John Davidson Says BAFTA Swore Outbursts Would Be Edited Out

When the British Academy of Film and Television Arts put out its apology for an incident during the February 22 awards show in which activist and Tourette’s advocate John Davidson shouted the N-word while Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage, it wrote that its takes “full responsibility for putting our guests in a very difficult situation.” That “difficult situation,” however, seems to be something of BAFTA’s own making, as not enough measures were put in place to protect either the stars of Sinners or Davidson himself. In his first in-depth interview following the BAFTAs, Davidson told Variety that “BAFTA had made us all aware that any swearing would be edited out of the broadcast,” which, despite the show being on a two-hour delay, was obviously not the case. “I have made four documentaries with the BBC in the past, and feel that they should have been aware of what to expect from Tourette’s and worked harder to prevent anything that I said — which, after all, was some 40 rows back from the stage — from being included in the broadcast,” Davidson explained, adding that despite being so far from the stage, he did notice there was a microphone just in front of him that would have picked up not only the tic he shouted at the Sinners stars but a number of other outbursts throughout the evening.

Davidson’s team also said that he had reached out to Jordan, Lindo, and production designer Hannah Beachler, who posted on X that she recognized the difficulty of the situation but directed most of her frustration at the throwaway apology of “if you were offended,” as she characterized Alan Cumming’s statement during the awards. “I had an expectation that the BBC would physically control the sound at the awards on Sunday,” Davidson reiterated in his conversation. If his tics could not be controlled, the sound of them could be. That the broadcast edited out Akinola Davies Jr.’s speech in which he said “Free Palestine” after he won for My Father’s Shadow goes to show how much control the BBC and the BAFTAs had in controlling the nature of the ceremony, at least in its airing. Despite their apology in the aftermath of the ceremony, however, it feels as though the BBC and BAFTA set themselves up for failure in downplaying the harm of Davidson’s language and putting him in a position where he would have to defend himself for saying something that is “the opposite” of what he believes.