‘Sinners’ Star Jayme Lawson Says BAFTAs Were Exploitative

Sinners star Jayme Lawson praised her co-stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo for how they handled having a slur shouted at them at the BAFTAs last weekend. “I’ll first say a big shout-out to Mike and Delroy; let’s continue to honor them for how they handled that in real time,” she told The Hollywood Reporter at the NAACP Image Awards. But Lawson also had much harsher words for the BAFTAs and the BBC.

Last weekend, Tourette’s advocate John Davidson was televised shouting the N-word at Jordan and Lindo. Davidson has coprolalia, where one’s involuntary tics are offensive and inappropriate. The audience was made aware of Davidson’s disability, but Lawson said other steps could and should have been taken to protect both Davidson and her co-stars. “Institutionally, we still don’t understand what inclusion means. Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don’t provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that’s not inclusivity. That’s exploitation,” she said. “That man’s disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses.”

Davidson was shown on the BBC saying the N-word, but he says the BBC edited out his other outbursts that night. Lawson said it was careless for the BBC to have aired just that one outburst, “and not like some haphazard accident — a real lack of care was exercised for those two Black men.” Lawson also pointed out how the BBC apparently cut “Free Palestine” out of director Akinola Davies Jr.’s speech. “So you censored one Black man. You failed to protect two others and our production designer,” she said, referencing Sinners’s production designer, who also had the N-word shouted at her. “You do not care for our dignity, our humanity. You want to celebrate our art, but you won’t protect it.” The BBC claimed it cut Davies’s speech for time considerations — a claim that is less plausible since “Free Palestine” was bleeped from the band Geese’s acceptance speech at the BRIT Awards last night.