Spike Lee thinks Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi advert was "horrible".
The award-winning movie-maker has blasted the model and the drinks company for attempting to profit from the Black Lives Matter movement, saying that Kendall was a completely inappropriate person to cast in the controversial commercial.
Spike explained: "When you deal with diversity and you don’t have anybody in the room who looks like what you’re trying to do, then you have a fiasco like the Pepsi spot."
In the advert – which was scrapped shortly after it first aired – Kendall walked away from a photoshoot and into the middle of a protest, where she appeared to calm tensions between the public and the police by handing a can of Pepsi to an officer.
But according to Spike, the advert undermined the Black Lives Matter movement.
He told Variety: "It was horrible. The pregnant woman in Seattle got shot the other day. Philando [Castile], the whole world saw him get killed on Facebook, and the cop walked, and Pepsi did something like [that]. Don’t get me started.
"That was a complete appropriation of Black Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter is not a joke. Black people getting shot down left and right, and cops are walking and they are going to make a commercial out of that?"
The ‘Do the Right Thing’ star said that companies like Pepsi should aspire to have a more diverse workforce because it can avoid awkward instances, like with the commercial, and it can also help to grow profits.
Spike – who is known for his outspoken nature – reflected: "There’s been several studies that show the more diverse your business is, the more profitable it is. You’d think that would be the number one incentive."