In the new “Star Wars” Disney+ series, which premiered last week, Ingram plays Reva Sevander, who is hunting the titular character played by McGregor.
On Monday, Ingram posted a series of screenshots to an Instagram Story showing racist messages she’s received on the platform in response to her role in the show, some of which included the N-word.
“The thing that bothers me is … this feeling of like, I just gotta shut up and take it, I just have to grin and bear it. And I’m not built like that,” she said, in a video posted to her Instagram stories. “Thank you to the people who show up for me in the comments and in the places that I’m not going to put myself. And to the rest of y’all, y’all weird.”
In response, the official “Star Wars”
tweeted that it was “proud to welcome” Ingram, who just made her debut as Reva in the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“There are more than 20 million sentient species in the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.”
Series lead Ewan McGregor also voiced his thoughts, in a video posted to the “Star Wars” Twitter account late Tuesday evening.
“I just wanted to say as the leading actor in the series, as the executive producer on the series, that we stand with Moses; we love Moses”
“Moses is a brilliant actor, she’s a brilliant woman and she’s absolutely amazing in this series, she brings so much to the series, she brings so much to the franchise and it just sickened me to my stomach to hear that this had been happening,” the actor added.
A personal message from Ewan McGregor. pic.twitter.com/rJSDmj663K
— Star Wars (@starwars) June 1, 2022
“And if you’re sending her bullying messages, you’re no ‘Star Wars’ fan in my mind,” he added.
“Ingram isn’t the first “Star Wars” actor to face racial abuse. Previous actors such as Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega have spoken about the issue before.
“Tran, who played Rose Tico in “The Last Jedi,” wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in 2018 addressing the online harassment she suffered for months after the movie opened, causing her to delete her social media accounts
“It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” Tran said in the essay. “For months, I went down a spiral of self-hate, into the darkest recesses of my mind, places where I tore myself apart, where I put their words above my own self-worth.”
