John Leguizamo is still dragging The Super Mario Bros. Movie over diversity

John Leguizamo has been very vocal about The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s lack of diversity. On the one hand, Mario and Luigi, as two famously Italian characters, aren’t exactly being whitewashed. On the other hand, it is accurate to say that the new film falls behind 1993’s Super Mario Bros. in casting a Latino in a lead role, and that is where Leguizamo is drawing a line.

“No I will not [be watching]. They could’ve included a Latin character,” he recently told TMZ. “Like, I was groundbreaking and then they stopped the groundbreaking. They messed up the inclusion. They dis-included. Just cast some Latin folk! We’re 20% of the population. The largest people of color group and we are underrepresented.”

The cast of The Super Mario Bros. Movie does include Anya Taylor-Joy, who was raised in Argentina and has Argentinian heritage, though most have agreed she would not be classified as a person of color. Leguizamo has actually taken issue with the term “POC” itself, arguing on his recent Daily Show hosting stint that the term is exclusionary to Latinx people.

In any case, Leguizamo may not be counting Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach as one of the “leads,” like he was in the 1993 film. “The directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man, and they [the studio] didn’t want me to be the lead,” he previously said. “They fought really hard, and it was such a breakthrough. For them to go backwards and not cast another [actor of color] kind of sucks.”

Leguizamo further argued that he was “the only one who knows how to make this movie work script-wise,” a bold but certainly intriguing claim. In our B review, The A.V. Club admits that “there’s not much new or fresh in the way of story or animation” in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. One wonders what Leguizamo’s take on the material would have been!