The Sophie character is not Jewish. She’s Polish Catholic. Ironically, Streep is partly Jewish.
I checked Streeps IMDB page and it doesnt mention her being Jewish but IMDB has been wrong before. Thank you for the corrections.
You’re welcome. I’d read the book and seen the movie – decades ago-- so I had to google myself to confirm. And, yeah, I only knew about Streep’s background because she was on Finding Your Roots. She wasn’t raised Jewish and doesn’t identify culturally, but she probably would have still been fodder for the death camps.
One case that bothered me (and apparently no one else) – and that, only because it’s inconsistent, not for any problem about inappropriate actors – is Bob Balaban playing Dr. Chandra in 2010: The Year we Made Contact (based on Arcthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two).
It’s pretty clear that “Dr. Chandra”, first named in Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and in the simultaneous Stanley Kubrick film, the creator and trainer of the computer HAL, must have been Indian, or possibly Sri Lankan. The name in Sanskrit for “Bright” or “Shining”, and is the name of the Hindu God of the moon, not to mention some other mythological and historical figures. It often figures in theophoros names, like Chandragupta or Chandrasekhar (and I always thought that Dr. Chandra’s name was a truncated form of something like this). In any event, Clarke lived on Sri Lanka, and I could easily see him having a computer scientist of Indian or Sri Lankan ancestry. Chandra isn’t really any other ethnic sort of name, so I figured that when we finally got to see Dr. Chandra, we’d have an ethnic South Asian. Instead, I got Bob Balaban.
As i said, I’m not bothered by Balaban getting the role. It just seems inconsistent with the actor.
My personal opinion on this matter is still evolving. I do believe that, as you worded it in the OP, “it’s called ‘acting.’ If you just want everyone to only ever portray characters that match exactly who they already are, that’s called a ‘documentary.’”
Then I watched an interview with a disabled actor. She agreed with that sentiment, but pointed out that it ought to work both ways, and the problem is that it rarely does. If I were a minority, I’m sure it would be nice to have a celebrity like me to look up to, rather than someone who is pretending to be like me.
To give a personal example: my boyfriend introduced me to the show The Boys, and in the pilot episode they showed a petite young woman (Erin Moriarty) lifting a car and doing other amazing feats of strength. As a muscular woman, I got pissed that they couldn’t cast a muscular woman in that role. I’m used to seeing tiny women on TV shows, but if her muscularity is a key part of her character, you should make her muscular! It’s so rare to see someone who looks like me on TV that I was bummed to see a missed opportunity.
To summarize: I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with casting an actor in a role that does not match their personal reality. Sometimes casting a big star will bring more awareness to important issues than casting a no-name would. Sometimes the big star would honestly do a better job than a less-experienced actor whose personal reality better fit the role. But sometimes, I can see where there would have been value added in hiring an actor that fit the role better.
Ben Kingsley is indeed a great actor. According to Wikipedia (“Ben Kingsley filmography”) he has also played many other Jewish characters: Meyer Lansky in Bugsy, Fagin in Oliver Twist, The Rabbi in Lucky Number Slevin, Simon Wiesenthal in Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story, Moses in Moses, Otto Frank in Anne Frank: The Whole Story.
I agree with this take. An actor should at least be believable in the role. Will Smith was no boxer but he was believable as Ali. Lucy Lawless was believable as Xena. On the other hand I never believed that Leonardo DiCaprio had the physical presence to play the gang leader in The Gangs of New York.
I don’t really think that’s true. The Nazis didn’t have a “one-drop rule.” People with 3 or more Jewish grandparents were ruled as Jewish and subject to all the persecution that this entailed; people with one or two Jewish grandparents were ruled as “mixed blood” but were still entitled to German citizenship under the Nazi government. I don’t doubt that these people were also subject to persecution but in theory they were tolerated. Someone who was 1/8th Jewish would still be considered German by blood. The rules for membership in the Nazi leadership, the SS, were stricter - “pure German blood” had to be documented as far back as 1750 - but even in this case a waiver was granted to at least one member, Emil Maurice.
This is in no way an implication that the Nazis were in any way “less bad” towards Jews than they actually were, just that they did often give people with negligible Jewish ancestry a “pass”, and Meryl Streep probably would have been one of them. The corollary to this, of course, is that if the Nazis specifically wanted you dead, you were dead, no matter how “pure” your ancestry was.
Really? I didn’t know it was that “generous.” I thought even, say, 25% Jewish ancestry was enough to doom you. Thanks for the info.
I’m sure it was entirely from pragmatic reasons, i.e. if they made the law overly broad, they would wind up killing too much of their own workforce for the country to function, and not out of any generosity.
I know this seems like a sidetrack to the thread, but it actually is kind of relevant because there are a lot of people who are only partially of some or other ethnicity but wind up being typecast in those roles. Robert DeNiro, for instance, is only 1/4 Italian but I’ve never heard anyone claim that he’s “not Italian enough” to play Italian-American characters. Many of the Jewish actors who portray Jewish characters are themselves “only” partially Jewish, and many Jewish actors also portray non-Jewish characters routinely.
We’re talking about ethnic identity that does not always translate to a role in any visible way. Which is to say, yeah there are varying degrees of people being ethnically miscast, but Sarah Silverman’s category of “Jewface” sounds like BS to me.
I don’t think Dances with Wolves would have worked with white people playing the Sioux.
Yeah, mid-20th-century westerns with white actors in “redface” look pretty bizarre and cringey nowadays.
I’m all for innovative counterhistorical versions of existing stories that deliberately cast actors you wouldn’t initially expect in the roles, as in Hamilton or the recent David Copperfield version with Dev Patel. But when your portrayal is supposedly straightforward realism, and you’ve got a bunch of white actors who look jarringly “against type” for the ethnicity they’re supposed to be playing, it’s just embarrassing. It proclaims that you couldn’t be bothered, or couldn’t manage, to find actors who actually look like the characters.
How so? It’s an actor.
It’s the old “suspension of disbelief” issue. If you’re asking an audience to accept your portrayal of a fictional situation as realistic, you can’t give them actors whose appearance too obviously contradicts that realism.
If you could, then we could have, for example, platoons of short female actors playing tall burly male soldiers in historical war movies. But we don’t, because that would un-suspend the audience’s disbelief about the made-up pictures they’re watching.
Wait, but we do that all the time. Or do you think that Emilia Clarke really did ride a dragon and turn a city into burnt toast?
I find the only “x” can play “x” to be disingenuous. Unless its a historic film and even then I think allowances to actual physical appearance should take a backseat to acting ability? Antony Hopkins was an amazing Nixon, even though the resemblance was non-existent. Yul Brennyer was the definitive Ramses II though he didn’t look anything like him.
I was going to use the example of Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban playing the Indian Sikh character Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek as an example of the kind of casting that wouldn’t be acceptable in this day and age when there are far more Indian actors available to Hollywood.
Then I remembered that the lily-white English-as-fuck Benedict Cumberbatch played Khan in the reboot.
Why is that a bad example? Besides the name?
Could any producer cast a white guy as Othello these days?
Some think it is an utter mockery every time he is played by an African-American. Like all Blacks are interchangeable.
It’s been done, although that’s over 20 years ago.
But you’d only get away with it in a full race-reversed version like this. Blackface is still a no-no.