Chris Rock recently sat down for an interview with Essence Magazine ahead of his hosting gig at this year's Academy Awards. The magazine quotes him as follows:
"I've never done a movie, any movie, the silliest movie, where someone, some studio person hasn't gone, 'Does the girl have to be Black?' It happens every time. Black women get paid less than everybody in Hollywood. Everybody's talking about Jennifer Lawrence. Talk to Gabrielle Union. If you want to hear stories, talk to Nia Long. Talk to Kerry Washington. They would love to get to Jennifer Lawrence's place, or just be treated with the same amount of respect. Black women are the least represented on-screen. They just are. You can go see a lot of movies and there's not one black woman in there with, like, a real part. It's a real, real, real problem."
On what Rock has done to try to address that problem:
"I think everything I’ve ever done has had a significant role for a Black or brown woman. I refuse not to. I’ve never gone into battle without a Black woman, you know, a movie battle. With Tichina Arnold in Everybody Hates Chris, I had to fight for Tichina. I’m not even going to tell you who the network wanted. She’s literally as good as Tina Fey or Julia Louis-Dreyfus or any of these chicks. They’re like, ‘Tichina who’?’”
On hosting the Oscars:
"I'm going to do my best. It could go horribly wrong. Don't ever think that it can't. That's when it goes wrong—when you don't think there's any chance of it going wrong. If you know it won't, it probably won't."
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