isn't a comic character that's inherently defined by his ethnic background like say, Black Panther. And it isn't like what they awkwardly did with the 2015 Fantastic Four movie, where they had Michael B. Jordan (a black actor) play the traditionally Caucasian Johnny Storm, yet they still had a white actress (Kate Mara) play his sister, Sue. And I suppose that since Harvey Dent was a relatively obscure character (this was really his first major appearance in media outside of the comics, since Two-Face wasn't a part of the Adam West series from the '60s) at that point it would've been much easier to get away with race-switching then say with Alfred or Commissioner Gordon.

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I think it would have been a bigger deal if his character was bigger. However, the fact that Harvey Dent is played by a white man in part 3 is a different story.

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I consider Batman Forever to be a semi-reboot (a la the James Bond series) with only Pat Hingle and Michael Gough retained from the Tim Burton films. It uses "broad-strokes" when describing events in Bruce Wayne's life that could've in theory, happened to Michael Keaton's interpretation, but it's for all intent and purposes, its own thing.

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Maybe this is an apples and oranges argument, but I do wonder if how big the backlash would be if Lucius Fox (arguably the most predominate black character in the Batman mythos) was for whatever the reason, race-swapped.

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As long as he wasn't white.

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While I don't hate him being Harvey Dent, it is a shame that he ended up being such a pointless character. And then he wasn't able to come back for Batman Returns. Someone on imdb claimed that the movie was supposed to have Two Face along with Joker as one of the villains and then they decided not to. Probably WB didn't want someone else overshadowing Jack Nicholson. Which is a shame but maybe a bit understandable considering what a huge star Jack Nicholson was.

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I think that I said once before that the problem that I have with Harvey Dent in this movie is that he is when you get right down to it, pretty interchangeable from Commissioner Gordon. They both are pretty much there to spout expository dialogue and verbally spar with the mayor.

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Yeah. Like I said he is pointless and contributes nothing to the plot.

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Fantastic Four director ‘slept with loaded gun’ after death threats over colour-blind Michael B Jordan casting

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fantastic-four-director-slept-loaded-070945735.html

Josh Trank, who directed the maligned 2015 Fantastic Four reboot, has revealed that he slept with a loaded gun after receiving death threats over the casting of Michael B Jordan.

Jordan’s casting in the role of Johnny Storm, a traditionally white character in the Fantastic Four comic books, sparked controversy in 2014. Stan Lee was forced to publicly defend the changing of the character’s race, while Jordan himself wrote an essay asking fans to give him a chance in the role.

Speaking to Polygon, Trank said that the backlash left him so paranoid that he bought a loaded .38 Special and kept it by his nightstand.

“I was getting threats on IMDb message boards saying they were going to shoot me,” Trank said. “I was so f***ing paranoid during that shoot. If someone came into my house, I would have ended their f***ing life. When you’re in a head space where people want to get you, you think, ‘I’m going to defend myself.’”

Trank got rid of the gun once production was over.

The filmmaker also spoke about his experiences making the movie. Released in the aftermath of months of negative buzz and rumours of on-set conflict and reshoots, the film left Trank feeling “castrated”.

“[Studio executives] really do pay attention to what people are saying on Twitter,” Trank said. “They look at that and they say, ‘S***, people are freaked out about how it’s not going to be funny. So we need to spend $10m to do a comedy rewrite.’”

Trank, who was hired to direct a Star Wars film on the promise of his 2012 debut Chronicle, but was then dropped by LucasFilm following the failures of Fantastic Four, has returned to filmmaking with an Al Capone biopic starring Tom Hardy.

Capone will be released on-demand on 12 May.

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Why did you even post this here in this topic? It has nothing to do with anything.

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What do you mean why did I post it!? It goes with the subject of fans reacting to the casting actors as comic book characters despite not being the same race as the way that said characters originally are in the comics. It's not that hard to put together!

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Yes but Josh Trank's F4 has nothing to do with Tim Burton's Batman. Also unlike Tim Burton's Batman it was a failure that most people didn't want to see.

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Its kinda ironic since Burton has received heat for only casting mostly white actors and for his pc comments.
Stephen King too with his books

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Tim Burton actually wanted to cast Sammy Davis Jr. as Beetlejuice before he was persuaded to cast Michael Keaton. So there's that about the supposed criticism of him not using enough people of color in his movies.

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I'm not going to read all these posts to see if someone already said it, but I wasn't aware of Batman lore and all I thought was "Oh shit, that's the guy who played Lando!". These days I'm not a fan of Hollywood remaking entire films and TV shows with race-swapping. One questions if those projects and casts would be any good with an original story.

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I think Billy Dee playing Harvey Dent was more of an afterthought because too many people were pissed at Michael Keaton being Batman.

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No one cares about the color of his skin other than you.

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