Kristen Bell quits role of mixed-race character on animated series Central Park, citing ‘lack of awareness’

Show’s creator said in January that Bell ‘needed’ to play the character, regardless of her race

Kristen Bell has quit the voiceover role of a mixed-race child on the Apple TV+ animated series Central Park.

The Good Place actor voiced Molly, an aspiring comic book artist, who is the daughter of a black man (voiced by Leslie Odom Jr) and a white woman (voiced by Kathryn Hahn).

In a statement, Bell said: “This is a time to acknowledge our acts of complicity. Here’s one of mine. Playing the Molly [sic] in Central Park shows a lack of awareness of my pervasive privilege. Casting a mixed race character w/a white actress undermines the specificity of the mixed race & Black American experience.”

In a longer statement, the show’s creative team said that “after reflection”, they confirmed that Bell would remain on the series in a new role, while casting a mixed-race actor as Molly to “get representation right”.

“We profoundly regret that we might have contributed to anyone’s feeling of exclusion or erasure,” the statement read. “Black people and people of colour have worked and will continue to work on Central Park but we can do better. We’re committed to creating opportunities for people of colour and Black people in all roles, on all our projects – behind the mic, in the writers room, in production, and in post-production.”

The show’s creator Loren Bouchard previously defended Bell’s casting.

“Kristen needed to be Molly,” he said in January. “We couldn’t not make her Molly. But then we couldn’t make Molly white and we couldn’t make Kristen mixed race so we just had to go forward.”

The decision for Bell to step down came hours after actor Jenny Slate quit her voiceover role on Netflix’s Big Mouth. She voiced black character Missy on the series, but declared in a statement that “black characters on an animated show should be played by black people”.

Bell recently came under fire for “glorifying colour blindness”, after writing a children’s book about a purple-skinned character who “looks for similarities before differences”.