Hamilton director Lin-Manuel Miranda sorry new Latino film is ‘too white’

In the Heights is set in a diverse neighbourhood with a Latino cast but Lin-Manuel Miranda is accused of ‘colourism’ for not including enough black Latino actors.

A scene from In the Heights.

The arrival of In the Heights at cinemas last week was billed as a milestone for Hollywood. It is a film with a Latino cast, set in a diverse neighbourhood and adapted from the musical of the same name by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the man who told the story of a nation of immigrants in Hamilton.

“The hope for me is that in five years’ time, people will go, ‘Why was In the Heights such a big deal? We have ten Latino movies every year’,” Miranda said before its opening.

Yet now the playwright and actor has issued an apology for the film not including enough black Latino actors in the cast. “I’m seeing the discussion around Afro-Latino representation in our film this weekend and it is clear that many in our dark-skinned Afro-Latino community don’t feel sufficiently represented, particularly among the leading roles,” he said. “I can hear the hurt and frustration.”

The film has been accused of colourism, a prejudice against people with darker skin tones in the same ethnic group; some people felt the film should have acknowledged colourism in the Latino community.

“Anti-blackness in Latino culture is prevalent and that could have been an honest portrayal,” one wrote on Twitter.

Miranda, who is from Washington Heights in New York City, said he began writing In the Heights twenty years ago. It opened on Broadway in 2008. Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the script for the musical then adapted it into a screenplay, recruited Jon Chu to direct the film.

Chu also directed Crazy Rich Asians in 2018, the highest-earning film of the decade, and with an all-Asian cast. Amid the praise, however, that film was also criticised for colourism. “The browner Asian characters are predominantly guards and domestic workers and drivers,” the Singaporean writer Ng Yi-Sheng said.

Chu, the son of a chef from San Francisco, said the success of Crazy Rich Asians made him anxious about In the Heights and he had offered Miranda and Hudes the chance to pick another director. He said he took particular care over accuracy in the portrayal of Washington Heights. “I was hyperaware all the time,” he said. “Like: ‘Oh, her hair is going to get in the way but those are her natural curls, don’t clip it back, move the light, move the camera’.”

He said that he had cast people “who were best for those roles”.

In his apology this week, Miranda said he still felt “incredible pride in the movie we made”.

The Times