The comedian gives a false dramatic performance as a saintly father coping with his daughter’s gender non-conforming behavior in a calculated new film
In December 2018, Kevin Hart landed himself in a maelstrom of negative PR that he just couldn’t make subside. Scoring the high-profile gig of
Academy Awards telecast host placed him under a greater scrutiny, which led to the exhuming of a bitterly homophobic backlog from earlier in the decade, spanning tweets describing a guy’s photo as “a gay bill board [sic] for AIDS” and an extended run in his Seriously Funny standup special about how he’d try to “prevent” his own son from being gay. For all the furor these remarks provoked, the comedian was resolute in his refusal to own up to them, offering “I think we love to make big deals out of things that aren’t necessarily big deals, because we can” as a halfhearted mea culpa in a 2015 Rolling Stone profile. As the controversy surrounding his selection as
Oscars emcee rolled into its third day, Hart declared in a video that “I chose to pass, I passed on the apology” when the Academy requested a formal declaration of contrition. One month later, however, Hart’s agents got him in as Channing Tatum’s replacement on the in-development Fatherhood.
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