Leslie Jones Details ‘Heartache’ Caused By Ghostbusters Backlash!
TheRoot.com, By Stephanie Holland, Posted October 10th 2023
In her new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, the SNL vet reveals personal details about her fascinating life. Throughout her career she’s defied everyone’s expectations and found success just by being herself. In a world that constantly wants to break you down, this is not a small accomplishment, especially for Black women. In an excerpt of the book published in Rolling Stone, Jones details how toxic fanboys and the Hollywood machine tried to break her when she signed on for the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
The comedian explained how after the trailer was released, she was inundated with racism and death threats because they had the audacity to make an all-female remake of a popular ‘80s comedy, and even decided to cast a Black woman. She revealed that after her account kept getting attacked and the threats became so vile and dangerous, she had to shut down her Twitter. Due to the endless attempts to hack her, Jack Dorsey, who was the platform’s CEO at the time, even had a team specifically working on her account.
“I can’t believe anyone would do this shit to someone, anyone, for working,” Jones writes. “This is awful. I am in a movie. Death threats for something as small as that?”
For the record, 2016’s Ghostbusters is not a perfect movie, but it is funny and features a very talented cast. None of the women involved deserved the uncomfortable level of hate they received, especially Leslie. I can understand having an emotional connection to the original. But if someone decided to remake Star Wars with a new cast, I wouldn’t send death threats to the actors. If I weren’t interested, I would just ignore it and move on with my life. A concept these entitled assholes clearly couldn’t grasp.
As bad as things were off the set, Jones revealed that she still had plenty of battles to fight on set. Like every Black woman ever, she had to go to war just to have her worth valued fairly. As a supporting actor in a cast full of big names, it’s expected that she would be offered significantly less money than her co-stars. However, there’s a difference between that and just being insulted.
“It was made clear to me at times during the process that I was lucky to even be on that movie, but honestly, I was thinking, ‘I don’t have to be in this muthafucka,’” she writes. “Especially as I got paid way less than Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig. No knock on them, but my first offer was to do that movie for $67,000. I had to fight to get more (in the end I got $150K), but the message was clear: ‘This is gonna blow you up—after this, you’re made for life,’ all that kind of shit, as though I hadn’t had decades of a successful career already. And in the end, all it made for me was heartache and one big-ass controversy.”
The experience taught Jones a lesson about the business and her place in it. Once the film wrapped, she vowed that she would not be put in this position again.
“By the end of that shoot, I knew so much more than I did when I started,” she writes. “By the end I was thinking, ‘This shit won’t ever happen again. I know that I’m not a big star yet, but after this muthafucka, after figuring this out, I’m about to release the Kraken.’
The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot is not the crime against humanity some critics and fanboys would have you believe that it is. And there’s no way Leslie deserved any of the vile hatred she got for being an actor who signed on to be in a major studio movie. I know a lot of people take their entertainment way too seriously, but all of y’all still owe her an apology.
