>Sure. But you see it’s problematic, that there are certain roles black actors have been afforded in history that have now become tropes in the history of Hollywood. And, for now, in 2016, to still be writing those parts could feel lazy …
>“Just because I’m a black woman doing it? Well, it’s just one role, people. Give me a scientist next, I promise the next role I play then will be some kind of brain.”
>Right.
>“I celebrate it. It’s just like, does she not exist? Are you saying I don’t exist? Why shouldn’t she, this character, be in the movie?” she asks. “Why even look at it like that? Back in the day, when I was coming up, the last page of Jet magazine was a guide to all the times black people were going to be on TV, because we were hardly on TV and we needed to see and support our people when we were. So my thing is, my parents and grandparents would have been, ‘Woah! She is in a Big Movie! A superhero in a BLOCKbuster.’ Why wouldn’t you be dancing in the street?”
>She lets out a sigh, then laughs again.
>“It’s everyone else’s hangup, it can’t be my hangup. Even if I had stood up in the middle of that movie and said ‘Fight the power, I don’t want to be the MTA [underground] worker’, what does that prove? They’d just get someone else to play the role, then you’d be bitching about them and they probably wouldn’t play it as good as me. Hellooooo!”
>She cackles this time and swipes the air with her arms, forcing me to laugh with her. Jones’s presence is a genuine force; she gets up to hug me as she leaves and cheerfully tells me she’s enjoyed herself, isn’t London dope and what is that perfume? The energy entirely evaporates, ghost-like, the second she exits the room.
>Ghostbusters is released in the UK on Monday 11 July. Leslie Jones will not be attending the premiere because she says that "driving is too smart for her."