OREANDA-NEWS. The drama Girl with Hope was scheduled to hit the Italian box office on May 13, but the release has now been postponed indefinitely. The picture was at the center of a scandal after the local division of Universal Studios published a fragment from it on May 6, in which the heroine of the actress Laverne Cox is voiced by a man.

This angered local LGBT activists, because Cox is a transgender person who considers himself a woman. Born a man, Cox has been identifying himself as a female for many years (despite the rather low timbre of his voice). Laverne Cox was voiced by Roberto Pedicini in the Italian dub of The Girl of Hope, while in the documentary series Amend: The Fight for America she was dubbed by Vittoria Schisano, also a transgender. It is known that the Italian office of Universal Pictures decided to entrust Laverne Cox's voice acting to a man, since earlier in the Netflix series "Orange is the Hit Season" (for her role in which Cox was nominated for an Emmy) for Italy she was voiced by a man.

Universal Pictures International quoted Variety in a statement: “We are grateful to Laverne and the entire transgender community for opening our eyes to a bias that neither we nor other colleagues in our industry recognized. And although we did not want to offend anyone with this mistake, we are trying to correct it. We decided to re-sound the heroine of Miss Cox, and we are deliberately postponing the release dates of our film in order to ensure that the correct version is available to the audience. We apologize for the pain, but we are grateful that we can improve the situation in this film and prevent similar mistakes from happening again in future projects. "

In Russia, the drama Girl with Hope was released in January 2021 - Anna Kiseleva voiced the character Laverne Cox in the rental version prepared by the Volga distributor.