Trans people fight to have their voices heard every day, but that’s quite literally the case after Laverne Cox‘s voice was replaced with a male actor in the Italian trailer for Promising Young Woman.
Italian voice actor Vittoria Schisano, who is trans, told The Guardian that noticeably male-sounding 59-year-old Roberto Pedicini was heard as Cox’s character Gail in the coming attraction; Cox played a co-worker and friend to the main character Cassie, played by Oscar-nominee Carey Mulligan.
Schisano, who dubbed the actress on the Netflix documentary, Amend: The Fight for America, tells the paper, “I think this dubbing choice was a straight-up act of violence. It’s insulting. I’d feel bullied if I were [her].”
Evidently, the Italian version of the Oscar winning film wasn’t an outlier, either. In Spain and Germany, a male also voiced Cox’s character.
Cox’s voice was also replaced by a different male when her project Orange Is the New Black ran there, The Guardian noted.
The flap caused Universal Pictures International to pull the trailer, and issue a statement to the paper that read in part, “We are deeply grateful to Laverne and the transgender community for opening our eyes to a bias that neither we nor many in our industry had recognized.”
The statement continued, “While there was no malicious intent behind this mistake, we are working diligently to fix it. We have begun redubbing Ms Cox’s voice with female actors in our international territories and are pushing back release dates to ensure the correct version is available.”
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