Wesley Snipes Denies Claim That He ‘Tried To Strangle’ Blade: Trinity Director, Says It ‘Never Happened!’
TheRoot.com, By Tonya Renee Stidhum, Posted November 26th 2020
Wesley Snipes is setting a rumored record straight. The 58-year-old actor has denied the claim that he tried to strangle Blade: Trinity director David Goyer.
“Let me tell you one thing. If I had tried to strangle David Goyer, you probably wouldn’t be talking to me now,” Snipes told The Guardian in a recent interview, where he also discussed his 2008 prison stint for tax evasion. “A Black guy with muscles strangling the director of a movie is going to jail, I guarantee you…Did I go to jail for strangling him? Never happened.”
This long-standing claim came from a 2012 interview with the film’s co-star Patton Oswalt conducted by our G/O Media cousin, A.V. Club.
In the A.V. Club interview, Oswalt said:
And he tried to strangle the director, David Goyer. So later that night, Ron Perlman was in the city. Everyone who makes movies in Vancouver stays in the same hotel. It’s like an episode of The Love Boat. Every time the elevator stops, you’ve got a different celebrity getting on. Like, [announcer voice] “Hey, now we’ve got Danny Glover!” So we went out that night to some strip club, and we were all drinking. And there were a bunch of bikers there, so David says to them, “I’ll pay for all your drinks if you show up to set tomorrow and pretend to be my security.” Wesley freaked out and went back to his trailer. [Laughs.] And the next day, Wesley sat down with David and was like, “I think you need to quit. You’re detrimental to this movie.” And David was like, “Why don’t you quit? We’ve got all your close-ups, and we could shoot the rest with your stand-in.” And that freaked Wesley out so much that, for the rest of the production, he would only communicate with the director through Post-it notes. And he would sign each Post-it note “From Blade.” [Laughs.]
“Why do people believe this guy’s version of this story? Answer me that,” Snipes added. “This is part of the challenges that we as African Americans face here in America—these microaggressions. The presumption that one white guy can make a statement and that statement stands as true! Why would people believe his version is true? Because they are predisposed to believing the Black guy is always the problem.”
Snipes has made the news for an alleged assault claim before when Christopher Williams claimed in 2004 that Snipes was the one that beat Halle Berry so severely that she lost most of her hearing in her right year. Berry herself hasn’t named her attacker from the previous relationship. So, Williams divulged that it was Snipes since people were assuming it was Williams (also an ex of Berry’s).
“The stuff they wrote about [me] and Halle was totally false,” he said at the time. “They said something like I busted her eardrum, and I’m tired of it. I never said it [before] but I’m so tired of people thinking I’m the guy [who did it]. Wesley Snipes busted her eardrum, not me.”
As for the character of Blade, Marvel will be reviving the film with a new lead—Mahershala Ali.
Staff Writer, Entertainment at The Root. Sugar, spice & everything rice. Equipped with the uncanny ability to make a Disney reference and a double entendre in the same sentence.
