> I think the answer is obvious: There aren’t really any rules about who can play who and why.
I think the real answer here is power. Netflix can afford to piss off Egyptians in the name of sticking up for Americans and American freedom of expression. They would not be able to do this as easily for India, or maybe Nigeria, and certainly not China. All it reveals is the lesser global soft power of Egypt as a country and people, and that a massive corporation can afford to ignore their concerns.
To me, the current Hollywood rule is obvious. It's okay if the actor is "less privileged" than the character, but not the reverse.
Black people can play the Founding Fathers; white people cannot play MLK Jr or Malcolm X. The Scooby Doo characters can be recast as Black and Asian (as in "Velma") and there can be a Black "Wonder Years", but you cannot remake a Black show with any other race.
It all functions according to US racial categories as understood in 2023, which is why (from the Hollywood perspective) a Black person can play any role, any time, any place. An Asian person can play a white role, but not a Black one. And so on.
When it comes to identities that are considered equal on the oppression hierarchy, there is no guiding principle, and we get squabbles between groups (see: "Can a Puerto Rican person play a Mexican person?" Mexicans may have strong feelings, but they're both Latinx, so white liberals stay out of it.)
How about instead of "an actor should be believable as the character they're playing" it's the exact opposite: "an actor should not be believable as the character they're playing".
Instead of making Cleopatra a white woman, a black woman, or even a middle eastern woman, she's played by Korean woman and Caesar is played by a Latino man. This way, everyone is wrong, and no one can get mad about the casting choices! Problem solved!
Meanwhile there’s the trend in fantasy shows to cast a broad range of races to play elves, dwarves, etc. sometimes with no apparent racial logic at all. For example, in Rings of Power, Durin the dwarf is played by a white actor, his wife a black actor, but then their children don’t appear to be mixed race. In fact, human notions of race just seem to be immaterial - some dwarves have dark skin, some have light skin, and these differences aren’t noticed or important. This kind of runs away from race essentialism to say - let’s just cast diverse actors and not get hung up on what the “correct” race is, which I like, especially since these are magical beings...though in the Rings of Power, the one thing that threw me off was the lack of explanation why elves, dwarves, hobbits, and other races all had such diverse skin colors within nuclear communities, even in places where everyone was born in one part of the world, these societies just “happened” to be all perfectly diverse. Maybe that affected believability for me.
The Castro one is hilarious, because Castro's father was from Spain (and therefore "white") and his mother was from the Canary Islands (and therefore a mixture of mostly "white" and some North African). It's hard to argue that Castro is anything but white.
Ancient Egyptians were not “black” in the same sense as Sub-Saharan Africans. Art work from the period showing interactions between Egyptians and Africans from further down the Nile, in modern day Sudan/South Sudan/Ethiopia makes this very clear.
That said, the ancient Egyptians were not “white” either, and could be credibly portrayed by actors/actresses of mixed/varied ethnicities. Vin Diesel would make a great pharaoh!
As for Fidel Castro, John Leguizamo needs to stfu..Castro’s parents were both Spanish immigrants to Cuba-Fidel is as lilly “white” as one can get.
It’s just the same tired oppression and marginalization hierarchy. It runs on a linear scale of how melinated your skin is. It is profoundly boring and makes for terrible art. I’m embarrassed for the people trying to push this ahistorical ‘cleopatra was an oppressed black woman’ narrative - it is so delusional. People are really fed up with this shit.
- Hamilton doesn’t posit “race doesn’t matter”; it explicitly casts all the historical figures as non-white except for King George. One of their casting calls got into a bit of hot water by listing for non-white only (or similar words) and when they were threatened with a lawsuit tweaked the wording and said “of *course* we welcome all auditioners!” (The winking that accompanied this could be heard from space)
- I like the “convincingly” part. Billy Crystal’s Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis, Jr. are stone cold classics, as is Eddie Murphy’s old Jewish guy in the barbershop in Coming To America (the SNL Mr. White was intentionally a stereotype, but that worked, too). There should be a space to do this, but it’s OK for it to be really narrow (“You best not miss”). Also, while I don’t have the specifics, there were Minstrel performers who went for “believability” and “accuracy”, or thought they were doing so, and now look just as racist as any Stepin Fetchit role, which is to say it’s a *really* narrow space, at least as far as performing Black is concerned.
- Which brings me to what the real rule seems to be (as I also wrote below): White people stay in your lane, others judged in a scale of skin tone (a reverse brown bag test, essentially)
I've been on a CBT journey lately to both improve my day-to-day mood and present myself in a better way to the outside world.
One thing that strikes me about this stuff is how maladaptive it is. It's just a bad way to live. Iranians shouldn't be hurt over a stupid Prince of Persia movie. Black and Egyptian people shouldn't feel anguish over the casting or lack of casting about some movie.
A few days ago, some moron at ESPN made some joke comparison the last name Whitecloud to a toilet paper. This is a shitty joke, and I didn't laugh. Someone who took the lessons I did from CBT should leave it there. But, of course, people went online to say how offensive it was because Whitecloud is a First Nations name, so the ESPN dude had to issue an apology about how it was erasing colonial blah blah blah.
Of course, I don't think the average Iranian, Egyptian, Black person, or First Nations Canadian gives even a 1/100th of a shit about any of this stuff or anything similar. But there's a certain group of middle and upper middle class people who destroy their mood and wellbeing over minor shit.
This is a nicely argued 'rant', and I agree with it (I'm Jewish and have played both a priest and a Nazi onstage, as well as Roy Cohn, who actually was Jewish, but, well, you know...) However, I strongly recommend carefully proofreading this--there are lots of typos and if it catches on you'll be embarrassed.
This is the exactly the kind of Analysis Of Niche Entertainment Industry Bullshit that I love from this blog
That one quote from the NYT.... how can anyone not roll their eyes at a phrase like "proximity to whiteness" at this point?
> I think the answer is obvious: There aren’t really any rules about who can play who and why.
I think the real answer here is power. Netflix can afford to piss off Egyptians in the name of sticking up for Americans and American freedom of expression. They would not be able to do this as easily for India, or maybe Nigeria, and certainly not China. All it reveals is the lesser global soft power of Egypt as a country and people, and that a massive corporation can afford to ignore their concerns.
To me, the current Hollywood rule is obvious. It's okay if the actor is "less privileged" than the character, but not the reverse.
Black people can play the Founding Fathers; white people cannot play MLK Jr or Malcolm X. The Scooby Doo characters can be recast as Black and Asian (as in "Velma") and there can be a Black "Wonder Years", but you cannot remake a Black show with any other race.
It all functions according to US racial categories as understood in 2023, which is why (from the Hollywood perspective) a Black person can play any role, any time, any place. An Asian person can play a white role, but not a Black one. And so on.
When it comes to identities that are considered equal on the oppression hierarchy, there is no guiding principle, and we get squabbles between groups (see: "Can a Puerto Rican person play a Mexican person?" Mexicans may have strong feelings, but they're both Latinx, so white liberals stay out of it.)
How about instead of "an actor should be believable as the character they're playing" it's the exact opposite: "an actor should not be believable as the character they're playing".
Instead of making Cleopatra a white woman, a black woman, or even a middle eastern woman, she's played by Korean woman and Caesar is played by a Latino man. This way, everyone is wrong, and no one can get mad about the casting choices! Problem solved!
Meanwhile there’s the trend in fantasy shows to cast a broad range of races to play elves, dwarves, etc. sometimes with no apparent racial logic at all. For example, in Rings of Power, Durin the dwarf is played by a white actor, his wife a black actor, but then their children don’t appear to be mixed race. In fact, human notions of race just seem to be immaterial - some dwarves have dark skin, some have light skin, and these differences aren’t noticed or important. This kind of runs away from race essentialism to say - let’s just cast diverse actors and not get hung up on what the “correct” race is, which I like, especially since these are magical beings...though in the Rings of Power, the one thing that threw me off was the lack of explanation why elves, dwarves, hobbits, and other races all had such diverse skin colors within nuclear communities, even in places where everyone was born in one part of the world, these societies just “happened” to be all perfectly diverse. Maybe that affected believability for me.
The Castro one is hilarious, because Castro's father was from Spain (and therefore "white") and his mother was from the Canary Islands (and therefore a mixture of mostly "white" and some North African). It's hard to argue that Castro is anything but white.
Ancient Egyptians were not “black” in the same sense as Sub-Saharan Africans. Art work from the period showing interactions between Egyptians and Africans from further down the Nile, in modern day Sudan/South Sudan/Ethiopia makes this very clear.
That said, the ancient Egyptians were not “white” either, and could be credibly portrayed by actors/actresses of mixed/varied ethnicities. Vin Diesel would make a great pharaoh!
As for Fidel Castro, John Leguizamo needs to stfu..Castro’s parents were both Spanish immigrants to Cuba-Fidel is as lilly “white” as one can get.
The Iron Sheik reference made my day. Thank you for that. 😁
It’s just the same tired oppression and marginalization hierarchy. It runs on a linear scale of how melinated your skin is. It is profoundly boring and makes for terrible art. I’m embarrassed for the people trying to push this ahistorical ‘cleopatra was an oppressed black woman’ narrative - it is so delusional. People are really fed up with this shit.
A few things:
- Hamilton doesn’t posit “race doesn’t matter”; it explicitly casts all the historical figures as non-white except for King George. One of their casting calls got into a bit of hot water by listing for non-white only (or similar words) and when they were threatened with a lawsuit tweaked the wording and said “of *course* we welcome all auditioners!” (The winking that accompanied this could be heard from space)
- I like the “convincingly” part. Billy Crystal’s Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis, Jr. are stone cold classics, as is Eddie Murphy’s old Jewish guy in the barbershop in Coming To America (the SNL Mr. White was intentionally a stereotype, but that worked, too). There should be a space to do this, but it’s OK for it to be really narrow (“You best not miss”). Also, while I don’t have the specifics, there were Minstrel performers who went for “believability” and “accuracy”, or thought they were doing so, and now look just as racist as any Stepin Fetchit role, which is to say it’s a *really* narrow space, at least as far as performing Black is concerned.
- Which brings me to what the real rule seems to be (as I also wrote below): White people stay in your lane, others judged in a scale of skin tone (a reverse brown bag test, essentially)
BLAKE EDWARDS FOREVER even if his view of Asians never evolved past Charlie Chan movies
That was amazing. But James Franco would be great as Castro in Tropic Thunder 2!
I've been on a CBT journey lately to both improve my day-to-day mood and present myself in a better way to the outside world.
One thing that strikes me about this stuff is how maladaptive it is. It's just a bad way to live. Iranians shouldn't be hurt over a stupid Prince of Persia movie. Black and Egyptian people shouldn't feel anguish over the casting or lack of casting about some movie.
A few days ago, some moron at ESPN made some joke comparison the last name Whitecloud to a toilet paper. This is a shitty joke, and I didn't laugh. Someone who took the lessons I did from CBT should leave it there. But, of course, people went online to say how offensive it was because Whitecloud is a First Nations name, so the ESPN dude had to issue an apology about how it was erasing colonial blah blah blah.
Of course, I don't think the average Iranian, Egyptian, Black person, or First Nations Canadian gives even a 1/100th of a shit about any of this stuff or anything similar. But there's a certain group of middle and upper middle class people who destroy their mood and wellbeing over minor shit.
I heard someone said about Cleopatra....that she was "culturally black African." Please someone explain to me what this means.
This is a nicely argued 'rant', and I agree with it (I'm Jewish and have played both a priest and a Nazi onstage, as well as Roy Cohn, who actually was Jewish, but, well, you know...) However, I strongly recommend carefully proofreading this--there are lots of typos and if it catches on you'll be embarrassed.