The Miscasting of Nina Simone: Why Hollywood Got It Wrong with Zoë Saldaña

The decision to cast Zoë Saldaña as Nina Simone wasn’t just controversial—it was a fundamental misjudgment rooted in misunderstanding. Despite Saldaña being Afro-Latina, her much lighter skin tone and Europeanized features made her neither visually nor symbolically aligned with Nina Simone—a dark-skinned Black woman whose identity, activism, and artistry were intrinsically tied to her proud, unapologetic Blackness. From the outset, it was a flawed idea—a mismatch in essence before any criticism of execution.

Nina Simone wasn’t simply a singer—she was a transformative force. Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933, she channeled her pain into music that spoke truth to racism, sexism, and the civil rights movement. She famously left the United States in the late 1960s and ultimately settled in Europe, driven away by the suffocating and dangerous anti-Blackness she experienced at home. Even her voice was shaped by her identity: tracks like “Mississippi Goddam” and “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” are infused with political urgency and personal resilience.

Casting Saldaña—a lighter-skinned Afro-Latina—required heavy prosthetics: darkened skin, a widened nose, even altered dental features. Critics immediately invoked terms like “blackface” and “colorism,” highlighting how the film engaged in literal and symbolic erasure of what Simone represented. Simone’s own daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, rejected the choice, emphasizing that her mother’s identity included “beautiful, luscious lips and wide nose” that the casting failed to honor.

The problem was deeper than makeup. Simone’s existence and artistry were shaped by her deep and visible Blackness—experiences often denied to lighter-skinned Black women. NPR culture critics and scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates—reflecting on the broader theme—called Simone’s life a kind of existential repudiation of systemic beauty standards and oppression. Coates observes that Simone embodied what society told her shouldn’t be beautiful, and turned that defiance into cosmic artistry. 

Colorism in Hollywood is no small matter. It’s a persisting hierarchy that grants opportunities to lighter-skinned actors while leaving darker-skinned artists undervalued. As noted in op‑eds and coverage by Teen Vogue and The Independent, casting Saldaña over a darker-skinned actress was a continuation of an industry that refuses to truly embrace the full spectrum of Black beauty. Despite more diverse casting, the preference for light skin persists—even in stories calling for the unapologetically dark. 

Saldaña herself eventually issued a public apology in 2020, admitting that she “should have never played Nina” and expressing regret for not using her leverage to advocate for a darker-skinned actress. She acknowledged that Nina deserved “the most specific detail” in representation and that her own casting undermined that. 

Even the director initially defended Saldaña’s performance, calling it courageous, and the studio distributor argued that performance should outweigh physical likeness. But critics, including Simone’s family, felt that creative expression didn’t excuse erasing what made Nina Simone’s story culturally and politically significant.

More than a casting choice, this misstep became a symbol of how history is distorted when Black stories are filtered through light-skinned lenses. Nina Simone’s struggle was deeply tied to her identity as a dark-skinned Black woman in America—a fact that shaped her music, her activism, and her politics. Casting someone who visually distanced themselves from that identity wasn’t a dramatic choice—it was a denial.

For darker-skinned women today, Nina Simone’s legacy—her refusal to hide her Black features, her insistence on being seen as she was—offers enduring strength. And the botched casting of a biopic underscores how dark-skinned women are still systematically erased or forced to surrender their image to conform to diluted standards.

The disaster of Zoë Saldaña playing Nina Simone wasn’t only the execution—it was the original idea. It reinforced colorism and denied authentic Black embodiment in mainstream cinematic storytelling. It sent a message that even for iconic Black women, Hollywood would always prefer the sanitized, the light-skinned, the assimilable. And in doing so, it betrayed Nina Simone’s legacy of unapologetic presence and racial pride. Representation demands not only visibility but truth. And in this case, faithfulness mattered more than fame.