Appearing on the MacTaggart Legacy panel at the Edinburgh International TV Festival (via The Independent), Iannucci explained why he thinks the debate around “wokeness” is ridiculous. He believes that the word “woke” has lost all meaning and is being gratuitously used by politicians to describe minor pop culture changes that they don’t like.
“My worry is that there is now this word, ‘woke’, that the government has weaponized to try and stop all that,” Iannucci said. “I want someone to ask [Prime Ministerial candidate] Liz Truss, ‘Do you want Doctor Who just to be a white man?’ I’ve got to see what her response is, because that’s the thing that’s referred to as ‘woke’, the ‘Doctor Who’ debate.”
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For his part, Iannucci sees absolutely zero problems with casting more diverse actors in British films and television shows.
“British television is great, we want it to be even better,” Iannucci said. “And it can only be better if it’s much more reflective of who we are, as a country and as an audience.”
In addition to making film and television more representative, Iannucci also believes that employing colorblind casting makes art better. The filmmaker is thrilled that the entertainment industry had progressed to the point where he could cast Dev Patel as an iconic Charles Dickens protagonist in “The Personal History of David Copperfield.”
“It was an enormous relief,” he said. “I felt liberated, I didn’t feel I was ticking boxes. I just felt, ‘my God, why have I not had access to 100 percent of the acting community [previously]?’
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