Fringe's Jasika Nicole: Running Joke About Astrid's Name Was 'Tasteless'

Seven-and-a-half years after Fringe‘s end, Jasika Nicole has shared that as “a black woman with a name that white people seem to find incredibly difficult to pronounce,” she found the running joke about Astrid’s name to be “pretty tasteless.”

As fans of the acclaimed Fox sci-fi series know, John Noble’s Dr. Walter Bishop had great trouble getting right the name of FBI agent/lab assistant Astrid Farnsworth, addressing her as “Astro,” “Asterisk” “Asgard” and the like.

“As a black woman with a name that white people seem to find incredibly difficult to pronounce, sometimes knowingly using the wrong name for me, I always thought it was a pretty tasteless joke,” Nicole recently shared on Twitter, “and hated that it lasted the whole 5 seasons of the show.”

When a Fringe fan apologized for not seeing it that way but as a term of endearment from curmudgeonly Walter, Nicole explained, “Most white people don’t do things to intentionally hurt the feelings of POC. And that’s the point. No one ever thought to ask how it made me feel cause it was written through the lens of whiteness. Just cause someone doesn’t SEE the harm doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Having been tagged into the conversation, Noble himself chimed in to say, “I can see that now,” adding: “I apologize for anything I may have done to appear disrespectful.” Nicole, though, quickly made clear that her former co-star had nothing for which to apologize.

“It’s OK,” she tweeted back, “you didn’t write it, John ♥️♥️♥️!”

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