Leslie Jones has spoken up about the death threats she received after she was cast in the Ghostbusters reboot as part of the film’s all-female cast.
Released in 2016 and directed by Paul Feig, Jones starred as supernatural hunter Patty Tolan alongside Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Kate McKinnon.
Her casting sparked a wave of misogynistic and racist abuse online, prompting Jones to appeal to bosses at Twitter (as the platform X was known at the time) to take action.
“The platform is the first thing I went after, because I was like: ‘Hey, I’m in your club; you’re supposed to have security. People are shooting at me. I shouldn’t have death threats on here,’” she told The Guardian in a new interview.
“People were like, ‘Ignore it’, and I absolutely was not going to ignore it. I am so tired of this attitude, I am so tired of being the bigger person.
“No, meet these motherf**kers where they at and fight back. I am not a victim – you’re an asshole. It’s wild to me that we can build these glorious things, we can build an iPhone, and we still can’t beat racism.”
Jones previously wrote about the experience in her 2023 memoir, Leslie F***ing Jones. “I can’t believe anyone would do this s*** to someone, anyone, for working,” she said. “This is awful. I am in a movie. Death threats for something as small as that?”
She also claimed that her experience working on the film was frustrating, alleging: “It was made clear to me at times during the process that I was lucky to even be on that movie.”
Having struggled for years as a comedian, Jones shot to fame aged 47, when she joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. Jones, however, struggled to adjust to the demanding environment of the sketch show as she dealt with the aftermath of losing her parents.
“I was not acting out, but I wasn’t well,” she explained to The Guardian. “I wasn’t cognisant of how my behaviour was affecting others.
“I remember Lorne [Michaels, producer and creator of SNL] texting me; I had said, ‘I’m so sorry how I’m acting,’ and he said, ‘I talk to my wife about a lot of things, and she says: ‘I am so glad you are talking about these things, but can you not talk about them to me? Can you find somebody else?’ That’s when SNL found me a therapist.”
Jones has since gone on to star in The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019), Coming 2 America (2021), Good Burger 2 (2023), and Sloth Lane (2024).
