'Yeah, my dad's half': The incredibly meta casting of Paris Jackson in Swarm
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Swarm offers some seriously meta takes on pop culture and social media, from the lines it blurs between real-life pop icon Beyoncé and her fictional surrogate Ni'Jah, down to its casting.
Paris Jackson makes an inspired cameo in the second episode of the Prime Video series, playing a stripper named Hailey at the club where Dre (national treasure Dominique Fishback) works.
Quantrell D. Colbert/Prime Video Paris Jackson in 'Swarm'
Swarm, like Atlanta before it, is about a lot of things. And, also like Atlanta, it's weird AF. Created by Donald Glover and Atlanta producer and writer Janine Nabers, the show deftly tackles, among other topics, society's obsession with fame, the toxicity of fandom, as well as the erasure of Black women.
Enter Paris Jackson, second child and only daughter of Michael Jackson and Debbie Rowe. If anyone has some experience with the dark side of fame and obsessive fan culture, the children of the King of Pop — who wore masks while in public to shield their faces not from a pandemic but the paparazzi — would be a logical start.
Jackson, as Hailey performs under the stage name Halsey, because like the singer, Hailey, too, is biracial.
"I ran away from my last relationship because he couldn't accept me being Black," Hailey explains to a shocked Dre. When Dre asks Hailey if she is, indeed, Black, she responds, "Yeah, my dad's half."
"Half what?" Dre asks the white-passing Hailey.
In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview, Jackson said she identifies as Black because her father told her she was Black and to be proud of her roots. And this is where we start to close the circle with another Beyoncé tie-in: In "Formation," Bey sings that she loves her "Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils."
Of course, then, there's the matter of Michael Jackson's own fraught relationship with his racial identity, and the very public evolution of his physical appearance over the years.
Still, that scene between Hailey and Dre carries a lot of weight and has a lot of layers, but it's also just scraping the surface of what Swarm is about. It is, however, a great example of what we like to call "stunt casting."
And stunts are being pulled all across this series. Rather effectively, at that.
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