John Leguizamo, the Latino actor and comedian who played Luigi Mario in the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, has one big criticism of the upcoming animated Mario movie's cast: it's too white.Leguizamo tweeted on Sept. 27, "So glad #SuperMarioBros is getting a reboot! Obviously it's iconic enuff [sic]. But too bad they went all white! No Latinx in the leads! Groundbreaking color-blind casting in original! Plus I'm the only one who knows how to make this movie work script wise!" Attached to this tweet are screenshots from the 1993 movie of his Luigi alongside Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, one of which has the caption "Apologize to this movie right now!"
In the new Mario movie, Chris Pratt and Charlie Day have been cast as the voices of Mario and Luigi, respectively. Pratt's casting has proven particularly controversial, not so much for him being white, but for the combined issues of him not being Italian (Leguizamo has Italian ancestry on his father's side) and the film's casting at large being a case of a big-budget animated movie choosing celebrities over professional voice actors.
Technically, the new Mario voice cast is not "all-white." Keegan-Michael Key is playing Toad and Kevin Michael Richardson (one of the only non-celebrity professional voice actors in the cast) is playing Kamek. The optics of this casting has also been questioned on the grounds that Toad, the most prominent character played by a Black actor, is a servant. It's also worth noting that Anya Taylor-Joy, the voice of Princess Peach, has been mistakenly labeled as a "woman of color" by some news sources due to her upbringing in Argentina, though her ancestry is European and she identifies as a white Latina.
John Leguizamo is one of the few cast members from the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie to have generally positive impressions of the film and its legacy. Leguizamo said he was "proud of the movie in retrospect" in a 20th anniversary video. Bob Hoskins, on the other hand, infamously loathed the film; in a 2011 interview with The Guardian, he was asked, "What is the worst job you've done?", "What has been your biggest disappointment?" and "If you could edit your past, what would you change?" and answered "Super Mario Bros." to all three questions. Dennis Hopper, who played King Koopa, described the production as a "nightmare," and directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel didn't have much nice to say about the experience either.
Nintendo and Illumination's Super Mario Bros. animated movie hits theaters in North America on Dec. 21, 2022.
Source: Twitter