Makes sense, but: reserved?
“He’s very reserved. It’s hard for him to show emotions.”
vs.
“He’s very reserved. He beheaded a dude with his car door because he caused a minor interruption on his date.”
Yeah, he was not so much reserved as he was repressing huge amounts of social anxiety and rage.
All the more reason I’m glad that I got out of comics. “Reed doesn’t really like talking to anybody?” That’s not the Reed Richards I know!
Note to writers: Making likeable characters into assholes does not constitute character development.
Yes, "“reserved” isn’t the word, but a succinct way to describe bipolar passive-zombie-to-rampaging-zombie was not immediately in mind.
I always thought the main problem with casting someone who wasn’t the same race / ethnicity / handicap / etc. as the character was, it sent a message that there are no actors of the correct attribute(s) that are good enough. “Wait a minute - Kevin McHale can walk? What’s he doing playing the wheelchair-bound Artie on Glee?”
I have also noticed that this “rule”, at least in terms of race, tends to apply to animated voiceovers as well - just about the only black character I can think of who’s voiced by a white actor is Cleveland on Family Guy. I leave gender out of this as the fact that, in most cases, kids don’t get older from one season to the next requires that either you hire a female to voice boys or you replace the actors as their voices change (e.g. Arnold on Hey Arnold! was voiced by four different boys - five, if you include the pilot).
If a script specifically calls for a character with certain attributes, then casting an actor with those attributes thins your pool of potential actors considerably. If, say, only 1% of the population is in a wheelchair, and you have a character who needs to be in a wheelchair, then if you limit your casting to wheelchair-bound actors, then you’ve only got 1% of the pool to choose from, and you’re much less likely to get the best actor for the job. You’ll also end up casting the same actors repeatedly, and over-exposing them. It’s much easier, if possible, to just have an open casting, and in the likely event that the best actor doesn’t have that attribute, you just fake it (which is, after all, what acting is all about).
Now, the catch to this is that while an able-bodied character can play someone in a wheelchair, it’s much harder for someone in a wheelchair to play an able-bodied person. And this will have the unjust effect of restricting wheelchair-bound actors. But there’s a better solution to this than to reserve wheelchair-bound roles to wheelchair-bound actors. The majority of roles, it doesn’t actually matter if they’re wheelchair-bound or not. When you’re casting for, say, a lawyer in a courtroom drama, you look at everyone for the casting, and if the best actor for the job happens to be in a wheelchair, well, I guess that lawyer is in a wheelchair. This would end up giving you about the same proportions as the real world, and would also give all actors mostly the same opportunities.
Huh so the parody of Reed Richards on Venture Bros is spot on then?
That goes to the heart of my grievance with the casting in the upcoming FF movie. Someone on a different message board convinced me that it’s not important to the story that Sue and Johnny be any race in particular, or even the same race; that it’s not important to the story that they be blood siblings, or adoptive siblings. But my heartache comes from which sibling they chose to make black. I feel like it was gutless that the one character they choose to make black is the one who has no chance of having a romantic relationship with Sue.
They could have, as you said, cast a white actor to play Johnny, and a black actress to play Sue. Or, they could have had both Sue and Johnny be white, and cast MBJ to play Reed, but we all know that wasn’t going down.
This is also a reason for (judicious) tokenism. The script doesn’t originally call for the “Sassy Roommate” to be in a wheelchair…but why not? It doesn’t change much if he is. Doing that offers opportunities to actors who otherwise are excluded. So (in my opinion) a little, careful, strategic Affirmative Action is also justified and good.
Yeah, that’s the thing: I feel like there are some people who object to a black Nick Fury because of historical accuracy, out of what I think is an erroneous belief that 616 Nick Fury and Ultimate Nick Fury (on whom the movie version is based) were ever meant to have the same origin story. It is indeed a ‘suspension of disbelief’ breaking circumstance to have someone who was supposed to have been a Colonel in the Army during WW2 portrayed as black, but I don’t think that Ultimate Nick Fury is even meant to be that old, in the first place.
I agree that it’s important to the characterization that they be siblings. Can you please direct me to the story line which demonstrates why it’s important that they be blood siblings?
With Marvel’s Amazing Traveling Timeline, even the original 616 Fury shouldn’t be that old anymore (and shouldn’t have been for quite a long time).
In the case of the new FF, I’m against pointless changes to continuity because it just adds another layer of stuff that the audience has to accept. If Sue and Johnny were always white and always blood siblings, then there should be a good reason to change that other than simply to shake things up.
I’m not against racial reboots. I have no problems with the recent Annie movie being made with black actors. The purpose was to tell a classic story with black actors. But FF didn’t do that, they just changed one character’s race. In that case, its not about FF told from the black POV, so the inclusion of one black character seems like an offensive tokenism. If they were all black, it would have been less annoying.
As for the topic of the thread, it seems that if there’s a decent reason, a plot issue or something, to change the race of the actors, its fine. I’m actually quite fine with the movie “Aloha” casting Emma Stone as a part-Asian because from what I read, part of the conflict is from the character trying to fit in racially even though she looks atypical. That’s a good enough plot reason to cast a white actress. Mickey Rooney in Breakfast and Tiffany’s is bad because they just wanted Mickey Rooney.
And I eagerly await The Fantastic Fo’, but in the meantime one black guy is what we got.
Just last night, I watched a montage of opening themes of 1960s/70s cartoons and after a while starting noting “token person of colour - token person of colour - hey, is that guy a Sikh? - token person of colour…”
Marvel fudges their dates a lot, but it’s DC that has the official editorial policy that everything in continuity happened seven years prior to the current period. 616 Nick Fury, in particular, is and always has been a WWII veteran who was born sometime in the mid-20’s. He’d been taking the Infinity Formula to retard his aging since around 1946. (Or since 1976, when they first introduced that retcon.)
Of course, ever since he went to the moon, killed Uatu the Watcher and stole his eyeballs, he’s been trapped there as the Unseen while his son, Nick Fury, Jr. (a one-eyed, bald black guy with a goatee) has taken over as Director of Shield.
Comics, everyone!
In fact, in the Ultimates universe, when Captain America was first revived and Fury introduced himself as “Colonel Nick Fury”, Cap thought that it was a Nazi plot (and a poorly-thought-out one at that), because he personally knew the highest-ranking black man in the US military, and he wasn’t a colonel.
YogSosoth, if you object to characters being black without some specific reason for it, do you also object to characters being white without some specific reason? Why, specifically, should Johnny Storm be white? Does it add anything to the characterization for him to be approaching from the “white perspective”?
Isn’t the 616 Fury the one who got retired and replaced by his black son Nick Fury, Jr. …patterned after … Samuel L. Jackson?
Well, up until now they’ve been full blood siblings and white. If they want to make them NOT siblings I guess I’m OK with that as long as the story and plot are good. I’m OK if they’re both black. It’s the “siblings of a different race” thing that would need some explanation - they’re half siblings, one is adopted, etc. - which seems a contrived way to get a token black into the cast.
I’m aware that Sue and Johnny have been portrayed as “full blood” siblings, up until now. That doesn’t really answer my question: is it important to the story that they be full blood siblings?
And, IIRC, it is explained: Sue is adopted.
You know that’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer except to say that unfortunately, white is the default race in the US for basically everything. I will also note that speaking from 2015, I have the somewhat forced traditional point of view that these characters were always white, and with 50+ years of history already, I’m not about to change that without a compelling reason.
However, I think that its far beyond the point where “white as default” should change, and if coming up with a new superhero group, I would hope that publishers look to make them all ethnic and NEVER comment on it, taking a step towards diversity as the default. Someone commented, on these boards I think, that often good characters are written without a race or gender in mind, and that you cast (I think we were talking about TV characters) the best actor to play them rather than to fit a race or gender.
One of the reasons why the new FF bugs me so much is that of all the characters that needed to be the same race, the brother and sister combo definitely should have been the last choice to be race swapped. That just brings up a whole host of questions like if they’re really brother and sister now, if there was an adoption, what’s the relationship like, who are their parents, etc. There was a sibling dynamic there that now is up in flux because only one of them was race swapped. It would have made much more sense if either Reed or Ben were black. Ben’s a friend and Reed a spouse, so there’s really no more explanation other than “Oh so she married a black guy”.