J.J. Abrams Makes Good on His Plans to Diversify Hollywood

God Particle is a film set in space with a top-secret story, and is already guaranteed to look like no other sci-fi film before it.

“The Oscars controversy was a wake-up call,” J.J. Abrams said recently about the distressing state of diversity in Hollywood. The director and producer had announced an initiative at his Bad Robot production company to hire talent that represented the actual U.S. population—that is, including women and people of color, not just the white guys in baseball hats, like Abrams, who largely dominate Hollywood.
That effort, it seems, has resulted in the newly announced cast for God Particle, an original sci-fi project under the Bad Robot banner. David Oyelowo, the magnetic star of Selma, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, of Concussion and Beyond the Lights, will star in the thriller, about a group of astronauts who make a “terrifying discovery.” In the grand tradition of any project with Abrams’s name attached, not much else is known about the project; it will be directed by Julius Onah, who was hired on God Particle way back in 2012 and made a splash last year with his debut feature, The Girl Is in Trouble, executive produced by Spike Lee.
With this month’s sly hit 10 Cloverfield Lane Abrams minted the career of yet another up-and-coming director with Dan Trachtenberg; like Cloverfield director Matt Reeves before him, Trachtenberg was able to make a bracing, original film under Abrams’s shelter, and the canny development of Cloverfield as a franchise brought the film to far more audiences than the average original genre film can ever dream of. Trachtenberg and Reeves, like Abrams and the vast majority of directors working in genre films or in any kind of film, are white. With his announcement that Bad Robot would commit to more diversity across the board, Abrams seemed to recognize the truth of Maureen Dowd’s famous observation that “That kind of leap — from indie to blockbuster — is almost exclusively reserved for young guys in baseball caps who remind older guys in baseball caps of themselves.” He recognized he was one of those guys in a baseball hat, and aimed to look beyond his own youthful doppelgangers in finding new talent to pluck from the indie world to the big leagues.
Onah may be a guy who wears a baseball hat—though most photos show him hatless—but he’s no Abrams clone, either. And as little as we know about God Particle, the sheer fact that it will be a sci-fi film directed by and starring black talent sets it apart from nearly everything else out there. (Except maybe Intelligent Life, the sci-fi thriller that will star Lupita Nyong’o with Selma’s Ava DuVernay directing.) The conversation about diversity in Hollywood that started with this Oscar season still has a long, long way to go and will take many forms, many of which will have nothing to do with white producers. But teaming up the stars of Middle of Nowhere and Belle? Not a bad place to start at all.