Actress Queen Latifah believes that it was “necessary” for her upcoming reboot of the The Equalizer to feature a black female protagonist, citing what she sees as the social and racial “inequities” facing the country.
Queen Latifah stars in CBS’ rebooted The Equalizer, which debuts after Super Bowl LV on Sunday. The crime series is inspired by the original 80s series that starred British actor Edward Woodward, as well as the subsequent movie versions with Denzel Washington.
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In an interview with USA Today, Queen Latifah said that she signed on for the reboot in part because she likes the thought of “delivering some justice (as) a Black woman on network television. I thought the idea of it was incredible and necessary and fun.”
She added that social justice plays an important role in the new series.
“When we started this project,” she said, “little did we know that we would face a pandemic; we would face such amazing divisiveness in this country; we would have to deal with a real, real hard look at the racial inequities, of the social inequities, of the financial inequities of this country.
“We just didn’t know that, God, would we need to see justice,” she told the newspaper. “There’s just so many different things that are going on that made this show timely.”
As Breitbart News reported, CBS has recently committed to spending 25 percent of its production budget to produce TV projects dedicated to “BIPOC” topics — an acronym for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” The network also promised to increase the number of minorities in creative roles.
Last year, Queen Latifah publicly trashed the movie Gone with the Wind, after playing actress Hattie McDaniel in a Netflix series. The actress was speaking shortly after WarnerMedia decided to pull the movie from its HBO Max streaming service over accusations that the classic movie glorified the antebellum South.
“Let Gone with the Wind be gone with the wind,” the actress said during an interview with the Associated Press.
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