How to Train Your Dragon star Nico Parker is brushing off the backlash her casting has generated.
Parker, 20, the daughter of Westworld star Thandiwe Newton and director Ol Parker, co-leads the new live-action remake of the 2010 animated original, alongside Mason Thames.
In the original animated movie and its 2014 and 2019 sequels, Parker’s character, Astrid, is a blonde Viking warrior, played by America Ferrera.
“There’s some people that really love the animated movies and really want to see an exact play-by-play of that film, and I hope that you can watch [the new version] and find something that you love about it, regardless,” Parker said in a new interview with The London Times.
“But for the people that just hate inclusivity, hate change — when it comes to that side of things, I just don’t care,” she added. “If I wouldn’t value your opinion on most things in life, I can’t value your opinion on my hair. If I did, I would go mad.”
The Last of Us alum is the youngest daughter of Ol and Newton. The pair, who were married from 1998 to 2022, also share daughter Ripley, 24.
Growing up, Parker recalled on-screen representation of “mixed race or Black icons” feeling “really minimal in comparison to what it could be for young people now, and I think that’s really special.”
“There’s still a long way to go — for women in general, in terms of new parts, original material and female-led stories,” she acknowledged. “But I think that everything’s changing. I’d like to think that I could contribute to that change at some point.”
How to Train Your Dragon, out in theaters Friday, is an adaptation of DreamWorks Pictures’ 2010 movie, which was loosely based on Cressida Cowell’s 2003 children’s book. It later spawned two additional sequels: How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019).
Besides Parker and Thames, the remake also stars Gerard Butler as Stoick, the character he originally voiced in all three of the animated films.
So far, the new remake has divided critics. In a paltry two-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey deemed it “another pointless, depressing copy-and-paste remake.”
“It may not have been made with generative AI but it certainly replicates its process, scraping images from a pre-existing artwork and re-rendering them with the prompt, ‘make it more grounded and more realistic,’” she lamented. “In practice, it’s merely blander and greyer. You have to wonder if studios are trying to prep us for the inevitable.”
