- Ben Stiller reported he “will make no apologies” for doing the controversial 2008 film “Tropic Thunder.”
- The actor was responding to a Twitter user who requested him to “stop apologizing for doing the motion picture.”
- “Happy of it and the get the job done that everybody did on it,” Stiller added.
Ben Stiller has no regrets when it comes to “Tropic Thunder.”
The 2008 action comedy, which also starred Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black, drew criticism for its portrayal of disabled people and Downey Jr.’s use of blackface.
On Tuesday, Stiller responded to a single Twitter consumer who stated the actor really should “quit apologizing for executing this motion picture.”
“It was and is humorous AF,” the user tweeted previously this 7 days. “Even funnier now with cancel tradition the way it is. It really is a movie. Ya’all can just get about it. I was dying laughing when I initial saw it again in the day and so was all people else.”
Stiller, who starred in and directed the motion picture, responded later that very same day.
“I make no apologies for ‘Tropic Thunder,'” the actor wrote. “Will not know who advised you that. It really is always been a controversial film due to the fact when we opened. Proud of it and the function that absolutely everyone did on it.”
—Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) February 21, 2023
“Tropic Thunder” follows a hapless team of actors shooting a war movie who are dropped into the jungle and pressured to endure utilizing their questionable acting capabilities when they stumble into a true-existence war zone.
In the film, Stiller portrayed Tugg Speedman, an action film star who thinks he can get an Oscar by portraying a dim-witted farmhand with a bowl haircut, buck tooth, and a stutter.
The exact same Twitter person also resurfaced an old tweet of Stiller’s from 2018 in which the actor talked about the boycott about the film when it arrived out. On the film’s launch in August 2008, 20 disability advocacy teams objected to the use of the word “retard” in the film.
“Essentially ‘Tropic Thunder’ was boycotted 10 yrs in the past when it arrived out, and I apologized then,” Stiller tweeted in 2018. “It was normally intended to make pleasurable of actors hoping to do everything to gain awards. I stand by my apology, the film, Shaun White, and the wonderful people and perform of the Exclusive Olympics.”
Downey Jr., meanwhile, played Kirk Lazarus, a technique actor who darkens his pores and skin to play a Black soldier. The actor has earlier stated he was in the beginning reluctant to consider the job, which gained him an Oscar nomination for greatest supporting actor in 2009.
“Ben understood particularly what the vision for this was, he executed it, it was unachievable to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a motion picture,” Downey Jr. stated on a podcast episode of “The Joe Rogan Working experience” in 2019. “And 90% of my Black good friends had been like, ‘Dude, that was fantastic.’ I are not able to disagree with the other 10%, but I know where by my coronary heart lies.”
Additional Downey Jr.: “I assume that it can be hardly ever an excuse to do a little something which is out of location and out of its time, but to me, it blasted the cap on the issue. I believe getting a moral psychology is occupation one particular. In some cases, you just gotta go, ‘Yeah I effed up.’ In my protection, ‘Tropic Thunder’ is about how incorrect [blackface] is, so I take exception.”
