vulture.com

Did you have any worries about how American audiences would react to blackface? It’s kind of a huge deal here.
Yeah, and it’s actually a big deal in Australia as well. The idea is that I play multiple characters. That’s what I’ve always done. Part of what I like to do is to push the boundaries and try new things. When I came up with the idea of the boys’ heroes on the wall, I thought, Well, they’re going to be into hip-hop. They’re going to want a rapper to come to their party, so I have to play a black guy. And I just thought, It’s going to provoke people, it’s going to be headlined — and certainly everyone in Australia fell into that trap. It was all over the place, like, “Blackface! He’s doing it!” Like, Australians definitely don’t walk around dressed up in blackface going “Ha-ha.” We’re exposed to American culture and stuff, so we get it. I think I wanted to do it because I thought it was a challenging, new, interesting idea, and mostly I just thought it was a really funny character. I think once you get through 30 seconds of S’Mouse you realize there’s more to the character than just a blackface joke. Like, obviously that’s not the joke. You see that he’s this vulnerable guy who’s living at home with his dad and he gets exposed by the documentary for not being the big tough guy he’s making himself out to be. There’s a lot more going on. It’s a character. The funny thing is, I played a Chinese student in We Can Be Heroes, I played a Tongan boy in Summer Heights High, and I play a Japanese woman also in Angry Boys, but the only one that people talk about is S’Mouse. It’s kind of funny that there’s only certain races that it’s an issue — yes, it’s that history with blackface — but, I don’t know. There’s no comparison. I think it’s a bit stupid that you would shut yourself off to being able to do that.