Jamie Foxx, the actor who recently joked it was great to kill white people while hosting “Saturday Night Live,” is speaking out about the role movie violence has on real-life tragedies like the Connecticut school shooting.
The timing is pretty poor for Foxx’s comments, considering his latest film may be the year’s most violent yet.
Foxx stars as an avenging slave in “Django Unchained,” the latest orgy of blood and mayhem from director Quentin Tarantino of “Pulp Fiction” fame. Foxx sees little irony in using the new film’s promotional circuit to pin some blame on violent movies for the massacres we read about far too often in the news.
Foxx said his peers “can’t ignore the fact that movie violence can influence people.”
“We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn’t have a sort of influence,” Foxx said in an interview on Saturday. “It does.”
Will other journalists ask Foxx more direct questions on the subject? Why would he star in a film like “Django Unchained” given those views? Or does he see movie violence as a freedom that cannot be taken away from filmmakers, even if it means it could inspire people to summon their own brand of off-screen violence?