CraveOnline: That’s exactly it! I despise this woman, like if I met her I would have a violent personal reaction to her, but from a dramatic perspective she is such a firework to throw into the cage, and I honestly don’t know how… it feels like she can only make everything worse.
John Ridley: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because certainly – and again, without giving too much away – [aside] from her viewpoints, as that person who opens that Pandora’s Box, how does the situation now change when somebody very actively enters into saying, “I want to make this thing about race,” or whatever the case may be. Sexual orientation or what have you. Once you enter that into the conversation and it becomes less grey, and it becomes more – no pun intended – black and white, does it actually help things or does it hurt things?
And certainly her coming in with her set [point of view]… and one thing Felicity has always said about the character [is] she’s mission specific. Everybody else is sort of dealing with, “Oh my God, this was a tragedy and it’s unexpected.” She was the one person who came in, very mission specific, and what happens when that mission… [when] you can’t put up the banner, “Mission Accomplished?” Or you put up the banner and it does make things more difficult because the optics change, everything that’s going on.
So the fact that people have engaged with that character and not just dismissed that character, that has always made me feel good from a writing standpoint, but very much so from watching Felicity and what she’s doing, because she really, she does not make that character a caricature. She makes sure that Barb has humanity in that space even if you don’t agree with what she’s saying.
I definitely believe that she exists. Unfortunately I have met people not unlike her. You brought up something very interesting though, which is that she is openly saying, “I’m making this about race.” That’s something you don’t get to confront head on a lot, either in real life or dramatically, people not even trying to pretend it’s about something else.
Right after Trayvon Martin there was the Australian tennis player that was shot somewhere, I think it was like Oklahoma, and the kids – one was black, one was hispanic, I think one was mixed race – and it was right after Trayvon and there were people saying, “Why isn’t that a hate crime? Why aren’t you saying that about that?” That concept of, if we are going to go down that road, what does that really mean? Should it have been? If it should not have been should we have been saying it was? There are corners of places where people feel very comfortable saying these things.
Fair point.
And not just white people saying this. As a person of color, there are places I go [where] I say things and people heard the things I said, and they go, “Really John? You feel that way?” No, but in this group we just have this shorthand about whatever. That difference is, when it is not merely a shorthand but an abbreviation for how we truly feel, and in a space where suddenly it’s not just, “Hey, I feel comfortable with you and we’re talking about this and whatever,” but people really inserting it into a conversation or an active space.
I have to say, honestly, even having finished the series, sitting here now thinking that, yeah, we got to explore these things and we got to explore them on ABC for broadcast, that’s still very trippy to me. We’ve arrived at a space where there’s a huge chunk of the audience that really is ready and receptive to dealing with this, looking at it and talking about it, and it’s not something that we just have to leave for cable news conversations.
