their foot through Hollywood’s cracked door, but was it their talent, or their weight that helped them to stay there?
Former Good Times writer, Bob Pete, once said this about larger African American actors: “If they get a job because they’re [larger], chances are they’ll stay [larger].”
Simply put, many larger actors felt that their careers and livelihoods would have been threatened if they would’ve shed too many pounds. If that happened, how would they be able to take care of their families? That’s a lot of pressure, but they were able to maintain. See what Fred “Rerun” Berry (What’s Happening), Johnny Brown (“Bookman” from Good Times), Shirley Hemphill and Mabel King (What’s Happening and The Wiz) had to say about their personal experiences with balancing Hollywood and their weight.
Rerun was 5’5″ and weighing 240 pounds at the height of his career and he was one of the most sought after actors at the time. In the late 70’s he said he wanted to get down to 180 pounds, but nothing less, because he didn’t want to lose his appeal to the entertainment world.
The same thing went for Shirley. She was 211 pounds during her stint on What’s Happening and she said she wanted to slim down but she also said: “I don’t want to lose too much weight too fast because I don’t want the audience to be disturbed.”
The late Mable King said she always kept her weight up to 260 pounds to please the producers and she once stated in a late 70’s interview that if she was given a choice between food and sex, she’d choose food because she said “it would last longer and it would fill me up” she laughed.
Johnny Brown (“Bookman”) gave a different point of view from the other three actors. He confessed to being on a constant diet back then and that he wasn’t concerned with losing work if he lost weight. “Some of my friends said I’d lose my character on Good Times if I lost too much weight. I didn’t buy that. I [got] parts based on my ability,” says Brown.
One popular magazine once said that ‘comedy calls for quick movement; the cameras can’t wait for the actors to drag their main selling point across the stage- or to huff and puff with fatigue.’ I hope that wasn’t the case, but it does make you wonder if that was the real reason why those shows wanted to cast larger sized actors- so that they could basically be the butt of a few jokes. Every actor we’ve mentioned in this article had outstanding acting abilities, so I will give those shows the benefit of a doubt and assume that the actors were hired for their acting skills, not for simply their look.
On a side note, I do not watch much TV nowadays, so it wasn’t until I actually wrote this article that I paid close attention to the fact that there actually aren’t any Black sitcoms, nor family shows on prime time non-cable TV anymore (although there are old school sitcom reruns). There are dramas such as Empire, Scandal, and Being Mary Jane. I can’t quite wrap my head around why sitcoms and family shows with minority casts don’t exist though…that just seems weird, being that we learned so much from shows like What’s Happening, Good Times, Sanford and Son, etc. back in the day.
With that said, I guess that also means that there are no more casting calls for larger actors to allegedly be the butt of jokes on national TV anymore.
Times have certainly changed. When you compare today’s actors to yesterday’s, there seems to be a slowly growing diversity of African Americans on prime time television. We have Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington and we also have Gabourey Sidibe and Amber Riley. Hopefully this diverse trend in dramatic characters will continue to grow, so that we aren’t subjected to seeing only one image, nor one body type on screen for those types of roles. That is not a true reflection of the world we live in, so it shouldn’t be the reflection that is depicted in Hollywood.
[Source: Jet Magazine]
