Trivia / BlacKkKlansman

• Ability over Appearance: Spike Lee cast his Production Posse regular Nick Turturro to play Walker, a KKK member, despite him clearly being Italian-American—which would invalidate him from KKK membership.
• Career Resurrection: Before this film, Spike Lee had faded from relevancy. Having garnered acclaim in 1989 for Do the Right Thing, he became big as a vivid voice in cinema for tackling racial matters and injustices in his films (Jungle Fever and Malcolm X being similarly praised) throughout The '90s and early 2000's. Unfortunately, he hit a creative slump after the critical and commercial success of Inside Man in 2006. His subsequent movies (Miracle At St. Anna, Red Hook Summer, Oldboy (2013), etc.) usually went ignored, with critical reception being tepid at best. This film revitalized Lee's career and has been hailed as his best film since Do the Right Thing, and he followed it up with the just as critically acclaimed Da 5 Bloods.
• Creator Breakdown: Topher Grace was so despondent from playing David Duke, and realizing that his racist vision for America had more-or-less come to pass, he had to take a minor break from acting and edited the three Hobbit movies into one film to cope.
• Fake American: Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen as the KKK member Felix Kendrickson.
• In Memoriam: The end of the movie honors Heather Heyer, who was killed at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
• Jews Playing Nazis:
  • Topher Grace, who's of partial Jewish descent, plays KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
  • An In-Universe example: Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), Ron Stallworth's Jewish coworker in the Colorado Springs Police Department, works with Ron to pose as a white supremacist and infiltrate the local KKK chapter.
• Method Acting: The targets that were used in the target practice scene were not props specifically created for the movie and instead were bought off of the internet. Spike Lee told John David Washington this fact before the scene was shot.
• Reality Subtext: Ron tells Walter over the phone that his father is sick in El Paso. The real life Ron Stallworth was born in Chicago, but grew up in El Paso.
• What Could Have Been: The real Ron Stallworth had originally wanted Denzel Washington to play him, but was ecstatic to find out his son got the role.

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