Terry Gilliam clarifies comments he made about 'white males being blamed for everything'

Terry Gilliam has said that he was just ‘playing angry’ when he made comments about the wave of diversity taking aim at white men.

The outspoken Monty Python star spoke out last summer, saying that the show could never get off the ground now, because it was made by white men from Oxbridge.

During a press conference at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, he said: “It made me cry: the idea that …no longer six white Oxbridge men can make a comedy show.

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“Now we need one of this, one of that, everybody represented… this is bulls**t. I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian… My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.”

Now, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he’s claimed that he ‘wasn’t particularly angry’, but was just ‘playing angry’, and that the ‘Loretta’ part of the remark was a callback to a line from Eric Idle in Life of Brian.

“The idea is that we’re already excluded because the world has changed,” he said. “I said, I’m tired of being, as a white male, blamed for everything that’s wrong in the world. So now I want you to call me Loretta. I’m a black lesbian in transition.

“When Eric [Idle’s character] Stan says, ‘I want you to call me Loretta. I want to be a woman.’ People now might take offense at that. And when offense becomes so easy, it takes the fun out of offending!”

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However, it’s not the first time Gilliam has made comments about current social and political changes, recently criticising the #MeToo movement as ‘mob rule’ while defending his friend, Johnny Depp.

“It’s crazy how simplified things are becoming. There is no intelligence anymore and people seem to be frightened to say what they really think. Now I am told even by my wife to keep my head a bit low,” he AFP.

“It’s like when mob rule takes over, the mob is out there, they are carrying their torches, and they are going to burn down Frankenstein’s castle.”

He also spoke about Harvey Weinstein, saying: “It is a world of victims. I think some people did very well out of meeting with Harvey and others didn’t.

“The ones who did knew what they were doing. These are adults, we are talking about adults with a lot of ambition. Harvey opened the door for a few people, a night with Harvey – that’s the price you pay. Some people paid the price, other people suffered from it.”