Mike Henry slammed as 'patronizing' over 'Family Guy' exit: 'By this logic, black actors will be jobless too'
Voice actor and comedian Mike Henry of 'American Dad' and 'The Orville' fame took to his Twitter page on Friday evening (June 26) to announce that he will be walking away from his voice acting role as Cleveland Brown on Fox's animated sitcom, 'Family Guy'.
'Family Guy' is created by actor-producer-director Seth MacFarlane and Cleveland is a supporting character on the show. MacFarlane also created a spin-off called 'The Cleveland Show' with Cleveland being the main character. Henry had been voicing the character on 'Family Guy' for 20 years. "It’s been an honor to play Cleveland on Family Guy for 20 years. I love this character, but persons of color should play characters of color. Therefore, I will be stepping down from the role," he wrote on his Twitter page, which has 17,700 followers. The post was up for over 9 hours while writing this article and it amassed 27,600 retweets, 1,06,100 likes and 13,600 comments.
"Bruh black people don’t care about that s**t!! Stop with this it’s going too far!" read a comment. "This guy enjoyed taking the job and money away from a minority voice person for 20 years!!! Sounds racist!!" read another. Another follower wrote, "I don't know the right or wrong of this, but it seems like pandering. Just so much of this cancel culture comes across as insincere." Another wrote, "After cashing how many checks?"
MacFarlane was called out as well for hiring a white person for the job. One of the comments read, "How many jobs does filthy rich Seth MacFarlane take from struggling voice actors that he could instead hire VOC (Voices of Color) for?" Another comment read, "In a way he (MacFarlane) not only takes jobs from blacks but everybody because he does half the voices himself instead of just giving the job to someone else like every other cartoon has always done but now they want to lecture whites about taking black cartoon jobs." Another comment read, "They don't understand that this is patronizing to black people. We aren't asking you to give up your job, we just trying to not get killed by cops and be seen as equal human beings for once. By this logic, black voice actors will be out of work too."
Henry's decision came on the heels of Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell who stepped down from their roles in 'Big Mouth' and 'Central Park' respectively on June 24.