“Sinners” Star Jayme Lawson Says John Davidson's 'Disability Got Exploited' at BAFTAs, Praises Costars' 'Grace' Over Incident
“Sinners” Star Jayme Lawson Says John Davidson's 'Disability Got Exploited' at BAFTAs, Praises Costars' 'Grace' Over Incident
Jack SmartMon, March 2, 2026 at 10:22 PM UTC
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Jayme Lawson at the 57th NAACP Image Awards on Feb. 28; Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo at the EE BAFTA Film Awards on Feb. 22Credit: Emma McIntyre/WireImage; Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty -
At the Feb. 22 BAFTA Film Awards, John Davidson, who has Tourette Syndrome, yelled the n-word while Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage
Sinners actress Jayme Lawson addressed the incident at the Feb. 28 NAACP Image Awards
Davidson’s “disability got exploited that night,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, blaming BAFTA and ceremony airer BBC for being “careless”
The Sinners cast is weighing in on the incident at the BAFTA Film Awards in which John Davidson, who has Tourette Syndrome, yelled the n-word while presenters Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage.
At the Feb. 28 NAACP Image Awards, Sinners actress Jayme Lawson spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, giving “a big shout-out to Mike and Delroy” for “the grace and the dignity that they exercised.”
The incident involving Davidson shouting expletives during the Alan Cumming-hosted telecast — which later led to apologies from The British Academy of Film and Television Arts; the BBC, which aired the ceremony; and Davidson himself — “exposed a couple of things,” Lawson, 28, continued in comments that have gone viral on social media.
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“Institutionally, we still don’t understand what inclusion means,” she said. “Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don’t provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that’s not inclusivity. That’s exploitation.”
(Left-right:) John Davidson; Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo at the Special Visual Effects Award at the EE BAFTA Film Awards on Feb. 22Credit: Aurore Marechal/BAFTA/Getty; Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty
Davidson’s “disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses,” Lawson continued, placing blame on BAFTA and the BBC, adding that the latter was “careless” in editing out parts of the award ceremony broadcast but not the n-word. “A real lack of care was exercised for those two Black men,” she said.
“We know the BBC knows how to take care of what they care about because they censored a bunch of other [words]. They went so far as to make sure certain things weren’t topics of conversation. They censored Akinola [Davies Jr.]’s speech, the director of My Father’s Shadow, which is an amazing film, by the way. So you censored one Black man. You failed to protect two others,” Lawson pointed out.
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“You do not care for our dignity, our humanity,” she concluded. “You want to celebrate our art, but you won’t protect [us]. And that’s why we celebrate Sinners. That’s why we celebrate Ryan [Coogler]. That’s why we show up to the NAACP, because those are spaces… where we feel safe.”
Sinners star Lindo, 73, told Vanity Fair on the night of the BAFTA ceremony that he and Jordan, 39, “did what we had to do” when they were on stage hearing Davidson’s shouts, but admitted he wished “someone from BAFTA spoke to us afterwards.”
Onstage at the NAACP Image Awards with Coogler, Lindo further commented: “I’d just like to officially say, I appreciate, we appreciate all the support and love we have been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend. It means a lot to us.”
At the Actor Awards on Sunday, March 1, Sinners nominee Wunmi Mosaku told Entertainment Tonight that she has “no hard feeling toward John Davidson at all,” when asked about the incident.
BAFTA, she added, “has a lot of lessons to learn, but… it felt exploitative and performative to have someone there without the full protection of everyone, including him, and anyone in that audience.”
The BBC choosing “to keep that in,” the British actress said, was “the bit that really kind of kept me awake at night and brought tears to my eyes… I can’t understand it and I’m not sure I can forgive it.”
Delroy Lindo and the cast of 'Sinners' at the Actor Awards on March 1Credit: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty
The Sinners cast earned multiple prizes this weekend, including an ensemble cast win at the NAACP Image Awards and another at The Actor Awards. At the latter, Jordan won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
