The Experiment Podcast: How Netflix’s Passing Upends a Hollywood Genre

The Experiment Podcast: How Netflix’s Passing Upends a Hollywood Genre

The Atlantic
2021-11-18

The American movie industry has a long, problematic history with stories about racial passing. But the actor-writer-director Rebecca Hall is trying to tell a new kind of story.

Hollywood has a long history of “passing movies”—films in which Black characters pass for white—usually starring white actors. Even as these films have attempted to depict the devastating effect of racism in America, they have trafficked in tired tropes about Blackness. But a new movie from the actor-writer-director Rebecca Hall takes the problematic conventions of this uniquely American genre and turns them on their head. Hall tells the story of how her movie came to life, and how making the film helped her grapple with her own family’s secrets around race and identity.

Listen to the podcast (00:31:41) here.

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