Haunted Mansion Director Justin Simien Pushed to Cast a Black Lead
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The post Haunted Mansion Director Justin Simien Pushed to Cast a Black Lead appeared first on Consequence.
Justin Simien (Dear White People) signed on to direct Disney’s newest take on Haunted Mansion, he tells Consequence, because he immediately connected with Katie Dippold’s script, and that he knew it needed to star LaKeith Stanfield — even though the script didn’t state that the lead role of Ben was a person of color. “I think the assumption is that the lead character would be white because it’s always, frankly, the assumption when it’s not specified in the script,” he says. “But I don’t think I could’ve directed it if that were the case.”
Inspired by the iconic Disneyland ride, Haunted Mansion begins in New Orleans, as tour guide in mourning Ben (Stanfield) gets drawn into uncovering the secrets of the rural spook-occupied house recently acquired by single mom Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon). It’s an ensemble in nature, but Ben’s emotional journey is a key anchor of it — a challenge worthy of the Oscar-nominated actor.
Simien says there was pushback to casting a Black actor in the role — “it’s never overt in that way, but you certainly feel a resistance to some names that you don’t feel to others.” However, he adds, “I felt really strongly about LaKeith. I felt I saw myself as Ben, and I also felt like Ben is from New Orleans and should be a Black guy because New Orleans is predominantly a Black city. It just felt kind of criminal to make a movie about New Orleans and not put a Black person in the lead. It’s an 85% Black town. It doesn’t really get a lot of representation in film that feels authentic to me. That was an essential part of my vision, to be honest.”
Casting Stanfield is comparable to the casting of Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Simien notes, because in both cases, “you hadn’t really seen him lead a movie in that way before. He’s a very particular kind of character actor. And LaKeith kind of had that unicorn vulnerable, but cool, swagger, and a sad boy energy that reminded me of Johnny Depp in that film — I also personally knew LaKeith to be a very charming, warm, soulful person. So I knew he had the leading man qualities. It was really just a matter of getting to showcase that and tease that out. He is a phenomenal actor and a phenomenal person, and just exactly who you want by your side, who understands that we are trying to tell a bigger story.”
Invoking Pirates was “a touchstone” in Simien’s conversations with Disney execs: “It works sometimes more than others,” he laughs. “But the thing about Disney is that so many of their movies are blends of dark and light and humor and sadness and strange casting choices or idiosyncratic artistic decisions. I drew upon a lot of Disney references in making this movie — I tried to speak Disney in as many ways as I could to communicate.”
In developing the project, Simien felt “very protective” of Dippold’s screenplay, “and I felt so called to help realize it. Because she had put on the page a really sophisticated story about grief and about death, but it was also very funny and encased in this family movie.”
Key to the film are moments now familiar to Jordan Peele fans, in which Stanfield and Dawson react to wild supernatural experiences with a firm (and sensible) “nope.” Simian observes that “I think we’re all holding that understanding of how people of color typically react in movies like this, and wanting to ground them in something that’s a little bit more real. Something that was super important to Katie, just on the screenplay level, is that yes, for whatever reason Gabbie decided to buy this house on Zillow and move her kid in. But once she was pretty sure that the thing was haunted, she’s definitely going to leave the house — she’s going to at least try to protect her people. I think that’s [Rosario Dawson] picking up on that and making it her own.”
The ensemble also includes Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson, and Jamie Lee Curtis, along with fun cameos by Dan Levy, Winona Ryder, and Hasan Minhaj. “I was really lucky that when we landed on the cast, everybody was really generous, and really understood that they were participating in a bigger ensemble — that it really wasn’t about making it their movie. That was really rewarding, the experience of getting to work with all these people and getting to work with them together, too, and see how they support each other as actors.”
At the time of this interview, two out of three of Hollywood’s major labor unions remain on strike: Simien is a member of the Director’s Guild of America, which has signed a deal with the AMPTP, but he is also a WGA member, and is passionate about participating in those protests “more fully” now that Haunted Mansion is out in theaters.
One thing he feels is important is “getting the message across that artists are really, really exhausted, and that we need more resources to keep generating these ideas that turn out to be wealth for a lot of folks. None of us have really gotten into it for the money, per se, you know? That would be kind of stupid. There are so many better ways to make money. But it is really hard to be an artist from a place of not enough and constantly scraping by and struggling. I think we all just want to be able to make great art and not worry about our rent and having to constantly fend for our lives.”
As he continues, “This is sort of what makes the world go round, these stories that we tell ourselves and each other. It’s really important work. It’s soulful work. And yeah, I think we need a new paradigm in a lot of ways — it’s long overdue and I don’t think that anyone is willing to lay down the anger and the unrest until we get there.”
Haunted Mansion (Disney)
For perspective’s sake, Simien executive produced the TV adaptation of his indie film breakout Dear White People, which ran four seasons. He also just directed a major studio picture. “And if I’m being honest, I don’t necessarily feel like I’m gonna be okay. I feel like I still have to hit the ground running and figure out what that next check is going to be. It’s a horrible place to be for, you know, decades at a time.”
In particular, Dear White People, despite its four-season run on Netflix, has not provided him with any financial security. Asked how much he’s made from residuals for that show, all Simien can say is that the number is “abysmal. It’s kind of a heartbreak actually, to think about how much work was put into that show, and to look at how very little I have to show for it, to be honest.”
These are frustrating times for creators. But that won’t stop them from creating, because they’re always finding a way. Prior to making Haunted Mansion, Simien already had first-hand behind-the-scenes Disneyland experience, as a former ride host for the Grizzly River Run attraction in Disney’s California Adventure, a river rapids ride where you will get wet. As a host, he worked across multiple areas of the ride, but his favorite was “this perch where you’re hidden behind a rock and you get to decide when passengers fall to their doom.”
Everything about his experience there sounds like a director in the making: “I really enjoyed that, partly because I’m an introvert, so I could actually be alone and just secretly torture people. It was really fun. I would make weird sound effects — I was already trying to sound design the experience for them and also let them know that there are humans here.” He laughs. “For whatever reason, I thought that that made it more fun. That was the best of the summer jobs, for sure.”
Haunted Mansion is in theaters now.
Haunted Mansion Director Justin Simien Pushed to Cast a Black Lead
Liz Shannon Miller
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