Black Women in Entertainment
What It Was Like To Finally See A Movie Hero That Looks Like Me
By ARIANNA DAVIS via www.refinery29.com
It was less than five minutes into A Wrinkle In Time that I started crying. It’s a vibrant, delightful young adult adventure, so it might sound odd that I would cry over Disney’s adaption of the beloved book, originally published in 1962. But in one of the movie’s earliest scenes, we meet protagonist Meg Murry, played by 14-year-old Storm Reid. With her glasses, brown skin, big curly hair, and love for learning, she’s the prime target for a group of girls led by her Regina George-like next door neighbor, Veronica (Rowan Blanchard). In an instant, that bullying scene took me back to my own middle school experience as the only awkward Black girl in my grade with glasses and frizzy hair. And the realization that this was the first time I’d ever seen my own adolescent experience so clearly reflected on the big screen was so sudden and so poignant, I had no choice other than to let the tears fall, one by one.
I’m a longtime fan of A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle, so when it was first announced in 2010 that Disney was doing a big screen adaptation, I nerded out. And when they then shared in 2016 that Ava DuVernay was directing — the first Black woman to ever direct a $100 million movie — I nerded out doubletime. But it was the casting of Reid as Murry that truly got me obsessed with what this could mean not just for me as a book lover, but moviegoers everywhere. While I have to give props to Disney for creating an array of diverse live-action TV movies throughout my childhood — ranging from Gotta Kick It Up to The Cheetah Girls (remember them?!) — the Blockbuster-level live action movies that came out in my pre-teen era were the likes of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings. In other words: Starring boys, with …
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