As is often said in mocking tone, it’s “Acting!” It’s one thing if it’s an intrinsic or canonical aspect of the character and the person. But what if it is something that can in fact be acted (which is a different thing than “faked”)?
And sometimes you have mixed blessings in being able to play across identities. Puertorrican José Ferrer made a glorious career playing French poet-swashbucklers and impressionist painters, Jewish-American naval lawyers and SC Justices, a British Marine, a galactic Emperor, etc. add several score other roles, back when many of his peers were adopting Anglo stage names to get good gigs, he was brilliant enough to not have to. But, sadly, when in his prime there were hardly any good roles in which for him or anyone to play a Puertorrican properly. (OTOH would he have been pigeonholed and typecast into those roles had they been available?)
I think the casting should follow ethnicity (or whatever) as closely as the rest of the production follows its source material. If you’re going to make sure your period costumes are exactly accurate, right down to the type of thread used to make them, then you’d better make sure you’re not substituting Koreans for Japanese. On the other hand, if you’re making Braveheart, throwing in a few Chinese clansmen would be the least of your sins.
Personally, I’d prefer closer adherence to the source material and therefore closer adherence to casting. That’s just a personal preference, though.
IIRC, they said at the time look, we genuinely tried to find a big white guy who was that light on his feet, and the best we could do were stuntmen who lacked the acting chops to make it as pro wrestlers; from every Oscar-caliber intimidator who can move like a nimble sumo, I assure you that we chose the palest.
As noted upthread, people are often cast for “sufficient resemblance.” That’s another way of saying “passing.” Sal Mineo passed sufficiently for an American Indian in a number of movies.
Because it’s bad writing. There’s an alternate universe where Devil Dinosaur and Fin Fang Foom have a really explicit sex scene. Figure Marvel is gonna publish it?
Grin! Wanna help find me an inker for the DD/FFF sex scene? I got the pencils.
So a transgendered woman isn’t a “real woman” unless she looks just like she was born with XX chromosomes?
This I don’t get at all. Why is it bad writing to make a character a different race when nothing about the character even remotely depends on it? That multicultural casted TV movie of Cinderella starring Brandy must’ve REALLY upset you, then.
I’m not sure a) why alternate universe stuff has to be bad writing or b) why you care so friggin’ much. I’m a Marvel fanboy. And I mean silver/bronze age read-every-issue-as-a-teen fanboy. And I don’t care. The cinematic universe is not the 616 universe. It’s not the Ultimate universe, either. Call it a hybrid…after all, why are you caviling about a black Nick Fury when the latest Avengers movie had Ultron created by Tony Stark?
Cinematic is its own universe, which draws from but does not necessarily follow the published comics universes. DC is doing the same kind of thing (although I’m much less enthusiastic about the DC Cinematic Universe, at least in part because they’re going to separate their television and film milieus). Most of the stories being told in the cinematic universes are decades old. Slavishly following the source material would be a disaster, I think.
I don’t care “so friggin’ much.” I care enough to venture my opinions on a discussion board. I mean, why do you “care so friggin’ much” to write a rebuttal?
I didn’t like that, either. (Although it was a damn fine movie!) (Also. logical fallacy. “Why do you complain about too much pepper in the soup when you’re inhaling dozens of parts per million of arsenic in the air?” Who says a greater sin excuses a lesser one?)
I guess I just miss the days when Marvel tried to maintain a continuity. You’d have editor’s notes in Amazing Spider-Man saying, “This story occurs before issue xyz of Peter Parker Spider-Man.” There was at least an illusion of coherence.
The X-Men titles threw that right under the bus. You’d have flatly self-contradicting story lines.
I call it bad writing. (Or bad editing.)
(And then both Marvel and DC throw out all continuity completely, with absurd reboots. Sheesh! I miss dramatic linearity!)
How the heck did theatrical casting get involved in all this? Or transgendered actors playing cis roles, for that matter? I was talking about the context of transgendered actors playing transgendered characters, and you introduced this idea of “passing” as cis being necessary for transgendered characters. If that’s not what you meant, then that’s fine, but the transition (heh) simply wasn’t there.
I actually thought that was brilliant casting. He’s big, bald, scary, and a flashy dresser. Plus, I always assumed that Kingpin and Norman Osborn were originally intended to be black or mixed-race, and the colorist never got the memo.
FWIW, Kingpin didn’t have the name “Wilson Fisk” until around 1979, when Frank Miller appropriated him into the Daredevil title (He’d been exclusively a Spider-Man character up until that point). I always associated the name “Fisk” with an historically black university in Nashville, further evidence he might be black.
Really? I mean, I stand by how Duncan was arguably the least bad choice for the role, but reading the Kingpin’s appearances is basically MafiaMafiaMafia.
When John Romita designed the character, his first instinct was to make him look like a movie mobster in a pin-striped suit, but he wanted to avoid the cliche and gave him a white dinner jacket/ascot combo instead. There was a distinct effort made to have him be a little bit atypical as a mobster.
