Rachel True has spoken out about her experiences of being the only back cast member of the 90’s hit Goth horror movie, The Craft.
The Black Lives Matter movement, which dominated the best part of the year, has led to many actors and actresses of color speaking out about the lack of diversity behind the scenes.
True revealed to Yahoo! Entertainment that her role as Rochelle Zimmerman was initially meant for a white actress — but her treatment at the hands of her costars and crew is an all-too-familiar tale for many Black artists and entertainers.
“It’s a big movie in terms of my career, but it’s also a big movie for Black people out there,” she says. “It’s one of the first teen movies that wasn’t a Black teen movie or a white teen movie.”
Despite landing the movie, True was given the frosty treatment on set and said she was singled out from her co-stars, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney.
“When we were shooting the movie, I had literally been told by my team to stay away from Fairuza,” she told the entertainment outlet. “[They said] she can get away with stuff, and you will get fired for it. I was literally told, ‘You’re Black, so don’t say, ‘F*ck you, mommy,’ like the white girls.'”
True also details the ways she was ostracized while on a promotional tour for the movie:
“They put up a poster of the four of us, mentioned the three girls and then skipped down the call sheet, I think, ‘This is how Black actors get underpaid, this is how they get forgotten, and it’s part of why I mouthed off about the publicity back in the day that I was excluded from. At the time, I don’t think my castmates understood; they were like, ‘You’re not as famous as us.’ What they didn’t get is that in the early to mid-1990s, [the studios] excluded the Black person, which meant they were never going to be as famous as you because they didn’t get the press.”
