Actor Harry Lennix calls ‘The Butler’ ‘historical porn’

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Although director Lee Daniels’ Oscar-baity film The Butler, which is based on the life of real life White House service-worker Eugene Allen, is receiving rave reviews — one black character actor is lashing out at the project.

Actor Harry Lennix, who most film buffs may recognize from his roles in The Matrix trilogy, Get On the Bus and most recently Man of Steel, has said the filmmaker of took Allen’s story and “ni**erfies” it and he has dismissed the project as “historical porn.”

“I read five pages of this thing and could not go any further. I tried to read more of it, and I’m not a soft spoken guy, but it was such an appalling mis-direction of history in terms of taking an actual guy who worked at the White House,” said Lennix in a July interview with Shadow and Act. But then he “ni**erfies” it. He “ni**ers” it up and he gives people these, stupid, luddite, antediluvian ideas about black people and their roles in the historical span in the White House and it becomes… well… historical porn. I refused.”

Lennix doesn’t got into specifics about which scenes or characterizations in particular rubbed him the wrong way. And despite his take on the movie, Daniels was able to convince a veritable who’s who of Hollywood to take part in the film.

In addition to the lead role played Forest Whitaker, the movie features Oprah Winfrey, Robin Williams, Jane Fonda, Lenny Kravitz, Cuba Gooding Jr. and John Cusack, just to name a few.

Still, Lennix is far from impressed.

“While any sort of aberrant behavior happens in any community, it has become normative in black cinema that we are these bestial, deprived people, and I refuse to play with that,” he said.