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Actor Tony Shalhoub Responds to Sarah Silverman’s ‘Jewface’ Comments: ‘It’s Troubling to Limit Actors’
by Shiryn Ghermezian
Tony Shalhoub accepts the award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” at the 26th Screen Actors Guild Awards. Photo: REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni.
Actor Tony Shalhoub of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” defended the right of non-Jewish actors to play overtly Jewish characters when asked about Sarah Silverman’s recent charge that Hollywood has a “Jewface” problem.
“I always feel that we’re actors,” Shalboub, 67, a Maronite Christian who plays a Jewish professor in the hit series on Amazon Prime Video, told Page Six at the premiere of “Mass.” The former “Monk” star, added, “We were trained to — at least I was — to not play myself, to play characters and so it’s troubling to me that they’re limiting actors.”
“I just don’t know,” he went on to say. “If we start to go down that road, I don’t know where it ends. Are people who are members of the Mafia, are they going to be upset that people who haven’t actually committed those types of crimes are playing those roles? When you extrapolate it all the way out the way lies complete chaos.”
On her podcast last week, Silverman discussed “WandaVision” actress Kathryn Hahn, who is not Jewish, being cast to play the late Jewish TV personality and actress Joan Rivers in an upcoming limited series for Showtime called “The Comeback Girl.” The comedian and actress said, “Kathryn Hahn did absolutely nothing wrong. She’s a brilliant actor … [But] there’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish, but people whose Jewishness is their whole being.”
Silverman continued to say that “One could argue, for instance, that a Gentile playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface,’” which she defined as “when a non-Jew portrays a Jew with the Jewishness front and center, often with makeup or changing of features, big fake nose, all the New York-y or Yiddish-y inflection.”
“And in a time when the importance of representation is seen as so essential and so front and center, why does ours constantly get breached even today in the thick of it?” she asked.
Hahn’s casting for “The Comeback Girl,” which she will also executive produce, was announced in September.
