Bill Maher told Lin-Manuel Miranda to “stop apologizing” to those that kept bullying him since his movie was criticized for not having enough diversity.
Maher then chimes in and says, “this is why people hate Democrats”.
In Miranda’s film, it begins the story with a Hispanic community located in New York City, and it has been heavily attacked for the lack of diversity in the film. Last Monday, he had released a public statement and promised to “do better” in the future for other works of his.
He tells the director, “Please, stop apologizing. You’re the guy who made the Founding Fathers Black and Hispanic! I don’t think you have to apologize to Twitter! For f***’s sake. This is why people hate Democrats. It’s cringy.”
Miranda created and starred in the Broadway version of In the Heights, but has received a lot of backlash with a statement he had posted on social media platform, Twitter.
He captions his tweet, “I started writing ‘In the Heights’ because I didn’t feel seen. And over the past 20 years all I wanted was for us — ALL of us — to feel seen.”
He says that he sees the discussion around Afro-Latino representation in the film, it is “clear that many in our dark-skinned Afro-Latino community don’t feel sufficiently represented within it, particularly among the leading roles. I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback.”
“I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short.”
Maher tells the audience that he thinks his outcry was “unnecessary.” Another CNN commentator, Paul Begala, says that activists “needed to focus their attention on issues such as health and financial disparities between black and white Americans” versus this problem at hand.
He also states that “Those are outrages and liberals ought to be focused on that, not the casting choices, of, I think, a heroic guy who’s making a film about a minority community.”