Nearly a week after the firestorm that erupted at and after the BAFTA Awards, “Sinners” star Jayme Lawson blasted both BAFTA and BBC over how the use of a racial slur made it to the broadcast of the awards ceremony.
“You do not care for our dignity, our humanity,” Lawson told THR at the NAACP Image Awards. “You want to celebrate our art, but you won’t protect.”
Lawson is of course referring to an incident involving Tourette’s activist John Davidson, who shouted the N-word at “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo as a vocal tic due to the disorder while the two presented onstage. On the red carpet for the Image Awards, Lawson broke down the catastrophic chain of decisions that allowed that scene, and all that came after it, to unfold.
In the week after the BAFTAs, new details came to light over the mishandling of the incident that occurred at the ceremony that night. Despite Warner Bros. immediately asking that the slur be cut from the broadcast, producers claimed they had not heard the exclamation before it aired. In an interview with Variety, Davidson questioned why BAFTA sat him, knowing his condition, in close proximity to a microphone. Lindo revealed that nobody from BAFTA spoke with him or Jordan after they left the stage.
The result, Lawson said, was unfair to her co-stars, her crew, Davidson and others.
“Institutionally, we still don’t understand what inclusion means. Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don’t provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that’s not inclusivity. That’s exploitation,” she said. “That man’s disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses. That’s the BAFTAs’ fault.”
Lawson took BBC to task for the airing of the offensive material despite the network’s willingness to broadcast other speeches. She specifically pointed to Akinola Davies Jr., the director of “My Father’s Shadow” (“An amazing film, by the way,” Lawson said).
Davies used his speech after winning Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer to call for a “free Palestine.” This statement did not make it past the censors.
“The BBC, to air what they aired, right, is careless — and not like some haphazard accident. No, like a real lack of care was exercised for those two Black men,” she said. “And we know the BBC knows how to take care of what they care about, right now? Because they censored a bunch of other — they went so far as to make sure certain things weren’t topics of conversation.”
Lawson praised Lindo and Jordan for their composure in the face of such a devastating scene. The two men have been at top of mind on the awards trail this week, with Lindo getting a standing ovation as soon as he walked onstage at the NAACP Image Awards.
“Let’s continue to honor them for how they handled that in real time, the grace and the dignity they exercised,” Lawson said. “The whole home team, everybody that was out there really carried themselves well.”
