It looks like the Nina Simone biopic starring Zoe Saldana is really happening. For real. Like, they’re actually going through with this.
From the very beginning, many have been, let’s say, skeptical, about the casting of Zoe Saldana, a light skinned black woman of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, as the dark-skinned Nina Simone. In the film, Zoe Saldana wears a wig far from her natural hair texture, a prosthetic nose and most jarringly, dark brown makeup. For many, Saldana is effectively wearing blackface.
To be fair, none of us have seen the film yet, but the visual of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone is going to be a hard thing to get past.
In 2012, Nina Simone’s daughter expressed her issues with the film, namely that the filmmakers should have cast a woman who more closely resembles her mother. Most seem to agree that there are plenty of black actresses with darker skin who would have been better suited to play Simone.
So how exactly did this happen? How did what I have to believe is one of the worst strings of decision-making in the history of film occur? We may never get an answer to that question, but what we do know is who actually made this film happen.
Take a look at the team behind Nina and see if you can perhaps glean what went wrong.
Writer and Director Cynthia Mort