Love it or loathe it, Tropic Thunder has proven time and time again that it's one of the more divisive movies of the last 15 years... But Ben Stiller is still not sorry for its controversial themes.
Starring Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Cruise, Brandon T. Jackson, and Stiller, the 2008 comedy centers on a film crew shooting a big-budget war movie that accidentally gets involved in some real conflicts with local drug dealers.
While this might seem like the average Hollywood comedy, the flick copped much flak for Downey Jr.'s character Kirk Lazarus. In the movie, Lazarus is an Academy Award-winning method actor from Australia who had a controversial "pigmentation alteration" surgery to temporarily darken his skin for his portrayal of the black character, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris.
Despite coming from Down Under, Lazarus refuses to break character throughout the entire shooting of the big-budget movie, even choosing to speak in African-American Vernacular English in between takes. Naturally, this was a topic of contention among viewers.
Many people accused the movie of using unnecessary Blackface, but Downey Jr. later commented that he didn't regret his character, saying that the whole point of Lazarus was to point out the wrongness of Blackface in a satirical way. He said: "…90 percent of my black friends were like, 'Dude, that was great.' I can't disagree with [the other 10 percent], but I know where my heart lies.
"I think that it's never an excuse to do something that's out of place and out of its time, but to me, it blasted the cap on [the issue]. I think having a moral psychology is job one. Sometimes, you just gotta go, 'Yeah I effed up.' In my defense, Tropic Thunder is about how wrong [blackface] is, so I take exception," he added, via The Things.
Likewise, Stiller has also refused to apologize for the movie. In fact, the Meet The Parents actor responded to a fan on Twitter who asked the actor to stop apologizing for Tropic Thunder. "Please stop apologizing for doing this movie. It was and still is funny AF... Even funnier now with cancel culture the way it is. It's a MOVIE. Ya'll can just get over it. I was DYING laughing when I first saw it back in the day and so was everyone else [sic]," they wrote.
Stiller responded with: "I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder. Don't know who told you that. It's always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it [...]."
What were your thoughts on Tropic Thunder? Is it just a bit of fun, or was some of the fallout necessary? Let us know in the comments!
