Unless some actors with dwarfism turn up as other Oompa Loompa characters in "Wonka" when the film is released in December 2023, it will mark the first film adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic tale — which stars Timothée Chalamet in the title role — to not feature a little person in the role of an Oompa Loompa.
In 1971's "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," several actors with dwarfism including Malcolm Dixon, George Claydon, and Angelo Muscat played Oompa Loompas opposite Gene Wilder's title character. Then, in 2005, Deep Roy — through the crafty use of visual effects — played all of the Oompa Loompas opposite Johnny Depp's iteration of Wonka in director Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
Like Hugh Grant's Oompa Loompa in "Wonka," the group working in the chocolate factory for Wilder's version in 1971 has orange skin and green hair. The presentation of the characters in the original "Willy Wonka" film marked a huge departure from the disturbing past of the Oompa Loompas in Dahl's 1964 book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," where the author wrote that Wonka imported members of a Pygmy tribe from "the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before."
Accusations of racism from advocacy groups like the NAACP and some of Dahl's fellow authors followed the release of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and the writer eventually realized the damaging error of his ways, changing the text in later editions of the book.
