Actor and self-admitted and criminally-charged abuser Jonathan Majors wants to make a Hollywood comeback.But before we unpack that, here’s a game of “three things can be true, and one thing still doesn’t change that.”
Yes, the ex-girlfriend he admitted to strangling in an audio recording – and was later convicted for harassing and abusing – is white.
Yes, the new woman in his life, actress Meagan Good – whom he quickly dated and later married during his public downfall – is Black...like Coretta Scott King, to whom he once infamously compared her.
Yes, there are white men in Hollywood who have faced similar controversies and gotten a chance to make a comeback (see: Sean Penn, Mel Gibson, Charlie Sheen, Steven Seagal, Nicholas Cage, and more), but even several of them had to sit down for some years before they came back. Robert Downey Jr. had to spend the better part of a decade cleaning up from a pattern of substance abuse before he pretty much built the Marvel Cinematic Universe brick by brick and they started backing Brinks trucks full of money to his house.
“God’s got a plan for me,” Majors recently told “The Breakfast Club,” in describing how he’s moving forward. Similar sentiments were shared during his teary eyed interview on the “Sherri Shepherd Show.” There’s already backlash following the announcement that he’s going to be a special guest on Keke Palmer’s “Baby, this is Keke Palmer” podcast next week – so it’s obvious that the former Marvel superstar is continuing to push his apology-without-actually-saying-sorry tour.
And it should be noted that because we live in a world where celebrities aren’t simply on a redemption tour for free – Majors is also pushing his formally canned film “Magazine Dreams” that’s tanking in the box office as we speak. Excuse the lack of sympathy, but from all of the tears and spiritual metaphors given by the actor – it’s hard to tell whether he’s actually trying to do better or if he’s going to continue to perform as a victim of a problem he brought on himself.
Because if there’s truly a redemption arc to this fallen star – where is the actual work? Seriously...crying during media press tours and using the already-beloved Good as a talking point ain’t cutting it when you literally admitted to strangling a woman.
As we saw with former NFL athletes Michael Vick and Ray Rice, who faced controversy for being abusive to dogs and women, respectively, part of making their way back into the public spotlight came with doing some form of tangible work. Whether it’s donating, speaking out about domestic violence causes, and/or explaining how you plan to seek professional guidance (beyond family, friends and God) to be better – more actual doing rather than telling is required here.
And as fans or onlookers of the actor, we should expect the same as well. It is not enough to keep justifying this lackluster comeback tour as simply a racial double standard between what white people get away with compared to us. Remember: Black humanity and decency shouldn’t be determined by the performance of any other race.
All comparisons aside: Johnathan Majors cannot continue to lean on prominent Black women in media to help salvage his image – he actually needs to work on it with actual actions, and not just words. Otherwise, this whole redemption attempt can flop just like the movie he’s trying to self-promote right now.
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Ernest Owens is an award-winning journalist and author of “The Case for Cancel Culture.” You can check him out at ernestowens.com