‘The Color Purple’ is coming to the London theatre and its main cast member, Seyi Omooba, is exposed to be a homophobe

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker, The Color Purple – the Steven Spielberg-directed, Academy Award-nominated 1985 movie that earned Whoopi Goldberg her Best Actress Oscar nod, and which later went on to become a hit Broadway production – is getting a theatre production in London.

Directed by Tinuke Craig, the production will play at Curve, Leicester June 28–July 13, prior to a July 16–20 run at Birmingham Hippodrome, and the casting has been announced. Seyi Omooba, a British-born Nigerian actress (pictured above), will head the cast as Celie, The Color Purple’s main character who was made famous by Whoopi Goldberg and has also being portrayed at Broadway by Rhonda LaChanze Sapp and later Cynthia Erivo.

Cynthia Erivo (left) on the Broadway production of ‘The Color Purple’

The Color Purple, told over the course of 40 years, follows heroine Celie as she journeys through joy, despair, anguish, and hope in her own personal awakening to discover her unique voice in the world. The story was also famed for depicting a lesbian romance – between Celie and Shug Avery (to be played in Leicester’s production by Joanna Francis) – in a time when the world was not ready to see such relationships depicted as part of its entertainment. This aversion is apparent when it garnered eleven Academy Awards in 1986 and won none, a perceived snubbing that ignited a controversy because many critics considered it the best picture that year.

Whoopi Goldberg in the 1985 movie adaptation of ‘The Color Purple’

So imagine our surprise when, following the announcement of the Leicester’s production’s cast, in a move that is reminiscent of Kelvin Hart’s Oscar downfall, a 2014 post made by Seyi Omooba was produced where she is read taking a religious homophobic stance against homosexuality, stating that she does not “believe that homosexuality is right, though the law of this land has made it legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Aaron Lee Lambert calls her out in a tweet that questions her hypocrisy. And Twitter users of course react.

@Seyiomooba Do you still stand by this post? Or are you happy to remain a hypocrite? Seeing as you’ve now been announced to be playing an LGBTQ character, I think you owe your LGBTQ peers an explanation. Immediately. pic.twitter.com/GK2xbzZYgy

— Aaron Lee Lambert (@aleelambert) March 15, 2019

It never ceases to be amazing how homophobic people can espouse prejudicial opinions, and then conveniently forget these biases when it is time to profit off of the LGBT identity.