Director Paul Feig has met the backlash of his Ghostbusters reboot head-on for months. One of its stars is joining him in setting the record straight, weighing in on the fans who are complaining about the female cast.
Melissa McCarthy is the subject of a new profile in the Guardian, which touches on her rise in Hollywood and the constant predictions from critics that she will fail, the projects she makes with her husband, actor and director Ben Falcone, and the types of characters she portrays. But in the piece she also addresses criticism about the female reboot of Ghostbusters.
While the pushback from fans of the original Ghostbusters movie have been near-constant, criticism has hit a fever pitch when a new trailer drops or with the spread of a viral video on why one critic refuses to see it. The original trailer is the most-disliked video on YouTube, and the newest trailer took a week to land on YouTube after an exclusive deal with Facebook and Twitter.
McCarthy’s comments particularly focuses on the group of people who have accused the reboot of ruining their childhoods.
“All those comments – ‘You’re ruining my childhood!’ I mean, really,” McCarthy told the Guardian. “Four women doing any movie on earth will destroy your childhood? I have a visual of those people not having a Ben, not having friends, so they’re just sitting there and spewing hate into this fake world of the internet. I just hope they find a friend.”
She’s hardly the first person to talk about the elephant in the room. Kristen Wiig has said the vocal (and sometimes sexist response) “really just bummed me out.” Sony domestic marketing president Dwight Caines told the Hollywood Reporter that “the people talking are such a tiny percentage of the people viewing” and “they are trying to define the experience.” Feig recently noted to the New York Daily News that “Geek culture is home to some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in my life.”
McCarthy also talked about some of the other backlash from the trailers. She mainly hones in on the fact that Leslie Jones’s character, Patty Tolan, is the outsider of the group and the only black Ghostbuster. The character stands as the only non-scientist of the new quartet, similar to the role that Ernie Hudson played in the original.
McCarthy confirms that Feig originally wrote the character for her, and that the new characters aren’t just a rehash of the older characters nor are their roles tied to a specific race or ethnicity.
“I think originally Paul had written me as that part and then he switched, so she could have been white, Hispanic… It was truly just a coincidence.”
Ghostbusters will be released July 15.
H/T The Guardian