New Star Wars Series Showrunner Leslye Headland Is Really Obsessed With Identity

Hollywood cares more about skin color than talent these days.

Leslye Headland, the co-creator and showrunner of the Netflix show Russian Doll, is working on a new female-centric Star Wars TV series for Disney Plus, which is worrying.

I don’t question Headland’s credentials — she’s got considerable experience writing for TV, film, and stage, and has been nominated for two Primetime Emmys — or even the fact that she was Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant for a year.

What depresses me is that the Mouse House has caved in yet again to wokeness and hired someone who cares more about the identity of a talent than their actual craft to oversee a new addition to a beloved franchise.

Last year, Headland spoke on a panel at the Variety Inclusion Summit, along with comrade Queens of Wokeness “Vida” creator Tanya Saracho and “Queen Sugar” producer Carla Gardini. In a bid to win some “you-go-girl” back-pats from the SJW community, Headland was all-too eager to express her virtuous hatred of white female creators in the entertainment industry:

“I think white women need to kind of step up their game, to be quite honest. Sorry, but I’m calling you bitches out. You really do. ’Cause like, I couldn’t agree more with everything these women are saying, but I’m also seeing the silent killer, which is a lot of white women at the top who are kind of reinforcing a lot of old ideas.”

It was just the beginning of a condescending rant that was packed with broad (heh) and vague statements, as well as plenty of jargon from the Lefist Lexicon. No data, no nuance, no semblance of understanding of the complications regarding identity and experience. Just pure, unbridled adherence to a venomous ideology that claims to look out for marginalized filmmakers while swiftly throwing nonbelievers under the bus.

“I wasn’t sure how to be an ally. I got so caught up in what kind of terminology I was supposed to be using, and being politically correct. And as I started to rise in television I started to get more blunt and start saying like ‘I would like a black writer.’”

One of the countless aspects I hate so much about wokeness is how its followers are so casual in their virtue signaling, their attempts to nonchalantly indicate to the world that they care about fighting privilege while signing lucrative multi-year deals with major studios.

“Because if I said diverse, you get ‘well, white is diverse,’ which is something somebody said to me. And I was like ‘Wow…It’s not. Cool.’”

According to Headland, all white people are the same, not an ounce of diversity among them. Swedes, Brits, Germans, Italians, Portuguese, French, Irish = samesies, apparently. After all, diversity isn’t about having a variety of cultural perspectives on your team — it’s about having a variety of skin colors, ideally without any of those pesky white ones.

I think the part of Headland’s twaddle that I have the biggest problem with is that nowhere in this clip does she use words like “creative”, “originality”, “visionary”, “risk-taking” or other terms to describe the types of talents she thinks the industry needs to hire more of. It’s just an appeal to enlist creators based on their immutable characteristics, a brand of gentle bigotry that is especially evident in this quote from the clip:

“I reached out to the women that I respect who are not white writers and directors and I said ‘what should I say? What language should I use?’ And I think it’s worth it if you’re in a position of hiring power or green-lighting power to reach out to people that are not like you and say, ‘what can I do to be an ally? And how can I support writers of color and LGBTQ and disabled writers? What kind of vocabulary should I be using?‘”

In Headland’s mind, the only thing that should qualify you to work in Hollywood is to be different in appearance from the studio executives. It’s a groin-kicking insult to the artists who’ve busted their asses developing their screencraft only to be subject to such a senseless purity test.

And it’s an insult to artists of all groups.

It’s an insult to minority, female, and LGBTQQUIA+ creators because they’re given priority regardless of their skills.

It’s an insult to straight, white, and male creators because they’re given the boot simply for being born a certain way.

Why isn’t anyone pointing this out?

I couldn’t care less how woke a filmmaker is in their private lives, but it rankles me to no end knowing that it’s becoming more and more popular for these views to seep into the content we consume.

Does every movie and TV show have to check off enough diversity and inclusion boxes before reaching our eyes and ears?

Does a filmmaker’s identity, something they can’t control, really factor into their ability to tell an engaging screen story?

Do mainstream audiences really give a fuck about the surface features of the cast and crew of a movie or TV show?

It’s a sorry state to be in when a top Hollywood talent like Leslye Headland believes that skin color and genitalia are viable metrics for the talent of a creator, and it’s worsened by virtue of the wretched reality that Headland isn’t alone in this belief.

Jesus Christ.