Tourette's Activist Shouted 'N***a' as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo Present on Stage at the BAFTAs

It took less than five minutes.

John Davidson, 54, was seated in the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday evening as an invited guest of BAFTA and the production team behind I Swear, the film based on his four decades living with severe Tourette's syndrome. The Prince and Princess of Wales were in the audience. So were several hundred of British cinema's most recognisable faces. And before the first award had been handed out, Davidson's vocal tics had already filled the room on 22 February 2026.

He shouted 'Boring!' during pre-show housekeeping. 'Bullshit!' when the crowd was told not to swear. He told BAFTA chair Sara Putt to 'shut the f**k up' while she was mid-sentence.

Nobody flinched. The floor manager had warned everyone beforehand, introducing Davidson by name and explaining that guests 'might hear some involuntary noises or movements during the ceremony.' Fair enough. People settled in.

Then Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo walked on stage to present the best visual effects award to Avatar: Fire and Ash.

The n-word, shouted from Davidson's seat, was picked up by the venue microphones. Lindo appeared visibly stunned, CNN reported. Jordan paused for a beat. Both men continued with the presentation, which is a kind of professionalism that deserves its own sentence.

A Life Spent Explaining What Cannot Be Controlled

Davidson is not someone who wandered in off the street. He is one of the most recognised Tourette's advocates in the country, and the reason I Swear exists at all.

Born in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders in 1971, he first showed symptoms at around 12. A formal diagnosis didn't come until he was 25, which tells you everything about how the condition was understood at the time. Or rather, how it wasn't.

In 1989, aged 16, he appeared in a BBC documentary called John's Not Mad, broadcast as part of the Q.E.D. series. The film followed his daily life when Tourette's was still widely dismissed as bad behaviour with a fancy name.

He did not retreat. He spent the next 30 years working as a caretaker at the Langlee Community Centre in Galashiels while giving talks in schools, training police forces and running residential camps for children with the condition. He got an MBE for it.

I Swear, directed by Kirk Jones, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2025 and hit UK cinemas through StudioCanal a month later. Robert Aramayo plays Davidson. The film was up for multiple BAFTAs on Sunday night.

Davidson was in that room because, in a real sense, the room was there because of him.

What the Audience Heard

The BAFTA floor manager's pre-show warning was specific. 'I'd like to welcome John Davidson MBE from one of our nominated films I Swear,' she told the audience. 'John has Tourette's Syndrome so please be aware you might hear some involuntary noises or movements during the ceremony.'

Coprolalia is the clinical term for the involuntary utterance of obscene or socially unacceptable words. It affects a minority of people with Tourette's. Davidson is among them and has been since he was a child.

Every outburst on Sunday was involuntary. That is not opinion. That is the medical consensus on how coprolalia works, confirmed by Tourette's Action and the wider neurological community.

But knowing that a tic is involuntary and hearing a racial slur shouted at you on a lit stage in front of cameras are two experiences that do not sit easily in the same moment. Whether Lindo knew who had shouted, or why, is something nobody in the hall could answer with certainty at the time.

Davidson left of his own accord during the second half. A source told Variety he was not asked to go. BAFTA said he would not have been removed under any circumstances.

'The Most Remarkable Man I Ever Met'

Aramayo won best actor later that evening. His acceptance speech went straight at what had happened.

'John Davidson is the most remarkable man I ever met,' he told the room. 'He's so forthcoming with education and he believes there should be still so much more we need to learn about Tourette's. For people living with Tourette's, it's us around them who help them define what their experience is.'

He paused. 'So, to quote the film, they need support and understanding.'

Emma McNally, chief executive of Tourette's Action, defended Davidson publicly. The outbursts at the BAFTAs, she maintained, were precisely the kind of lived experience that I Swear was made to show audiences.

A Country Split and No Sign of It Narrowing

Here is where the story gets harder to hold in one hand.

Actor Jamie Foxx posted a response under an Instagram discussion of the incident. The view that gained traction online, and it gained traction fast, held that two truths could sit side by side without cancelling each other out: Davidson's tic was involuntary, and Jordan and Lindo, both Black men who have each been nominated for Academy Awards for their work in Sinners, deserved a more direct and personal acknowledgement of what had happened to them on that stage.

Nobody credible was saying Davidson chose to do it. The argument, for those making it, was about what comes after. Who reaches out. Who says sorry even when no one is to blame. Whether being called a racial slur in front of a televised audience at the Royal Festival Hall lands differently depending on the colour of your skin. For a lot of people watching from home, the answer felt obvious and the silence from organisers felt loud.

Neither Jordan nor Lindo had issued a public statement at the time of writing. Whether that silence is patience, or processing, or something else entirely is not something any journalist should pretend to know.

What Comes Next

I Swear took home two BAFTAs on Sunday: best leading actor for Aramayo and best casting. The American release is scheduled for April 2026.

Davidson has given four decades to making the public understand Tourette's. That same room on Sunday, the one that existed because of him, became the place where his condition collided with something he could not explain away and did not cause.

The film is called I Swear. On Sunday night, he did.