Switching the Race of Characters

Cafe Society
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First off, I know anything involving race is touchy, so to start with I just want everybody to try to stay chill. So here we go.

As much as I hate the racist trolls who lose there minds when something like a black Spiderman comes out, I am similarly annoyed when people on the other side of the coin panic about “white-washing”. So, in this thread I want to examine which characters can be racially switched while it still makes sense to the story line, and which ones can’t.

I’m going to start with those that can’t. First, pretty much any historical figure because, well, come on. That one’s easy. It gets more complicated in fiction. There are some that just HAVE to be played by a specific race due to their iconic nature. I can’t imagine Thor played by anybody else than a big blond white guy and I can’t imagine Black Panther played by anybody else but an athletic black guy. But how far does “iconic” go?

Superman, I would argue, is iconic enough that he needs to be played by a white guy with dark hair (preferably with the little “s” curl on his forehead). James Bond is iconic, but it’s a bit different because his iconic nature is more just Britishness. Idris Elba would make a phenomenal James Bond, but as bad ass as he is, I can’t see him as Superman. Batman, though…?

Idris Elba is a good example for what I want to get into, because while on the surface it would seem like he’s a great choice to play The Gunslinger, it get’s a bit problematic when you start thinking about Susana in “The Drawing of the Three”. She absolutely HAS to be black, no question there, and I would argue that Eddie has to be white and the gunslinger does too just for the storyline.

Now, to touch on whitewashing, the accusations of that can annoy me. Take Charlize Theron as The Major in “Ghost in the Shell”. Why did anybody care? The characther herslelf inhabits an artificial body. What difference does race make in something like that? And as far as Japanese culture is going to be damaged by “white washing”, I’m going to have to laugh at that a bit. I seriously doubt anybody in Japan was bothered by it.

Anyway, um… discuss?

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I think Idris Elba would be fine for James Bond. If James Bond is meant to be a single person, then he’d be about 90 years old now, so the film series has already jumped the shark in that sense. If one thinks of “James Bond” as a service name assigned to various British secret agents over the years, then there’s no reason it couldn’t be a black man in 2019. I guess the next question would be: could there be a woman called “James”?

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Well, in MY production I don’t HAVE to do anything except fulfill my artistic vision. If a Korean woman is cast as Othello, then that’s who will be appearing on stage. Note that you don’t have to be a drunk to play an alcoholic, let’s say.

ETA I would never mess with any of the Bard’s lines, though. That’s not cool.

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Ah, but you’re missing my point regarding Susana. Race may not matter, but sometimes it does. Othello is ALL about race. That’s the whole plot!

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The race of the characters can certainly be important to the plot. The actor isn’t actually the character.

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But audience perception matters, no?

I am not talking about the ability of an actor. Let me make that VERY clear. I am talking about casting. A brilliant actor can/t play every role in existence. I want to talk about the roles, not the actors.

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Thankfully, Marvel doesn’thave your limited imagination.

Hell, Thor’s been a frog…

Look, I know all white people look alike, but … that was Scarlett Johansson.

By all accounts, the people behind the original were cool with it, as were most Japanese people. Stoked, even.

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I always found it bizarre when they change the race of a character who was already a minority actor to begin with and apparently people are okay with it.

Those “Black Boba Fett” rumors that we’re going around a few years ago actually made me angry due to how people were acting as if this was the greatest decision of all time on the rumor boards. We already had a great Maori actor play him, why did Disney suddenly muse changing his canonical race for absolutely no reason? Just either get Temuera Morrison to play him again or another Maori actor if you wanted somebody younger.

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Historical figures have to be the correct race?

Tell that to Lin-Manuel Miranda.

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I thought Michael Clarke Duncan was a great choice to play Kingpin (since Kingpin’s main physical attribute is bigness)

Brian

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A fairly famous switch a few years ago was the choice to have the adult version of Harry Potter’s Hermione Grainger played by a black woman in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

I think the success of switching the race of a character or cast depends on how far-fetched the story is, how much ethnicity/culture is part of the plot, and how close the later production is intended to follow the original. I think a black or Asian cast doing Fiddler on the Roof in a Russian village setting would be a bit jarring. However, switch the setting to India, have an Indian cast, make a few tweaks and you could probably get it to work. On the other hand, doing Fiddler on the Roof with a multi-racial cast in any setting would take a substantial amount away from the plot and reduce the musical to essentially a concert.

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Context matters.

As mentioned already, you can cast our founding fathers as minorities (Hamilton) and not skip a beat. I’d say you could cast a black Superman, or James Bond, play it dead straight and it would work just fine.

However, if you’re doing a serious Civil War drama, and cast black actors a slaves, white actors as slave owners and politicians and a historically accurate mix of other actors, you can’t just throw in Denzel as Robert E. Lee and let it go at that. You can’t really play that change straight and have it work, the casting pulls you out of the narrative.

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I agree with the OP about the uproar over the casting of Ghost in the Shell being absurd.

There has been plenty of both race- and gender-switching already, especially on stage. Heck, Pearl Bailey played a black Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly! back in 1967 (!)

Whoopi Goldberg took over the role of Pseudolus (previously a white male role) in a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1996.

There have been tons of gender-reversed plays (I’ve seen gender-reversed Waiting for Godot and Taming of the Shrew – with “Peter” jokes taking the place of “Kate” jokes.) A feature of one science fiction convention I regularly attend is a gender-reversed episode of Star Trek TOS.

We haven’t had a black James Bond yet, but there have been two different black Felix Leiters. And Will Smith played what was effectively a black 19th century Bond in The Wild, Wild West, something that actually added something when they made Dr. Loveless an unrepentant Southern racist. (Jim West was played by the white Robert Conrad in the TV original).

I’m even okay with blackface, yellowface, and the inverses of these, under the proper circumstances, although this is a VERY touchy subject still. But the multiple incidences in Cloud Atlas didn’t bother me at all – the whole point of the film was the interconnectedness of human lives, so it was altogether appropriate to have men playing female roles, women playing male roles, white people in black roles, black people in white roles, white people playing people of oriental ancestry and (the first time I think I’ve seen this) a woman of oriental ancestry playing a white woman. Also a black woman playing an Asian man.

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Right, the context is not the context of the story. It’s the context of race in society and in the entertainment industry.

The problem of casting and race has to do with non-white and non-male actors, writers, and other creators being locked out of large parts of the industry. It’s not about whether in an artistic sense an actor of X race or gender or what ever should be allowed to portray a character of Y race or gender or what ever.

Because an actor is someone pretending to be someone ē isn’t, and whether it’s oretending to be a doctor, or a space alien, or someone of a different race or gender isn’t an artistic obstacle.

That it seems physically possible for a white woman to disguise herself as an Asian woman more easily than a black man to disguise himself as a white man is not an acting problem. It’s a problem created by the prejudices of our society.

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There was a time I wasn’t bothered by Mr. Yunioshi, but these days, it completely ruins the experience of the film for me. I’d like to see a modern example of yellowface, well-executed.

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It’s not unbelievable for an audience to buy an actor who is black to buy ēm in a role as a white character. That’s a societal issue, not an inherent one.

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I believe you are WILLFULLY missing the point here.

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In Japan they were aware that, uneasy as it may be to recognize it, no major distributor would lay out the big, big bucks for a live action GITS without some international headliner in the lead, to reach worldwide audiences beyond already existing fandom since most of humanity has no knowledge of the original. (Shirow of course doesn’t mind at all as long as the check is large and it clears, allowing him to keep doing his bizarre new stuff).

It doesn’t help, though, that in the comic/animation everyone in Section 9 is Japanese in name and culture, and that it is an established understanding that in Manga/Anime, characters intended to be Japanese are *drawn * the same generic-cartoon style anyway. So “westernizing” it did shake up many.

That is clearly an American-Market-centric calculation. Not for the sake of representing a minority, but for a big sale with the African-American audiences.

Very well put. With historic narratives, you are either playing it dead straight to “the facts, ma’am” or doing an artistic-license symbolic thing, mixing them will just be confusing. With pure fiction, you may have far more flexibility. (Of course, you still should try to be consistent in-universe: a black Bond works better in 2020 than 1960 because Britain *itself *is more multiracial today.)

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Have a look at Cloud Atlas, then. I thought the makeup was well done, not an insulting stereotype. I suspect it bothered people a bit to see James d’Arcy and Hugo Weaving with epicanthic folds, because they were familiar with the actors (who, after all, appear as other character in the film). But I’ll bet that, like me, most people didn’t realize that Halle Berry also played an Asian character until they saw the scene credited to her in the closing credits.

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So your point wasn’t that you can only imagine a big, blonde White male Thor?