Rosario Dawson Wants to Change the Face of Geekdom
Rosario Dawson is a Comic Con regular who demands more from the comic book and video game industry. (Photo: Getty Images)
This month, Daredevil and Jessica Jones star Rosario Dawson has been making headlines for speaking out. Most recently, she told MTV News that Hollywood shouldn’t just be focused on the gender wage gap. “It’s a very complex situation when you think about what are black women making in comparison to white women, what are Latin women making, what are Asian women making in comparison, and it gets even more convoluted,” she said. At an AirBnB Havana-themed party in New York City on Tuesday, Dawson told Yahoo Beauty that MTV had not published another wage gap issue she had brought up in her interview: “I also talked about the transgender wage gap, but they cut that out.” She shrugged. “Maybe next time.”
Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple in Marvel’s ‘Daredevil’. (Photo: Marvel Comics)
The New York City native has been in showbiz since age 15 — but she’s been reading comic books and playing video games long before she made her screen debut. “I have a comic book that’s 10 years old, and I’ve been going to Comic Con for years,” she said. “There’s a lot of women and people who have been a part of it for a really long time and unfortunately, it’s been a major boys’ club for so long too. But the shift is timely and necessary.” Dawson plays Claire Temple in the Netflix Marvel universe. She’s been on one season of Daredevil so far, and also appears in the new series Jessica Jones starring Krysten Ritter, out on Netflix today. Temple is not a superhero by a traditional definition — she’s a nurse. But when the superheroes and the civilians in the Marvel universe get inevitably injured, Temple’s the only one with the power of healing. “I love when people ask me, like, does she have special powers?” Dawson remarked. “I’m like, yes man! She can sew you up and save your life! That’s pretty damn good.”
Dawson will also be the voice of Batgirl in the new Lego Batman movie, out in 2016, and she is determined to start changing the focus around comics and video games to be more inclusive of gender and race. “Half the people who play [video games] are women and it’s a disservice to them not to have an avatar or have a character to play that looks like themselves,” Dawson said. “But not only that, but it’s a disservice to men to not be able to have these non-white female characters and to be able to play through them — and see what that’s like.”
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