Over the weekend Pete Davidson and Kate Beckinsale were spotted leaving a Los Angeles comedy club holding hands. In the paparazzi photo, seen above, Beckinsale, 45, with her open coat, knee-high boots, and sky-high ponytail, looks hot AF. Davidson, 25, leads the way in a graphic sweatshirt as a lollipop dangles from his mouth.
Nick Jonas, 26, put a ring on Priyanka Chopra, 36.
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The paparazzi shot called to mind another photo of Davidson, one from this summer that captured him with Ariana Grande as they left their then shared apartment. (This was before she said “Thank u, next” to their engagement.) In it, Grande wears an oversize sweatshirt with her signature thigh-high boots and sky-high ponytail, clasping hands with Davidson. They have matching lollipops. The photo spurred tons of memes, and quickly became one of 2018’s most popular Halloween costumes.
But it also signified something greater: The pic seemed to kick off a sea change in celebrity coupledom. Grande and Davidson had just announced their engagement, after only about a month of dating, and were happily flaunting their newfound love and commitment to the world. Soon after, their peers started following suit. Justin Bieber popped the question to Hailey Baldwin, Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra made it official, and so on. As Glamour put it at the time, suddenly marriage and babies had become the new naked selfie.
Naomi Campbell, 48, isn’t the first older woman Liam Payne, 25, has dated. His ex, Cheryl Cole, was 10 years his senior.
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Davidson’s first boo’d up candy-coated pic might have kicked off the summer of love, but his latest shot with Beckinsale is announcing the current trend in celebrity relationships: More women in Hollywood are dating much younger men. There’s Beckinsale and Davidson and their 20-year age difference, of course. Meanwhile, Naomi Campbell, 48, is reportedly getting it on with One Direction–er Liam Payne, 25. This Is Us star Chrissy Metz, 38, is dating Hal Rosenfeld, a 25-year-old composer. Kourtney Kardashian, 39, may or may not be seeing Luka Sabbat, the 21-year-old Grown-ish star. And, as previously mentioned, Chopra, 36, and Jonas, 26, recently tied the knot.
Chrissy Metz, 38, and her boyfriend, Hal Rosenfeld, 25, tear up the red carpet.
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Older women with younger beaux is even becoming more normalized on television. In this season of Grace and Frankie, for example, Jane Fonda, 81, has a love interest in Peter Gallagher, 63. This is, of course, only a recent example—I have to hat-tip Golden Girls for pairing Blanche Devereaux with a much younger aerobics instructor all the way back in 1985. We’re breaking age barriers in politics too: French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte, is 24 years his senior, and they’re nothing short of couple goals.
People on Twitter are here for all of it. “Pete Davidson and Kate Beckinsale hooking up is foreshadowing how dope 2019 is going to be. Let’s go,” said one user. Another said, “I was not aware of Priyanka and Nick Jonas’ age difference until today and while before I didn’t particularly care about this couple I am in full Shakira-Pique support. GET IT LADIES.”
What’s even more surprising, given the garbage fire of hate that often comes with social media commentary? There’s very little outrage about their age differences. In the past we might have seen countless tweets and think pieces questioning what these men could possibly see in an older woman. Now, though, the narrative has shifted: People are valuing these relationships for what they really are—a hot, successful woman at the top of her game getting her life. People may have criticized the overt spon-con of Chopra and Jonas’ wedding, but nobody batted an eye at their age gap. In all the fanfare around Beckinsale and Davidson, people are only questioning why she’d be into him.
Studies say women don’t hit their sexual peak until they turn 36—why the hell wouldn’t these dudes want to get in on that?
It hasn’t always been this way. In the past, society gave men like actor Jason Statham, 51, a pat on the back for dating Victoria Secret’s model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, 31. Or praised Michael Douglas, 74, for landing Catherine Zeta-Jones, 49. But do you remember the backlash when the OGs of this trend, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, first began dating in 2009? It shocked the world. “People made such a fuss about it you would have thought the world had never seen it before,” Moore once said of the public fascination. “Age wasn’t what I was thinking about, but to the rest of the world, it was a very big deal.”
Kourtney Kardashian, 39, is the patron saint of dating below her age bracket. Luka Sabbat, her current fling, is 21. Scott Disick is 35. Her ex Younes Bendjima is 25.
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It’s 2019. Women are running for president in spades, taking back our power in Hollywood, and fully owning our sexuality. Isn’t it time to change the fact that women in Hollywood are told they’ve “peaked” at 30, while men age like a fine wine? Who knows, maybe more women dating a pretty young thing can change that mind-set. I mean, I’d love to watch a rom-com in which recent red-carpet BFFs Glenn Close and Timothée Chalamet (also known as Glennothée) fall madly in love. The more we honor these women as the sexy and powerful figures they are—whether it’s by respecting their desirability to younger men or simply validating their right to exist onscreen—the better off we’ll all be. In the meantime, I’ll just be here, setting my age limits on Bumble back by a few years.
Alana Mayo, the 34-year-old head of production and development at Outlier Society, is happily riding shotgun with her AirPods firmly in place. She’s not listening to music or a podcast; no one is rolling calls on the other line. She just likes to be ready for anything. A 12-year veteran of the film industry—most recently a VP at Paramount Pictures, where she worked on The Big Short, Fences, and Selma—Mayo has spent the last nine months turning the start-up that Michael B. Jordan launched in 2016 (and named after the Malcolm Gladwell book) into a proper studio. And when you’re trying to go from celebrity LLC to Hollywood heavy-weight, being plugged in is simply part of the job.
At any given moment, Outlier, which has only three full-time employees including Mayo and 31-year-old Jordan, is developing an impressive slate of feature films, scripted and nonscripted TV shows, short-form Web series, and a panoply of other platform-agnostic content. “What is so great about this company is that you can be bold and quick and fail without losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and adapt from there,” Mayo says when we sit down in a high-gloss conference room Outlier shares with Skydance Media, the Santa Monica company behind blockbusters like World War Z, Jack Reacher, and several Mission: Impossibles. “I always describe us as a millennial company. I think, because Michael and I are actually in this demographic, we so clearly see the opportunity in reaching people outside of traditional means.”
And reaching people is the mission: Mayo considers “meeting the audience where they’re at” to be her primary concern. “I don’t think the world is fixed by content, but I’d say it is 100 percent informed by content and the images people see,” she says. “I often think back on what I remember from my childhood and how that shaped the image of myself. I think content has a really profound effect on kids.”
In March the studio became one of the first to publicly adopt inclusion riders, a contract amendment that guarantees cast and crew diversity on all productions. The decision was a no-brainer. “Being a person of color, we’re always fighting for inclusion,” Jordan says. “So when we’re able to be in a position of power to bring people in? I didn’t think twice about that. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a thing? Oh, cool. Great.’” And in July, Outlier got its first vote of industry approval in the form of five Emmy nominations for a modern reimagining of Fahrenheit 451 for HBO.
Together the digitally savvy pair pulls inspiration from social media, obscure comic books, even an inkling that something is about to pop in the zeitgeist. “We don’t have a strict formula to how we find intellectual property, but there shouldn’t be any rock left unturned,” says Jordan, who is currently filming back-to-back Outlier projects in Atlanta. “I’ll send Alana a DM or a post on Instagram that inspired my mind. It’s more or less me throwing stuff her way to see if she thinks there’s something there. Then we go back and forth and see if there’s any existing intellectual property or articles that might support the story or if it’s something that we build from the ground up.”
PHOTO: JON KOPALOFF/FILMMAGIC
The Power Couple
“I met Lena as a writer before I met her as a romantic interest,” Mayo says of fiancée Waithe. “I hope one day we’ll figure out a way to work together.”
PHOTO: MICHAEL GIBSON/HBO
The Blockbuster
“The correlation between a diverse cast and box office numbers is incredibly strong,” Mayo says of Outlier’s remake of Fahrenheit 451, starring Jordan as Guy Montag. “The more diverse, the more box office—time and time again.”
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MICHAEL B. JORDAN
The Moguls
From left: Mayo, director Destin Daniel Cretton, and Jordan on the set of Outlier’s Just Mercy, a coproduction with Gil Netter and Warner Bros., the first major studio to follow Outlier’s lead and adopt inclusion riders.
Oftentimes an aching void in the marketplace is the perfect place to start. Raising Dion, a forthcoming Netflix series about a young boy with superpowers, is Outlier’s response to Black Panther. “There are so few science-fiction films or TV shows that have people of color as the star. And not in a way where it is the usual paradigm and you’re just casting it differently, but where you’re actually embracing other people and their culture,” Mayo says. “Whoopi Goldberg talked about how [growing up] she never saw black people in the future in film and television. As a child she was like, ‘What happens to us?'”
From an early age Mayo struggled to answer that question for herself. A child of the eighties, she never identified with era classics like Sixteen Candles. “I’m from Chicago, so I should be like, ‘Oh, John Hughes,’ but I did not relate to that movie at all,” she says. “I grew up identifying as an outsider. I had these weird, potentially contradictory parts of my identity.” Mayo’s mom, Maisha, is a Jehovah’s Witness who worked in entertainment law. Her dad, Barry, is a meditation enthusiast and retired radio executive who helped launch New York’s WRKS-FM. “To grow up with weird, idiosyncratic people who did not look at that as a deficit allowed me and my brothers to embrace doing things differently,” she says. “Like, ‘Yeah, we are black kids raised in Chicago in this devout Christian religion, but also we’re all of these other things. And all of these things can exist as a whole.’ I was lucky to grow up that way. I think it very directly led me to what I’m doing professionally now.”
“I grew up identifying as an outsider. I had these weird, potentially contradictory parts of my identity.”
Back at Skydance, Mayo and company stand out among the framed Tom Cruise posters and comically oversize movie props. Her assistant, Christina (employee number three), a recent Columbia University grad with bleached-out blue hair and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of film, keeps answering her cell phone, “Alana Mayo’s office!” At one point during our photo shoot, a female Skydance executive in slacks and a button-down hovers in a door frame. “I’m loving this. I’m texting Lena,” she teases, referring to Mayo’s fiancée, Lena Waithe, Emmy-winning writer and the creator of The Chi. Mayo lets out a laugh—“I’m never going to live this one down, am I?” she says—but continues to clack away on her laptop as a hairstylist sets the edges on her braids.
Later, while drinking her second coffee of the morning, she talks about her experience of being black in white spaces. “This is how we dress. This is how I wear my hair. And I think it is really, really cool for people like us to occupy these spaces because one feeds the other…. We’re finally at a place where I feel like ‘the system’ is excited by young people coming in with a different point of view,” she says. “To be able to work alongside a company like this”—she gestures around Skydance—“means a big-budget, all-audience movie is possible. It allows us to feel emboldened to change and experiment.”
“My office was always filled with people of color and gays and women.And for that, I was ostracized.” —Lee Daniels
In other words, it allows Outlier to change the industry from the inside out, something that hasn’t always been possible. “My office was always filled with people of color and gays and women. And for that, I was ostracized,” says Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels, for whom Mayo interned while in college at Columbia University. “That Alana is being embraced for it makes my heart swell.” When I ask Mayo whether she identifies as a disruptor, her eyes light up. “I love that word,” she says. “I love disruptor. I love innovation. I’m a contrarian by nature, so anything that is about fucking with the status quo is very exciting to me. I would love to think of this company, and everybody who works at it, as a disruptor.”
But what if this all-stories-welcome wormhole closes? What if the next Black Panther doesn’t break records? Or audiences don’t clamor to see David Makes Man, Outlier’s upcoming OWN series from Moonlight cowriter Tarell Alvin McCraney about growing up in a South Florida housing project? What if disruption becomes passé? Hollywood is, after all, a fickle town. “There is a history in this industry of trending,” Mayo concedes. “I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the moment happening right now will not be a trend.”
But she hopes that by the time the tides shift, too many outliers will already have a seat at the conference room table. “People who are looked at as ‘other’ are kicking ass in the industry right now,” Mayo says. “They are setting themselves up for incredible longevity and creating paths for a ton of people to come in behind them, so it won’t really matter when the powers that be don’t feel this to be valuable anymore. At the risk of sounding obnoxious, we’re trying to build something that feels like a legacy and not like a moment.”
Justine Harman is the features director at Glamour.
Awkwafina is having a history-making year: Not only did she star in Crazy Rich Asians—the first film in years with a cast of Asian descent—but on Saturday she also became just the second Asian women ever to host Saturday Night Live in the show’s 44-year history.
During her opening monologue, Awkwafina told a few great jokes about how she’s not, in fact, a “crazy rich Asian,” instead she’s a “rebuilding-my-credit Asian” who still buys her underwear in “12 packs from CVS.” As she wrapped up, however,, she took a moment to share a heartfelt story about how as a teenager she traveled to 30 Rock to stand outside as her idol, Lucy Liu, became the first Asian woman ever to host the show.
“Back in 2000, I came to 30 Rock and waited outside when my idol, Lucy Liu, hosted SNL,” she said, waiting for a quick applause break from the audience. “I was a kid, and I didn’t have a ticket so I knew I wasn’t getting in, but I just wanted to be near the building. And I remember how important that episode was for me, and how it totally changed what I thought was possible for an Asian-American woman.”
She waited out the hearty applause from the crowd before closing out her monologue and adding, “Standing here tonight is a dream I never thought would come true. So thank you, Lucy, for opening the door. I wasn’t able to make it in the building back then, but 18 years later I’m hosting the show.”
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Awkwafina again addressed the issue of representation in a sketch called “#MeToo, Year Two” alongside several women on the cast. In the sketch, Awkwafina played Sandra Oh. noting that the #MeToo conversation “almost been compounded with [the one around] representation.”
McKinnon, playing her hilarious character of “legend” Debette Goldry laughed off the comment saying, “That’s not true. There were plenty of fabulous parts for Asian gals in the 1940s. And I played all of them!” Clearly, however, there’s still a long way to go.
Sandra Diaz wasn’t expecting to find the courage to come forward with her story of sexual assault. But, over the years, as she watched security officers, janitors and airport workers coming together to protest against the sexual misconduct they often face on the job, everything seemed to change. These women were members of the labor union which she co-leads, and in them, she found an unexpected strength stand firm in her own power.
“I saw the sacred wounds that, like me, they had held inside of them with shame” she says. “But I also saw the relief in their eyes to finally let it out.” In union meetings, as they fought back against gender violence at work, their stories rang out: Yes, I was raped while I was working. I didn’t say anything to the union. I kept silent for one year … 10 years.
“As a survivor, I understood the burden of silence and the relief and uncertainty when silence is broken,” Diaz, the Vice President and Political Director for SEIU United Service Workers West, says.
Feeling safe within a sisterhood of women reclaiming their power, she was finally able to feel what many have taken to social media to say in the past year: Me too.
Like so many others, Diaz and the women she serves have kept their stories of abuse and misogyny to private conversations, group chats, and whisper networks. In late 2017 however, it seemed as though a critical turning point was reached; a turning point that cued up all women to stop whispering in order to let their stories be heard. And yet, it hasn’t exactly played out that way.
It’s been a year since the #MeToo Movement became part of the national discourse online, having been kicked off by reports from the New York Times and the *New Yorker*which featured multiple women alleging that Harvey Weinstein—the burly, bullish Hollywood executive—had sexually harassed or assaulted them. (This summer, Weinstein pleaded not guilty to six felony sex crimes, including two counts of rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault.) Following the accusations, actress Alyssa Milano retweeted something she found online that encouraged women to share their own stories of abuse. The hashtag was #MeToo, and it went viral shortly after, but the criticism about who started it—and who it served—would dot headlines for the next 12 months.
What Milano didn’t know at the time was that #MeToo had been created in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke to advocate for women and girls of color who had been sexually abused. The 2017 iteration, by default, was intended to belong to the everywoman, thousands of whom responded to Milano in a deluge of tweets and status updates. And yet, it still felt as though the movement was most talked-about when familiar Hollywood stars joined in. And why not? Their stories were salacious, empowering, and captivating—a lurid peek into the darker side of the industry.
But that was only part of the story—of course, there were other women who had been trying to get their voices heard for years. And as the star power behind #MeToo grew, so did the opinion that it was owned by liberal women. Republican and conservative women who have #MeToo stories have reportedly felt left behind, like their experiences were being ignored by their party, and the movement.
One woman’s narrative crushes the criticism that #MeToo is strictly left-leaning. When Gretchen Carlson, formerly a face at Fox News, sued the conservative network’s chief in 2016, she was one of few women associated with that world to publicly come forward. Carlson’s lawsuit alleges that the late Roger Ailessabotaged her career when she rejected his sexual advances. Like Weinstein, Ailes was a larger-than-life executive whose misogynistic tycoon persona seemed to emanate from an old Hollywood playbook. According to reports, Ailes told her they should have had a “sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.”
Eventually, she decided enough was enough.
“It was the most excruciating decision of my life,” Carlson tells Glamour of coming forward. “Before there was a [Hollywood] #MeToo movement, before there was Time’s Up, before there was anything, it was me taking on one of the most powerful men in the world by myself.” Stepping forward a year before the hashtag’s meteoric rise gave her a new purpose and birthed her best-selling book, Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back, which was released just days after the Weinstein allegations were made public.
A year later, other women who identify as conservatives have come forward, but the movement on the right is slow to pick up, Vox points out. But it’s not about party lines for Carlson. More importantly, it’s about “every socioeconomic line” having access.
“It’s important to me that the every woman story is also heard,” the author, who recently defended herself against accusations of bullying, says. “Because this … pervasive epidemic, as I call it, it’s not just famous, rich people.”
The struggle to gain access to the movement goes beyond class lines, cash or politics. There’s also the elephant in the room when it comes to #MeToo: The racial disparity and how underreported the narratives of black, brown and gender nonconforming women are.
“White women have always had dominion over the narrative concerning sexual violence and gender-based empowerment.”
This was on the minds of Kenyette Barnes and Oronike Odeleye, who together created the #MuteRKelly movement, which seeks to put the alleged victims of the accused predator, musician R. Kelly, at the forefront. According to several accounts, Kelly has spent decades hunting for teenage “pets,” who, according to a recent documentary, he groomed to be sex slaves. (Kelly has denied the accusations.) Barnes and Odeleye, who began the organization to stand up for these young black women, both credit Burke and #MeToo as being extremely integral in their quest to bring Kelly to justice. And yet, their push is often overshadowed by high-profile alleged predators like Weinstein, Ailes or Bill Cosby, men whose alleged victims are often white.
“White women have always had dominion over the narrative concerning sexual violence and gender-based empowerment,” Barnes tells Glamour. “There’s a tendency to marginalize the unique experiences of black and brown women. This is no different in the attempted appropriation of #MeToo.”
It’s not like everyone in Hollywood completely ignored Burke’s original standard for #MeToo. Celebrity women who have engaged with the hashtag seem well-intentioned enough. But lip service is different from inclusion, and over the last year, actresses like Rose McGowan—whose outspoken participation seems to exclude black, brown and gender nonconforming victims, at least to some accounts—has been called out for her lack of it. She’s been criticized for dismissing the experiences of women of color and trans women, and yet, is hailed as one of the movement’s strongest heroines. She’s even earned an E! reality show—which aired in May—while most of the activists at the center of the movement, who organize marches and protests or offer support for victims, continue to move in the margins.
To be clear, McGowan is hardly an outlier. Often praised for her feminist ideals, actress and writer Lena Dunham drew criticism for dismissing a woman of color, actress Aurora Perrineau, who came forward with accusations against Dunham’s friend, writer Murray Miller, last year. And in the midst of Weinstein’s wave of accusers coming forward last year, the mogul was radio silent until actress Lupita Nyong’o shared her own account of his alleged misconduct towards her. Only then, after a black woman accused him, did he feel the need to publicly defend himself.
“There is no one coming to rescue black women,” Odeleye says of the struggle. “We have to save ourselves.”
One of the biggest culprits in pushing the false idea that the fight to end sexual abuse is the same for all women and men has been the media, Odeleye and Barnes note, which often fails to center varied identities in their coverage. Even Burke herself, who was unavailable for comment on the story as she organized and prepared protests against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh, addressed this in a recent op-ed for Variety.
“I launched the #MeToo movement because I wanted to find ways to bring healing into the lives of black women and girls,” she wrote. “But those same women and girls, along with other people of color, queer people and disabled people, have not felt seen this year.”
This is especially evident in the coverage of the sexual degradation of female victims over the last few years like Chikesia Clemons, whose breasts were exposed in her violent arrest at a Waffle House in Alabama earlier this year or Daniel Holtzclaw, the police officer convicted in 2015 of assaulting 13 women and raping eight in Oklahoma City. His victims, all of whom are black and many of whom had criminal records, remain ghosts lost in the coverage. We do not know many of their names. We do not speak of their immeasurable trauma.
It’s a similar story for the staggering number of trans women who have been murdered in the past two years alone. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates that 2018 could be ‘the deadliest year on record’ for violence against trans women. (As of September 2018, 27 trans women have been reportedly murdered). And yet, a year later, as dozens of cisgendered women are given magazine covers and major platforms to discuss their trauma, there has been little to no coverage of the clear and present dangers our trans sisters face.
These challenges for women of color or varied identities can be, in part, attributed to the unique set of consequences that they face, both from society and their own cultural norms.
“We have to challenge our biases and ask ourselves, ‘Why don’t we see the power in women of color and in immigrant women?'”
“Often black women and girls are shamed into pushing aside their need for gender justice,” Barnes explained. Instead, it is often seen as “of little importance [when] viewed within the larger system of White Supremacy.”
This is also prominent in the Latinx community, according to Lilia Garcia-Brower, executive director of the watchdog group, Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, who advocates for janitorial workers in California. For these women, many of whom are undocumented, work is synonymous with sexual violence, intimidation and wage theft.
“If [these women] don’t believe that they are more valuable than the violence that they’re confronting every day, they’re not going to denounce what’s happening to them,” Garcia-Brower says. “ We’ve spent a lot of time unpeeling the gender socialization that tells [women] that we are less than a man … that we cannot defend ourselves.”
For both the unions and the watchdog groups, it was clear that the women would have to be the ones in charge of empowering themselves since they could not trust the industry to do it. As Diaz adds: “How do you hold an industry accountable for training their workers on sexual violence when we can’t even hold them accountable for paying them?”
These workers, whose struggles were chronicled in the Frontline documentary aired on PBS, “Rape on the Night Shift,” teamed up with the SEIU-USWW labor union and Garcia-Brower’s group to form the YA BASTA! COALITION. Through hunger fasts, protests and community training of “promotoras, (who educate their peers on self defense), the women of Ya Basta, which means ‘Enough Is Enough,’ are taking back their lives.
At the end of a recent march, a group of the janitors took off their shirts to call attention to the power dynamics at play in sexual violence—an action that was meant to reject the shame that survivors feel and to denounce that idea that sexual misconduct is about sex.
There, standing in their bras with their resolve at an all time high, they shouted: “Quien es dueña de tu cuerpo. Yo soy dueña de mi cuerpo.” Translated, it means, “tell me who owns your body. I own my body!” It was a simple declaration, but an immensely profound one in a society that, as Odeleye notes, “does not value a women’s ownership of her body.”
Still, the question remains: what does protection look like? And who has access to the new #MeToo as it reaches its first birthday?
“As a society, we have to challenge our biases and ask ourselves, why don’t we see the power in women of color and in immigrant women,” Diaz says. Shifting that power back to them, she says, “is at the center of eradicating sexual violence.
“But first we have to recognize the humanity in them.”
Allison McGevna is an editor and writer based in New York City. You can follow her @AllieMcGev on Twitter.
The nominees for the 2018 Emmys are more diverse than ever, with shows like Atlanta, Insecure, and The Handmaid’s Tale racking up multiple categories. Sandra Oh is the first Asian woman to be nominated for a lead actress award for Killing Eve (which you absolutely should check out if you haven’t already). That being said, the industry still has a long way to go. While the nominations this year show we’re heading in a better direction, Hollywood is still by and large dominated by white men, both in front of and behind the camera. It’s important not to lose sight of that.
Don’t worry, though: Kristen Bell, Keenan Thompson, Kate McKinnon, Ricky Martin, Sterling K. Brown, and Tituss Burgess are here to make sure showbiz titans don’t pat themselves on the back too hard. These performers and more appeared in a musical intro at the beginning of tonight’s show that relayed an important message: Just because we’ve made progress in one or two areas doesn’t mean diversity is “fixed.”
Watch the first 30 seconds of the performance for yourself, below:
One of the highlights of the musical number was when RuPaul came on stage to hammer home the fact that a few LGBTQ+ people or actors of color appearing on hit TV shows isn’t the cure for Hollywood’s diversity problem.
Other memorable moments included when Thompson and McKinnon gave a hat-tip to Sandra Oh’s historic nomination and Oh just said, “It’s an honor just to be Asian,” in response. And at one point, Andy Samberg descended from the stage and asked if there was room for a straight white man in this song—and I think you can deduce how that (hilariously) panned out.
Back in March, at the Oscars, Frances McDormand introduced the “inclusion rider” to non-Hollywood types during her Best Actress acceptance speech when she said, “I have two words for you: inclusion rider.” It became a much-discussed term as people learned that it’s essentially a contract clause, used by those both in front of and behind the camera, that stipulates there should be a certain amount of diversity in the film or project for which the contract has been created.
Since then, though, the amount of big companies adopting these inclusion riders has been limited. But now, in a big move that could have far-reaching implications, Warner Media (the parent company to Warner Bros. and HBO, among other media entities) is instituting a company-wide diversity policy.
“It is essential that our content and creative partners reflect the diversity of our society and the world around us,” the company said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “Together with other production companies, networks, guilds, unions, talent agencies and others in the industry, we all must ensure there is greater inclusion of women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, those with disabilities and other underrepresented groups in greater numbers both in front of and behind the camera.”
Their partner in bringing this vision to light? Actor Michael B. Jordan. His next film (about to start production), Just Mercy, will be the first made under the new guidelines.
“Inclusivity has always been a no-brainer for me, especially as a black man in this business,” Jordan said. “[But] it wasn’t until Frances McDormand spoke the two words that set the industry on fire — inclusion rider — that I realized we could standardize this practice. It allowed me to formally pledge my production company, Outlier Society, to a way of doing business.”
While there are not super-specific steps laid out in the Warner Media policy, the company says that it will work with writers, directors, and producers it the early stages of the process to “to create a plan for implementing this commitment to diversity and inclusion on our projects, with the goal of providing opportunities for individuals from under-represented groups at all levels.”
Diversity is something that the Hollywood powers-that-be have long struggled with, despite the public’s obvious hunger for more. Just look at the blockbuster success of films like Girls’ Trip, Black Panther, and Crazy Rich Asians and television shows like Orange Is the New Black, Insecure, and Atlanta.
But the concept of an inclusion rider certainly isn’t foreign to all creatives. As Glamour highlighted in a recent story, many female-led sets work hard to include a diversity of voices. Still, it can’t be left to women and people of color alone to carry the weight, which is why it’s good to see a giant corporation stepping up. After all, more voices always make for better stories.
