Samuel L. Jackson has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Joe Rogan's repeated use of the n-word in the past.
Last month, Grammy award-winner India Arie called out Rogan for his "language around race".
Following the controversy surrounding his Spotify podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, a video started to circulate on social media showing Rogan repeatedly using the 'n-word' in public appearances and on his podcast.
Watch Joe Rogan's apology below:The 29-second clip has been widely shared on platforms like Twitter, amassing millions of views in the process. It shows a compilation of times in the past when Rogan has used the slur. In fact, the video shows Rogan saying the word 22 times.
Following the backlash to the video, Rogan apologized for using the racial slur – calling it "the most regretful and shameful thing I’ve ever had to talk about publicly" – but insisted he was not racist.
"I know for most people there's no context where a white person is allowed to say that word – and I agree with that now," he said in his apology. "I haven't said it for years... I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing."
"I'm making this video to talk about the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly," the 54-year-old said in the video. "There's a video that's out, that's a compilation of me saying the n-word."
"It's a video that's made of clips taken out of context of me of 12 years of conversations on my podcast, and it's all smushed together, and it looks f****** horrible, even to me," he added.
Now, Hollywood legend Samuel L. Jackson has slammed Rogan's apology, saying it was "wrong" for the podcaster to use the slur in the first place.
"He is saying nobody understood the context when he said it," Jackson told The Times. "But he shouldn't have said it. It's not the context, dude – it's that he was comfortable doing it.
"Say you're sorry because you want to keep your money, but you were having fun and you say you did it because it was entertaining."
Asked whether Rogan's use of the slur lacked context, the 73-year-old replied: "It needs to be an element of what the story is about. A story is context – but just to elicit a laugh? That's wrong."