When Steven Toussaint was cast in House of the Dragon, the first of several ambitious Game of Thrones spinoffs, he honestly didn’t think much of it. The British actor had Black friends who had “small parts or recurring parts” in the original series, which to be frank, had an overwhelmingly white cast. However, as Toussaint delved into the role of Corlys Velaryon, The Sea Snake, he realized the warrior turned wealthy lord is a veritable force unlike anything seen in Westeros before. Unfortunately, another signifier of the Sea Snake’s prominent role also emerged.
“I didn’t realize it was a bigger deal until I was racially abused on social media when it was announced,” Toussaint told The Hollywood Reporter. “Yeah, that sh*t happened.”
As Touissant further explained, social media did what social media does as bigoted social media users had no qualms with throwing out racial slurs following his casting:
It got announced and somebody put up like an artist impression of The Sea Snake, which must come from one of the books. So someone put that up opposite my picture and [expressed dismay]. Then someone else referred to me by the N-word – that was in reply to a director I had worked with who wrote, “Steve Toussaint is great” and they said, “No, Steve Toussaint is a … —” There was also a Black American chap who is a big fan of the show who contacted me saying that he gets abuse because he championed me for the part. And on platforms like Reddit, which I’m not on, there are such discussions going on about it.
Obviously, the situation is not great, and yet another example of how racism continues to infect fandoms as evidenced by the more recent attacks on Obi-Wan Kenobi star Moses Ingram. For Toussaint, he’s done his best to power through and ignore fan expectations, racially tinged or not. “I thought, ‘Okay, this means a lot to some people, but I can’t allow that to bother me,’” he told THR.
House of the Dragon premieres August 21, 2022 on HBO.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)