Former wrestler and Fox News commentator Tyrus argues that racism isn’t the reason the “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte” was canceled. The franchise has “gone out of their way” to emphasize racial, ethnic and gender diversity over the story, the biracial Black panelist added. “Here’s the problem. Your woke writing sucks,” Tyrus insisted on Fox News’ “Gutfeld,” on which he’s a regular panelist.
Tyrus noted that while there may be “alt-right conservatives” who didn’t like the show, the bigger problem was the lack of a sizable audience. “I would love to say it sucked,” Tyrus continued. “I have no idea, because I looked at it and went, ‘I don’t want to watch this.’”
His comments come following “Acolyte” star Amandla Stenberg posting a series of videos on Instagram in which she said the show’s cancellation after one season was “not a huge shock” given the negative reaction among some outspoken fans to the show’s diverse casting.
Host Greg Gutfeld interjected with his own take, asking, “It’s like, how can you make something that’s so popular, bad? It’s like you open a toy store that children don’t want to go in, or you make doughnuts that fat people won’t eat.”
Tyrus defended the franchise’s diversity early in the segment, noting, “Star Wars was already one of the most diverse movies in the ’70s.” The franchise featured Carrie Fisher’s Leia as a strong female lead alongside Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, while Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian became a breakout character for the series as a bold antihero.
In her social media posts following the show’s cancelation, Stenberg wrote, “There has been a rampage of vitriol that we have faced since the show was even announced, when it was still just a concept and no one had even seen it. That’s when we started experiencing a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us.”
That reaction “really affected” Stenberg after she was hired, despite the fact that she “anticipated it happening.” The fact of the matter is, she continued, “it’s not something you can fully understand what it feels like until it’s happening to you.”
“These young actors and actresses today, they don’t take ownership, so they’re not growing to go as actors. They blame everything on everybody else, but it’s everybody else who buys,” Tyrus argued. “Keep blaming everybody else, that’s going to go good for you,” he sarcastically added.
Comedian Jim Norton added on “Gutfeld” that he had a friend who is a big “Star Wars” fan, but still didn’t like the show. He believed it may have been less the politics and more the show’s quality. Norton and panelist Johnny Joey Jones agreed that there may also be some franchise fatigue for “Star Wars” at this point.
“The Acolyte” is hardly the first “Star Wars” installment to face a barrage of racist, homophobic, sexist and otherwise bigoted responses. In 2018, “Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi” star Kelly Marie Tran deleted her Instagram account after months of online harassment.
Tran explained in an essay in the New York Times that “it wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them.” She added, “Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.”
You can watch Tyrus and the rest of the “Gutfeld” team speak about “The Acolyte” in the video above.
