‘Wonka’ Should Have Known Better Than to Put Keegan-Michael Key In A Fat Suit

Wonka doesn’t leave anything to pure imagination.

The highly-anticipated 2023 musical will fill your theater with peals of laughter, but some of it is in extremely poor taste. What begins as a sweet adventure is quickly reduced to cheap shots through an ongoing plot that requires Keegan-Michael Key to don a fat suit as his character gains weight from eating an abundance of chocolate. While it’s nothing new to Hollywood, this particular gag is Shallow Hal-levels of horrendous.

Directed by Paul King, the movie serves as a prequel to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In it, Timothée Chalamet stars as Wonka, an illiterate chocolatier with a recently deceased mother.

Down on his luck, Wonka journeys to Europe with dreams of opening his own chocolate shop. He faces several obstacles caused by the town’s powerful chocolate cartel and a pair of greedy innkeepers.

Slender comedian Key plays a corrupt chief of police, who strikes a dirty deal with the chocolate cartel in exchange for all the chocolate his heart desires. Starting in the movie as an average-sized fella, he steadily gains weight as he’s bribed with delicious sweets while he attempts to stop the titular character from selling chocolate on the cartel’s turf.

The chief of police’s weight gain is noticeably inserted into the plot to elicit laughs, but it fails to emulate the cartoonish nature of the other characters’ quirks. His body transformation also isn’t a riff on Violet Beauregarde’s transformation into a blueberry in the book or movies… There is no deeper interpretation of the weight gain, no extra layer of commentary there. All the movie does is equate fatness with cruel amusement.

Is this some sort of tribute to Dahl’s original work? When published in 1964, the author included multiple “jokes” about characters’ weights, and how disgusting it made them. But also: Dahl has been rightly accused of anti-Semitism, so perhaps his hot takes on body shape and culture are worth updating?

Another actor in the movie, Olivia Colman, also wears a fat suit in her role. But unlike Key, attention isn’t drawn to her body size through snide comments and questionable looks. In an interview with People, Colman explained that her exaggerated look was due to the production team envisioning her character as “a little bigger, so she had bigger bosoms and a bigger bum.”

Following the movie’s early screenings, the internet lit up with comments about Key’s body transformation and the fatphobic jokes. Roger Ebert contributor Robert Daniels, who was otherwise tickled by the movie, expressed his disdain for the specific storyline. “I did not like the barrage of fat jokes. Poor form in a delightful film,” he tweeted. Other critics echoed the concern. Jeff Ewing shared that the movie was “fine,” but the “fat jokes were inexcusable. Hoped to go one awards season without a fat suit, but I guess not,” and Alan W. Cerny wrote that he liked that Wonka was “a full-blown musical” but “didn’t care for the fat jokes.”

Given recent controversies surrounding fat suits in entertainment, Wonka should’ve known better than to reduce a character’s entire story arc to morbid weight gain for a few quick laughs. Wasn’t there a smarter — or more magical — way to portray the officer’s addiction to chocolate?

There are plenty of strong arguments against the use of fat suits in entertainment, with a strong one being, “Well, why not just hire a fat actor instead?” Beyond that, a worthwhile perspective lies in, “What was the purpose?” Now, this isn’t to defend the use of fat suits within any context; however, there is a stark difference between a body transformation being a crucial part of the story or presented in a way that doesn’t intend to evoke harm, and the use of a fat suit to encourage the audience to point their fingers at the screen with their heads thrown back in laughter. “Ha, ha, you’re fat!” Isn’t that so 2002?

Just last year, Brendan Fraser won an Academy Award for his role in The Whale, a movie soiled by the controversy surrounding Fraser’s use of a 300-pound prosthetic fat suit. Jared Leto in House of Gucci is another example that drew righteous fire, along with Renee Zellweger in The Thing About Pam. Eloise Hendy for The Independent described this trend as “contemporary cinema… stuck in a vicious cycle – justifying a reluctance to cast fat actors by proclaiming they are hard to find, and then creating portrayals that only serve to further alienate fat people from the industry.”

Unfortunately, Wonka is another example to add to the towering list. It’s upsetting that the movie opted to let its cruelness overshadow the wholesome, magical adventure that unfolds over its 2-hour runtime. Perhaps when the movie is released with the inevitable director’s cut, when it comes to Key’s storyline — in the words of Wonka himself — they can strike that, and reverse it.

Wonka is out now in theaters.