With well over 100 credits to her name and decades of experience in the business, Vanessa Bell Calloway has witnessed first-hand how much in Hollywood has changed — and how much has stayed the same. In a recent interview with The Undefeated, the “Coming to America” star was asked her thoughts about the visibility of black women in Hollywood, and whether there’s still “erasure or a lack of invitation to sit at the big table.”
“It’s gotten better — we can’t deny that — but it still has a long way to go,” Calloway said. “I look at my young sisters and I’m so happy for them, because they are literally coming out of school and getting their own series where they could be the star or the star of [a] movie. We didn’t have those opportunities when I was that same age, in my early 20s and 30s,” Calloway recalled.
The “Shameless” actress explained that “they weren’t writing for [black women] then.” Few parts existed, and “the black girls had to fight over [them].”
Calloway observed, “It has gotten better, and with that said, we are getting invited into some of the rooms, but not enough, because there still aren’t enough women directors period, so you know there’s not enough black women directors or black women producers.”
Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative published a study examining the prevalence of female directors working across 1,300 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2019, and found that “women of color held less than one percent of all directing jobs … whereas white males held 82.5 percent of jobs, underrepresented males 12.6 percent of jobs, and white females 3.9 percent of jobs.”
Dr. Martha Lauzen and the Center for the Study of Women in Television’s study of the top-grossing films of 2019 revealed that 18 percent of major female characters were black, and their report on the 2018-19 TV season found that 17 percent of the female characters were black.
“Harriet,” “Saints & Sinners,” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show” are among Calloway’s most recent credits.
Head over to The Undefeated to check out the interview, and see how Calloway will know when Hollywood has truly progressed and to what she attributes the longevity of her career.
