Her #OscarsSoWhite campaign changed how Hollywood deals with race
Now she’s taking on HBO
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Sonia Rao.
When April Reign joined Twitter back in 2010, she opted for a simple play on words: @ReignOfApril.
“I decided I was royalty,” she said.
Reign has lived up to her commanding name. Since she cheekily tweeted “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair” in response to an all-white slate of Academy Award acting nominees in 2015, Reign, 47, has been at the epicenter of the online conversation about representation in Hollywood.
#OscarsSoWhite went viral in 2015 with no intention on her part. That year and the next, which also saw only white actors nominated, Twitter users rallied behind the hashtag, sharing statistics and furious reactions. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts eventually set new diversity standards for two of its major film awards, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a goal last year to double the number of “diverse members” by 2020.
“It tells me the more I continue to talk about these issues, the more change will come,” Reign said.
Her viral hashtag transformed the way we talk about entertainment, and she’s now using another to try to take down “Confederate”—the “Game of Thrones” creators’ next TV show — all from her home office in Ellicott City, Md.
“If you had told me five years ago that I would be doing some of the things that I’m doing now, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said. “I was just an avid moviegoer like anyone else.”
She’s gained more than 90,000 Twitter followers since sending the catalytic tweet and is pulled into so many discussions that she restricted her notifications to direct messages only.
“More followers, more problems,” she joked. “Biggie said that, I believe.”
Nowadays, Reign’s mentions are often tied to her #NoConfederate campaign. She started the hashtag with four others — Jamie Broadnax, Shanelle Little, Rebecca Theodore-Vachon and Lauren Warren — in response to the planned HBO series, an alternate history in which the South successfully seceded and slavery remains legal.
Earlier this month Reign tweeted:
Production on “Confederate” is at least a year away, set to begin after the final season of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s “Game of Thrones,” but the social media backlash was instant.
“They were unprepared for why people would be upset that enslavement of black people is a concept that they plan to bring to TV,” she said.
The five Twitter friends coordinated the campaign via direct messages and, two days after HBO’s news release, announced their goal to get #NoConfederate to trend during “Game of Thrones” that Sunday night. It did, nationally and internationally. The network was quick to respond with a statement expressing a “hope that people will reserve judgment until there is something to see.”
Reign and her team’s next project is curating 30-second videos from the public for a larger film that they’ll share with HBO.
In addition, Reign has been approached to write a book, which she joked will be done by 2047. And she’s co-hosting a podcast about the entertainment industry with Matthew A. Cherry, 35, an up-and-coming filmmaker.
